colorist of a very eminent type, both in prose and verse; but his talent
lacked that free-flowing, spontaneous abundance--that charming air of
improvisation--with which Schandorph captivates his reader, takes him
into his confidence, and overwhelms him with entertainment. Jacobsen
painted faces better than he did souls; or, rather, he did not seem to
think the latter worth painting, unless they exhibited some abnormal
mood or trait. There is something forced and morbid in his people--a
lack of free movement and natural impulse. His principal work, "Mistress
Marie Grubbe," is a series of anxiously finished pictures, carefully
executed in the minutest details, but failing somehow to make a complete
impression. Each scene is so bewilderingly surcharged with color that,
as in the case of a Gobelin tapestry, one has to be at a distance before
one discovers the design. There is something almost wearisome in the
far-fetched words with which he piles up picturesque effects, returning
every now and then to put in an extra touch--to tip a feather with
light, to brighten the sheen of his satins, to polish the steely lustre
of swords and armors. Yet, if one takes the time to linger over these
unusual words and combinations of words, one is likely to find that they
are strong and appropriate. All conventional shop-work he disdained; the
traditional phrases for eyes, lips, brow, and hair were discarded, not
necessarily because they were bad, but because by much use they have
lost their freshness. They have come to be mere sounds, and no longer
call up vivid conceptions. An author who has the skill and the courage
to undertake this repolishing and resharpening of the tools of language
is, indeed, a public benefactor; but it requires the finest linguistic
taste and discrimination to do it with success. Most authors are
satisfied if they succeed in giving currency to one happy phrase
involving a novel use of the language, or to an extremely limited
number; I know of no one who has undertaken the renovation of his
mother-tongue on so extensive a scale as Jacobsen. To say that he has in
most cases done it well is, therefore, high praise. "Mistress Marie
Grubbe" is not, however, easy reading; and the author's novelettes,
entitled "Mogens and Other Stories," seem to be written, primarily, for
literary connoisseurs, as their interest as mere stories is scarcely
worth considering. They are, rather, essays in the art of saying things
unusually and yet well. They do not seem to me, even in this respect, a
success. There are single phrases that seem almost an inspiration; there
are bits of description, particularly of flowers and moods of nature,
which are masterly; but the studious avoidance of the commonplace
imparts to the reader something of the strain under which the author has
labored. He begins to feel the sympathetic weariness which often
overcomes one while watching acrobatic feats.
In Jacobsen's third book, "Niels Lyhne," we have again the story of a
Danish Rudin--a nature with a multitude of scattered aspirations,
squandering itself in brilliant talk and fantastic yearnings. It is the
same coquetting with the "advanced" ideas of the age, the same lack of
mental stamina, the same wretched surrender and failure. It is the
complexion of a period which the author is here attempting to give, and
he takes pains to emphasize its typical character. One is almost tempted
to believe that Shakespeare, by a gift of happy divination, made his
Prince of Denmark conform to this national type, though in his day it
could not have been half as pronounced as it is now. Whether the Dane of
the sixteenth century was yet the eloquent mollusk which we are
perpetually encountering in modern Danish fiction is a question which,
at this distance, it is hard to decide. The type, of course, is
universal, and is to be found in all countries. Only in the English
race, on both sides of the Atlantic, it is comparatively rare. That a
vigorous race like the Danish, confined, as it is in modern times,
within a narrow arena of action (and forbidden to do anything on that),
should have developed it to a rare perfection seems, as I have already
remarked, almost a psychological necessity.
Holger Drachmann, in his capacity of lyrist, has also a strain of the
Hamlet nature; although, in the case of a poet, whose verses are in
themselves deeds, the assertion contains no reproach. I am not even sure
that the Protean quality of Drachmann's verse--its frequent voicing of
naturally conflicting tendencies--need be a matter of reproach. A poet
has the right to sing in any key in which he can sing well; and
Drachmann sings, as a rule, exceedingly well. But, like most people with
a fine voice, he is tempted to sing too much; and it thus happens that
verses of slipshod and hasty workmanship are to be found in his volumes.
In his first book of "Poems" he was a free oppositional lance, who
carried on a melodious warfare against antiquated institutions and
opinions, and gave a thrust here and a thrust there in behalf of
socialists, communists, and all sorts of irregular characters. Since
that time his radical, revolutionary sympathies have had time to cool,
and in each succeeding volume he has appeared more sedate, conservative,
_bourgeois_.[25] In a later volume of poems this transformation is half
symbolically indicated in the title, "Tempered Melodies." Nor is it to
be denied that his melodies have gained in beauty by this process of
tempering. There is a wider range of feeling, greater charm of
expression, and a deeper resonance. Half a dozen volumes of verse which
he has published since ("Songs of the Ocean," "Venezia," "Vines and
Roses," "Youth in Verse and Song," "Peder Tordenskjold," "Deep Chords")
are of very unequal worth, but establish beyond question their author's
right to be named among the few genuine poets of the latter half of the
nineteenth century; nay, more than that, he belongs in the foremost rank
of those who are yet surviving. His prose, on the other hand, seems
aimless and chaotic, and is not stamped with any eminent
characteristics. A volume of short stories, entitled "Wild and Tame,"
partakes very much more of the latter adjective than of the former. The
first of the tales, "Inclined Planes," is a discursive family chronicle,
showing the decadence of a fishing village under the influence of city
boarders. The second, "Love and Despatches," inculcates a double moral,
the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the
third, "The Cutter Wild Duck," is a shudderingly insipid composition
about a village lion who got drunk on his birthday, fell overboard, and
committed no end of follies. A later volume of "Little Tales" is,
indeed, so little as scarcely to have any excuse for being. The stories
have all more or less of a marine flavor; but the only one of them that
has a sufficient _motif_, rationally developed, is one entitled "How the
Pilot Got his Music-box." The novel, "A Supernumerary," is also a rather
weak performance, badly constructed, and overloaded with chaotic
incidents.
[25] Since this was written Drachmann has undergone a fresh
transformation, and is said to have returned to the radical camp.
_Völund Smed_ (1895) is a cycle of spirited poems dealing with the
tragic fate of Weland the Smith, who took such a savage vengeance upon
the King for having maimed and crippled him. The legend is invested with
an obvious symbolic significance, and seems to have been intended as a
poetic declaration of independence--a revolutionary manifesto
signalizing the Drachmann's re-espousal of the radical opinions of his
youth, in his allegiance to which he had, perhaps, out of regard for
worldly advantages been inclined to waver.
GEORG BRANDES
It is a greater achievement in a critic to gain an international fame
than in a poet or a writer of fiction. The world is always more ready to
be amused than to be instructed, and the literary purveyor of amusement
has opportunities for fame ten times greater than those which fall to
the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight--the delight in
fable and story--to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in
human nature; it appears full grown in the child, and has small need of
cultivation. But the faculty of generalization to which the critic
appeals is indicative of a stage of intellectual development to which
only a small minority even of our so-called cultivated public attains.
It is therefore a minority of a minority which he addresses, the
intellectual _élite_ which does the world's thinking. To impress these
is far more difficult than to impress the multitude; for they are
already surfeited with good writing, and are apt to reject with a
shoulder-shrug whatever does not coincide with their own tenor of
thought.
What I mean by a critic in this connection is not a witty and agreeable
_causeur_, like the late Jules Janin, who, taking a book for his text,
discoursed entertainingly about everything under the sun; but an
interpreter of a civilization and a representative of a school of
thought who sheds new light upon old phenomena--men like Lessing,
Matthew Arnold, and Taine. The latest candidate for admission to this
company, whose title, I think, no one who has read him will dispute, is
the Dane, Georg Brandes.
Dr. Brandes was born in Copenhagen in 1842, and is accordingly
fifty-three years of age (1895). At the age of seventeen he entered the
University of his native city, devoting himself first to jurisprudence,
and occupying himself later with philosophical and æsthetical studies.
In 1862 he gained the gold medal of the University by an essay on
"Fatalism among the Ancients," which showed a surprising brilliancy of
expression and maturity of thought; and soon after he passed his
examination for the doctorate of philosophy with the highest
distinction. It is told that the old poet Hauch, who was then Professor
of Æsthetics at the University, was so much impressed by the young
doctor's ability that he hoped to make him his successor. And toward
this end Dr. Brandes began to bend his energies. During the next five or
six years he travelled on the Continent, spending the winter of 1865 in
Stockholm, that of 1866-67 in Paris, and sojourning, moreover, for
longer or shorter periods in the principal cities of Germany. He became
a most accomplished linguist, speaking French and German almost as
fluently as his mother-tongue; and, being an acute observer as well as
an earnest student, he acquired an equipment for the position to which
he aspired which distanced all competitors. But in Denmark, as
elsewhere, cosmopolitan culture does not constitute the strongest claim
to a professorship. In his book, "The Dualism in Our Most Recent
Philosophy" (1866), Brandes took up the dangerous question of the
relation of science to religion, and treated it in a spirit which
aroused antagonism on the part of the conservative and orthodox party.
This able treatise, though it may not be positivism pure and simple,
shows a preponderating influence of Comte and his school, and its
attitude toward religion is approximately that of Herbert Spencer and
Stuart Mill. The constellation under which Brandes was born into the
world of thought was made up of the stars Darwin, Comte, Taine, and
Mill. These men put their stamp upon his spirit; and to the tendency
which they represent he was for many years faithful. Mill's book on "The
Subjection of Women" he has translated into Danish (1869), and he has
written besides a charmingly sympathetic essay, containing personal
reminiscences, of that grave and conscientious thinker, whose
"Autobiography" is perhaps the saddest book in the English language.
The three next books of Brandes, which all deal with æsthetical subjects
("Æsthetic Studies," 1868, "Criticisms and Portraits," 1870, and "French
Æsthetics at the Present Day"), are full of pith and winged felicities
of phrase. It is a delight to read them. The passage of Scripture often
occurs to me when I take up these earlier works of Brandes: "He
rejoiceth like a strong man to run a race." He handles language with the
zest and vigor of conscious mastery. There is no shade of meaning which
is so subtle as to elude his grip. Things which I should have said, _a
priori_, were impossible to express in Danish he expresses with scarcely
a sign of effort; and however new and surprising his phrase is, it is
never awkward, never cumbrous, never apparently conscious of its
brilliancy.
I do not mean to say that these linguistic excellences are
characteristic only of Dr. Brandes's earlier works; but, either because
he has accustomed us to expect much of him in this respect, or because
he has come to regard such brilliancy as of minor consequence, it is a
fact that two of his latest hooks ("Impressions of Poland" and
"Impressions of Russia") contain fewer memorable phrases, fewer winged
words, fewer _mots_ with a flavor of Gallic wit. Intellectually these
"Impressions" are no less weighty; nay, they are more weighty than
anything from the same pen that has preceded them. They show a faculty
to enter sympathetically into an alien civilization, to seize upon its
characteristic phases, to steal into its confidence, as it were, and
coax from it its intimate secrets; and they exhibit, moreover, an
acuteness of observation and an appreciation of significant trifles (or
what to a superficial observer might appear trifles) which no previous
work on the Slavonic nations had displayed. It is obvious that Dr.
Brandes here shuns the linguistic pyrotechnics in which, for instance,
De Amicis indulges in his pictures of Holland and the Orient. It is the
matter, rather than the manner, which he has at heart; and he apparently
takes a curb bit between his teeth in the presence of the Kremlin of
Moscow and the palaces of St. Petersburg, in order to restrain mere
pictorial expression.
Having violated chronology in speaking of these two works out of their
order, I shall have to leap back over a score of years and contemplate
once more the young doctor of philosophy who returned to Copenhagen in
1872 and began a course of trial lectures at the University on modern
literature. The lecturer here flies his agnostic colors from beginning
to end. He treats "The Romantic School in Germany" as Voltaire treated
Rousseau--with sovereign wit, superior intelligence, but scant sympathy.
At the same time he penetrates to the fountains of life which infused
strength into the movement. He accounts for romanticism as the chairman
of a committee _de lunatico inquirendo_ might account for a case of
religious mania.
The second and third courses of lectures (printed, like the first, and
translated into German by Strodtmann) dealt with "The Literature of the
French Emigrés" and "The Reaction in France." Here the critic is less
unsympathetic, not because he regards the mental attitude of the
fugitives from the Revolution with approbation, but because he has an
intellectual bias in favor of everything French. Besides having a
certain constitutional sympathy with the clearness and vigor of style
and thought which distinguish the French, Dr. Brandes is so largely
indebted to French science, philosophy, and art that it would be strange
if he did not betray an occasional _soupçon_ of partisanship. His
treatment of Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël, Oberman,
Madame de Krüdener, and all the queer saints and scribbling sinners of
that period is as entertaining as it is instructive. It gives one the
spiritual complexion of the period in clear lines and vivid colors,
which can never be forgotten. Nearly all that makes France France is to
be found in these volumes--its wit, its frivolity, its bright daylight
sense, contrasting so strikingly with the moonshiny mysticism of German
romanticism. And yet France has its romanticism too, which finds vent in
a supercredulous religiosity, in a pictorial sentimentalized
Christianity, such as we encounter in Chateaubriand's "Génie du
Christianisme" and "Les Martyrs." It is with literary phenomena of this
order that "The Reaction in France" particularly deals.
The fourth course of lectures, entitled "Byron and his Group," though no
less entertaining than the rest, appears to me less satisfactory. It is
a clever presentation of Byron's case against the British public; but
the case of the British against Byron is inadequately presented. It is
the pleading of an able advocate, not the charge of an impartial judge.
Dr. Brandes has so profound an admiration for the man who dares to rebel
that he fails to do justice to the motives of society in protecting
itself against him. It is not to be denied that the iconoclast may be in
the right and society in the wrong; but it is by no means a foregone
conclusion that such is the case. If society did not, with the fierce
instinct of self-preservation, guard its traditional morality against
such assailants as Byron and Shelley, civilization would suffer. The
conservative bias of the Philistine (though not so outwardly attractive)
is no less valuable as a factor in civilization than the iconoclastic
zeal of the reformer. If the centrifugal force had full sway in human
society, without being counteracted by a centripetal tendency, anarchy
would soon prevail. I cannot (as Dr. Brandes appears to do) discover any
startling merit in outraging the moral sense of the community in which
one lives; and though I may admit that a man who was capable of doing
this was a great poet, I cannot concede that the fact of his being a
great poet justified the outrage. Nor am I sure that Dr. Brandes means
to imply so much; but in all of his writings there is manifested a deep
sympathy with the law-breaker whose Titanic soul refuses to be bound by
the obligations of morality which limit the freedom of ordinary mortals.
Only petty and pusillanimous souls, according to him, submit to these
restraints; the heroic soul breaks them, as did Byron and Shelley,
because he has outgrown them, or because he is too great to recognize
the right of any power to limit his freedom of action or restrain him in
the free assertion of his individuality. This is the undertone in
everything Dr. Brandes has written; but nowhere does it ring out more
boldly than in his treatment of Byron and Shelley, unless it be in the
fifth course of his "Main Currents" dealing with "Young Germany."
These four courses of lectures have been published under the collective
title "The Main Literary Currents in the Nineteenth Century"
(_Hovedströmningerne i det Nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur_). The
German translation is entitled _Hauptströmungen in der Litteratur des
Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts_. Barring the strictures which I have made, I
know no work of contemporary criticism which is more luminous in its
statements, more striking in its judgments, and more replete with
interesting information. It reminds one in its style of Taine's
"Lectures on Art" and the "History of English Literature." The
intellectual bias is kindred, if not the same; as is also the pictorial
vigor of the language, the subtle deductions of psychical from physical
facts, and a certain lusty realism, which lays hold of external nature
with a firm grip.
In Dr. Brandes's "Impressions of Poland" I found an observation which
illustrates his extraordinary power of characterization. The
temperament of the Polish people, he says, is not rational but
fantastically heroic. When I recall the personalities of the various
Poles I have known (and I have known a great many), I cannot conceive of
a phrase more exquisitely descriptive. It makes all your haphazard
knowledge about Poland significant and valuable by supplying you with a
key to its interpretation. It is this faculty Dr. Brandes has displayed
in an eminent degree in his many biographical and critical essays which
have appeared in German and Danish periodicals; as also in his more
elaborate biographies of Benjamin Disraeli (1878), Esaias Tegnér (1878),
Sören Kierkegaard (1877), Ferdinand Lassalle (1882), and Ludwig Holberg.
The first of these was translated into English, and was also published
in the United States. A second volume, entitled "Eminent Writers of the
Nineteenth Century," was translated some years ago by Professor R. B.
Anderson. The greater number of these highly finished essays were
selected from the Danish volumes "The Men of the New Transition" (1884)
and "Men and Works in Recent European Literature" (1883), and one or two
from "Danish Poets" (1877). They give in every instance the keynote to
the personality with which they deal; they are not so much studies of
books as studies of the men who are revealed in the books. Take, for
instance, the essay on Björnstjerne Björnson, which I regard as one of
the finest and most vital pieces of critical writing in recent times.
What can be more subtly descriptive of the very innermost soul of this
poet than the picture of him as the clansman, the Norse chieftain, who
feels with the many and speaks for the many; and what more beautifully
indicative of his external position than this phrase: "To mention his
name is like running up the flag of Norway"?
It seems peculiarly appropriate to follow up this essay with one on
Ibsen, who is as complete an antithesis to his great and popular rival
as could well be conceived. There is no bugle-call in the name Henrik
Ibsen. It is thin in sound, and can be spoken almost with closed lips.
You have no broad vowels and large consonants to fill your mouth as when
you say Björnstjerne Björnson. This difference in sound seems symbolic.
Ibsen is the solitary man, a scathing critic of society, a delver in the
depths of human nature, sceptical of all that men believe in and admire.
He has not, like Björnson, any faith in majorities; nay, he believes
that the indorsement of the majority is an argument against the wisdom
of a course of action or the truth of a proposition. The summary of this
poet's work and personality in Dr. Brandes's book is a masterpiece of
analytical criticism. It enriches and expands the territory of one's
thought. It is no less witty, no less epigrammatic, than Sainte-Beuve at
his best; and it has flashes of deeper insight than I have ever found in
Sainte-Beuve.
The last book of Dr. Brandes's that has been presented to the American
public is his "Impressions of Russia." The motto of this work (which in
the Danish edition is printed on the back of the title-page) is "Black
Earth," the significance of which is thus explained in the concluding
paragraph:
"Black earth, fertile soil, new soil, wheat soil ... the wide, rich,
warm nature ... the infinite expanses, which fill the soul with
melancholy and with hope ... the impenetrable, duskily mysterious ...
the mother-womb of new realities and new mysticism ... Russia, the
future."
The prophetic vagueness of this paragraph, big with dim possibilities,
conveys the very impression to which all observations and experiences in
Russia finally reduce themselves. It is the enduring residue which
remains when all evanescent impressions have lapsed into the background.
It expresses, too, the typical mental attitude of every Russian, be he
ever so Frenchified and denationalized. The word "Virgin Soil" was a
favorite phrase with Tourguéneff when speaking of his country, and he
used it as the title of his last novel. It seemed to him to explain
everything in Russian conditions that to the rest of the world appeared
enigmatical. The whole of Dr. Brandes's book is interpenetrated with
this consciousness of the vast possibilities hidden in the virgin bosom
of the new earth, even though they may be too deeply hidden to sprout up
into the daylight for centuries to come. The Russian literature, which
is at present enchaining the attention of the civilized world, is a
brilliant variation of this theme, an imaginative commentary on this
text. The second half of Dr. Brandes's "Impressions" is devoted to the
consideration of Puschkin, Gogol, Lermontoff, Dostojevski, Tourguéneff,
and Tolstoï; of each of whom he gives, as it appears to me, a better
account than M. de Vogüé in his book "Le Roman Russe," which gave him a
seat among the Forty Immortals.
The significance of Dr. Brandes's literary activity, which has now
extended over a quarter of a century, can hardly be estimated from our
side of the Atlantic. The Danish horizon was, twenty years ago, hedged
in on all sides by a patriotic prejudice which allowed few foreign ideas
to enter. As previously stated, the people had, before the two
Sleswick-Holstein wars, been in lively communication with Germany, and
the intellectual currents of the Fatherland had found their way up to
the Belts, and had pulsated there, though with some loss of vigor. But
the disastrous defeat in the last war aroused such hostility to Germany
that the intellectual intercourse almost ceased. German ideas became
scarcely less obnoxious than German bayonets. Spiritual stagnation was
the result. For no nation can with impunity cut itself off from the
great life of the world. New connections might, perhaps, have been
formed with France or England; but the obstacles in the way of such
connections appeared too great to be readily overcome. Racial
differences and consequent alienism in habits of thought made a
_rapprochement_ seem hopeless. It seemed, for awhile, as if the war had
cut down the intellectual territory of the Danes even more than it had
curtailed their material area. They cultivated their little domestic
virtues, talked enthusiastic nonsense on festive occasions, indulged in
vain hopes of recovering their lost provinces, but rarely allowed their
political reverses to interfere with their amusements. They let the
world roar on past their gates, without troubling themselves much as to
what interested or agitated it. A feeble, moonshiny late-romanticism was
predominant in their literature; and in art, philosophy, and politics
that sluggish conservatism which betokens a low vitality, incident upon
intellectual isolation.