Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

by Georg Brandes

Here, I doubtless touch upon a point that is distinctive of your criticism. It is an absolute beauty worship. With that you can quickly traverse our little literature and benefit no one greatly; for the poet is only benefited by the man who approaches him with affection and from his own standpoint; the other he does not understand, and the public will, likely enough, pass with you through this unravelling of the thousand threads, and believe they are growing; but no man or woman who is sound and good lays down a criticism of this nature without a feeling of emptiness.

I chanced to read one of your travel descriptions which really became a pronouncement upon some of the greatest painters. It was their nature in their works (not their history or their lives so much as their natural dispositions) that you pointed out,--also the influence of their time upon them, but this only in passing; and you compared these painters, one with another. In itself, much of this mode of procedure is correct, but the result is merely racy. A single one of them, seized largely and affectionately, shown in such manner that the different paintings and figures became a description of himself, but were simultaneously the unfolding of a culture, would have been five times as understandable. A contrast can be drawn in when opportunity arises, but that is not the essential task. Yes, this is an illustration of the form of your criticism. It is an everlasting, and often very painful, juxtaposition of things appertaining and contrasting, but just as poetry itself is an absorption in the one thing that it has extracted from the many, so comprehension of it is dependent on the same conditions. The individual work or the individual author whom you have treated of, you have in the same way not brought together, but disintegrated, and the whole has become merely a piquant piece of effectiveness. Hitherto one might have said that it was at least good-natured; but of late there have supervened flippant expressions, paradoxical sentences, crude definitions, a definite contumacy and disgust, which is now and again succeeded by an outburst of delight over the thing that is peculiarly Danish, or peculiarly beautiful. I cannot help thinking of P.L. Möller, as I knew him in Paris.

There are a thousand things between Heaven and Earth that you understand better than I. But for that very reason you can listen to me. It seems to me now as if the one half of your powers were undoing what the other half accomplishes. I, too, am a man with intellectual interests, but I feel no cooperation. Might there not be other tasks that you were more fitted for than that of criticism? I mean, that would be less of a temptation to you, and would build up on your personality, at the same time as you yourself were building? It strikes me that even if you do choose criticism, it should be more strongly in the direction of our educating responsibilities and less as the arranger of technicalities, the spyer out of small things, the dragger together of all and everything which can be brought forward as a witness for or against the author, which is all frightfully welcome in a contemporary critical epidemic in Copenhagen, but, God help me, is nothing and accomplishes nothing.

This part of the letter irritated me intensely, partly by the mentor's tone assumed in it, partly by a summing up of my critical methods which was founded simply and solely on the reading of three or four articles, more especially those on Rubens and Goldschmidt, and which quite missed the point. I was far from feeling that I had been understood, and for that reason warned against extremes; on the contrary, I saw myself only caricatured, without even wit or humour, and could not forget that the man who had sketched this picture of me had done his utmost to injure me. And he compared me with P.L. Möller!

The fact that the conclusion of the letter contained much that was conciliatory and beautiful consequently did not help matters. Björnson wrote:

When you write about the Jews, although I am not in agreement with you, altogether in agreement, you yet seem to me to touch upon a domain where you might have much to offer us, many beautiful prospects to open to us. In the same way, when you interpret Shakespeare (not when you make poetry by the side of him), when you tranquilly expound, I seem to see the beginnings of greater works, in any case of powers which I could imagine essentially contributing to the introduction into our culture of greater breadth of view, greater moral responsibility, more affection.

When I now read these words, I am obliged to transport myself violently back, into the feelings and to the intellectual standpoint that were mine at the time, in order to understand how they could to such a pitch incense me. It was not only that, like all young people of any account, I was irritable, sensitive and proud, and unwilling to be treated as a pupil; but more than that, as the way of youth is, I confused what I knew myself capable of accomplishing with what I had already accomplished; felt myself rich, exuberantly rich, already, and was indignant at perceiving myself deemed still so small.

But the last straw was a sentence which followed:

I should often have liked to talk all this over with you, when last I was in Copenhagen, but I noticed I was so pried after by gossips that I gave it up.

The last time Björnson was in Copenhagen he had written that article against me. Besides, I had been told that some few times he had read my first articles aloud in public in friends' houses, and made fun of their forced and tyro-like wording. And now he wanted me to believe that he had at that time been thinking of visiting me, in order to come to an understanding with me. And worse still, the fear of gossip had restrained him! This hero of will-power so afraid of a little gossip! He might go on as he liked now, I had done with him. He did go on, both cordially and gracefully, but condescendingly, quite incapable of seeing how wounding the manner of his advances was. He wished to make advances to me and yet maintain a humiliating attitude of condescension: