It is a well-known fact that at the beginning of this century several
prominent Danes endeavored to acquire citizenship in German literature.
Since then the effort has not been repeated by any Danish author. To
say nothing of the political variance between Germany and Denmark,
these examples are far from alluring on the one hand, and on the
other hand they furnish no criterion of the Danish mind. The great
remodeler of the Danish language, Oehlenschläger, placed his works
before the German public in German so wholly lacking in all charm,
that he only gained the rank of a third-class poet in Germany. The
success, however, which lower grades of genius, such as Baggesen and
Steffens, have attained, was the result, in the first case, of a
veritable chameleon-like nature and a talent for language that was
unique of its kind, and in the second, of a complete renunciation of
the mother-tongue.
The author of this volume, who is far from being a chameleon, and who
has by no means given up his native tongue, who stands, indeed, in the
midst of the literary movement which has for some time agitated the
Scandinavian countries, knows very well that a human being can only
wield a powerful influence in the country where he was born, where
he was educated by and for prevailing circumstances. In the present
volume, as in other writings, his design has simply been to write in
the German language for Europe; in other words, to treat his materials
differently than he would have treated them for a purely Scandinavian
public. He owes a heavy debt to the poetry, the philosophy, and the
systematic æsthetics of Germany; but feeling himself called to be
the critic, not the pupil, of the history of German literature, he
cherishes the hope that he may be able to repay at least a small
portion of his debt to Germany.
The nine essays of which this book consists, and of which even those
that have already appeared in periodicals, have been thoroughly
revised, are not to be regarded as "Chips from the Workshop" of a
critic; they are carefully treated literary portraits, united by a
spiritual tie. Men have sat for them, with whom the author, with one
exception (Esaias Tegnér), has been personally acquainted, or of whom
he has at least had a close view. To be sure, the same satisfactory
survey cannot always be taken of a living present as of a completed
past epoch; but perhaps a picture of the present as a whole may be
furnished, the general physiognomy may be arrived at, by characterizing
as faithfully and vividly as possible, some of its typical forms.
The mode of treatment in these essays is greatly diversified. In some
of them the individuality of the author portrayed is represented as
exhaustively as possible; in others, an attempt has simply been made to
present the man in actual person before the eyes of the reader; some
are purely psychological; others offer a fragment of æsthetics; others,
again, are eminently biographical and historical. In all of them the
characteristics of the individual are so chosen as to bring out the
most important features of the author's life and works.
Even the personalities described are of a very heterogeneous nature.
They belong to not less than six nationalities. Common to all of them,
however, there is a something which is more easily felt than defined;
they are modern authors. By this I do not mean that they all, without
exception, with full consciousness, and with their whole hearts, have
paid homage to the "modern" in art and in thought, but merely that
they, even though in a very unequal degree,--which heightens the charm
to the observer,--represent the modern style of mind.