And it was so all his life. He had freed himself defiantly from the point of view imposed upon him by his teachers, and he fled with his sympathy to the side of those who had wasted their strength in vainly kicking against the pricks. In the books he had been given to read and in what he had been taught, God and His chosen people and ideas marched on in an endless triumphal procession, and he had joined in the jubilant shouting, had exulted in the sense of being counted with the proud legions of the conqueror; for is not victory always righteous, and is not the victor a liberator, a reformer, a light bringer?
But now the shouting had died down. Now he was silent, and he began to enter into the thoughts of the defeated and feel with the hearts of the vanquished. He understood that even when that which prevails is good, that which yields is not therefore bad. He went over to the losing side and told himself that this was finer and greater. The power of the victor he called mere brute force and violence. He took sides—as wholeheartedly as he could—against God, but as a vassal who takes up arms against his liege lord; for he still believed, and could not drive out his faith by defiance.
His tutor, Mr. Bigum, was not one who could lead a soul back to the old paths. Indeed, his temperamental philosophy, by virtue of which he could be fired and enraptured by each and every side of the question—today, one; tomorrow, another—set all dogmas adrift in the minds of his pupils. At bottom he was really a man of Christian principles, and if anyone could have pinned him down to saying what was the fixed point in all this fluid matter, he would most likely have replied that it was the creed of the Evangelical Lutheran Church or something akin to that, but he himself had very little inclination to drive his pupils along the straight road of orthodoxy or to warn them at every step that the least deviation from the beaten track meant straying into lies and darkness, likely to end in perdition and hell; for he had none of the passionate concern of the orthodox for jots and tittles. He was, in fact, religious in the slightly artistic, superior manner such talented people affect, not afraid of a little harmonizing, easily enticed into half unconscious rearrangements and adaptations, because, whatever they do, they must assert their own personality, and, in whatever spheres they fly, must hear the whirring of their own wings.
Such people do not guide, but their instruction has a fullness, a copiousness, and a wobbly many-sidedness which, provided they do not utterly confuse a pupil, tend to develop his independence in a high degree, since they almost force him to make up his mind for himself. For children can never rest upon anything vague or indefinite; their very instinct of self-preservation demands a plain Yes or a plain No, a for or against, to show them where to turn with their hate and where with their love.
Hence there was no firm and immutable authority that might have guided Niels with its constant clinching of arguments and pointing of ways. He had taken the bit in his teeth, and plunged headlong on any path that opened before him, provided only that it led him away from what had been the home of his feelings and of his thoughts.
He felt a new sense of power in thus seeing with his own eyes and choosing with his own heart and forming himself by his own will. Many new things came to his mind; traits of his own nature that he had never thought of and that seemed unrelated one to the other, fitted themselves together wonderfully and were fused into a rational whole. It was a fascinating time of discovery. Little by little, in fear and uncertain exultation, in incredulous joy, he found himself. He began to realize that he was not like others, and a new spiritual modesty made him shy, awkward, and taciturn. He grew suspicious of questions, and imagined he found hints of his own most hidden thoughts in everything that was said. Having learned to read in his own heart, he supposed everybody else could read what was written there, and he shunned his elders, preferring to roam about alone. It seemed to him that people had suddenly become very intrusive; he developed a slightly hostile feeling toward them as to creatures of another race, and in his loneliness he began to hold them up for scrutiny and judgment. Formerly the names of father, mother, the pastor, the miller, sufficed to characterize, and the name had quite hidden the person from him. But now he saw that the pastor was a jolly little man, who made himself as meek and demure as he could at home to escape the notice of his wife, while abroad he tried to forget the domestic yoke by talking himself into a frenzy of rebellion and loud-voiced thirst for liberty. That was the pastor as he saw him now.
And Mr. Bigum?
He had seen him ready to throw everything overboard for Edele’s love, had heard him deny himself and the soul within him in that hour of passion in the garden, and now he was always talking about the philosopher rising in Olympic calm above
