Frederik Paludan-Müller was the son of a refined and highly cultured
Danish bishop. He inherited his father's talents for idealistic
reflection. He does not belong, like Grundtvig and Ingemann, Heiberg
and Poul Möller, Hauch and Christian Winther, Aarestrup and Bödtcher,
to the great Oehlenschläger group. Like Henrik Hertz, he belongs to
the circle of J. L. Heiberg. Unquestionably, Heiberg was the Danish
master of poetic art, to whom from the outset he looked up. He was, as
he once told me himself, so captivated in his youth with the personal
presence and conversation of Heiberg that sometimes the latter, in
order to get clear of him when they had been together until late in
the night, was forced to repeat the formula: "Now listen to me once
for all, Paludan-Müller; if you do not leave immediately, I shall
be obliged to order a bed for you on the floor." He never referred
to Heiberg's poetry but with the greatest warmth. It was attractive
to him because of its lucidity, its wealth of thought, and its
romantic flight. He rejoiced in its satire, the related chords met
with a response within his own soul, and its speculative tendencies
harmonized with his own propensity to depict what was universally
valid, universally human. His judgments regarding other poets were
instructive so far as they afforded an insight into the nature of his
own talent. He who so highly esteemed reflection in poetry, could not
sympathize with Oehlenschläger. One day when the discourse turned on
Oehlenschläger, he exclaimed, with the most comical gravity, "In short,
Oehlenschläger was stupid." I laughed, and asked, "Do you think that
'Axel and Valborg amount to-nothing?" He replied, "There maybe much
that is fine in the work, yet only in temper and sentiment; there is
no thought in it." Thought, which Théophile Gautier once defined, "the
final medium in which the poet takes refuge when he is devoid of both
passion and coloring," was the main essential with Paludan-Müller,
if not in his poetry, at least in his æsthetics. He himself always
strove to represent the idea, in the Platonic sense of the word, as
what was eternally typical. Therefore it was that he wrote "Amor
and Psyche," "Adam Homo," and "Ahasuerus." When he failed to find
this universality, this typical element, he could discover no merit
in poetry. He had no patience, for instance, with Björnson's novels
of peasant life. "Anything of that kind may be very well on a small
scale," he said. "It is great folly, however, to devote an entire book
to the inner emotions of a little poultry-yard maiden." What made this
remark peculiarly individual was the fact that he offered no critical
objections to the mode of treatment; he simply protested against the
material as material, against the propriety of a detailed description
of an uncultured inner life. A taste for naïveté was wholly lacking in
him. On the other hand, he had an actual horror of the theatrical, and
in his zealous antipathy he many times found it where others had not
discovered it. He called Runeberg theatrical, for instance, and with
critical assurance he cited one of the extremely few passages of the
Finnish poet where a glimmer of the theatrical can be found. "What a
theatre hero is not his Sandel," said he.
"My horse! bid them saddle my noble Bijou!'
"Who else than a hero of the coulisses would speak so? And then the
description of his position on the redoubt,--
'He proudly remained, unmoved was his mien,
As at first he still sat in view;
His eye it was calm, his brow was serene,
And he shone on his noble Bijou!'"
Paludan-Müller hated the theatrical because he was always on his guard
against all greatness that manifested itself in æsthetic form. He found
the great Alexander small, and the Indian ascetic Kalanus sublime. In
his eyes, human greatness was confined to moral greatness, and moral
greatness for him passed entirely into moral purity.