Page:Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard.djvu/33

 the book is written in a like manner. But this is in my eyes the worst misconception possible." And as to its peculiar conversational, entertaining manner which in the most leisurely, legère fashion and in an all but dogmatic style treats of the profoundest problems, it is well to recall the similarly popular manner of Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales. Like him — and his grand prototype Socrates — Kierkegaard has the singular faculty of attacking the most abstruse matters with a chattiness bordering on frivolity, yet without ever losing dignity.

For four and a half years Kierkegaard had now, notwithstanding his feeble health, toiled feverishly and, as he himself states, without even a single day's remission. And "the honorarium had been rather Socratic": all of his books had been brought out at his own expense, and their sale had been, of course, small. (Of the "Final Postscript," e.g., which had cost him between 500 and 600 rixdollars, only 60 copies were sold). Hardly any one had understood what the purpose of this "literature" was. He himself had done, with the utmost exertion and to the best of his ability, what he set out to do: to show his times, which had assumed that being a Christian is an easy enough matter, how unspeakably difficult a matter it really is and what terribly severe demands it makes on natural man. He now longed for rest and seriously entertained the plan of bringing his literary career to a close and spending the remainder of his days as a pastor of some quiet country parish, there to convert his philosophy into terms of practical existence. But this was not to be. An incident which would seem ridiculously small to a more robust nature sufficed to inflict on Kierkegaard's sensitive mind the keenest tortures and thus to sting him into a renewed and more passionate literary activity.

As it happened, the comic paper Korsaren "The Corsair" was then at the heyday of its career. The first really democratic periodical in Denmark, it stood above party lines and through its malicious, brilliant satire and amusing