it occur to Kierkegaard that in the days when he himself had been a theology
student he had in fact writtenThe Battle between the Old and the New Soap-
Cellarsin which, among others, Martensen had been exposed to derision.
Instead, Kierkegaard became angry that he was unable to defend himself,
for if he invoked the law against using his name, the response would simply
be that, after all, Søren was a common name. It was not in factthatcommon,
Kierkegaard objected in one of his many monologues on the matter, but
he did not take any action—the affair of the trousers had taught him about
this sort of thing: “If I made a fuss about my name, it would be new material
for ridicule.”
Kierkegaard never learned that he had a sympathizer in B. S. Ingemann,
who wrote to Hostrup on December 14, 1847, after having seen the stu-
dents perform the comedy at Sorø Academy: “The Aristophanean presenta-
tion of well-known personalities (namely Søren K.) conflicts with my prin-
ciple of poetic freedom, and I believe that what you gain in immediate
effect is offset by a loss in the higher artistic sphere. All of my complaints
on this score would disappear if you would simply omit allusions to names
and to the accidental externalities of personal peculiarities.”
Kierkegaard would surely have given his full support to this point of
view, but of course the damage had been done, and from then on people
would always link Søren Kirk with Søren Kierkegaard, however much they
said they didn’t. And the desire to “obtain justice against the public” was
and remained an “impossibility, just as impossible as catching a fart.”
“S. Kjerkegaard and His Reviewers”
It was certainly irritating. The enormous amount of talk generated by his
personwas exceeded only by the silence with which hiswritingswere greeted.
“For five, going on six, years, I have labored as an author. From a literary
point of view practically not one single word has been said about me. Every-
one remains silent....This is how I live, in fact deprived of the most
ordinary human rights to which anyone is entitled in a state. The humblest
office clerk, every broom maker, has a sense of the seriousness of his exis-
tence, and in the eye of the state it is taken seriously. Only my existence is
nonsense. If I gambled, and whored, and drank all day long, it would be
forgiven me—but what a crime it is to use one’s leisure well.” Since his
work as an author was “zero, less than zero,” Kierkegaard considered—in
order that he might do some good for the country and qualify as a proper
patriot—offeringFædrelandethis “services as a newspaper boy, by delivering
the paper.”