Summing up his impressions and reminiscences twenty years later, Holberg says in his autobiography: "I confess that I have many reasons for considering myself under great obligations to the Oxonians."
This is no phrase of politeness. It is the opinion of a man whose correct and blameless demeanour, no less than his sincerity, his loyalty, and his intellectual abilities, had won him the appreciation of his professors and the friendship of his fellow-students. His English was excellent, and he does not conceal the fact that he is a bit proud of it. Indeed, it is somewhat of a sacrifice not to indulge in quotations from Holberg's autobiography—particularly so at the point at which we find ourselves now—for his description of his stay at Oxford is highly attractive, not only from a literary but a human point of view. Altogether his autobiography is a curiously fascinating work, of which no one will repent making the acquaintance. It ought to reappear in a modern English translation.
III.
After an interesting decade the importance of which to the development of Holberg's genius cannot be over-rated we meet him in 1718 as Professor of Metaphysics in Copenhagen University. After having left Oxford in 1708 he had—to sum up the period as briefly as possible—spent his time in studies at home and in travels abroad. He never revisited England, but he lived and rooted in the English world of thought, and whether in Germany, in Paris, in Rome, or at Copenhagen, he studied and reasoned on the basis of his Oxford experiences. His principal work from this period, Introduction to the Law of Nature and of Nations, although little more than an abridgement of Pufendorf's great work on the same subject, is interesting as a proof of his independent views and his patriotic ambitions as an historian.
It would be an exaggeration unworthy of the reserved way in which Holberg used to express himself, to say that he owed everything to England. He was certainly also highly indebted to France. Setting apart what he owes to Holland, Germany and Italy, I think we may square the debt by saying that while England moulded his character and gave the first impetus to his genius as an historian, France chiefly contributed to the unfolding of his genius as a humorous writer. He is the Molière of the North and, no doubt, one of the greatest dramatic authors ever born.
In 1719 Holberg's genius, which, until then, had kept strictly within the rules prescribed by his professorship, apparently cool and indifferent to the outside world, suddenly burst into a fit of laughter which resounded through the North. This was his immortal heroic poem, Peder Paars, which appeared in the autumn of 1719, and which marks nothing less than a new era in Norwegian and Danish literature.
Peder Paars, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, the only parallel in our literature, is written in verse. Ibsen's rhymes are stamped by his mastership of form, and move in shifting stanzas according to the requirements of the situation and the emotion they are intended to create. Holberg walks throughout his poem on the high-heeled Alexandrines of the age. Peer Gynt is the embodiment of the Norwegian soul—Norway, as seen from within. Peder Paars is the central gallery of contemporary Denmark, with all its queer figures—Denmark, as seen from without. That is why Holberg could never have written Peder Paars if he had been born and bred a Dane. He had to be an outsider to get the right perspective.
The gist of the poem is quickly told. Peder Paars, a plain Danish citizen of a provincial town, wants to visit his sweetheart at some other provincial town a few miles off. He has to go by sea, of course, for Denmark, as you know, is pre-eminently a country composed of isles, and, like Odysseus and Aeneas, he has some mighty enemies among the immortal gods who will not allow him to complete his very reasonable journey. He is shipwrecked and washed ashore with his followers on Anholt, the very smallest of all Danish isles. His experiences in this place form the chief part of the poem, for in this little, out-of-the-way island Holberg gives us, as it were, contemporary Denmark in a nutshell. Finally, the goddess of love pities him; he succeeds in making his escape from Anholt, and arrives subsequently at Jutland, where he has another series of remarkable experiences. Like Peer Gynt, he is put into a mad-house, but some time afterwards he is released and is escorted in triumph out of town. The last glimpse we get of him is where he is made a soldier and has to strip himself of all he is possessed of in order to be set free and become a civilian again. Here the poem ends abruptly, unfinished, as if the author has got tired; but the torso stands out as the work of a genius, and for two centuries it has stood the test of time and towers still as one of the most imposing works of fiction in Northern literature.
Holberg had a double purpose with Peder Paars. By the form he chose he intended to aim a decisive blow at the learned apparatus of classic poetry as we meet it, especially in Homer and Virgil. There was at that time a lively discussion going on in England and France as to whether classic or modern poetry ought to be preferred, and both views had their eager advocates and opponents. Holberg, as you may easily imagine, sided with the defenders of modern literature, partly because, being a true son of the age to which he belonged, he was as indifferent to the fresh originality of Homer as he was untouched by the high-sounding imitation of Virgil, and in his poem he mixes them up in a most disrespectful way.
What is considerably more important to us than the form of his poem is, however, the substance of it. The former belongs to the taste of an age which has disappeared long ago; the latter is—as I have already suggested—a cultural portrait of contemporary Denmark, and at the same time a marvellous gallery full of human characters, stamped by the eternal mark of life itself. Holberg, like Hamlet, was of opinion that there was "something rotten in the state of Denmark," and he made up his mind to set her right by the sound cure of irony. He could have chosen no better remedy; for, in fact, the community in which he found himself was not disgraced by vices which preyed on the very pith of the nation and endangered its future. The chief fault with it was that owing to a development which forms a highly-interesting chapter in the cultural history of the country—but which it would take too long to detail—Denmark, as Holberg found her two centuries ago, was about to be stifled by an atmosphere of pedantry, humbug, hypocrisy and unsound ambition. Surrounded by laws and orders in council which interfered with their daily life in the most foolish way and increased the number of misdemeanants, the Danish people was about to lose its self-respect and absorb itself in an indiscriminate imitation of foreign nations. Holberg's keen glance pierced through all this foolery into the very depth of the national character. He saw that the Danish people was sound at the core, and he therefore merrily divested it of one piece of these masquerade garments after the other. He wanted to show the people among which he lived that life is truth, not humbug, and that instead of the comfortable advice: Disguise! hide! there is the more noble appeal: Be thyself, and fear not!