From the Introduction to 'Main Currents in the Literature of the
Nineteenth Century'
What I shall portray for you is a historical movement, having very
completely the form and the character of a drama. The six distinct
literary groups that I intend to present to you are entirely like the
six acts of a great play. In the first group, the French
emigrant-literature inspired by Rousseau, the reaction has already
begun, but the reactionary currents are everywhere blended with the
revolutionary. In the second group, the half-Catholic romantic school
of Germany, the reaction is growing; it goes further, and holds itself
more aloof from the contemporary movement towards freedom and progress.
The third group, finally, formed of such writers as Joseph de Maistre,
Lamennais in his orthodox period, Lamartine and Victor Hugo under the
Restoration, when they were still firm supporters of the legitimist and
clerical parties, stands for the reaction, impetuous and triumphant.
Byron and his associates make up the fourth group. This one man reverses
the action of the great drama. The Greek war of liberation breaks out, a
current of fresh air sweeps over Europe, Byron falls as a hero of the
Greek cause, and his heroic death makes a deep impression upon all the
writers of the Continent. Just before the July Revolution all the great
French writers turn about, forming the fifth group, the French romantic
school, and the new liberal movement is marked by the names of
Lamennais, Hugo, Lamartine, De Musset, George Sand, and many others. And
when the movement spreads from France into Germany, liberal ideas
triumph in that land also, and the sixth and last group of authors I
shall portray became inspired by the ideas of the July Revolution and
the War of Liberation, seeing, like the French poets, in Byron's great
shade the leader of the movement towards freedom. The most important of
these young writers are of Jewish origin, as Heine, Börne, and
later, Auerbach.
I believe that from this great drama we may get a lesson for our own
instruction. We are now, as usual, forty years behind the rest of
Europe. In the literatures of those great countries the revolutionary
stream long ago united with its tributaries, burst the dikes that were
set to impede its course, and has been distributed into thousands of
channels. We are still endeavoring to check it and hold it dammed up in
the swamps of the reaction, but we have succeeded only in checking our
literature itself.
It would hardly be difficult to secure unanimous consent to the
proposition that Danish literature has at no time during the present
century found itself languishing as in our own days. Poetical production
is almost completely checked, and no problem of a general human or
social character awakens interest or evokes any more serious discussion
than that of the daily press or other ephemeral publication. Our
productivity has never been strongly original, and we now utterly fail
to appropriate the spiritual life of other lands, and our spiritual
deafness has brought upon us the speechlessness of the deaf-mutes.
The proof that a literature in our days is alive is to be found in the
fact that it brings problems up for debate. Thus George Sand brings
marriage up for debate, Voltaire, Byron, and Feuerbach religion,
Proudhon property, Alexander Dumas _fils_ the relations of the sexes,
and Emile Augier social relations in general. For a literature to bring
nothing up for debate is the same thing as to lose all its significance.
The people that produce such a literature may believe as firmly as they
please that the salvation of the world will come from it, but their
expectations will be doomed to disappointment; such a people can no more
influence the development of civilization in the direction of progress
than did the fly who thought he was urging the carriage onward by now
and then giving the four horses an insignificant prick.
Many virtues--as for example warlike courage--may be preserved in such a
society, but these virtues cannot sustain literature when intellectual
courage has sunk and disappeared. All stagnant reaction is tyrannical;
and when a community has by degrees so developed itself that it wears
the features of tyranny beneath the mask of freedom, when every
outspoken utterance that gives uncompromising expression to free thought
is frowned upon by society, by the respectable part of the press, and by
many officials of the State, very unusual conditions will be needed to
call forth characters and talents of the sort upon which progress in any
society depends. Should such a community develop a kind of poetry, we
need not wonder overmuch if its essential tendency be to scorn the age
and put it to shame. Such poetry will again and again describe the men
of the time as wretches; and it may well happen that the books which are
the most famous and the most sought after (Ibsen's 'Brand,' for example)
will be those in which the reader is made to feel--at first with a sort
of horror, and afterwards with a sort of satisfaction--what a worm he
is, how miserable and how cowardly. It may happen, too, that for such a
people the word Will becomes a sort of catchword, that it may cry aloud
with dramas of the Will and philosophies of the Will. Men demand that
which they do not possess; they call for that of which they most
bitterly feel the lack; they call for that which there is the keenest
inquiry for. Yet one would be mistaken were he pessimistically to
assume that in such a people there is less courage, resolution,
enthusiasm, and will than in the average of others. There is quite as
much courage and freedom of thought, but still more is needed. For when
the reaction in a literature forces the new ideas into the background,
and when a community has daily heard itself blamed, derided, and even
cursed for its hypocrisy and its conventionality, yet has remained
convinced of its openness of mind, daily swinging censers before its own
nostrils in praise thereof,--it requires unusual ability and unusual
force of will to bring new blood into its literature. A soldier needs no
uncommon courage to fire upon the enemy from the shelter of an
earthwork; but if he has been led so ill that he finds no shelter at
hand, we need not wonder if his courage forsakes him.
Various causes have contributed to the result that our literature has
accomplished less than the greater ones in the service of progress. The
very circumstances that have favored the development of our poetry have
stood in our way. I may in the first place mention a certain
childishness in the character of our people. We owe to this quality the
almost unique naïveté of our poetry. Naïveté is an eminently poetical
quality, and we find it in nearly all of our poets, from Oehlenschläger
through Ingemann and Andersen to Hostrup. But naïveté does not imply the
revolutionary propensity. I may further mention the abstract idealism so
strongly marked in our literature. It deals with our dreams, not with
our life....
It sometimes happens to the Dane on his travels that a foreigner, after
some desultory talk about Denmark, asks him this question: How may one
learn what are the aspirations of your country? Has your contemporary
literature developed any type that is palpable and easily grasped? The
Dane is embarrassed in his reply. They all know of what class were the
types that the eighteenth century bequeathed to the nineteenth. Let us
name one or two representative types in the case of a single country,
Germany. There is 'Nathan the Wise,' the ideal of the period of
enlightenment; that is, the period of tolerance, noble humanity, and
thorough-going rationalism. We can hardly say that we have held fast to
this ideal or carried it on to further development, as it was carried on
by Schleiermacher and many others in Germany. Mynster was our
Schleiermacher, and we know how far his orthodoxy stands removed from
Schleiermacher's liberalism. Instead of adopting rationalism and
carrying it on, we have stepped farther and farther away from it.
Clausen was once its advocate, but he is so no more. Heiberg is followed
by Martensen, and Martensen's 'Speculative Dogmatic' is succeeded by his
'Christian Dogmatic.' In Oehlenschläger's poetry there is still the
breath of rationalism, but the generation of Oehlenschläger and Örsted
is followed by that of Kierkegaard and Paludan-Müller.
The German literature of the eighteenth century bequeathed to us many
other poetic ideals. There is Werther, the ideal of the "storm and
stress" period, of the struggle of nature and passion with the customary
order of society; then there is Faust, the very spirit of the new age
with its new knowledge, who, still unsatisfied with what the period of
enlightenment has won, foresees a higher truth, a higher happiness, and
a thousandfold higher power; and there is Wilhelm Meister, the type of
humanized culture, who goes through the school of life and from
apprentice becomes master, who begins with the pursuit of ideals that
soar above life and who ends by discerning the ideal in the real, for
whom these two expressions finally melt into one. There is Goethe's
Prometheus, who, chained to his rock, gives utterance to the philosophy
of Spinoza in the sublime rhythms of enthusiasm. Last of all, there is
the Marquis von Posa, the true incarnation of the revolution, the
apostle and prophet of liberty, the type of a generation that would, by
means of the uprising against all condemned traditions, make progress
possible and bring happiness to mankind.
With such types in the past our Danish literature begins. Does it
develop them further? We may not say that it does. For what is the test
of progress? It is what happens afterward. It has not been printed in
this shape, but I will tell you about it. One fine day, when Werther was
going about as usual, dreaming despairingly of Lotte, it occurred to him
that the bond between her and Albert was of slight consequence, and he
won her from Albert. One fine day the Marquis von Posa wearied of
preaching freedom to deaf ears at the court of Philip the Second, and
drove a sword through the king's body--and Prometheus rose from his rock
and overthrew Olympus, and Faust, who had knelt abjectly before the
Earth-Spirit, took possession of his earth, and subdued it by means of
steam, and electricity, and methodical investigation.
Translation of W.M. Payne.