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In "Emanuel, or Children of the Soil," Henrik Pontoppidan gives us a chapter in the Evolution of the Danish Peasant. The period he chooses for the story, about twenty years ago, was one filled with the falling echoes of great religious and political enthusiasms.
Until 1788, when Serfage was abolished under the regency of Frederik the Sixth, "the People's Friend," the Danish Peasant was simply a slave, bought and sold with the land he laboured on, and absolutely at the mercy of his feudal lord. Personal freedom became his then, but he was still without the other rights of a citizen. These were, however, granted him in the fullest measure by the Constitution of 1849, a constitution that was then the most free of any in Europe. This gave him, amongst other things, Religious Liberty, Manhood Suffrage, Free Education, a Free Press, and Parish Councils. The outburst of popular enthusiasm at this juncture was immense. The Peasant was half intoxicated with his new powers, and was anxious to experiment with them at once.
The two predominant political parties in Denmark at that time, under whose influence he fell, were the "National-Liberal" party and the "Friends of the Peasants." The former had grown out of the Constitutional disputes with the dependent Duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, which culminated in the war of 1848, when the Danes were victorious. It was patriotic, anti-German, Scandinavian; and taught with unmeasured enthusiasm that no personal sacrifice was too great in the cause of Denmark.
The "Friends of the Peasants" were also Patriotic, but more democratically so, and declared that the welfare of their country depended mainly on the Peasant, whom they courted and exalted in every possible way.
Both of these movements also more or less directly influenced a man who was then one of the most remarkable figures in Denmark, Bishop Nicholai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the Saga-Priest; and through him reacted back on the Peasant. Born in 1783, he had spent his early life and manhood in combating the hide-bound orthodoxy and formal pietism of the State Church; and by the time the Constitution was granted he had gathered a great following in the Church, and had aroused the same sort of personal enthusiasm as John Wesley in England.
He saw that the peasant, though nominally free, was still bound in ignorance, an ignorance which he bent all his mind to dispel. He had been struck during a visit to England with the efforts that were made there for the enlightenment of the poorer classes, and resolved to imitate them in Denmark.
This he did by the establishment of "High Schools" for the people, where he gathered together young men and maidens, for months at a time (the one sex in summer the other in winter), and by means of lectures, historical readings, and the singing of patriotic songs, saturated their minds with a love of their Fatherland and a knowledge of its glorious past. He put the old gods before them as the only natural and inevitable forerunners of Christianity, and constantly recited the Eddas and Sagas. The awakening of the spirit was his prime object, rather than the training of the intellect.
So successful were the High Schools that in a somewhat modified form they are now general all over Denmark, and in an address given at the opening of the new building of the Danish Students Society, in 1894, Georg Brandes said:— "If we wished to point out to a foreigner what was most remarkable in modern Denmark we should distinguish three things of National Origin," and the first of these is "the Peoples' High Schools."
This great institution, then, with its religious-political teaching, together with the outcome of the agitations of the "National-Liberal" party and the "Friends of the Peasants," form the background to the story before us. Grundtvig himself had died in 1872, but the Grundtvigians were still a united and powerful body.
The National-Liberals and the Friends of the Peasants were no longer organized parties, but they had left their mark on the minds of the People, whose keen interest in politics was kept alive by the grave dangers that loomed on the constitutional horizon. By the revision of the Constitution in 1866 their liberties were already and somewhat curtailed, and a still more serious incursion on them (to which reference is made in Mr Pontoppidan's later story, "The Promised Land," a sequel to "Emanuel") was soon to be made by the decreeing of provisionary Budgets by the King without the consent of the Rigsdag.
Veilby and Skibberup have their prototypes in two picturesque and remote villages on the Roeskilde Fjord in North Sjoelland. Here Henrik Pontoppidan lived for years, and here he learnt to know the Peasants whom he describes so charmingly, not only in "Emanuel" and "The Promised Land," but also in his volumes of short stories, "Village Pictures," and "From the Cottages." Here, too, the material for the illustrations in this volume and "The Promised Land" was collected.
April 1896.