In the month of July I started on a walking tour through Jutland, with
the scenery of which province I had not hitherto been acquainted;
travelled also occasionally by the old stage-coaches, found myself at
Skanderborg, which, for me, was surrounded by the halo of mediaeval
romance; wandered to Silkeborg, entering into conversation with no end
of people, peasants, peasant boys, and pretty little peasant girls,
whose speech was not always easy to understand. I studied their
Juttish, and laughed heartily at their keen wit. The country inns were
often over-full, so that I was obliged to sleep on the floor; my
wanderings were often somewhat exhausting, as there were constant
showers, and the night rain had soaked the roads. I drove in a
peasant's cart to Mariager to visit my friend Emil Petersen, who was in
the office of the district judge of that place, making his home with
his brother-in-law and his very pretty sister, and I stayed for a few
days with him. Here I became acquainted with a little out-of-the-world
Danish town. The priest and his wife were an interesting and
extraordinary couple. The priest, the before-mentioned Pastor Ussing, a
little, nervous, intelligent and unworldly man, was a pious dreamer,
whose religion was entirely rationalistic. Renan's recently published
_Life of Jesus_ was so far from shocking him that the book seemed to
him in all essentials to be on the right track. He had lived in the
Danish West Indies, and there he had become acquainted with his wife, a
lady with social triumphs behind her, whose charms he never wearied of
admiring. The mere way in which she placed her hat upon her head, or
threw a shawl round her shoulders, could make him fall into ecstasies,
even though he only expressed his delight in her in half-facetious
terms. This couple showed me the most cordial kindness; to their
unpractised, provincial eyes, I seemed to be a typical young man of the
world, and they amazed me with the way in which they took it for
granted that I led the dances at every ball, was a lion in society,
etc. I was reminded of the student's words in Hostrup's vaudeville:
"Goodness! How innocent they must be to think _me_ a dandy!" and vainly
assured them that I lived an exceedingly unnoticed life in Copenhagen,
and had never opened a ball in my life.
The priest asked us two young men to go and hear his Sunday sermon, and
promised that we should be pleased with it. We went to church somewhat
expectant, and the sermon was certainly a most unusual one. It was
delivered with great rapture, after the priest had bent his head in his
hands for a time in silent reflection. With great earnestness he
addressed himself to his congregation and demanded, after having put
before them some of the cures in the New Testament, generally extolled
as miracles, whether they dared maintain that these so-called miracles
could not have taken place according to Nature's laws. And when he
impressively called out: "Darest thou, with thy limited human
intelligence, say, 'This cannot happen naturally?'" it was in the same
tone and style in which another priest would have shouted out: "Darest
thou, with thy limited human intelligence, deny the miracle?" The
peasants, who, no doubt, understood his words quite in this latter
sense, did not understand in the least the difference and the contrast,
but judged much the same as a dog to whom one might talk angrily with
caressing words or caressingly with abusive words, simply from the
speaker's tone; and both his tone and facial expression were ecstatic.
They perceived no heresy and felt themselves no less edified by the
address than did the two young Copenhagen graduates.