I gave one on Heiberg's
Aesthetics.
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.
Thus it was that my eager patron first introduced what became a
wearisome tangle, lasting a whole generation, concerning my claims to a
certain post, which gradually became in my life what the French call
_une scie_, an irritating puzzle, in which I myself took no part,
but which attached itself to my name.
That letter agitated me very much; not because at so young an age the
prospect of an honourable position in society was held out to me by a
man who was in a position to judge of my fitness for it, but because
this smiling prospect of an official post was in my eyes a snare which
might hold me so firmly that I should not be able to pursue the path of
renunciation that alone seemed to me to lead to my life's goal. I felt
myself an apostle, but an apostle and a professor were, very far apart.
I certainly remembered that the Apostle Paul had been a tent-maker. But
I feared that, once appointed, I should lose my ideal standard of life
and sink down into insipid mediocrity.
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