Essays on Scandinavian Literature

by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

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.