Chapter 2
Glad as chaplain Hirsch was that he had met a latent power, he was no less glad that he could try his new method.
That, he knew, was good. That was but natural. That, which all teachers in the art of bringing up a child had used. He would not pummel the child full of letters, he would teach the wisdom of life. Nurture the life of his heart as the life of his mind, teach him to know and understand the soul. A fresh natural way of bringing-up that would grow into something unique.
Daniel came to the priest in gladness and uneasy thoughts. He anticipated lessons as long as the road to the church that stretched out as the day of judgment. But he was told that they should not be anxious about lessons. Instead of examining Daniel, the chaplain set himself to telling and explaining things. He did not do so much as bade Daniel “listen carefully”, so that he could “remember it next time”. Daniel wondered. Could such lead to learning and the examination?
Now then, the chaplain understood it better. The chaplain knew what he is doing. It can happen that the way it took works fine. They did not care about slaving over lessons and such things.
When one day the chaplain told him that this method they are using is not used in the typical latin schools, Daniel was uneasy.* He stared with wide eyes on this man who decided to use his own way and believed himself smarter than both the bishop and high priests [who ranked just below the bishop]. In reality, Daniel would rather have it as in the regular latin school. And he would have felt more secure if he knew that it follows the prescribed way. But one could not say so to the chaplain. He calmed himself and told his teacher with immense eyes: you know best, do with me as you see will.
It was the sagas that the chaplain took up in the first lessons. Each time Daniel brought with him the German language book and laid it on the table before him, like a silent prayer, for as long as he could not do German, he was not smarter than the other farmers. But the chaplain let the book lie there.
He recounted tales of the old ancestors. And he told of the beliefs of these forefathers. For Daniel, they came up in a shining row, these gods whom he had not known of before; god after god came radiantly, first three, then 12, and with the goddesses, big and beautiful, with light bright hair, with golden tears, the face shining like the rim of the day, with eyes so clear like the fading stars. And Odin sat high at Hildskjalv with his ravens, looking out over the world and knew everything. But Thor roamed around the heavens, hit the beings of Jotunheim with his hammer and thus turned them into stones. Balder was the mild god of light that maintained right among mankind, but had to die because of Loke’s cunning and thus had to go to Hel, the realm of the dead; Froy was the god for a good year and a great ruler, but gave away his sword for love of a woman of Jotun. Daniel had never heard of such; he sat and listened, so that he forgot the German lessons and all others; he stared at the teacher with his smiling and trusting eyes, like the eyes of a child or a dog.
It was a pair of extraordinary eyes, thougt the chaplain. He almost did not have the words for it, but he finally understood: they showed a gift for believing. But was it not actually such a gift that the times needed? Soul weary and sick, he lay like a fish on land that gasped for air; through all these poetry he searched for the resolve and conviction for that who should come and bring salvation must be the man who had the faith of a child. And this, the farm boy had. Our Lord had been so good to this country that when the faith had faded in the upper stratum, so then did the lower come forth with salvation; this was first and foremost what made the farmer our hope for the future. All the great gifts were of no use without the strong, wholehearted faith; but with which the farmer, rich in power as he was otherwise, would build the new Norway.
The chaplain held on for a long time with the Nordic gods. In them lived the souls of the forefathers, most strongly and clearly; and through them the Norwegian soul would awaken anew. And he saw that this took seed in the young mind. It was wonderful, it was heartening, to see how effortlessly this young boy came to understand the worldview of his forefathers.
But Daniel marveled at all this wisdom that his ancestors had laid down in their teaching about the old gods. He came home from these lessons deep in dreams about the old Nordic gods and thought to himself that these old Norwegians must have been better than the weaklings nowadays.
But when one day he told his mother about what he studied with the priest, she was frightened and asked if the priest would make him a heathen. He had to assure her at some length before she was soothed, but he never again told her anything more about the “great beings”. But the less he told of these, the more he dreamed.
Old Johannes asked now and then if he had learned a lot of German. Then Daniel was at a loss how to answer, but he managed to say that one first had to learn much before he could tackle German, and this satisfied Ole Johannes. Daniel answered in this manner when the villagers asked the same question. If anyone wanted to know what one has to learn before one could begin studying German, Daniel answered that it was “grammar and such things”; and this he knew nobody understood.
What they worked on most, besides the sagas, was the mother language. This, the chaplain did not want to tackle according to the method in the latin school. They should not be “unduly concerned with grammar“. What was necessary in grammar, Daniel could get later; it was the content, the ideas, the soul that was essential.
The treasure in the big, great ideas that we have in our Nordic poetry is so rich, that when we make it a part of ourselves, we could manage without borrowing from Germany or Rome. And when the chaplain took up the great Nordic poets with the boy, it had enough of the old poets’ spirit. Most of what they read was the poetry in the sagas. They went easily through Holberg and Wessel, and the chaplain praised them highly; but they dug deeper into Oehlenschlaeger and Grundtvig. Daniel, who before had not read anything more than prayers, homilies and Olger Danske’s chronicles, was amazed; could these people write so easily about such deep thoughts? But he learned that the great Nordic poets were not ordinary people; they were inspired. And this explanation Daniel found reasonable.
Later they read more recent Norwegian poets; the most spirited of them was Bjørnson. But when they came to the fairy tales and the folktales, Daniel enjoyed himself most. In this , the chaplain infused so much spirit, that the whole world came alive; the mountain stood thinking; the forest related adventures, the ocean sighed in low long waves and sang about timeless things; high up in the hills the hulder blew the horn; the small people who lived beneath the earth danced on mounds and rocks, under the waterfall sat the sprite who played music so beautiful that everything wept; out in the pale moonlit sea lay the beautiful mermaids who enticed with their song so that the seamen broke their hearts with love. It must be wonderful to be a poet, then can one hear of such things.
Afterwards, Daniel got the wisdom, so rich in the dreams that the teacher lived on.
The land did not have it so good during these times. The people slept; they lay in hibernation; the trolls had cast a spell on it; they had fallen into something bad and terrible that the chaplain called materialism; they knew nothing about the spirit. For as long it was this way, no “Pentecost winds” could blow life into the dead bones all over the land.
People went about distractedly and with false images in their head, digging in the earth and thought of nothing else but food. Not a dream about what a man’s life should be. No higher love; no sense or sight for that which was great and high and noble on earth; only a slavish worry about what went into the pot and filled the purse, this narrow minded idea about the “practical”; the chaplain sneered when he said the word. Soulless striving for food lay like a curse over the land, which turned the people into slaves, into animals; the people lay as if in a troll’s spell, enfolded in the power of Loke. The people must be brought out from under the mountain, the Norwegian soul from the old times must be brought up, great deeds, the sagas, the songs, to wake them up to a new life. And through all these, the strong apostolic Christian belief must shine like the creative power of life, so that the psalms and the folksongs, sagas and beliefs, the godly and popular could hang together whole and full; then would the soul unfold its wings anew; thus would Norway be reborn.
Daniel thought he understood this. Was it not the same thing he himself had thought, even if he had not seen so clearly or found such a word for it. He felt himself very glad. Never had he looked on his teacher with such fond eyes; and never had his teacher been convinced that in his apprentice glowed a holy fire, that would one day burst out in song or deed for the good of the country.
Half a year passed before the chaplain could not longer postpone the lessons in the German language. Still, he would not deal with it in the soulless way of the latin school. The latin school was, on the whole, a pathetic hole, he said. It was not a school for the young; it was a school for cold wisdom and was hostile to the soul. Therefore, we could say that so many of our civil servants were on the same side as the food slaves in the big conflict of the souls. Daniel did not understand this. Could not the rich and learned people also be food slaves? Yes, when the chaplain said it. And he was thus happy that he was led into a better road, otherwise he would not have been so afraid to study lessons.
They did not care too much for the German grammar. They started with reading book through which they would learn the grammar. The chaplain read and translated; Daniel did the same accordingly. And it went well. If Daniel did not remember the words, then he remembered the content; he soon knew the meaning of many words; those which were most often repeated, he learned. This goes well, thought Daniel.
The chaplain thought the same thing. He was satisfied both with the boy and the method; in this way the spirit shall come into the German language. And he wrote about this in a professional journal, how good it went with the new method.
Just as the teacher was in bliss with this, so was Daniel as blissful that he could now say he was at last reading German. He especially took notice of certain words and phrases that he could use; these he studied so that he would have something to bring home, as well as those that he could use to show off at the bellman’s school.
There he was known as quite a guy, and he thrived on this. Among other things, he also liked Inga Holm, the daughter of the bellman. Inga was a plump, sweet little thing with a good, kind face and graceful movements; her eyes were almost halfway close and rather dreamy, swimming in a mild, sleepy glow. It was strange that the classroom turned light and pleasant when she came in. There was something special about her that Daniel never saw in others; everything she did, even just moving a finger–it was so decent, so innocent, so nice to look at. But the eyes were like a glimpse of the sun. When she looked at Daniel, he felt warm, and a wonderful sweet and agitated feeling coursed through his chest. Daniel often dreamed about those eyes; and when the chaplain told about Ydun or Froeya, Daniel always thought of Inga. He thought a little about it, and turned red as blood, that maybe he loved Inga Holm?
After a short while, they had to start with the latin. It was not according to the usual method, but it so happened that the chaplain continued in this way.
Daniel felt proud. He knew that it was latin that distinguished the learned from the ignorant: latin was the narrow road that led from the shoal towards heaven; nobody was great man who did not know latin; and now he would learn latin.
The next day he hurried to the chaplain’s farm, with Cesar’s Bellum Gallicum reverently tucked in his arm.
When he arrived, he heard that the old Romans had been robbers; the Norwegian production of books was a soulless imitation of the Greeks, it was unnatural and meaningless for us, people of the North, to read latin. Daniel could not understand this. Since the chaplain said it, then it had to be true; but he had to wait until he became older to understand this.
It did not take long for him to know that the chaplain was right. Latin was in all aspects so contrary to everything that we used, so opposed to our way of thinking, that one should never take such a view. First of all, the words were unwieldy. That a country should be named terra, or a city urbs; was so unlike anything. There was no use in guessing at the words: each and every word had literally to be learned. But even worse were the sentences. They were so interwoven, and the words were strewn in any way the writer wanted, that it was almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. The predicate verb could be the first word in the sentence, and the subject could be anywhere down the page, and sometimes there was no subject at all! He had never seen such a thing. And the grammar. Now he had to study grammar. The method did not work here at all; to infuse soul in that which was soulless was futile, as the chaplain had said. It had to do with reading with sense; Daniel should not learn by rote. But he had to “look at” on the grammar, both repeatedly and often. And latin grammar appeared terrible. Four declensions! Six cases! And two or three expressions from the rule; and exception from each exception again; and so on in an endless fashion! Daniel felt overwhelmed.
Neither was there soul in that which they had to read. Daniel had expected deep thoughts and high visions and wonderful tales of an entirely new kind, and then he got the usual dry description of some small wars and battles between Romans and the barbarians up in Gallia. Was that something? Daniel had read much more glorious descriptions of battles in “The Friend of the Plebians”. So, there was a lot of striving but little progress with the latin. But the chaplain did not care much about this. That the naturally fresh farm boy did not do well in latin was, in reality, something merely to be noted: how completely the Roman way was opposed to the Nordic spirit. And he comforted Daniel that he would always learn enough latin to manage the entrance examination to the university. It was not worth wasting so much of his youth on something not worthwhile but rather corrodes our Nordic spirit.
On the whole, it went along well with both one or the other at first. That from which Daniel learned most was the Nordic saga. The chaplain narrated well, and Daniel followed easily. It was easy, this, and easy to remember; and if he forgot something, it was simple enough to look it up in the book.
Thus he learned to dream. He dreamed about the hulder** and about Inga Holm, and more and more, the two became one. He also dreamed about the great and good things he would do when he became a university student or a priest; he learned from the old Nordic poets and from the chaplain that the dreams of youth belonged to what is great in life. A man who had not dreamed in his youth was not a real man! And when the chaplain told Daniel about the life of a university student, he loved to say that what gave this life its luster and its grandeur was the bold dreams of youth. To the life of the university student belonged joy, song, wholesome fun, good camaraderie; but each student who had the essence of manhood, secretly carried the beautiful dreams that gave pleasure a seriousness and a meaning to amusement
So dreamed Daniel, and thought that he was of the same material as the men he dreamed about; and so he read as he would. If he lived high in the dreams and in those bright and uplifting moments with the chaplain, he thought that life at home became more and more a strife.
It was so tight and so small there. So unpleasant and spiritless. Everything was about that wretched food. And so untidy that there was no order in anything. In addition, here was no proper cleaning and washing, and the window was almost never open, so they breathed the same stale air. They did not even care about cleaning themselves; they washed themselves every Sunday and that was good enough. Not a single thought outside the distressing striving for food, unless one counted the religious times. About human life, they did not dream at all. And in this he felt so alone. He had no one to talk with. That could only be Judith, but what did she understand. And Lias, he was a soulless clod, who gave more thought to a bucket of potatoes than to his soul or poetry. Really, this was not a life for Daniel.
When he said anything about this mismanagement, they had made fun of him. Sometimes his father was angry when the boy came with his “fine ideas”. Maybe he has become a big guy already? It would not take the pig to get bigger before he should have a curled loop on the tail! Everyday at the school with a white collar at the neck, and so well-combed and carefully dressed, as if he would be what he was not, he never did anything but little work but when he did, he went at once to the kitchen to wash himself! Yes, yes. And how would it be for the village, if everybody would go around like that and wash up all the time!
Daniel became angry when he heard such remarks now and then. Once at twilight, he came in and found the living room stuffy with a smell that wasn’t good. It had rained that day, and the fireplace was hung full with wet clothes steaming with a powerful smell. Huh, said Daniel, breathing and blowing; so he went to the window to open it even if it there was light rain and blowing outside. He pushed and pulled noisily at the windows, as none of them would open easily. And he thought he was all alone in there. But over at the curtained bed lay the old man, watching and listening to everything, and he began to boil inside. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked sharply. Daniel was startled, but pulled himself together, and said that he merely wanted to have the window up, as it was so stifling inside. Ole Johannes was silent a while, he was boiling inside, he wanted to find a word that would bite “Oh, yes. It is supposed to be ... very fine, that, I should know!” he said. Daniel became angry and replied that whether it was fine or not, he wanted fresh air! The old man was trembling with anger where he lay. “Huh, just listen! Maybe you think I would have the draft and the rain in the bed with me when I sleep?” – “If you want to sleep, lying in this stuffy air will do you little good,” answered Daniel, and he went back to knocking on the window again, but not so hard. At last the window was got up, but he let it stay open just a bit and then left the room. Then the wind caught the windowpane and pulled it all the way up. Shivering, the old man crawled up and went to the window; pulled it down with an enraged bang that Daniel must have heard if he were in the house.
After that day, Ole Johannes went about tight-lipped. But with Mari, he mentioned that it seemed that all the learning Daniel was getting did not do him good. Mari understood what he meant and immediately went to Daniel. She asked him to remember what his going to school is costing his father. It is not surprising that the old mad was a bit sore about it, that he should pay out the money and get little thanks for it – Oh, those money, scoffed Daniel. Was there any other money to talk about yet? Does not the chaplain teach for free? He did not care so much about the money, he. To this answered Mari, that for the sake of decency, one could not let the chaplain work without anything in return. One always ought to send him a meat pudding or a tub of butter now and then, and then one has to give a little extra in the offering during the high holidays; in the same way was it with the bellman; so everything was altogether, including what Daniel himself needed, a matter of money. Ole Johannes had indeed in this last year borrowed not so little. Daniel felt himself deep in a swamp. Only food bills and thinking about food, smallness, and poverty all the time. He went out. He must have fresh air. Where else could one go.
But after this, he did not dare be anything but a nice boy. He gave in to the custom of the house and tried to get along with his father as best he could. Ole Johannes was quite satisfied with this. That serves you well, my man! But Daniel did not like this game. He almost hated this soulless soil-slave of a farmer who could not understand that which is high and great and noble on the earth; and always he went about singing Bjørnson’s classic yearning verse in “Arne”
“I will go, out, oh, so far, far, far
over the high mountains
Here it is so depressing, oppressively narrow,
and my mind is so young and upright!
But when his brother Lias heard such, this soulless clod said, “Master Daniel” could be happy if he would never get it worse than at home.
NOTES
* Here, ‘latin school’ refers to the school, originally administered by the Church, that prepares students for priesthood in Norway. Not only latin is taught, but also other subjects like algebra, history, geometry, etc. Later, the ‘latin school’ became the basis for education after the 10-year Norwegian ‘ground school’.
** In Nordic folktale, the hulder is a being that looks like a beautiful woman but with a tail. If the hulder marries a man in church, then she becomes a human and the tail disappears. This seldom happens, as usually, the man is enticed to go and live with her under the earth, never to return to his own kind.
*** Loke is the treacherous trickster of Jotunheimen who caused the death of Balder, and went among both gods and the humans causing discord and stride.