1846
Victor Eremita’s Admirers
One spring day in 1843, Meı ̈r Aron Goldschmidt took the initiative to
arrange a not entirely ordinary symposium, sending written invitations to
two people. Only one of them reacted, namely P. L. Møller; the other did
not even bother to reply to the invitation. This was all the more lamentable
because he was the real occasion of the symposium and the point of the
party. No one could reasonably blame him for his silence, however, because
this absent person was none other than Victor Eremita, the pseudonymous
author ofEither/Or.
Despite the absence of the guest of honor, Goldschmidt’s dinner party
was nevertheless an unforgettable success. P. L. Møller showed up as pre-
scribed in the invitation, “crowned with laurels in the Greek manner and
in a festive spirit,” and Goldschmidt, who was well aware that “symposium”
meant a drinking party, opened a bottle of fine Italian wine, which is well-
known to help promote the emergence of truth. The truth about Victor
Eremita’s marvelous genius had indeed already emerged—in print, in fact,
and thanks to Goldschmidt himself. In the March 10, 1843, issue of his
popular journalThe CorsairGoldschmidt had reviewedEither/Orenthusias-
tically, praising its author to the skies: “This author is a powerful intellect.
He is an intellectual aristocrat. He scoffs at the entire human race, demon-
strating its wretchedness. But he is entitled to do so; he is an extraordinary
intellect.” Even if these were pretty grandiose words to have been uttered
as early as March 1843, Møller could not but declare his assent. He, too,
Goldschmidt later remembered, had believed that “Victor Eremita was the
most intellectually gifted Hellene resurrected in modern times. There was
a wealth of ideas, wit, irony, superiority—especially this latter. He stood
superior to everything else and—if not by means of his personality, then by
means of his ideas—he could himself be Either/Or, Both/And.” Victor
Eremita, or rather his literary backer, with whose legal name the two men
of course were quite familiar, was nothing less than “the chief spokesman
for the aesthetic view of life.”
There was a heady atmosphere that spring evening, and as Goldschmidt
writes, invoking a Mediterranean scenario, “Never, before or since, did we
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