Essays on Scandinavian Literature - Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (best books to read non fiction txt) 📗

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.

What was needed at such a time was a man who could re-attach the broken connection--a mediator and interpreter of foreign thought in such a form as to appeal to the Danish temperament and be capable of assimilation by the Danish intellect. Such a man was Georg Brandes. He undertook to put his people _en rapport_ with the nineteenth century, to open new avenues for the influx of modern thought, to take the place of those which had been closed. We have seen that he interpreted to his countrymen the significance of the literary and social movements both in England and in France. But a self-satisfied and virtuous little nation which regards its remoteness from the great world as a matter of congratulation is not apt to receive with favor such a champion of alien ideas. The more the Danes became absorbed in their national hallucinations, the more provincial, nay parochial, they became in their interests, the less did they feel the need of any intellectual stimulus from abroad; and when Dr. Brandes introduced them to modern realism, agnosticism, and positivism they thanked God that none of these dreadful isms were indigenous with them; and were disposed to take Dr. Brandes to task for disturbing their idyllic, orthodox peace by the promulgation of such dangerous heresies. When the time came to fill the professorship for which he was a candidate, he was passed by, and a safer but inferior man was appointed. A formal crusade was opened against him, and he was made the object of savage and bitter attacks. I am not positive, but am disposed to believe, that it was this crusade, not against his opinions only, but against the man himself, which drove Dr. Brandes from Copenhagen, and induced him, in October, 1877, to settle in Berlin. Here he continued his literary activity with unabated zeal, became a valued contributor to the most authoritative German periodicals, and gained a conspicuous position among German men of letters. But while he was sojourning abroad, the seed of ideas which he had left at home began to sprout, and in 1882 his friends in Copenhagen felt themselves strong enough to brave the antagonism which his æsthetical and religious heresies had aroused. At their invitation he returned to Denmark, having been guaranteed an income of four thousand crowns ($1,000) for ten years, with the single stipulation that he should deliver an annual course of public lectures in Copenhagen. Since then his reputation has spread rapidly throughout the civilized world; his books have been translated into many languages, and he would have won his way to a recognition, as the foremost of contemporary critics, if he had not in his later publications discredited himself by his open sympathy with anarchism.

In order to substantiate this it is only necessary to call attention to the fifth volume of his lectures entitled "Young Germany" (_Det unge Tydskland_, 1890), which betrays extraordinary intellectual acumen but also a singular confusion of moral values. All revolt is lauded, all conformity derided. The former is noble, daring, Titanic; the latter is pusillanimous and weak. Conjugal irregularities are treated not with tolerance but with obvious approval. Those authors who dared be a law unto themselves are, by implication at least, praised for flinging down their gauntlets to the dull, moral Philistines who have shackled themselves with their own stupid traditions. That is the tone of Brandes's comment upon such relations as that of Immermann to Eliza von Lützow.

But nowhere has he unmasked so Mephistophelian a countenance as in his essays on Luther and on an obscure German iconoclast named Friedrich Nietschke (_Essays: Fremmede Personligheder_, pp. 151-244). It is difficult to understand how a man of well-balanced brain and a logical equipment second to none, can take _au sérieux_ a mere philosophical savage who dances a war-dance amid what he conceives to be the ruins of civilization, swings a reckless tomahawk and knocks down everybody and everything that comes in his way. There must lie a long history of disappointment and bitterness behind that endorsement of anarchy pure and simple. And it is the sadder to contemplate because it casts a sinister light upon Dr. Brandes's earlier activity and compels many an admirer of his literary art to revise his previous opinion of him. Can a man ever have been a sound thinker who at fifty practically hoists the standard of anarchy? A ship is scarcely to be trusted that flies such compromising colors.

That all development, in order to be rational, must have its roots in the past--must be in the nature of a slow organic growth--is certainly a fundamental proposition of the Spencerian sociology. It is the more to be wondered at that an evolutionist like Dr. Brandes, in his impatience at the tardiness of social progress, should lose his philosophic temper and make common cause with a crack-brained visionary. The kind of explosive radicalism which Nietschke betrays in his cynical questions and explanations is no evidence of profundity or sagacity, but is the equivalent of the dynamiter's activity, transferred to the world of thought. His pretended re-investigation of the foundations of the moral sentiments reminds one of the mud geysers of the Yellowstone, which break out periodically and envelop everything within reach in an indeterminate shower of mud. To me there is more of vanity than of philosophic acumen in his onslaught on well-nigh all human institutions. He would, like Ibsen, no doubt,


"Place 'neath the ark the torpedo most cheerfully;"


but torpedoes of his making would scarcely do the ark much harm. They have not the explosive power of Ibsen's. There are in every age men who, unable to achieve the fame of Dinocrates, who built the temple of the Ephesian Diana, aspire to that of Herostratos, who destroyed it. To admire these men is as compromising as to be admired by them.

In the essay on "Martin Luther on Celibacy and Marriage" Dr. Brandes derides with a satyr-like leer all traditional ideas of chastity, conjugal fidelity, and marital honor.

Though he pretends to fight behind Luther's shield the deftest thrusts are not the reformer's, but the essayist's own. Fundamentally, I fancy, this is an outbreak of that artistic paganism which is so