Now came a happy time for Niels, the glorious time when the mighty impulse of growth sweeps us jubilantly past the dead points in our own nature; when we are filled to bursting with a strength that makes us eager to put our shoulders to mountains if need be, while we build away bravely on the Tower of Babel, which is meant to pierce the sky, but ends in being just a squatty structure that we go on all our lives adding to—now a timid spire, now a freakish bay window.
Everything was changed; his nature, his faculties, and his work fitted into one another like cogged wheels. He could never think of stopping to rejoice in his art, for a thing was no sooner finished than it was cast aside: he had outgrown it even while he worked on it, and it became a mere step that led upward to an ever-receding goal, one of many steps on a road he had left behind him and forgotten even while it resounded with his footfall.
While he felt himself borne along by new impulses and new thoughts to greater power and wider vision, he grew more and more solitary. One after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great hostile mass of boredom. What did they write when they gave the call to battle? Pessimistic verses in which they declared that dogs were often more faithful than men and jailbirds more honest than those who walked freely about, eloquent odes to the effect that green woods and brown heath were preferable to dusty cities, stories of peasant virtue and rich men’s vice, of red-blooded nature and anemic civilization, the narrowness of age and the divine right of youth. What modest demands they made when they wrote! They were at least bolder when they talked within four safe walls.
No, when his time came, he would give them music—a clarion call!
His older friendships suffered too, especially that with Frithjof. The fact was that Frithjof, who had a very positive nature, a good head for systems, and a broad back for dogmas, had read a little too much Heiberg, and had taken it all for gospel truth, never suspecting that the makers of systems are clever folk who fashion their systems from their books and not their books from their systems. It is a well-known fact that young people who have committed themselves to a system generally become great dogmatists, because of the praiseworthy affection youth often bears to what is finished and finite. And when you have become the possessor of the whole truth, it would be unpardonable to keep it for yourself alone and to allow less fortunate fellow creatures to go their own misguided way, instead of leading and instructing them, pruning away their wild shoots with loving severity, forcing them up against the wall with gentle coercion, and pointing out to them the lines along which they must grow, in order that they may sometime, when they have been formed into correct and artistic espaliers, thank you, even if tardily, for the trouble you have taken.
Niels was fond of saying that he liked nothing better than criticism, but the truth was that he preferred admiration, and he certainly would not brook criticism from Frithjof, whom he had always regarded as his serf, and who had always been delighted to wear the livery of his opinions and his principles. And here he was trying to play the equal and to masquerade in a self-chosen mantle! Of course he must be snubbed, and Niels first tried, in a tone of good-natured superiority, to make Frithjof ridiculous in his own eyes, but when that would not work he had recourse to insolent paradoxes, which he would scorn to discuss, simply throwing them out in all their grotesque hideousness and then retiring behind a teasing silence.
In this way they grew apart.
With Erik he got on better. Their boyish friendship had always kept a certain reserve, a kind of spiritual modesty, and this had saved them from the too great familiarity that is so dangerous to friendship. They had been enthusiastic together in the festival hall of their souls and had chatted intimately in the drawing-room, but they had never made free with each other’s bedrooms, bathrooms, and other private places in the mansion of their souls.
It was the same now; indeed, the reserve was, if anything, stricter, at least on Niels’s part, but that did not lessen their friendship, the cornerstone of which, now as of old, was Niels Lyhne’s admiration for Erik’s spirit and audacity, his way of seeming at home with life, and his readiness to grasp and hold. Yet Niels could not conceal from himself that the friendship was extremely one-sided. Not that Erik was wanting in real affection or faith in him—far from it. No one could think more highly of Niels than Erik did; he considered him so vastly his own superior in intellect that he never dreamed of criticizing, but this blind admiration led him to place Niels and his work and interests too far beyond the horizon his own eyes could scan. He was sure that Niels would go far along the road he had chosen, but
