Historical Introduction
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
THE CORSAIR AFFAIR
“I hope that someone will soon write a fully documented history of the Corsair affair,” declared W. H. Auden a decade ago.1 In an elemental way, the present volume is intended to be a fulfillment of that hope. Instead of being a documented history, it is in large part a collection of the most pertinent documents by the main figures: Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Peder Ludvig Møller (1814-1865), and Meïr Goldschmidt (1819-1887).2
The Corsair affair has been called the “most renowned controversy in Danish literary history.”3 The immediate occasion was literary—P. L. Møller’s review of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way (see Supplement, pp. 96-104)—and those involved were writers, but the issues were more ethical, social, and philosophical than literary. Similarly, the consequences of the controversy for the participants were ethical, philosophical, and religious, with appropriate effects upon their writing.
The relation between Goldschmidt, the editor of The Corsair (1840-1846) and the pseudonymous author of the novel En Jøde (A Jew; 1845), and Kierkegaard was one of mutual admiration: on the one hand, a young writer who sought the esteem and advice of a more acknowledged writer, who, on the other hand, discerned the talent and possibilities of the younger man. They first met at a party in 1838, and Goldschmidt recounts that Kierkegaard’s eyes were “sagacious, lively, and masterful, with a mixture of good humor and malice” and that in conversation he “constantly remained much superior to me.”4
Their second meeting5 occurred after the appearance in The Corsair of an inadequate review (October 22, 1841),6 which Goldschmidt had amended in a postscript, of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony. As they conversed, Kierkegaard advised Goldschmidt to apply himself “to comic writing, that was my task. I took his words as good advice kindly meant, which they also undoubtedly were. . . . But what was the task assigned to me: comic writing? I could not very well ask him about that, and I did not know what it was.”7 During other meetings on the street, Goldschmidt recounts, “the question was always on the tip of my tongue: What is the task you have assigned me? What is comic writing? But neither did I have the right talents for raising the question, nor did his personality make such an approach easier.”8
When Either/Or, edited by Victor Eremita, appeared in 1843, Møller and Goldschmidt were “more or less agreed that Victor Eremita was the most brilliant Greek to emerge again on the scene. There was a wealth of thought, wit, irony, mastery, especially the last. He was masterly in everything and could himself be Either/Or, Both/And, if not personally, then in his thought.” Goldschmidt even sent Victor Eremita and Møller an invitation to a celebration (with a “flask of rare Italian wine”), although, of course, the guest of honor could be present only invisibly.9 In The Corsair,10 the book was praised, albeit in a typically offhanded way.
In 1845, The Corsair lauded the editor of Stages on Life’s Way by suggesting that it would be more enjoyable “to eat dry bread and drink water with Hilarius Bookbinder than to drink champagne with Mr. Böotius.”11 The climax of The Corsair’s always gentle and often laudatory treatment of the pseudonymous Kierkegaard came in the fateful phrase in the issue of November 14, 1845: “Lehman will die and be forgotten, but Victor Eremita will never die.”12
Goldschmidt’s esteem for Kierkegaard and the pseudonymous works was genuine, as were Kierkegaard’s admiration of and expectations for Goldschmidt. As reputed editor of The Corsair, Goldschmidt had made himself something of an outsider in a way consistent with the paper’s flamboyant motto: “His hand shall be against all, and the hands of all against him.” Whatever Kierkegaard thought about the paper, he thought well of the young writer, and Goldschmidt appreciated the older writer’s interest and his willingness to converse with him publicly. According to Rikard Magnussen, at that time “the position of Jews in Denmark was still such that the oppression of the race could force upon the gifted Jew a constrictive inner insecurity and a passionate need for recognition, a need that in reality still contained a certain contempt for the society whose recognition it sought . . ..”13
Goldschmidt edited the satirical, oppositionist weekly paper for six years, from 1840 to 1846, a time called “The Corsair’s reign of terror.” Magnussen writes of “the tyranny the scandal sheet The Corsair exercised over the citizenry at the time.”14 Georg Brandes declares, “At that time The Corsair seemed to have at least as much power as the dominant so-called serious press in our day.”15 With the largest circulation in the city and in the country, with talented anonymous writers and cartoonists of wit and malice, with a series of straw men as “responsible editor,” with disdain for public position and personal privacy, The Corsair gathered and cleverly exploited fact, rumor, and gossip—“and with good reason all feared being treated in that paper, and it could be fateful for a man’s reputation and his future.”16 The second line of The Corsair’s masthead motto, “Ça ira, Ça ira,” from the so-called “Carillon national” of the French Revolution, reads: “les aristocrates à la lanterne” (hang the aristocrats). Thousands in Denmark delighted in seeing others being hanged in the satire, ridicule, malice, and caricature that overshadowed the political and esthetic lead pieces in the paper, and everyone—almost everyone—was apprehensive of being the next to receive the Corsair treatment. In 1880, J. Davidsen, in referring to the Smuds- eller Skandalepresse17 (gutter or scandal press), says that what Kierkegaard later wrote about The Corsair “is hard, but it is not untrue.”18
“Then P. L. Møller loomed up.”19 This short sentence is central in Volume I of Goldschmidt’s autobiography, and the very verb (tonede frem, the basis of Goldschmidt’s own coinage, Fremtoning)20 gives a special accent to its significance. Chapter VIII, on P. L. Møller, is the “main section of the book.”21 In the autumn of 1842, the relation between Møller and Goldschmidt commenced and developed. Goldschmidt knew Møller’s reputation as something of a genius who had won a gold medal for his writing and also as “an extremely dangerous, not only satirical but malicious person; but this could not frighten me, who had the same thing on hand and was not afraid.”22 For some time, Møller became the chief influence on Goldschmidt. Paul V. Rubow declares that Møller’s relation to Goldschmidt was comparable to that of Henrich Steffens and Adam Oehlenschläger.23 When Goldschmidt was sentenced to “six times four days” for violation of the press laws, Møller became his chief defender through an article in his own publication, Arena.24 During Goldschmidt’s absence at student meetings in Sweden in June 1843 and his journey to Paris in the autumn of 1843, Møller was in charge of The Corsair25 “Both on this occasion and in his entire Corsair activity, Goldschmidt’s relation to P. L. Møller must be taken into consideration, for even though historically Goldschmidt was definitely the primary and proprietary leader of the paper . . . he himself was under the direction or in any case under the decisive influence of P. L. Møller . . ..”26
Møller had entered the University of Copenhagen in 1832, Kierkegaard in 1830. Møller won the gold medal in 1841 for his essay on French poetry; Kierkegaard submitted and successfully defended his dissertation on irony in the same year. Møller moved from medicine to theology to esthetics; Kierkegaard began in theology, became occupied with esthetics and literature, and wrote a philosophical dissertation. During this prolonged student decade, they must have known each other, although there are no references to Møller in Kierkegaard’s extant journals and papers from that time. Frithiof Brandt, however, convincingly makes a case for the thesis that P. L. Møller, the Byronic esthete, a modern Don Juan type, was the model for Johannes the Seducer in Volume I of Either/Or (1843).27 Three years later, Kierkegaard, in affirming his interest in “a psychological familiarity with actual people,” stated, “Such an actual person is Mr. P. L. Møller.”28
After winning the gold medal for his essay, Møller nourished the hope that he might become Adam Oehlenschläger’s successor as professor of esthetics at the University of Copenhagen. As a contribution to that end, he began a series of three esthetic yearbooks entitled Gæa, which provided a means of publishing his own criticisms and poetry and of developing associations with influential critics and writers, including the poet Carsten Hauch and Oehlenschläger himself. Victor Eremita (Kierkegaard), too, had been asked to contribute to Gæa but had declined.29 Gæa . . . 1846 (actually published in December 1845) included Møller’s “A Visit in Sorø,”30 the main part of which was a clever and in some ways discerning, but generally uncomprehending, review of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way, cast in the form of a discussion among the author and various persons at Sorø Academy.
Carsten Hauch, in whose house the discussion presented in “A Visit in Sorø” supposedly took place, was involved in Møller’s writing of the piece, although Kierkegaard did not know or suspect it. In a letter to Møller, Hauch wrote: “The observations I have expressed regarding Kierkegaard I gladly turn over to you for your use, since I am assured that you will use them with discretion; meanwhile, you will thereby bring upon yourself a heavy battle with Denmark’s most subtle dialectician.”31
Georg Brandes later characterized Møller’s piece in Gæa as “a frivolous and dishonorable article: frivolous, because its author had made no attempt whatsoever to put himself into what he wrote about, and dishonorable, because it (under the guise of evaluating Kierkegaard’s authorship), as is customary in this kind of article, dealt with street gossip about his private life, accused the hero in the diary of ‘placing his betrothed on the experimental rack, of dissecting her alive, of torturing her soul out of her drop by drop,’ all of which accusations were made as if directed against Kierkegaard himself.”32
Goldschmidt, thinking of Møller’s desire to establish himself as critic and esthetician, saw the piece as giving “the impression of being a manifesto originating at or supported by Sorø Academy. . . . It was a kind of cunning that perhaps only poets have; they are so simple-minded that in their craftiness they become both ludicrous and pathetic as a result. . . . Møller created the impression that such gentlemen seemed to lend their authority, and in many respects the whole work was splendid, perhaps the most lively and energetic he had written. But he had caught a Tartar.”33
The Tartar responded directly with an article in the newspaper Fædrelandet (December 27, 1845)—“The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner,”34 an attack on Møller and also The Corsair, but not on Goldschmidt. The sting came at the end: “Ubi P. L. Møller, ibi The Corsair!”35
Why did Kierkegaard respond to Møller’s article in a way that eventually had momentous consequences? The review itself was the occasion, not the central issue. The most accentuated part of the review did indeed invade the personal Regine-Kierkegaard relation, which in Stages is transmuted into an aspect of the universally human. And that the model for Johannes the Seducer should do this, “that this morally depraved person, this conscienceless libertine, should dare to pose as morally offended . . . was too much for Søren Kierkegaard and awakened his deepest indignation.”36
Møller’s review, however, as the immediate occasion, and Kierkegaard’s response, as its immediate effect, are both only tokens of the more central and earlier issues and only the beginning of the extended series of consequences. In many journal entries from early 1846,37 Kierkegaard declares that the action against Møller and The Corsair was not undeliberated: “For some time now, I have been aware of that paper and its insinuating misuse of the comic. It is not at all true that I got into all this by a rash step.”38 “Prior to that time nothing could be done; my work for my idea demanded all my time, every minute, and as undisturbed as possible.”39
Kierkegaard’s early criticism of The Corsair, because of Goldschmidt’s misunderstanding of the comic, has been noted. Goldschmidt recounts a conversation (1842) in which Kierkegaard took exception to invasion of privacy and to anonymous writing.40 On another occasion (1845), as they discussed a review praising Goldschmidt’s recent book, Kierkegaard, according to Goldschmidt, said, “the point is that there are men who want to see in you the author of En Jøde but not the editor of The Corsair—The Corsair is P. L. Møller.”41 In response to The Corsair, no. 269, November 14, 1845, which declared that “Victor Eremita will never die,”42 Victor Eremita (Kierkegaard) wrote “A Request to The Corsair,” complaining that to “become immortal . . . through the testimonial of The Corsair . . . will be the death of me. . . . Oh, let me move you to compassion; stop your lofty, cruel mercy; slay me like all the others.”43 This piece, written, as Elias Bredsdorff says, “in The Corsair’s own style,”44 was not published, but it was repeated in essence in Kierkegaard’s December response to Møller’s article in Gæa.
In December 1845, Kierkegaard had finished Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. Not only was the work a postscript to an earlier work, but it was also supposed to be his concluding work as an author. Now he was ready to do something about certain things that concerned him and “in such a way that to be an author becomes a deed.”45 Møller’s piece in Gæa provided him, according to journal entries from the time and later, with the occasion to make “a personal statement in costume,” an “action-response in personal costume,”46 with the following aims: (1) to test Goldschmidt; (2) to separate Møller and Goldschmidt; (3) to “snatch” Goldschmidt from The Corsair; (4) to do a service to others; and (5) to widen the distance between himself and his writings.
(1) “I had entertained the thought of becoming more involved with him [Goldschmidt]. But before that happened, there had to be a test.”47 Assuming Goldschmidt’s admiration for him and his own high expectations for Goldschmidt and his developing talent, Kierkegaard saw that the test would reveal whether Goldschmidt had the “courage and self-respect to say: No, I will not attack him or I will attack the little article he has written but not the earlier books I have admired and immortalized and to which I really am deeply indebted. He did not stand the test. For me it became—if it must be called a punishment—a punishment for being the only person here at home who did Goldschmidt the wrong of having too much faith in him . . ..”
(2) Kierkegaard made a distinction between Goldschmidt as the editor of The Corsair and Goldschmidt as a writer and the “editor” of the book En Jøde (1845),48 one who “deserves honor for having published a good book.”49 Kierkegaard’s idea that Møller was a detrimental influence upon Goldschmidt was epitomized in a conversation that took place in early 1845, in which Kierkegaard stated to Goldschmidt that “The Corsair is P. L. Møller.”50 Of course, Kierkegaard knew that Goldschmidt was the proprietary and editorial principal in a formal sense, but he accurately discerned that for Goldschmidt “Møller loomed up.”51 His hopes for Goldschmidt could be fulfilled only by driving “a wedge between the promising (despite everything) Goldschmidt and his evil spirit Møller.”52 If that had not been the case, the omission of Goldschmidt from Kierkegaard’s attack on Møller and The Corsair53 would be entirely inexplicable.
(3) Consonant with the aim of separating Møller and Goldschmidt was the aim of persuading Goldschmidt to give up The Corsair. “It was my desire to snatch, if possible, a talented man from being an instrument of rabble-barbarism . . ..”54 “I told him that he perhaps had misunderstood all that I previously had pointed out to him, admonished him to give up the Corsair enterprise, and said that he even may have imagined that I was putting on a good face with him in order not to be exposed to his attack myself. Now surely he could see that the opposite was the case. I wanted earnestly to repeat what I had said to him. This I did. I urged upon him very earnestly that he must leave The Corsair.”55 The most amazing thing about the whole Corsair affair is that this particular aim was not only achieved but achieved very quickly,56 yet not before other unforeseen consequences had emerged.
(4) Kierkegaard wanted not only to separate Goldschmidt from Møller and The Corsair but also to alter or to eliminate The Corsair, which he considered to be a social blight. As a satirical-political paper, it could have its place, particularly if the satire did not take a merely party line: “it was nonsense [for Goldschmidt] to be ironical and also a party man who merely attacked the government; irony must make a clean sweep—the very point of which was to indicate to him how cowardly he was toward the public.”57 This was a remark, “dialectically thrown out and misunderstood, that had led Goldschmidt in the past to take a new direction, to attack everybody, while in another sense I did everything to save Goldschmidt from the whole stinking mess, but always dialectically, in order to give him the chance to become open.”58 To Kierkegaard, The Corsair actively represented a destructive misconception of satire, irony, and the comic. In Two Ages (1846), published during the Corsair affair, he wrote: “anyone who understands the comic readily sees that the comic does not consist at all in what the present age imagines it does and that satire in our day, if it is to be at all beneficial and not cause irreparable harm, must have the resource of a consistent and well-grounded ethical view, a sacrificial unselfishness, a highborn nobility that renounce the moment; otherwise the medicine becomes infinitely and incomparably worse than the sickness.”59 We are, he continues, “oblivious to the fact that in an era of negativity the authentic ironist is the hidden enthusiast (just as the hero is the manifest enthusiast in a positive era), that the authentic ironist is self-sacrificing, for, after all, that grand-master of irony ended by being punished with death.”60
In a time of demoralization, an authentic ironist would be of great benefit. Goldschmidt and The Corsair, however, were not practitioners of authentic irony, because they lacked the presuppositions, as stated above. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard did not charge Goldschmidt with being the cause of the demoralization but rather with being a sign and an instrument of it.
What brought in a new government61 was not wisdom, patriotism, and the like but an expression of this demoralization. And what will overthrow the new government will again be envy, caprice, pettiness, and the like; it is not the noble, the good, that triumphs—no, it is the same demoralization, which has given itself a new shape.
In this respect, Goldschmidt is not undistinguished. He is like a cholera fly to cholera; it cannot be said that it is he who produces the demoralization (and everybody else is good) but that he makes manifest that there must be demoralization. He is and remains the characterless instrument of envy and demoralization. He has nothing to lose, cannot be attacked, or envied, either; he is safeguarded by means of contemptibility—and then he gnaws and gnaws. And a good many representatives of the old regime think this is fine—because the new government is the victim. How tragic that there is no character at all, no reflection, no consistent point of view anywhere in Denmark, but everything is momentary passion.62
Another aspect of The Corsair, its anonymous, gossipy, and at times libellous invasion of privacy, made the journal feared more than its political satire and literary criticism. “It was clear to all of any importance in the intellectual world that this destructive influence had to be curtailed, but to do it oneself—no one had any desire to do that. On the other hand, there were many who gave him to understand that he, Kierkegaard, with an esteemed name as author and especially with an independent position in society, was the right one to undertake what was necessary. Consequently, here was a situation in which he felt himself in contact with the best and most important men in the country and in which they acknowledged that they had use precisely for him. . . . But the basis of his mode of approach lay deeper, namely, in the presuppositions of his entire authorship.”63
(5) Besides hoping (4) “to benefit others by this step,”64 Kierkegaard wrote in the spring of 1846: “It is expedient for my life as an author to be abused, and that is why I wished it and asked for it as soon as I was finished, for by the time Frater Taciturnus wrote [the article against Møller and The Corsair], Johannes Climacus [Postscript] had already been delivered to the printer a few days before.”65 It is not clear to what extent this aim was important to Kierkegaard before writing the provocative article against Møller and The Corsair, but it was certainly consonant with the idea of pseudonymity from the outset, which Kierkegaard formulated in terms of the Corair affair: “it can serve the idea to have every possible lie and distortion and nonsense and gossip come out, confusing the reader and thus helping him to self-activity and preventing a direct relationship.”66
Motivated by these five privately recorded aims, Kierkegaard used Møller’s piece on Stages in Gæa67 not only as the immediate occasion to respond68 directly and publicly to Møller’s discussion of Stages but also and primarily to create a situation in which the more central issues would be clarified and resolved. The sting comes at the end,69 where Møller is linked with the Corsair but Goldschmidt is not mentioned. Møller’s reply70 came quickly in the form of a short piece in Fædrelandet (no. 2079, December 29, 1845) addressed “To Mr. Frater Taciturnus, Chief of Part Three of Stages on Life’s Way,” in accordance with Kierkegaard’s article of December 27. Møller states that he finds “no reason to discuss the particular points,” but he does wish to point out “a small factual inaccuracy” with regard to the participation of Carsten Hauch and to Hauch’s house as the setting of the discussion reported in Gæa. At the same time, Møller wrote—in a quite different vein—a four-part piece71 for The Corsair. The manuscript of this piece shows some signs of initial editing in another hand, presumably that of Goldschmidt, who did not use Møller’s piece but printed his own bantering, but at times incisive, fantasy on “How the Wandering Philosopher [Frater Taciturnus] Found the Wandering Actual Editor of The Corsair.”72
The next piece in the exchange, written by Goldschmidt, appeared in The Corsair (no. 277) on January 9, 1846. Here the whole approach by way of pseudonyms, an approach that had also been maintained in the earlier conversations between Kierkegaard and Goldschmidt, is dropped, and Kierkegaard is considered by name.73
Frater Taciturnus’s next and last published piece74 (January 10) is an elaboration of a few sentences in the last paragraph of his earlier article. He again protests being immortalized in The Corsair. He also states a willingness to renounce, for ethical reasons, his old wish “ ‘always to have the laughter on my side,’ the laughter of those who have a true sense of the comic [a reference to the “task” assigned to Goldschmidt by Kierkegaard], for to be abused on one’s own order [“Would that I might only get into The Corsair soon,” for it is hard to be “the only one who is not abused there”] is precisely that advantage, even though I took the step for the sake of others.”75 In the first paragraph, Goldschmidt is mentioned by name and also as being the editor of the financially profitable Corsair. In a confrontation of “the Terrible One” by irony, The Corsair may be “ruined by the dialectic of one person’s order to be abused . . ..”76 An analogy is made between The Corsair and a prostitute on the sidewalk. Reference is also made to the use of street-corner loafers as straw-men editors.
The series of Corsair pieces on Kierkegaard for the next six months is quite different from the first piece in no. 276. The new central elements are defamation of character by association and personal ridicule by caricature of external characteristics. On January 16 appeared the first77 of the pieces identifying in a doubly brutal way Frater Taciturnus with Crazy Nathanson,78 a well-known Copenhagen character. Victor Eremita and Frater Taciturnus are directly declared insane. On January 23 began the numerous references to and caricatures of Kierkegaard’s external appearance, particularly his legs and trousers.
Goldschmidt initially felt that he had to do something when such a hard blow had been “struck against The Corsair . . .. What I wanted most of all at the moment was to show him that I had fulfilled the task he once had assigned to me: to do comic writing. In my opinion, even now, the task was successfully carried out in that I strictly limited the question and gave a sprightly account of the discovery at last of the secret editor of The Corsair . . ..”79 “The whole thing took an unexpected bitter turn. . . . After the replies, which I wrote myself, some accompanied by cartoons, my colleagues carried on, and thus the affair was constantly raked up, with side-cuts at him. To what extent this was distasteful to me, I cannot say.”80
Thirty years later, Georg Brandes made this assessment of the affair:
It was unfortunate for Kierkegaard that he had placed his article in the newspaper Fædrelandet, which for long had looked askance at its younger and more successful fellow and which gladly would take an article against the more widely read Corsair.
But Goldschmidt’s situation was far less enviable. It is stupid to abuse a man one has spontaneously praised earlier, and also on his order, and it is abominable to depict such a man in caricatures and to make peculiarities of his external appearance and of his dress the objects of ridicule by those who always laugh with the jokester and at intellectual-spiritual superiority.81
Elias Bredsdorff, although generally holding both parties equally responsible for the negative aspects of the affair, concludes that “The Corsair hereby fell for the temptation to begin the ridiculing of Kierkegaard’s external appearance, which justifiably came to wound Kierkegaard very much. . . . Although it must be acknowledged that The Corsair was rudely provoked, the paper should not have fallen for that temptation.”82
By shifting the center of attention from Kierkegaard’s works (as in Gæa) and from Møller’s writing and The Corsair itself (as in Kierkegaard’s two articles) to character assassination and visual caricature, The Corsair outflanked Kierkegaard. He wrote many long and short pieces for possible publication,83 but they remained among the papers until 1872, when H. P. Barfod published them in Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, five years before the appearance of Goldschmidt’s autobiography. In caricaturing prose and drawings, The Corsair exploited the identification of Kierkegaard and Crazy Nathanson and made public property of Kierkegaard’s legs and trousers. Kierkegaard was effectively silenced, because The Corsair made his person the object of ridicule. In Two Ages (1846) there are unspecified references to The Corsair and other references to journalism,84 and in On My Work as an Author (1851) there is a footnote on the affair,85 but that is all. Here and there in the journals there are retrospective summaries and analyses of the Corsair affair86—obvious indications of its significance for Kierkegaard, not only as something remembered but also as a crucial occasion for making new decisions about the last phase of his life.
One of Kierkegaard’s pieces87 for possible publication contains a specific challenge to Goldschmidt to reply, agreeing or disagreeing, in a paper other than The Corsair. Although the piece was not printed, the challenge was given in a decisive, silent meeting of the two men on Myntergade in March 1846.88 Goldschmidt recalls:
But then he publicly named himself Victor Eremita, Frater Taciturnus,89 etc., etc., and immediately thereafter he met me on Myntergade and passed me by with an intense, very bitter glance, without wanting to give a greeting or to be greeted. . . . There was something about that intense, wild glance that drew the curtain, as it were, away from the higher right90 that Kierkegaard had asserted earlier and that I had not been able, rather, was unwilling, to see, although I did indeed suspect it. It accused and depressed me: The Corsair had won the battle, but I myself had acquired a false no. 1. Nevertheless, a protest also arose in my mind during that moment packed with meaning: I was not one to be looked down upon, and I could prove it. On my way home I decided that I would give up The Corsair, and when I told them at home that I was going to do it, they said, Praise God—so happy but so little surprised, as if they had known about it before I did. . . . The Corsair itself was actually not salable. As soon as I left it, anyone could take the name and continue it. But Flinch, the wood engraver, thought that if I would turn it over to him he could give me 1,500 rix-dollars for it. Reitzel bought a volume of short stories I had written, and thus I gathered together around 4,000 rix-dollars, which I divided, and with one-half I left the country “in order to be done with witticism and to learn something.”91
After editing the Corsair issue of October 2, 1846, Goldschmidt left Denmark for the Continent and did not return until the autumn of 1847. Thus one of Kierkegaard’s aims was fulfilled: Goldschmidt was separated from The Corsair. Another aim was also fulfilled: The Corsair was never the same and in its last nine years was reduced to a rather insignificant paper. (In the photo-offset edition launched in 1977, the issues of the last nine years are omitted.)
A more tentative aim—the possibility that there might be a working relation between the two men—was, of course, not fulfilled. Another aim, however, Kierkegaard’s expectations for Goldschmidt and for his talents, was in a measure fulfilled. Upon returning to Denmark, Goldschmidt founded Nord og Syd, a political-literary journal of a kind entirely different from The Corsair. He also wrote numerous novels and short stories, which, according to P. M. Mitchell, make him “the most significant forerunner of modern realism” in Danish literature.92
Goldschmidt’s appraisal of the affair is summarized in a letter written in 1878: “as far as the affair itself is concerned, I think that K. understood The Corsair very well. To me a powerful testimony seems to be the fact that he advised me to produce ‘comic writing’ and gave me that as the task. . . . For me, S.K. was the first of the means to ‘comic writing’ and thereby, when I had practiced the art upon him, the great occasion for my casting the whole Corsair from me and for my achieving in a significant moment a painful ideality, which long afterwards has cast a kind of splendor in my mind.”93
P. L. Møller, after being excluded by Goldschmidt from direct participation in The Corsair’s attacks upon Kierkegaard, devoted himself to writing, publication, and republication. On March 27 and 28, 1846, in Kjøbenhavnsposten, no. 73 and 74, a review by Møller of Concluding Unscientific Postscript appeared over the name Prosper naturalis de molinasky. In 1847, the review was reprinted in Møller’s Kritiske Skizzer with an additional sentence: “Since in the meantime it has become apparent that this author belongs to the irritable species of the genus, I have decided this time to be satisfied with my own insignificant name, in order to calm his mind with the declaration that apart from the present article (and a postscript omitted here) I have had nothing printed pseudonymously or anonymously concerning the author and his writings.”94 In the style and tone of The Corsair—quite different from that of Møller’s published reply95 to Kierkegaard’s first article96—Møller lightly treats of concepts such as “the absurd” and “the single individual.” Before stating “some aphoristic observations that occurred to me during the reading,”97 Møller makes the general observation that the French require that a book “shall be worked through organically, and there an author like our great Climacus, despite all his writings, would perhaps find a place under the rubric: chaotic literature—or not be recorded among the writers at all.”98 The only need is, “as it is put in Either/Or (I, p. 377), ‘to place me astride a thought,’ in order to get the most advantageous arrangement at the circus in Tivoli.”99 Kierkegaard offered no reply, but in his journal100 he made passing note of the review. In addition to republishing the critical writings, Møller republished some poems, together with some new poems, in a volume entitled Billeder og Sange (1847).
When Goldschmidt returned to Denmark in October 1847, he started the journal Nord og Syd and published the first volume in December. “At that time Møller was about to travel.”101 They had not seen much of each other since the evening when Goldschmidt had reported the conversation (early 1845) in which Kierkegaard had said “The Corsair is P. L. Møller.”102 Although their relationship had become cool and more distant, they did meet on occasion. During their last meeting before Møller’s departure, Møller sarcastically congratulated Goldschmidt on the first issue of Nord og Syd as being quotable by Bishop Mynster. “It is difficult to defend oneself against such congratulations—that I had had to learn for myself during the Corsair period—and when I nevertheless tried, he said that nothing would help, that by giving up The Corsair I had betrayed myself; it was not natural for me to pursue some ‘positive good’ in public life here at home; the caustic Jewish nature demanded hate, and in hate I had and have my strength.”103 Goldschmidt shifted the conversation to Møller’s attainments. “What have you yourself accomplished by not choosing something positive? What effect, if only literary, has your esthetics had on writing? Where is that for which we had once hoped?” He then went on to criticize Møller’s poetry. “One word led to another, and we were a hair’s breadth from becoming outright philistine enemies.” Reminded of their pact that for the sake of truth in literature they would, if necessary, oppose each other, Møller said, “ ‘Well, let’s fight, then! I can find occasion to say a lot on that score. Come on!’ ”104
Møller left Denmark in late December 1847 and never returned. Although he and Goldschmidt kept in touch through occasional letters and Goldschmidt’s visits to the Continent, the ties had been cut and the relationship became more and more distant.
Møller’s ambition had been to succeed the poet and dramatist Oehlenschläger as professor of esthetics at the University of Copenhagen. The post did not become vacant until 1850, four years after the Corsair affair, but, according to Goldschmidt, Møller had nourished the dream since he won the University gold medal in 1841 for an essay on French poetry. This dream, Goldschmidt states in a draft of his autobiography, explains “many things that are otherwise self-contradictory, his seeking after friendship and his reckless enmity.”105 But Møller was his own worst enemy. “I believe that the greatest error he committed was his continual desire to avoid suffering, for by fleeing from the consequences of the evil possibilities he had created for himself, he fled also from the good possibilities. . . . He demanded a miracle in the outer world, and therefore did not get it in the inner world.”106 This may sound like Judge William in Either/Or, but the words are Goldschmidt’s about Møller the man.
Goldschmidt thought that Møller considered himself “to be a genius, and he did not have the enthusiasm required for him to be able to take upon himself the obligation of a genius; he would only demand the reward and the privileges of a genius, and on this he was broken, in this his fate was consummated.”107 Furthermore, in Goldschmidt’s view, Møller’s basic defects in the esthetic sphere were that “he was not a poet,” that “no great vision passed by his ‘inner eye,’ ”108 that he lacked a “comprehensive theory of literature and poetry, and he had never developed any system in the sense of a view of life.”109 This may sound somewhat like Kierkegaard’s criticism of H. C. Andersen in From the Papers of One Still Living, but the words are those of Goldschmidt on Møller the poet and esthetician.
Goldschmidt’s retrospective assessment of Møller as poet and esthetician suggests that Møller was not qualified to be Oehlenschläger’s successor. However, after Oehlenschläger’s death, Goldschmidt sent a letter to Møller in which he said, “My ambition is to become professor of esthetics at the University of Copenhagen when you have been that and are dead. . . .”110 Paul Rubow, however, judges that Møller’s expectation was unjustified. Møller believed, “according to Goldschmidt,” that because of Kierkegaard’s linking of Møller and The Corsair111 he “lost his chance to become Oehlenschläger’s successor as professor of esthetics. He had none, and in 1850 he would scarcely be disqualified because of The Corsair.”112 Møller’s productivity during the intervening four years—largely reprintings, letters to the editor, and editing the works of Johan Herman Wessel and Steen Steensen Blicher—contributed little to whatever chance he might have had.
An important issue related to Møller and the unattained professorship is the significance of the brief Latin phrase “Ubi P. L. Møller, ibi The Corsair.”113 Just as Kierkegaard’s relation to the pseudonymous writings was known or definitely suspected in literary and university circles114 before Kierkegaard’s declaration in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Møller’s participation in The Corsair was also known and did not need merely to be suspected by those who had already read Møller’s own bibliographical piece in Erslew’s lexicon of authors.115 Kierkegaard was aware of the piece,116 which only confirmed what he already knew about the relation between Møller, Goldschmidt, and The Corsair.117 If Møller’s qualifications to become Oehlenschläger’s successor four years later were in themselves dubious, and if his esthetic productivity during those four years was qualitatively inadequate, the statement in a short Latin line of what was already known in the pertinent inner circles could scarcely have been an important factor in the appointment (1851) of the poet Carsten Hauch, rather than of Møller, as Oehlenschläger’s successor.
As noted above, the consequences of the Corsair affair for Møller and Goldschmidt were quite different from what they had expected. For Kierkegaard, too, the consequences were, if not wholly different, more numerous and more incisive than he had anticipated. “Incidentally, it has happened here, as it frequently does, that despite all my deliberation, a something more eventuates . . ..”118 Appropriate to all three men is the observation in the “Diapsalmata” that “sometimes a brisk little cause produces a colossal effect.”119
Goldschmidt recalled his view of Kierkegaard and of Kierkegaard’s probable response. “He belonged to a great illuminated world of thought; he carried within himself—in his head there was, so to speak, an Olympus—clear, blessed gods of thought; there was interest, probably not for the individual, but for all mankind; there was a special purity and consequently a special power, and when he stood before me in such a form, I perceived that for such persons one should go out of one’s way with hat in hand, while one looks through chinks for their small weaknesses. And when I suddenly remembered that I myself had been led fatefully to attack his weaknesses, there was a veil, something both pleasant and unpleasant, in which I could wrap myself and hide myself from that thought: he himself took it so good-naturedly, was not hurt, did not suffer because of it.”120
At the outset, Goldschmidt’s characterization of Kierkegaard’s response was appropriate. The first stage involved the unpleasantness of controversy, which Kierkegaard accepted as part of the enterprise. But with the shift of The Corsair from concern with Kierkegaard’s two articles to attacks on Kierkegaard’s person, there was a destruction of Kierkegaard’s environment.121 The character assassination by way of identification of Kierkegaard with Crazy Nathanson and the incessant ridicule of his clothes and physical features made him the object of curiosity and taunting on the streets, where he had been Copenhagen’s foremost peripatetic and conversationalist. “Søren” (as well as “Enten/Eller”) became a street nickname and the name of ludicrous characters in plays.122 Copenhagen was no longer the congenial place it had been for him. He felt that he was undergoing a “martyrdom of laughter,”123 and in a journal entry from 1847 he wrote, “To be trampled to death by geese is a lingering death . . ..”124 Driven from the streets and the frequent company of ordinary people, he took numerous drives to wooded areas near Copenhagen in order to find simple solitude,125 but even there curiosity followed him. For two weeks in May he visited Berlin, where he could walk again without molestation.
For all his emphasis on “the single individual,” Kierkegaard was a sociable person. Despite his full awareness that he had taken the initiative against The Corsair and had to expect unpleasantness, he had not reckoned that the atmosphere would become “tainted for me.”126 Least of all had he expected that those who had urged him to engage The Corsair would give him the silent treatment publicly (although many thanked him privately) and regard the whole thing as a trifle.
In one sense, the affair did become an affair of trifles—Kierkegaard’s clothes and physical appearance—and therefore Kierkegaard was silent after the two articles were published. But the immediate effect of the caricature and ridicule that altered the atmosphere was heightened by two things: the pervasive and devastating power of an unprecedented kind of journalism in a small city of 125,000 and the uncommon sensitivity of the object of the personal attack. Writing in retrospect about an earlier discussion among the Corsair editorial staff, Goldschmidt observed, “but accustomed as we are now [1877] to vehement and violent newspaper articles, one will have difficulty in understanding how it could sound in that anxious, quiet time [1846] and how dangerous it must appear if one like me had had his sensitivity sharpened a little.”127 In the late twentieth century, when journalists operate practically without even the restraint of libel laws, it is even more difficult to comprehend the sensational, tyrannizing effect of The Corsair. It may be said that the wounding inflicted by the ostracism of ridicule is in some degree a universal experience, but in the Corsair affair there was at least one difference—the sensitivity of a poet deeply interested in other persons.
Kierkegaard’s hope that the distortions would increase the distance between him and the pseudonymous works, with the result that the reader would be alone with the works without the intrusion of an author,128 went unfulfilled at the time. Besides being mocked with “Søren, Søren,” Kierkegaard was taunted on the streets with “Enten/Eller,” as is epitomized, for example, by the well-known contemporary drawing with the caption: “There comes Either/Or!—Psst! Psst!”129
However important the consequences of the Corsair affair were for Goldschmidt, Møller, and The Corsair itself, and however much Kierkegaard’s aims were fulfilled, plus the unexpected tainting of the whole atmosphere, the most important consequence was wholly unexpected and unintended: the second phase of Kierkegaard’s authorship.
Kierkegaard clearly intended Concluding Unscientific Postscript as the conclusion of his work as a writer. He thought an occasional long review would be possible, such as of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages, which he wrote in 1846, and of A. P. Adler’s writings, which he drafted in 1847, but his intention was to seek an appointment as a rural pastor or a post as a teacher. At the moment, December 27, 1845, after delivering the manuscript of Postscript to the printer, he wanted simply to perform an act on behalf of Goldschmidt in relation to Møller and The Corsair and on behalf of others in relation to The Corsair. Perhaps Kierkegaard could never have given up writing, even if the Corsair affair had not taken an unexpected turn with an unexpected consequence for him. In retrospect (1853) he wrote:
I intended to finish writing as quickly as possible—and then become a rural pastor.
With every new book I thought: Now you must stop.
I felt this most strongly in connection with Concluding Postscript.
At this point I meant to stop—then I wrote the lines about The Corsair.
From that moment on, my idea of what it is to be an author changed. Now I believed that I ought to keep on as long as it was in any way possible; to be an author now, to be here, was such a burden to me that there was more asceticism involved in this than in going out in the country. 130
The Corsair affair had been a crucial step in his “education and development.”131 In a sense driven out of his ordinary associations, he was driven to deeper reflection and higher vision. “Voluntarily exposing myself to attack by The Corsair is no doubt the most intensive thing along the order of genius that I have done. It will have results in all my writing, will be extremely important for my whole task with respect to Christianity and to my elucidation of Christianity, to casting it entirely into reflection.132
The result was the second phase of the authorship, not essentially unconnected with the earlier pseudonymous works, but more concentrated, different in form, with a decisive accent, and also with new pseudonyms: Anti-Climacus (above, not against, Johannes Climacus of Fragments and Postscript), author of The Sickness unto Death (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850); H. H., author of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays (1849); and Inter et Inter, author of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848). Besides those came the signed works: Two Ages (1846); Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847); Works of Love (1847); Christian Discourses (1848); The Point of View for My Work as an Author (written in 1848, published posthumously in 1859); Armed Neutrality (written in 1848-1849 but not published); The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849); Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849); An Upbuilding Discourse (1850); Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1851); On My Work as an Author (1851); For Self-Examination (1851); Judge for Yourselves! (written in 1851-1852 but not published); various short pieces and The Moment (1854-1855); and, on September 3, 1855, The Unchangeableness of God.
On October 2, 1855, Kierkegaard entered Frederiks Hospital, and on November 11, 1855, he died. In one sense, he had been defeated in the Corsair affair “because the conflict was drawn into another sphere—the ridicule of his person.”133 With regard to Goldschmidt and the “others,” he had accomplished his purposes. Most important of all, the affair was the occasion for his further education and the whole second phase of the authorship, without which his legacy would have been very important but would have lacked some of his greatest works. The Corsair affair, in its unexpected consequences, was indeed a felix culpa.
Because the present volume is somewhat different from the other volumes in the series Kierkegaard’s Writings, a special word about the inclusion and the arrangement of materials—and a suggestion about an order of reading—are in order. Part I (Articles) comprises early writings published by Kierkegaard. Part II (Addenda) comprises articles of possible, but dubious, attribution to Kierkegaard. As newspaper articles they belong in kind to the Corsair affair. Except for the “Open Letter” to Rudelbach (1851), they belong chronologically to a period before and around the Corsair affair. The Supplement includes writings pertaining to the Corsair affair published by others, as well as unpublished pieces by Kierkegaard (journal entries and drafts of articles), and items from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers pertaining to “An Open Letter.” In approaching the Corsair affair, the reader is advised to observe the following order:
1. Early Corsair items on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works (pp. 91-96).
2. Frater Taciturnus-Kierkegaard’s unpublished open letter, written before Møller’s article (pp. 157-58).
3. P. L. Møller’s article in Gæa (pp. 96-104).
4. The piece by Frater Taciturnus-Kierkegaard in Fædrelandet (pp. 38-46).
5. P. L. Møller’s published reply (pp. 104-05).
6. P. L. Møller’s rejoinder, rejected by Goldschmidt (pp. 105-08).
7. Goldschmidt’s first Corsair article in the attack (pp. 108-12).
8. Kierkegaard’s second and last published piece in the affair (pp. 47-50).
9. The subsequent articles in The Corsair (pp. 112-37).
10. Kierkegaard’s unpublished drafts of articles and journal entries (pp. 159-241).
11. Goldschmidt’s retrospective observations (pp. 138-52).
If the present volume were an independent work and not part of Kierkegaard’s Writings (published works plus supplementary material), the above order could have been used in arranging the various parts.
ARTICLES
The two articles related to the Corsair affair, “The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician” and “The Dialectical Result of a Literary Police Action,” overshadow the others in the volume because of the unique significance of that episode for Kierkegaard the man and the writer. The others have importance as elements akin to works within the authorship as a whole.134
Among the other articles, the first four and the one on Don Giovanni are directly related to the pseudonymous authorship and are part of Kierkegaard’s intricate and ingenious indirect approach. “Public Confession” (1842) appeared eight months before the publication of Either/Or (February 20, 1843). In this elaborate disavowal of being the author of anything that might be credited to him, Kierkegaard requests that he should never be regarded “as an author of anything that does not bear my name.”135 The second piece, by A. F. (1843), on the author of Either/Or, and the next piece, by Victor Eremita, addressed to the literary critic J. L. Heiberg, are not of the same kind, yet both are again part of the mystification of pseudonymity and appeared shortly after the publication of Either/Or. “A Little Explanation” is, like “Public Confession,” a signed disclaimer. “An Explanation and a Little More” (1845) is likewise a signed disclaimer but differs from the others in that it is a direct disclaimer occasioned by the first printed attribution of Either/Or and Stages to Kierkegaard. 136
The serial article by A. on Don Giovanni (May 19-20, 1845) is also linked to Either/Or (1843) in particular and to the other early pseudonymous works, but in a different way. In substance, it is clearly an extension of the brilliant discussion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Either/Or.137 Its special importance (which it shares with The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, 1848) is that its substance is more akin to the first phase of the authorship (pre–Corsair affair) and that the piece was written in the second phase. Kierkegaard’s explanation of the significance of The Crisis holds also for the later piece on Don Giovanni: “The religious is present from the very beginning. Conversely, the esthetic is still present even in the last moment. After the publication of only religious works for two years, a little esthetic article follows. Therefore at the beginning and at the end there is assurance against explaining the phenomenon by saying that the writer is an esthetic author who in the course of time had changed and had become a religious author.”138
With regard to the remaining articles, the polemical “Open Letter” to Dr. Rudelbach (January 31, 1851), published about six years after the two polemical pieces against The Corsair, is more significant in substance than the two pieces, but it did not have the important immediate consequences they had. It was, however, prophetic.
Andreas Gottlob Rudelbach (1792-1862) was the Danish son of a Saxon, J. H. Gottlob Rudelbach, and a Swede, Birgitte Østrom. In 1817 he won a University gold medal for a study of “The Nature and Value of Dithyrambic Poetry,” and in 1822 he was granted a doctor’s degree by the University of Copenhagen for his dissertation on the principles of ethics. The following year he traveled in Germany, Switzerland, and France. In 1825, together with N.F.S. Grundtvig, he began the publication of Theologisk Maanedsskrift (Theological Monthly); he continued it alone from Volume VI (1826) through Volume XIII (1828) because Grundtvig had been censured officially. The journal usually contained a polemic against the reigning rationalism. He impressed students, H. L. Martensen in particular, by a “combination of earnestness and keenness but especially by his prodigious learning and his large library.”139 With little chance of getting an appointment in Denmark because of his Grundtvigianism and his opposition to dogmatic rationalism, Rudelbach accepted an appointment in Saxony as head pastor and councilor in Blauchau. After an active, influential, and scholarly career in Germany, he returned to Denmark in 1845. He broke with Grundtvig over interpretation of apostolic symbols as “the living word.” H. N. Clausen and others were opposed to his appointment to the university divinity faculty, and after lecturing in 1847-1848 as privat-docent, Rudelbach gave up thought of an academic appointment and was named pastor of St. Mikkels in Slagelse, Denmark. A series of writings in Danish (essentially Grundtvigian and free church in outlook) included, in 1846, Christelig Biographie (Christian Biography), which Kierkegaard read and appreciated, and, in 1851, Om det borgerlige Ægteskab (On Civil Marriage), the occasion of Kierkegaard’s “An Open Letter.”
Three times in his life, Kierkegaard ventured into uncharacteristic direct controversy: with Meïr Goldschmidt and The Corsair on the issue of destructive anonymous journalism; with A. G. Rudelbach on the issue of politicizing reformation of the Church; and later (December 1854-1855) with H. L. Martensen and the established order on the main issue of the acculturized, emasculated Christianity of Christendom. In each case, the primary concern was an issue, not a person. Goldschmidt and Kierkegaard each had a certain respect for the other. Rudelbach and Kierkegaard were acquainted through visits and conversations in the remarkable home of M. P. Kierkegaard. Martensen had been Kierkegaard’s teacher and was a scholar and professor of eminence. Furthermore, in all three instances, Kierkegaard initiated the battle because of the important issues at stake.
The three engagements became intertwined in “An Open Letter.” One strand was the politicizing and sectarianizing of Church reformation by Rudelbach. This involved Bishop Mynster (whom Martensen, an early admirer of Rudelbach, succeeded and called “a witness”).140 It also drew in Goldschmidt and the aftermath of the unresolved Corsair controversy because of Mynster’s bland insensitivity to what was at stake in the Corsair controversy and in Kierkegaard’s critique of Rudelbach. To Kierkegaard, this was a token of Mynster’s obtuseness in trying to accommodate Christianity to the mediocre mentality of the age. Although he was deeply attached to Mynster personally, Kierkegaard reluctantly initiated an attack on the bishop’s apostasy of accommodation after Martensen’s “witness” eulogy. Although “An Open Letter” (January 31, 1851) was in one sense a defense of Mynster against sectarian, politicizing reformers, it was, together with Practice in Christianity (September 11, 1850) and For Self-Examination (September 10, 1851), the beginning of a direct critique of the establishment because of its “modifications” and devitalization of Christianity. Therefore, “An Open Letter” is important both as a direct declaration of Kierkegaard’s position and as a signal bell of what was to come. Within eight months after “An Open Letter,” only three small publications appeared, all under his own name, and for three years thereafter there was an unusual silence. Then came the terminating series of direct-action communications, culminating in the issues of The Moment.
Given the relationship of the seemingly disparate pieces and their essential relationship with the later writings, the present volume might well be summed up in a subtitle: “Kierkegaard: Pseudonymist and Polemicist, Practice and Preparation.”