Soren Kierkegaard

naked sensuality, he was also abel hommewho practiced what he poetized
about. Møller actually engaged in what so many others merely practiced
platonically on paper, and he was thus the target of much condemnation
and of a great deal more envy. And if he could not brag, like Don Giovanni,
about the 1,003 women in Spain, he had at any rate scored several score in
Copenhagen. This was an expensive pastime for Møller, who was always
short of funds, and who had therefore (according to the rumor) sold the
skeleton of one of his sweethearts, a poor seamstress who had apparently
not been made of stern-enough stuff. In a letter to a friend, Hans Christian
Andersen indignantly reported that even reasonable people believed in this
“fable.” It is not likely that Kierkegaard was among the believers, but it is
certain that, filled with fearful fascination, he followed the best Copenhagen
could offer in the way of a genuine Don Juan and as an example of sexual
realization—a subject concerning which Kierkegaard himself had such a
buttoned-up attitude.
Gossip and his own untrustworthiness thus threatened to block Møller’s
academic career. He harbored the ambition of filling the professorial chair
in aesthetics recently vacated by Oehlenschla ̈ger, a post for which he was
decidedly not unqualified. True, he had not finished his university degree,
but in 1841 he had demonstrated his merits with a gold-medal-winning
essay on French poetry, and since then he had published a series of top-
flight critical studies on theater and literature which, taken together, might
almost resemble a dissertation.
It is difficult to say how well the two men, Møller and Kierkegaard, knew
each other personally. In his journals, Kierkegaard never mentions Møller
even once prior to his collision withThe Corsair. Møller’s literary remains
do not mention Kierkegaard at all. And finally, in his memoirs Goldschmidt
rather seems to assume that the two scarcely knew each other personally.
Nonetheless, there were quite a few places where their paths must have
crossed: at the university, as already mentioned, but also at the Student
Association, which Kierkegaard frequented in his youth and where Møller
was known as an argumentative sort. Nor could these two aesthetic loners
have avoided encountering one another in Copenhagen’s cafe ́s and water-
ing holes. And then, as almost always in the Danish romantic period, there
was Regensen College, where Kierkegaard was at times a frequent guest
and could hardly have avoided meeting or at least hearing about this Møller,
who was a resident there from 1834 to 1837. As a part of the Shrove Tues-
day festivities in 1835, Møller wore a placard on his back, bearing the fol-
lowing words: “We, the King of Greenland and neighboring islands, et
cetera, do proclaim that we alone know what best serves the well-being of
our subjects.” This was patent mockery of King Frederick VI’s well-known
rebuff, in February of that year, to the many liberal politicians and academics