Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century: Literary Portraits

NOTE.
This volume is published by special arrangement with the author. At my request Dr. Georg Brandes has designated me as his American translator and takes a personal interest in the enterprise.
To Auber Forestier, who kindly aided me in translating the stories of Björnstjerne Björnson, I have to express my cordial thanks for valuable assistance in the preparation of this translation.
RASMUS B. ANDERSON.
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK,
July, 1886.
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.