Part 7 (1/2)
(translated into German under the t.i.tle _Moderne Geister_) which impelled me, some years ago, to make the acquaintance of the three authors who represent whatever there is of promise in contemporary Danish literature, viz., Sophus Schandorph, Holger Drachmann, and J. P.
Jacobsen. The last named, who died (1884) in the flower of his young manhood, is, perhaps, not in the strictest sense contemporary. But he is indispensable to the characterization of the group.
Widely different as these three men are in almost everything, they have this in common, that they have deeply breathed the air of the nineteenth century; and they all show more or less the influence of Brandes. That this influence has been direct and personal seems probable from the relation which they have sustained to the revolutionary critics. Of this I am, however, by no means sure. Mr. Jacobsen, who was by profession a botanist, and translated Darwin into Danish, no doubt came by his ”advanced views” at first hand. In the case of Schandorph it is more difficult to judge. He is an excellent linguist, and may have had access to the same sources from which Brandes drew his strength. Drachmann is so vacillating in his tendencies that he refuses to be permanently cla.s.sified in any school of art or thought. Of the three, Schandorph seems altogether the maturest mind and furnishes the most finished and satisfactory work. In his novel ”Without a Centre” (_Uden Midtpunkt_) the reader feels himself at once face to face with an interesting and considerable personality. He has that sense of surprise and delighted expectation which only the masters of fiction are apt to evoke. It is a story of a Danish national type--the conversational artist. In no country in the world is there such a conversational fury as in Denmark.
A people has, of course, to do something with its surplus energy; and as political opposition is sure to prove futile, there is nothing left to do but to talk--not only politics, but art, poetry, religion, in fact, everything under the sun. At the time, however, when Albrecht, the hero of ”Without a Centre,” plied his nimble tongue, the country had a more liberal Government, and criticism of the Ministry was not yet high treason. But centuries of repression and the practical exclusion of the bourgeoisie from public life were undoubtedly the fundamental causes of this abnormal conversational activity. There is something soft and emotional in the character of the Danes, which distinguishes them from their Norwegian and Swedish kinsmen--an easily flowing lyrical vein, which imparts a winning warmth and cordiality to their demeanor.
Socially they are the most charming people in the world. Also in this respect Albrecht is typical, and the songs in which he gives vent to his lyrical moods have such a rapturous melody that they keep humming in the brain long after the reader has closed the book. It almost follows as a psychological necessity that a man so richly endowed with the gift of speech is feeble and halting in action. Like Tourgueneff's ”Rudin,” who suffered from the same malady, he gains by the brilliancy and novelty of his speech the love of a n.o.ble young girl, who, taking his phrases at their face value, believes his heart to be as heroic as his tongue.
Like him, too, he fails in the critical moment; nay, restrained by petty scruples, he even stays away from the rendezvous, and by his cowardice loses what by his eloquence he had won.
A second novel, ”Common People,” which deals with low life in its most varied phases, shows the same admirable truthfulness and exactness in the character drawing, the same refres.h.i.+ng humor and universal sympathy and comprehension. ”The Story of Thomas Friis” undertakes to show, in the career of a Danish youth who is meant to be typical, the futility of the vainglorious imaginings with which the little nation has inflated itself to a size out of proportion to its actual historic _role_. In ”The Old Pharmacy” the necessity of facing the changed reality of the modern world, instead of desperately hugging an expiring past, is enforced in a series of vivid and vigorous pictures of provincial life.
”The Forester's Children,” which is one of the latest of this author's novels, suffers by comparison with its predecessors, but is yet full of cleverness and smacks of the soil.
Schandorph's naturalism is not pathological; not in the nature of an autopsy or a diagnosis of disease. It is full-blooded and vigorous--not particularly squeamish--but always fresh and wholesome. His shorter tales and sketches (”From the Province,” ”Five Stories,” ”Novelettes”) are of more unequal merit, but are all more or less strongly characterized by the qualities which fascinate in his novels. Of his poems ”_Samlede Digte_,” (1882) I have not the s.p.a.ce to speak, and can only regret that they are written in a language in which they will remain as hidden from the world as if they had been imprinted in cuneiform inscriptions upon a.s.syrian bricks. They are largely occasional and polemical; and more remarkable for vigor of thought than sweetness of melody.
J. P. Jacobsen, the second in the group to which I have referred, was a colorist of a very eminent type, both in prose and verse; but his talent lacked that free-flowing, spontaneous abundance--that charming air of improvisation--with which Schandorph captivates his reader, takes him into his confidence, and overwhelms him with entertainment. Jacobsen painted faces better than he did souls; or, rather, he did not seem to think the latter worth painting, unless they exhibited some abnormal mood or trait. There is something forced and morbid in his people--a lack of free movement and natural impulse. His princ.i.p.al work, ”Mistress Marie Grubbe,” is a series of anxiously finished pictures, carefully executed in the minutest details, but failing somehow to make a complete impression. Each scene is so bewilderingly surcharged with color that, as in the case of a Gobelin tapestry, one has to be at a distance before one discovers the design. There is something almost wearisome in the far-fetched words with which he piles up picturesque effects, returning every now and then to put in an extra touch--to tip a feather with light, to brighten the sheen of his satins, to polish the steely l.u.s.tre of swords and armors. Yet, if one takes the time to linger over these unusual words and combinations of words, one is likely to find that they are strong and appropriate. All conventional shop-work he disdained; the traditional phrases for eyes, lips, brow, and hair were discarded, not necessarily because they were bad, but because by much use they have lost their freshness. They have come to be mere sounds, and no longer call up vivid conceptions. An author who has the skill and the courage to undertake this repolis.h.i.+ng and resharpening of the tools of language is, indeed, a public benefactor; but it requires the finest linguistic taste and discrimination to do it with success. Most authors are satisfied if they succeed in giving currency to one happy phrase involving a novel use of the language, or to an extremely limited number; I know of no one who has undertaken the renovation of his mother-tongue on so extensive a scale as Jacobsen. To say that he has in most cases done it well is, therefore, high praise. ”Mistress Marie Grubbe” is not, however, easy reading; and the author's novelettes, ent.i.tled ”Mogens and Other Stories,” seem to be written, primarily, for literary connoisseurs, as their interest as mere stories is scarcely worth considering. They are, rather, essays in the art of saying things unusually and yet well. They do not seem to me, even in this respect, a success. There are single phrases that seem almost an inspiration; there are bits of description, particularly of flowers and moods of nature, which are masterly; but the studious avoidance of the commonplace imparts to the reader something of the strain under which the author has labored. He begins to feel the sympathetic weariness which often overcomes one while watching acrobatic feats.
In Jacobsen's third book, ”Niels Lyhne,” we have again the story of a Danish Rudin--a nature with a mult.i.tude of scattered aspirations, squandering itself in brilliant talk and fantastic yearnings. It is the same coquetting with the ”advanced” ideas of the age, the same lack of mental stamina, the same wretched surrender and failure. It is the complexion of a period which the author is here attempting to give, and he takes pains to emphasize its typical character. One is almost tempted to believe that Shakespeare, by a gift of happy divination, made his Prince of Denmark conform to this national type, though in his day it could not have been half as p.r.o.nounced as it is now. Whether the Dane of the sixteenth century was yet the eloquent mollusk which we are perpetually encountering in modern Danish fiction is a question which, at this distance, it is hard to decide. The type, of course, is universal, and is to be found in all countries. Only in the English race, on both sides of the Atlantic, it is comparatively rare. That a vigorous race like the Danish, confined, as it is in modern times, within a narrow arena of action (and forbidden to do anything on that), should have developed it to a rare perfection seems, as I have already remarked, almost a psychological necessity.
Holger Drachmann, in his capacity of lyrist, has also a strain of the Hamlet nature; although, in the case of a poet, whose verses are in themselves deeds, the a.s.sertion contains no reproach. I am not even sure that the Protean quality of Drachmann's verse--its frequent voicing of naturally conflicting tendencies--need be a matter of reproach. A poet has the right to sing in any key in which he can sing well; and Drachmann sings, as a rule, exceedingly well. But, like most people with a fine voice, he is tempted to sing too much; and it thus happens that verses of slipshod and hasty workmans.h.i.+p are to be found in his volumes.
In his first book of ”Poems” he was a free oppositional lance, who carried on a melodious warfare against antiquated inst.i.tutions and opinions, and gave a thrust here and a thrust there in behalf of socialists, communists, and all sorts of irregular characters. Since that time his radical, revolutionary sympathies have had time to cool, and in each succeeding volume he has appeared more sedate, conservative, _bourgeois_.[25] In a later volume of poems this transformation is half symbolically indicated in the t.i.tle, ”Tempered Melodies.” Nor is it to be denied that his melodies have gained in beauty by this process of tempering. There is a wider range of feeling, greater charm of expression, and a deeper resonance. Half a dozen volumes of verse which he has published since (”Songs of the Ocean,” ”Venezia,” ”Vines and Roses,” ”Youth in Verse and Song,” ”Peder Tordenskjold,” ”Deep Chords”) are of very unequal worth, but establish beyond question their author's right to be named among the few genuine poets of the latter half of the nineteenth century; nay, more than that, he belongs in the foremost rank of those who are yet surviving. His prose, on the other hand, seems aimless and chaotic, and is not stamped with any eminent characteristics. A volume of short stories, ent.i.tled ”Wild and Tame,”
partakes very much more of the latter adjective than of the former. The first of the tales, ”Inclined Planes,” is a discursive family chronicle, showing the decadence of a fis.h.i.+ng village under the influence of city boarders. The second, ”Love and Despatches,” inculcates a double moral, the usefulness of economy and the uselessness of mothers-in-law; and the third, ”The Cutter Wild Duck,” is a shudderingly insipid composition about a village lion who got drunk on his birthday, fell overboard, and committed no end of follies. A later volume of ”Little Tales” is, indeed, so little as scarcely to have any excuse for being. The stories have all more or less of a marine flavor; but the only one of them that has a sufficient _motif_, rationally developed, is one ent.i.tled ”How the Pilot Got his Music-box.” The novel, ”A Supernumerary,” is also a rather weak performance, badly constructed, and overloaded with chaotic incidents.
[25] Since this was written Drachmann has undergone a fresh transformation, and is said to have returned to the radical camp.
_VOlund Smed_ (1895) is a cycle of spirited poems dealing with the tragic fate of Weland the Smith, who took such a savage vengeance upon the King for having maimed and crippled him. The legend is invested with an obvious symbolic significance, and seems to have been intended as a poetic declaration of independence--a revolutionary manifesto signalizing the Drachmann's re-espousal of the radical opinions of his youth, in his allegiance to which he had, perhaps, out of regard for worldly advantages been inclined to waver.
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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 _elite_ which does the world's thinking. To impress these is far more difficult than to impress the mult.i.tude; 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 t.i.tle, 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 aesthetical 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 pa.s.sed his examination for the doctorate of philosophy with the highest distinction. It is told that the old poet Hauch, who was then Professor of aesthetics 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 princ.i.p.al 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 compet.i.tors. But in Denmark, as elsewhere, cosmopolitan culture does not const.i.tute the strongest claim to a professors.h.i.+p. 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 att.i.tude 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 aesthetical subjects (”aesthetic Studies,” 1868, ”Criticisms and Portraits,” 1870, and ”French aesthetics at the Present Day”), are full of pith and winged felicities of phrase. It is a delight to read them. The pa.s.sage 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 c.u.mbrous, 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 Emigres” and ”The Reaction in France.” Here the critic is less unsympathetic, not because he regards the mental att.i.tude of the fugitives from the Revolution with approbation, but because he has an intellectual bias in favor of everything French. Besides having a certain const.i.tutional 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 _soupcon_ of partisans.h.i.+p. His treatment of Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael, Oberman, Madame de Krudener, 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 moons.h.i.+ny 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 ”Genie du Christianisme” and ”Les Martyrs.” It is with literary phenomena of this order that ”The Reaction in France” particularly deals.
The fourth course of lectures, ent.i.tled ”Byron and his Group,” though no less entertaining than the rest, appears to me less satisfactory. It is a clever presentation of Byron's case against the British public; but the case of the British against Byron is inadequately presented. It is the pleading of an able advocate, not the charge of an impartial judge.