Aspects and Impressions Part 12

It will be seen that the new author approached literature definitely from the scientific side, but also that he placed himself almost exclusively under the direction of English minds. M. Clemenceau, in that intense and unceasing contemplation of life which has been his most remarkable characteristic, has always been inspired by English models.

In his early youth he was deeply impressed with the teaching of J. S.

Mill, and in later years he was manifestly under the successive sway of Sir Charles Lyell and of Herbert Spencer. But by the time he collected his essays in _La Melee Sociale_, he was completely infatuated by the system of Darwin. He had long been familiar with _The Origin of Species_ and _The Descent of Man_; the death of Darwin in 1882 had deprived him of a master and, as it seemed, a friend, while the publication of the _Life and Letters_ in 1887 had given a coherency and, we may say, an atmosphere, to his conception of the ill.u.s.trious English savant. When, therefore, M. Clemenceau put together the material of _La Melee Sociale_, he did so in the quality of an advanced Darwinian, and he produced his first book almost as a tribute of affection to the memory of the greatest exponent of the tragedy of natural selection. But the habit of his mind, and no doubt the conditions of his own fortunes, led him into a field more tragical than any haunted by the spirit of the placid philosopher of Down. Charles Darwin refrained from pus.h.i.+ng his observations to such sinister conclusions as this:

La mort, partout la mort. Les continents et les mers gemissent de l'effroyable offrande de ma.s.sacre. C'est le cirque, l'immense Collysee de la Terre, ou tout ce qui ne pouvait vivre que de mort, se pare de lumiere et de vie pour mourir. De l'herbe a l'elephant, pas d'autre loi que la loi du plus fort. Au nom de la meme loi, le dernier ne de l'evolution vivante confond tout ce qui est de vie dans une prodigieuse hecatombe offerte a la suprematie de sa race.

Point de pitie. Le pouce retourne commande la mort. L'ame ingrate repudie l'antique solidarite des etres enlaces en la chaine des generations transformees. Le cur dur est ferme. Tout ce qui echappe au carnage premedite, voulu, s'entretue pour la gloire du grand barbare. La splendeur de la floraison de vie s'eteint dans le sang, pour en renaitre, pour y sombrer encore. Et le cirque, toujours vide, s'emplit toujours.

This pa.s.sage may be taken as characteristic of the manner of M.

Clemenceau in his most reflective mood, in the "style bref, mais clair et vibrant," which Octave Mirbeau commended. This way of writing would err on the side of rhetoric, were it not so concise and rapid, so full of the gusto of life even in its celebration of death. For, in the pages of _La Melee Sociale_, M. Clemenceau shows himself interpenetrated by the sorrows rather than sustained by the possibilities of the tormented inhabitants of earth. Recent events, in his own life and in the history of the French nation, had impressed on his consciousness the inherent cruelty of human beings to one another. Like Wordsworth, and with a far sharper personal pang, he had good reason to lament what man has made of man. Moreover, the months which had extended between M. Clemenceau's political fall and the publication of _La Melee Sociale_ had been marked by violent unrest and by a succession of political crimes. Anarchism, hitherto more a theory and a threat than a practical element in the existence of the people, had taken startling prominence. In quick and formidable succession the crimes of Vaillant, of Emile Henry, of Caserio and others, had filled the minds of men with alarm and horror. These events, and the strikes in various trades with their attendant sabotage, and the unrest among the miners, and the earliest germination of that new disease of the State, syndicalism,--all these and many other evidences of renewed bitterness in the struggle for life created in the mind of M. Clemenceau an obsession which is reflected in every chapter of _La Melee Sociale_. As a physician, no less than as a publicist, he diagnosed the "misere physiologique" of the age, and he railed against those in power who touched with the tips of their white kid gloves the maladies which were blackening the surface and substance of human society. In the memory of the attempt made last February to a.s.sa.s.sinate M. Clemenceau, a special interest attaches to his discussion of this cla.s.s of murders, of which he gave a remarkably close and prolonged a.n.a.lysis, little conceiving, of course, that he would live to be himself the object of a crime at which the whole world would shudder.

The reader who wishes the literary aspect of M. Clemenceau's mind to be revealed to him in its greatest amenity may next be recommended to turn to the preface of the volume ent.i.tled _Le Grand Pan_, which appeared in 1896. The book itself consists of seventy little essays, reprinted from the _Figaro_, the _Echo de Paris_, and other newspapers. These have nothing or very little to do with Pan, but they are eked out and given determination by a long rhapsody in honour of the goat-foot son of Callista, treated as the symbol of natural, as opposed to supernatural science. Everybody knows the famous pa.s.sage in Plutarch which describes how Thamous the pilot, sailing out of the Gulf of Corinth towards the Ionian Sea on the eve of the crucifixion of Christ, heard a voice announce that "Great Pan is dead!"

And that dismal cry rose slowly And sank slowly through the air, Full of spirit's melancholy And eternity's despair!

And they heard the words it said-- Pan is dead--Great Pan is dead-- Pan, Pan is dead.

In a pa.s.sage of rare picturesque beauty M. Clemenceau reproduces the animated and mysterious scene. He had himself lately returned from a visit to Greece, which had deeply stirred the sources of his sensibility. He recalled how the sun, in a transparency of pale gold, sank behind the blue ma.s.s of Ithaca, tinged with rose-colour the crags of the Echinades, and bathed the mountains and the sea in the delicate enchantment of sunset. He was sensitive to the paroxysm of pleasure such an experience produces, and he conceived himself standing by the side of the grammarian, Epitherses, on board the merchant-vessel, at the very moment when there sounded three times from the sh.o.r.e the name of Thamous, the Egyptian pilot, who answered at length, and received the mysterious command, "When thou art opposite Palodes, announce that the great Pan is dead!" The recesses of the mountains, the caves on the island, the solitude of the drear battle-field of Actium, took up the hollow cry and reverberated it in a thousand accents of despair, with groans and shrieks of sorrow and confused bewailing, while all nature united in the echoing lamentation, "Pan, great Pan, is dead!"

In this strange way M. Clemenceau opens an essay in defence of a purely positivist theory of human existence. He describes the doctrine of the pagan divinities, under the tyranny of Christianity, and he predicts their resurrection under clearer and calmer auspices. For M. Clemenceau, Pan is the symbol of life in its harmonious and composite action, and science is the intelligent wors.h.i.+p of Pan. This despised and fallen G.o.d, who seemed for one dark moment to be dead, survives and will return to his faithful adorers, has indeed returned already, and turns the tables on his priestly persecutors. The apparent death of Pan was but a sleep and a forgetting; the spirit of humanity, dominated for a moment by superst.i.tion and ignorance, seemed to be lying bound and mute, but it is vocal again, and its powers prove to be unshackled. The Orphic hymn, in dark numbers, had p.r.o.nounced the sky and the sea, earth the universal and fire the immortal, to be the limbs of Pan. Under the early sway of Christianity the office and meaning of the pagan G.o.ds faded into mist; they seemed to disappear for ever. Darkness gathered over the sweet natural influences of the physical world, and reality was bartered for a feverish dream of heaven and h.e.l.l.

But the G.o.ds were only preparing in silence for their ultimate resuscitation. Lactantius said that "Idols and religion are two incompatible things"; in his famous _De Origine Erroris_, conscious of the necessity of recognizing a central force of energy in nature, the earliest Christian philosopher repulsed the notion of polytheism, and insisted that piety can exist only in the wors.h.i.+p of the one G.o.d. He, like the Christian Fathers before him, shut up the spirit of man in a prison from which there seemed no escape. But the polytheists, thus violently Christianized against their will, remained pagan in essence, and they escaped, as by a miracle, from the furies of the Gospel and the Koran. The revolt was held in check through the Middle Ages; in the Renaissance it became victorious, and the first activity of man in liberty was an unconscious but none the less real rest.i.tution of the old liberating deities. The shepherds of Arcadia saw the blood come back into the marble face and hands of their dead G.o.d. Pan was moving on the earth once more, for he had triumphed over the sterile forces of dissolution. Pan, as ancient as social order itself, radiant master of the beneficent powers of light, has once more become the supreme deity.

This, put briefly, is the thesis of M. Clemenceau.

The influence of Renan is manifest through the whole of this rhapsody, which is unique among the writings of its author. M. Clemenceau had followed the track of Pan through the valleys of Arcadia, and up the rocky pathways that rise abruptly from the stony bed of Alpheus. An actual visit to Greece, the date of which I have not verified, appears to have influenced his imagination; he says, "je l'ai voulu chercher, moi-meme; au depit de Thamous, pres des antiques sources dolentes," and he tells us how an avalanche of falling stones and a clatter of cloven hoofs overhead often made him fancy the deity almost within his grasp.

In these pa.s.sages M. Clemenceau reveals himself more plainly than anywhere else as an imaginative positivist, who permits his fancy to play with romantic and even fantastic visions, yet who is none the less essentially emanc.i.p.ated from everything but reality. He is never the dupe of his own symbol. He rejects natural religion no less firmly than revealed religion, and he will not submit his conscience to any supernatural authority. The reader, if he has the patience to do so, may follow the close parallelism of the purely intellectual positivism of the author with the charming, supple, elusive philosophy of Renan in his _L'Avenir de la Science_.

In no other of his writings is M. Clemenceau quite so emanc.i.p.ated from the prejudice of the moment as he is m the preface to _Le Grand Pan_.

His central idea is one of satisfaction in the survival of the spirits of the dead G.o.ds, to whom, of course, he gives his own formula of definition. Nothing in history seems to affect him more painfully than the tragedy of the ma.s.sacre of the sacred statues under Theodosius, when, as Gibbon has so eloquently described, the most high G.o.ds were exposed to the derision of the crowd, and then melted down. Where M.

Clemenceau's emotion seems to be slightly deficient in logic is the parallel between these ancient G.o.ds who retain his sympathy, and the strictly impersonal forces of which he acknowledges them a symbol. He delights in Apollo, Pan, and Jove, and speaks of them almost as though they were individuals, yet he admits no sentimentality with regard to what they represent. On the whole, his att.i.tude is not one of benignity.

He confesses that nature reveals nothing but a system of forces interacting upon one another; it is not moral and it is not beneficent.

Here the tone of _Le Grand Pan_ becomes identical with that of _La Melee Sociale_. But we demand a clear definition of the central symbol. What does M. Clemenceau really mean us to understand by Pan? We push him up into a corner; we refuse to let him take refuge in his Renanesque imaginations, and we extract an answer at last. Pan is the source of all moral and intellectual action:

Pan nous commande. II faut agir. L'action est le principe, l'action est le moyen, l'action est le but. L'action obstinee de tout l'homme au profit de tous, l'action desinteressee, superieure aux pueriles glorioles, aux remunerations des reves d'eternite, comme aux desesperances des batailles perdues ou de l'ineluctable mort, l'action en evolution d'ideal, unique force et totale vertu.

The career of M. Clemenceau has been marked throughout by sudden and spasmodic crises, rather than by slow evolution of events. If this is true of his political history, it is repeated in his literary record. We need not, therefore, affect surprise at finding him, at the age of fifty-seven, and in the midst of the most bewildering distractions, produce his one and only novel, a modern story deliberately conducted to its close in four hundred pages. When _Les Plus Forts_ was published, in 1898, its author was extremely out of the fas.h.i.+on, and it pa.s.sed almost un.o.bserved from the press. Not a single Parisian critic, so far as I have discovered, gave it any serious attention, and it sank at once into an obscurity out of which the immense recent vogue of M. Clemenceau has only lately drawn it. _Les Plus Forts_ was issued at the darkest moment of the statesman's reversal, when he was repudiated by the great majority of those who adore him to-day. He had actually gone so far as to speak of his own as a "vie manquee," when a fresh opportunity of perilous service to the State fell in his way.

In October, 1897, M. Ernest Vaughan, who had laid by a very considerable sum of money for the purpose of founding an efficient social and literary newspaper, approached Clemenceau with the offer of the editors.h.i.+p in chief. The famous _L'Aurore_ came into existence, and it set sail at once in the stormy waters of the Dreyfus affair. Terrific was the clash of pa.s.sions around the name of the mysterious Jew, whose exact character and definite purpose will perhaps never be completely elucidated. M. Clemenceau did not hesitate to throw the weight of his pen into the unpopular scale. When Esterhazy was acquitted he almost lost his self-control; with furious irony and snarling invectives he lashed the populace into a frenzy. Then followed (on the 13th of January, 1898) the famous intervention of Zola, in a manifesto which rang from one end of the civilized world to the other. This was _J'accuse_, the admirably effective t.i.tle of which, so M. Maurice Le Blond a.s.sures us, was the invention of Clemenceau. Next month, at the Zola trial, Clemenceau defended the cause of justice in the teeth of enemies who did not refrain from threatening his very life, and for two years _L'Aurore_, in the midst of the frenzied Dreyfus hurly-burly, was unflagging in its attacks and its rejoinders.

At such a moment M. Clemenceau sat down to write his solitary novel. It would be fulsome to represent _Les Plus Forts_ as a masterpiece of fiction, though in the present flush of the author's celebrity some have dared so to describe it. As a matter of fact it owes the interest which it possesses almost entirely to the light which it throws on the character of its author. As a mere romance, _Les Plus Forts_ suffers from the fact that its author, gifted in so many other directions, is not an effective narrator. As Dr. Johnson mischievously said of Congreve's one novel, _Incognita_, it is easier to praise _Les Plus Forts_ than to read it. The scene is laid in a village deep in the heart of Poitou, and commentators have recognized a close reproduction of Mouilleron-en-Paradis, the hamlet near Fontenay where M. Clemenceau was born. At the moment of his fiercest struggle in Paris, his thoughts turned back to the cool woods and the still waters of his old home in the west, to the land of hollow valleys, and to the inexpressive sixteenth-century chateau which the doctor's child learned to regard as the symbol of rapine and tyranny in the past.

We are introduced to M. Henri, marquis de Puymaufray, a man of over sixty, solitary, a confirmed bachelor, not so good a shot as he used to be. The lonely old man comes back, defeated by life, to his chateau in Poitou. The mise-en-scene is lugubrious in the extreme, punctuated by the shrieking peac.o.c.ks at noon and the hooting owls at night. When this impression has been sketched in, we turn back to the hero's early history, and follow the adventures of a young buck of the Second Empire, brought up to despise science, modern thought, the action of democracy in every form. He begins as a pontifical zouave in bondage to Rome; he ends as a sort of anarchist. The biography of the young and stupid n.o.bleman is thus made a peg on which to hang dissertations on all the princ.i.p.al maladies which affected French society a quarter of a century ago. There is an exaggerated forceful woman, the Vicomtesse de Fourchamps, who plays a sustained but obscure part in the intrigue. What does she want? It is difficult to say; she is always "preparing for the battle" or attempting to "conquer" somebody. "Il faut conquerir," she incessantly repeats; she is a kind of tigress, and she seems to be, in petticoats, a type of every social and political movement of which M.

Clemenceau disapproves.

The Parisian scenes in M. Clemenceau's novel are not very amusing, and, oddly enough, they are weighed down by a sort of heavy gorgeousness, somewhat in the mode of Disraeli not at his best. All the characters preach, and the reader comes to sympathize with the vicomtesse when she declares herself "agacee des sermons du marquis." The young girl, Claude Harle, is a somewhat shadowy heroine. She pa.s.ses as the daughter of a rich industrial, but she is in reality the child of Puymaufray, who was the lover of her mother, since deceased. It is easy to understand that M. Clemenceau has taken this pathetic and tremulous figure as representative of what is chimerical in the society of the day. In her original condition, he puts into her mouth the crude sentiments which are supposed to be nurtured by the enemies of democracy. Claude calmly states that "the good G.o.d has inst.i.tuted two cla.s.ses of human beings, the rich and the poor, and it is our duty to maintain our inferiors in the practices of religion." A good deal of art is required to remove from such speeches as these the crude appearance of falsity; and it may be remarked that the pious characters in _Les Plus Forts_ are not more like real human beings than are the atheists in M. Paul Bourget's later romances.

What is of extraordinary interest in _Les Plus Forts_ is not the story itself, which is thin, nor the conduct of the adventures, which is stilted, but the temper and att.i.tude of the writer. If we ask ourselves what is the princ.i.p.al characteristic of this novel, the answer must be--the intensity of action of the personages; they seem to have springs of steel in their insides; they run when other people walk, and cannot move without leaping in the air. "Il faut aux conquerants la pleine securite de leur corps. Ou l'ame conduit, la bete doit suivre." The book is full of strange utterances of this order, which reveal the violence of the author's temperament in flashes of odd light. The episodes, the conversations, are little more than a series of irregular theses on various aspects of the struggle for life. The world is regarded as simply "le syndicat des plus forts," and this idea underlies the t.i.tle of the book. We are not allowed to forget it, even when our attention is being switched away to the discipline of little Chinese children in a missionary settlement, or to the importance of encouraging a manufacturer of paper in Ceylon.

What is perhaps the most characteristic pa.s.sage of M. Clemenceau's single novel may be quoted as an example both of his philosophy and of his style. It occurs in the course of a long conversation between father and daughter.

Certes non, l'argent n'est pas tout. Il est trop, simplement.

L'argent n'est pas tout, mais il a le genre humain pour clientele, car il est devenu, de force liberatrice, l'egosme tangible en rondelles de metal. Voila pourquoi tout cede a l'universelle attraction qui n'est pas suffisamment contre-balancee par d'autres.

L'argent n'est pas tout. Pourtant autour de lui se ra.s.semblent toutes les autres puissances sociales, et celles-la meme qui s'annoncerent protectrices des hommes, aussitot installees, par lui se sont agglomerees en tyrannie. Il a remplace la force brutale, dit-on ... a la condition de l'exprimer par d'autres signes. Contre l'expression du monde, il y avait Dieu autrefois, a dit quelqu'un.

Peut-etre. J'ai toujours trouve Dieu du cote des plus forts.

M. Clemenceau did not pause, meanwhile, from his journalistic labours, and he continued to offer to the public of Paris successive selections from the ma.s.s of his productions. On each of these occasions a preface, composed with more than usual care, gave the keynote to the series of essays, or rather suggested a tone of mind in which the reader would do well to study them. In the introduction to the volume of 1900, called _Au Fil des Jours_, the author returned to his favourite theme, the struggle against the universally destructive forces of Nature. The life of man is concentrated on resistance to the persistent attacks upon it made by an army of inimical forces. The pride of existence is humbled by the inevitable fatality which governs the fortunes of the Olympian G.o.ds themselves. And it is useless to appeal, with the sentimental pantheists, to the beneficence of Nature, for Nature is the most relentless, the most indomitable of our enemies. In that extraordinary little tragedy of Victor Hugo, _Mangeront-ils_, the vain appeal is made:

Est-ce pas, Nature, que tu hais les semeurs de trepas, Qui dans l'air frappent l'aigle et sur l'eau la sarcelle, Et font partout saigner la vie universelle?

With the clairvoyance of the biologist, M. Clemenceau divines the vanity of these remonstrances, and from the terrible cruelty of Nature he sees no relief save in vigorous action. "Toute ame haute veut etre de la melee." The most troublous epochs are battles for the ideal, even at their worst moments. The only way to resist the destructive fatality of Nature is to strive for an amelioration of the lot of the human race. In all this, the texture of which is occasionally a little stretched when it is made to cover newspaper articles on the lighting of Paris or a show of prize pigeons, M. Clemenceau displays his eager wish to subordinate all his writing to a set of philosophical ideas. He has always held that the general impulses on which our daily existence depends reach us through the channels of thought. He is, therefore, a philosopher by determination, and he bases his own intellectual system on Pasteur and Spencer, on Darwin and J. S. Mill, on Taine and Renan. I have already spoken of the immense influence evidently exercised on Clemenceau by Renan's early and least ripe work _L'Avenir de la Science_. No doubt it was the reading of that remarkable book which led Clemenceau, already bia.s.sed in favour of materialism, to transfer to science all the pa.s.sion which an earlier generation, and since his middle age a later generation, gave to religion. It must be understood that he does not belong in habit of mind or intellectual aspiration to the characteristic French tradition of to-day.

The great merit of M. Clemenceau, in the agitated years when he wielded a pen that was like a rapier, consisted in his fearless and disdainful audacity. He fought in literature exactly as he has always fought in politics, with the air of one who had no wish to conciliate his opponent, but always to browbeat him, to crush him by the weight of his argument, and then run him through the body with his irony. When we turn over the pages of his books, which suffer an inevitable loss from the fugitive nature of the themes on which they mainly expatiate, we are astounded at the ceaseless agility of the lucid, restless brain of the man. He is an acrobat, incessantly flinging himself with aerial lightness into some new impossible position. An article a day for twenty-five years--what an expenditure of vital force that seems to sum up; and yet to-day, at the age of seventy-eight, the indefatigable brain and body seem as elastic as ever! The fullness of the material in M.

Clemenceau's articles has always been a matter of amazement to those who know how much clever journalism is of the kind Francisque Sarcey described when he said, "You may turn the tap as much as you please; if the cistern is empty, nothing but wind comes out!" But M. Clemenceau seemed always full, and copious as was the output, the reader had always the impression that there was much more behind.

We may regret that while the great politician was chiefly engaged in writing, namely between 1893 and 1903, he was obliged by circ.u.mstances to expend so much of his experience and his condition upon occasional issues. In turning over his pages, we must not forget that he wrote, not in the calm retirement of a study, but out in the street, in the midst of the battle and heat of the day. His insatiable appet.i.te for action drove him forth into the madding crowd. There has always been something encyclopaedic about his pa.s.sion for knowledge, for practical acquaintance with the actual practice of life. He has cultivated a genius for observation, and his feverish career has been spent in pursuing knowledge day by day, without giving himself time to arrange the trophies of his pursuit. He has published no systematic scheme of his philosophy, but has left us to gather it as well as we may from his prefaces, and most of all from _Le Grand Pan_. As an author, we may sum him up as the latest, and in some respects the most vigorous and agile, of the disciples of the Encyclopaedists. Like them, through a long and breathless career, he has ceaselessly striven to struggle upward into the light of knowledge.

1919.

A VISIT TO THE FRIENDS OF IBSEN

In the summer of 1872 I received special leave from the Princ.i.p.al Librarian of the British Museum to visit Denmark and Norway for the purpose of reporting on the state of current literature in those countries. Of my Danish experiences I have given an account in my book called _Two Visits to Denmark_ (Smith, Elder & Co., 1911); but hitherto I have not published any of my Norwegian adventures. I am led to do so now, in consequence of a letter which I have just received from Rektor Frederik Ording, of Holmestrand, who is engaged on a biographical study of "Henrik Ibsen's Ungdomsvenner," and who tells me that it has become almost impossible to obtain information about the particular group of men of letters whom I conversed with more than forty-five years ago.

They are all long since dead, and no one survives who recollects them in their prime. No one--so it appears--but me! The fact is a solemnizing one. I feel like the Moses of the poet:

Je vivrai donc toujours puissant et solitaire?

Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre;

but before I am allowed by Norway to do that, it seems that I am called upon to disgorge my recollections. They are, I am afraid, though founded on a full journal, rather slight.

Ibsen, as is well known, was at that time, and had long been, an exile from his native country, where his plays were ill received and his character subjected to a great deal of stupid insult. But there was a small circle of his early friends who remained true to the devotion which his genius had inspired in them. When I was in Copenhagen, it was impressed upon me that these men formed the real Norway, the fine flower of Norse culture and intelligence, and it was to them that I took introductions. They were mainly jurists, archaeologists and historians, whose studies into the annals of their country had given them a determination to support existing inst.i.tutions. They were called "Conservatives," and by the radical press were treated as though their ideas were desperately retrograde. But in any other country but Norway, fifty years ago, they would have been called advanced Liberals. They desired to introduce broad and sweeping reforms, and they were particularly desirous to follow the example of England. If I understand their position aright, they were rather Const.i.tutionalists than Conservatives, for their first idea always was to bring their views into line with the Const.i.tution.

A short time before my visit, the barrier which surrounded and isolated the group of men of whom I speak had been emphasized by the development of the Venstre, the national radical party, which was urged on and supported by the Peasants' party. The debates in the Storthing in 1871 and 1872 had been very bitter, and public opinion was sharply, but unequally, divided over the burning question of the admission of ministers to the national a.s.sembly. Without going further into the obscurity of foreign politics, it is enough to say here that the group into which I was for a short time admitted as an indulged and attentive guest, had the hope that, with all its talents and knowledge, it would be called upon to take over the government of the country. It was thought that Aschehoug would oust the radical Sverdrup as the next Prime Minister. The reign of const.i.tutionalism would begin; the peasant leaders would be sent back to their farms; and Norway would open a splendid period of conservative re-action. In this, the friends were supported by the most powerful newspaper of the country, _Morgenbladet_, which like themselves had long been frankly democratic, but had recently taken a very strong line in opposition to the Left. _Morgenbladet_ was boisterously attacked by _Dagbladet_, the rival newspaper, edited by Samuel Baetzmann, a bearded and very tall young man, who was pointed out to me in the street, with execration and contempt, by Jakob Lokke.

The hope of my friends was not realized. The whole tendency of Norwegian life was in the opposite direction, and a few days after I left Christiania, the death of King Carl had the effect of still further encouraging the Liberals. The group I had known were swept out of public life by the tide of radicalism, and suffered the obscuration which awaits the unsuccessful politician. Now, as it appears, when all pa.s.sion has died down, there is a great curiosity about men whose talents and accomplishments, as well as their high patriotism, were an a.s.set in the civilization of Norway at a critical moment. Hence, when it is almost too late, and when I am left the only survivor, I am appealed to for my recollections, pale and slight as they must be.

Late, then, in the summer of 1872 I arrived in Christiania, armed with cards and letters of introduction from friends in Copenhagen, and with a recommendation from Tennyson to Professor Ludwig Kristensen Daa, who had been very civil to the poet when he visited Norway. I arrived in the midst of the excitement caused by the recent celebration of the 1,000 years' festival, and in particular we crossed Prince Oskar who was returning to Stockholm from being present at Haugesund on that occasion, when he had unveiled a colossal symbolic statue of Harald Fairhair.

Before my first evening closed in, I hastened to explore the length of the city right up Carl Johans Gade to the New Park; and in the Eidsvoldplads, a square opposite the Storthing House, I received a little shock, for gazing up at the new bronze statue of Harald Fairhair, I saw the drapery rise and flutter in the wind. This was not a replica of the national statue at Haugesund, but an independent design, put up in lath and plaster to see whether public opinion approved of it. It occurred to me afterwards that it was the symbol of the stalwart conservatism of the group of friends of whom I am about to speak, who trusted to their heroic att.i.tude to impress public opinion--and failed.

Early next morning I called on Jakob Lokke (1829-1881), who was head-master of the Christiania Cathedral School, and the leading educational authority in Norway. I had been able to be of some a.s.sistance to Lokke in London during the year 1871, and his hospitable and genial acquaintance was now very valuable to me. Close to the great church of Our Saviour, in the centre of the city, in the first house on the left-hand side of the Stor Gade, Mr. and Mrs. Lokke had an apartment on the third storey in which they received a small, but extremely distinguished, circle of guests. Lokke was pompous in manner and a touchy man, but full of warmth and generosity under a somewhat difficult surface. His hospitality to me, on this occasion, was untiring, and it was wholly owing to him that I was admitted to the remarkable group of Norse Tories who were making so resolute and so vain a struggle to stem the rising flood of radicalism. Lokke's "tredie etage" in Stor Gade was a typical home of lost causes, and the group of friends were all ardent supporters of Ibsen, whose satirical temper was then looked upon askance by the various popular parties.

The first person to whom Lokke presented me was Emil Stang (born 1834), the son of the then prime minister of Norway, Frederik Stang, and a leading advocate. He became very cordial when he learned that I was bent on introducing Ibsen to the English public, and had begun to do so; and he told me that he held a brief for the poet at that moment. It will be remembered that Ibsen then resided in Dresden. Taking advantage of this exile, a Danish publisher of the baser sort had produced a pirated edition of the _Warriors of Helgeland_, with an announcement that a similar reprint of _Madam Inger at Osterraad_ would follow. Stang laughed as he told me of Ibsen's gigantic anger at this offence; he had immediately put the matter into Stang's hands, and had desired him to get a full indemnity from the Danish publisher. But it was the usual case of trying to bleed a stone. The man would not even withdraw his edition, though no more was said of the projected piracy of _Madam Inger_. Mr. Stang told me that the case was still dragging through the courts; I never learned the result.

Lokke took me to the University Library to see the Librarian, Ludwig Daae (not to be confounded with Daa), who was born in 1834 and died in 1910. The visit was untimely, for Daae had not arrived, and only one single clerk was on duty. This man was ready to be friendly, but he was being bullied by the Princ.i.p.al Librarian of the University of Stralsund, a typical loud-voiced Prussian, to whom I took a violent dislike. The librarian was acquainted with Lokke and attached himself to us; he spoke with great contempt of the Library of the British Museum, which he said he knew very well. We proceeded to the Record Office, in order to see Mr. Michael Birkeland (1830-1897), the Master of the Rolls, of whom I shall have much to relate. The Record Office (Riksarkivet) was then in the same clump of buildings as the Storthing House. We did not find Birkeland in, but we found an even more ill.u.s.trious person, J. E. W.

Sars (1835-1915), who was already deep in the preparation of those works which have made him famous as the most philosophical of Norwegian historians. He was shortly after my visit appointed Professor of History in the University of Christiania.

My introduction to Ludwig Daae was only postponed. The next time I called at Lokke's house, a little shabby man with a beard, with woefully dishevelled hair and snuff-coloured old coat, was dancing a sort of lonely pirouette in the middle of the floor, while he talked. He stopped at my entrance, and Jakob Lokke, coming forward, presented me to him as to "the Librarian of the University, Ludwig Daae." "The author of that delightful _Gamle Kristiania_?" I asked. "Ah, do you know my book?" he said, and seemed pleased. I felt very much drawn to Ludwig Daae from the first, and he spoke Norwegian so plainly and elegantly that it was particularly easy for me to follow him. All through the rest of my visit to Christiania I had the benefit of his kindliness and wit, his ingenuousness and his fund of knowledge. His book, _Gamle Kristiania_, a picturesque series of essays on the history of the city up to 1800, was familiar to me, and I had written a long review of it in the _Spectator_ for Richard Holt Hutton, in which I had ventured to say that it would be impossible for any one in future to attempt a history of modern Norwegian affairs without the help of Mr. Daae's admirable book.

The name of this gentleman offered much difficulty, because, by a very odd coincidence, there were at that moment three unrelated persons whose names were in sound identical. There was Ludwig K. Daa, and there were two Ludwig Daaes, my friend, and a politician whom I did not meet.