“Yes; a long series of them about many different things. Amongst others, that we must introduce Latin and Greek into our schools again; we must see that we get some culture up here. We cannot go on like this any longer. Our national emblem will be a wooden porringer with painted roses on it and some carving, which is supposed to be a clumsy imitation of the poorest of all European styles, the rococo. That is how we are national up here in Norway. You know that the best praise they can give anybody in this country—artist or other decent fellow—is that he has broken away—broken away from school, tradition, customary manners, and ordinary civilized people’s conception of seemly behaviour and decency. “I should like to point out for once that, considering our circumstances, it would be much more meritorious if somebody tried to get into touch with, appropriate, exchange, and bring home to this hole of ours some of the heaped-up treasures in Europe that are called culture. “What we do is to detach a small part from a connective whole—a single ornament of a style, literally speaking—and carve and chip such an ugly and clumsy copy of it that it becomes unrecognizable. Then we boast that it is original or nationally Norwegian. And it is the same with spiritual movements.” “Yes, but those sins were committed even when classical education was the official foundation of all education.” “Quite so. But it was only a small part of the classics—a detached piece. A little Latin grammar and so on. We have never had a complete picture among the stories of our valued ancestors of what you might call the classical spirit. As long as we cannot have that, we are outside Europe. If we do not consider Greek and Roman history as the oldest history of our own culture, we have not got European culture. It does not matter what that history was in reality, but the version of it matters. The war between Sparta and Messene, for instance, was in fact only the fights between some half-savage tribes a very long time ago, but in the delivery of it, as we know it, it is the classic expression for an impulse which makes a sound people let themselves be killed to the last man rather than lose their individuality or the right to live their own life. “Bless you, for many a hundred years we have not fought for our honour; we have lived merely to nurse our insides. The Persian wars were really trifles, but for a vigorous people Salamis, Thermopylæ, and the Acropolis mean the bloom of all the noblest and soundest instincts, and as long as these instincts are valued, and a people believes that it has certain qualities to uphold, and a past, a present, and a future to be proud of, these names will be surrounded by a certain glamour. And a poet can write a poem on Thermopylæ and imprint it with the feelings of his own time, as Leopardi has done in his ‘Ode to Italy.’ Do you remember I read it to you in Rome?” Jenny nodded.