I. Romanticism. Oehlenschläger's attitude towards the past corresponds exactly to Victor Hugo's; only that the resurrection of the Middle Ages in poetry is much more successful (Earl Hakon, The Gods of the North), by reason of the fresh originality in Snorre and the Edda. Grundtvig's Scenes from the Lives of the Warriors of the North likewise owes all its value to the Edda and the Sagas. Oehlenschläger's Aladdin is the Northern pendant to Hugo's Les Orientales. Gautier, as a poet, Delacroix as a painter, affect the East, as Oehlenschläger does in Ali and Gulhyndi. Steffens and Sibbern, as influenced by Schelling, correspond to Cousin. Hauch not infrequently seeks his poetic themes in Germany, as do Nodier and Gérard de Nerval. Ingemann's weak historical novels correspond to the French imitations of Sir Walter Scott (Alfred de Vigny's Cinq-Mars, Dumas' Musketeers). Oehlenschläger's tragedies correspond to the dramas of Victor Hugo. With the Danes, as with the French, hatred of intelligence, as cold; only that the Danes glorify imagination and enthusiasm, the French, passion. Romanticism lasts in Denmark (without Revolutions and Restorations) until about 1848, as in France.
II. The School of Common Sense is in Denmark partly a worship of the sound sense of the people, partly a moralising tendency. Grundtvig, with his popular manner, his appreciation of the unsophisticated peasant nature, had points of contact with the pupils of Rousseau. Moralising works are Heiberg's A Soul after Death, Paludan-Müller's Adam Homo, and Kierkegaard's Either-Or. The funny thing about the defence of marriage contained in this last book is that it defends what no one in Denmark attacks. It can only be understood from the contemporary movement in the intellectual life of Europe, which is now asserting the universal validity of morality, as it formerly did the right of passion. Its defence of Protestantism corresponds to Octave Feuillet's defence of Catholicism, only that Feuillet is conciliatory, Kierkegaard vehement. Björnson's peasant novels, which are a continuation of Grundtvig and Blicher, are, by their harmony and their peaceable relations to all that is, an outcome of love of common sense; they have the same anti-Byronic stamp as the School of Common Sense. The movement comes to us ten years later. But Björnson has simultaneously something of Romanticism and something of Realism. We have not men to place separately in the various frames.
III. Realistic Art. There is so far only an attempt at a realistic art.
Thus, in Björnson's Arne and Sigurd Slembe. Note also an attempt in Bergsöe's clumsy use of realistic features, and in his seeking after effect. Richardt corresponds in our lyric art as an artist in language to the poets of the Parnasse, while Heiberg's philosophy and most of his poetry may be included in the School of Common Sense. Bröchner's Ideal Realism forms the transitional stage to the philosophy of Reality. Ibsen's attack upon the existing state of things corresponds to realism in the French drama. He is Dumas on Northern soil. In the Love Comedy, as a scoffer he is inharmonious. In Peer Gynt, he continues in the moralising tendency with an inclination to coarse and brutal realistic effects (relations with Anitra).
In Germany we find ourselves at the second stage still, sinking deeper and deeper into dialect and popular subjects (from Auerbach to Claus Groth and Fritz Reuter).
It is unnecessary to point out to readers of the present day how incomplete and arbitrary this attempt at a dissection of Danish literature was. I started from the conviction that modern intellectual life in Europe, in different countries, must necessarily in all essentials traverse the same stages, and as I was able to find various unimportant points of similarity in support of this view, I quite overlooked the fact that the counterbalancing weight of dissimilarities rendered the whole comparison futile.
IX.
As, during my first stay in Paris, I had frequently visited Madame Victorine, the widow of my deceased uncle, and her children, very cordial relations had since existed between us, especially after my uncle's faithless friend had been compelled to disgorge the sums sent from Denmark for her support, which he had so high-handedly kept back. There were only faint traces left of the great beauty that had once been hers; life had dealt hardly with her. She was good and tender-hearted, an affectionate mother, but without other education than was usual in the Parisian small bourgeois class to which she belonged. All her opinions, her ideas of honour, of propriety, of comfort and happiness, were typical of her class.
Partly from economy, partly from a desire not to waste the precious time, I often, in those days, restricted my midday meal. I would buy myself, at a provision dealer's, a large veal or ham pie and eat it in my room, instead of going out to a restaurant. One day Victorine surprised me at a meal of this sort, and exclaimed horrified: "Comment? vous vous nourrissez si mal!" To her, it was about the same as if I had not had any dinner at all. To sit at home without a cloth on the table, and cut a pie in pieces with a paper knife, was to sink one's dignity and drop to poor man's fare.
Her thoughts, like those of most poor people in France and elsewhere, centred mostly on money and money anxieties, on getting on well in the world, or meeting with adversity, and on how much this man or the other could earn, or not earn, in the year. Her eldest son was in St. Petersburg, and he was doing right well; he was good and kind and sent his mother help when he had a little to spare. He had promised, too, to take charge of his next brother. But she had much anxiety about the little ones. One of them was not turning out all that he should be, and there were the two youngest to educate.