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Updated: June 27, 2025
On January 1, 1863, I received a New Year's letter from Broechner, in which he wrote that the essay on Romeo and Juliet had so impressed him that, in his opinion, no one could dispute my fitness to fill the Chair of Aesthetics, which in the nature of things would soon be vacant, since Hauch, at his advanced age, could hardly continue to occupy it very long.
Broechner had given me a letter of introduction to Costanza Testa, a friend of his youth, now married to Count Oreste Blanchetti and living in Paris, with her somewhat older sister Virginia, a kind-hearted and amiable woman of the world. So warm a reception as I met with from the two sisters and their husbands I had never had anywhere before.
But the ignorance Goldschmidt had sometimes shown about philosophy, and the incapacity he had displayed with regard to art, his change of political opinion, his sentimentality as a wit, all the weaknesses that one Danish critic had mercilessly dragged into the light, had inspired Broechner with the strongest aversion to Goldschmidt. Add to this the personal collisions between the two men.
Broechner, who, with not unmixed benevolence, and without making any special distinction between the two, looked down on both these papers of the educated mediocrity, saw in his young pupil's bitterness against the trivial but useful little daily, only an indication of the quality of his mind.
The outcome of it far exceeded my expectations, inasmuch as Broechner was moved by my letter, and not only thanked me warmly for my daring words, but went without delay to Nielsen and told him that he intended to write a book on his entire philosophical activity and significance. Nielsen took his announcement with a good grace.
In an eleven-page letter to Broechner I condensed all that I had thought about the philosophical study at the University during these first years of my youth, and proved to him, in the keenest terms I could think of, that it was his duty to the ideas whose spokesman he was, to come forward, and that it would be foolish, in fact wrong, to leave the matter alone.
I handed in, then, my request to be allowed to sit for my Master of Arts examination; the indefatigable Broechner had already mentioned the matter to the Dean of the University, who understood the examinee's reasons for haste.
Now, I determined to venture up to Broechner. But I had not the courage to mention it to my mother beforehand, for fear speaking of it should frighten me from my resolution, so uneasy did I feel about the step I was taking.
At some public meeting Broechner had gazed at Goldschmidt with such an ironic smile that the latter had passionately called him to account. "Don't make a scene now!" replied Broechner. "I am ready to make a scene anywhere," the answer is reported to have been. "That I can believe; but keep calm now!"
Now, there was nothing that annoyed Broechner so much as when anyone called him an atheist, and tried to make him hated for that reason, the word, it is true, had a hundred times a worse sound then than now, he always maintaining that he and other so-called atheists were far more religious than their assailants.
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