Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, volume 05 — Selected Excerpts

BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE

The man of letters who devotes himself chiefly or wholly to criticism is an essentially modern type.

Although the critical art has been practiced in all literary periods, it has not until the present century enlisted anything like the exclusive attention of writers of the highest order of attainment, but has rather played a subordinate part beside the constructive or creative work to the performance of which such men have given their best energies.

In the case of some writers, such as Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, we recognize the critical spirit that informs the bulk of their work, yet are compelled on the whole to classify them as poets, or historians, or philosophers.

Even Coleridge, who wrote no inconsiderable amount of the best literary criticism in existence, is chiefly remembered as a poet;

even Lessing, one of the fountain-heads of authoritative critical doctrine, owes to his plays the major part of his great reputation.

As for such men as Ben Jonson and Dryden, Lamb and Shelley, Goethe and Heine, their critical utterances, precious and profound as they frequently are, figure but incidentally among their writings, and we read these men mainly for other reasons than that of learning their opinions about other people's productions.

For examples of the man of letters considered primarily as critic, we must then look to our own century, and we find the type best illustrated by such men as Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Brunetière, and the subject of the present sketch.

[Illustration: Georg Brandes] It is indeed a rather remarkable fact that the most conspicuous figure in literary Denmark at the present time should be not a poet or a novelist, but a critic pure and simple; for that is the title which must be given to Georg Brandes.

Not only is his attitude consistently critical throughout the long series of his writings, but his form and matter are also avowedly critical; so much so that hardly one of his score or more of published volumes calls for classification in any other than the critical category.

Even when he takes us with him upon his travels to France or Russia with the best intentions in the world as to the avoidance of "shop," he finds himself in the end talking about the literature and the politics of those countries.

One of his latest books, 'Udenlandske Egne og Personligheder' (Foreign Parts and Personalities) has a preface with the following opening paragraph:-- "One gets tired of talking about books all the time.

Even the man whose business it is to express himself in black and white has eyes like other people, and with them he perceives and observes the variegated visible world: its landscapes, cities, plain and cultivated men, plastic art.

For him too does Nature exist; he too is moved at sight of such simple happenings as the fall of the leaves in October; he too is stirred as he gazes upon a waterfall, a mountain region, a sunlit glacier, a Dutch lake, and an Italian olive grove.

He too has been in Arcadia."

Yet half the contents of the volume thus introduced must be described as the work of the critic.

Not only are the set papers upon such men as Taine, Renan, and Maupassant deliberate critical studies, but the sketches of travel likewise are sure to get around to the art and literature of the countries visited.

The life of criticism, in the larger sense, comes from wide observation and a cultivation of the cosmopolitan spirit.

And it must be said of Brandes that he is a critic in this large sense, that he has taken for his province the modern spirit in all its varied manifestations.

The very title of his chief work--'Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century'--shows him to be concerned with the broad movements of thought rather than with matters of narrow technique or the literary activity of any one country--least of all his own.

It was peculiarly fortunate for Denmark that a critic of this type should have arisen within her borders a quarter-century ago.

The Scandinavian countries lie so far apart from the chief centres of European thought that they are always in danger of lapsing into a narrow self-sufficiency so far as intellectual ideals are concerned.

Danish literature has been made what it is chiefly by the mediation of a few powerful minds who have kept it in touch with modern progress: by Holberg, who may almost be said to have brought humanism into Denmark; by Oehlenschläger, who made the romantic movement as powerful an influence in Denmark as it was in Germany; by Brandes, who, beginning his career just after the war in which Denmark lost her provinces and became as embittered toward Germany as France was to become a few years later, strove to prevent the political breach from extending into the intellectual sphere, and helped his fellow-countrymen to understand that thought and progress are one and have a common aim, although nations may be many and antagonistic.

There is much significance in the fact that the name of 'Emigrant Literature' is given to the first section of his greatest work.

He thus styles the French literature of a century ago,--the work of such writers as Chateaubriand, Senancour, Constant, and Madame de Staël,--because it received a vivifying impulse from the emigration,--from the contact, forced or voluntary, of the French mind with the ideals of German and English civilization.

It has been the chief function of Brandes, during the whole of his brilliant career, to supply points of contact between the intellectual life of Denmark and that of the rest of Europe, to bring his own country into the federal republic of letters.

A glance at the course of his life, and at the subjects of his books, will serve to outline the nature of the work to which his energies have been devoted.

A Jew by race, Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was born February 4th, 1842. He went through his academic training with brilliant success, studied law for a brief period, and then drifted into journalism and literature.

A long visit to Paris (1866-7) gave him breadth of view and the materials for his first books, 'Æsthetiske Studier' (Æsthetic Studies), 'Den Franske Æsthetik' (French Æsthetics), and a volume of 'Kritiker og Portraiter' (Criticisms and Portraits).

A later visit to foreign parts (1870-1) brought him into contact with Taine, Renan, and Mill, all of whom influenced him profoundly.

In 1871 he began to lecture on literary subjects, chiefly in Copenhagen, and out of these lectures grew his 'Hovedströmninger i det Nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur' (Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century), a work that in the course of about ten years extended to six volumes, and must be considered not only the author's capital critical achievement, but also one of the greatest works of literary history and criticism that the nineteenth century has produced.

The division of the subject is as follows:--1. 'Emigrant Literature'; 2. 'The Romantic School in Germany'; 3. 'The Reaction in France'; 4. 'Naturalism in England'; 5. 'The Romantic School in France'; 6. 'Young Germany.'

In spite of the growing fame that came to him from these masterly studies, Brandes felt the need of a larger audience than the Scandinavian countries could offer him, and in 1877 changed his residence from Copenhagen to Berlin, a step to which he was in part urged by the violent antagonism engendered at home by the radical and uncompromising character of many of his utterances.

It was not until 1883 that he again took up residence in his own country, upon a guarantee of four thousand kroner (about ) annually for ten years, secured by some of his friends, the condition being that he should give courses of public lectures in Copenhagen during that period.

Among the works not yet named, mention should be made of his volumes upon Holberg, Tegnér, Kierkegaard, Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Earl of Beaconsfield.

These brilliant monographs are remarkable for their insight into the diverse types of character with which they deal, for their breadth of view, felicity of phrase, and originality of treatment.

There are also several collections of miscellaneous essays, with such titles as 'Danske Digtere' (Danish Poets), 'Danske Personligheder' (Danish Personalities), 'Det Moderne Gjennembruds Mænd' (Men of the Modern Awakening), and 'Udenlandske Egne og Personligheder' (Foreign Parts and Personalities).

The latest publication of Brandes is a careful study of Shakespeare, a work of remarkable vigor, freshness, and sympathy.

As a critic, Brandes belongs distinctly to the class of those who speak with authority, and has little in common with the writers who are content to explore the recesses of their own subjectivity, and record their personal impressions of literature.

Criticism is for him a matter of science, not of opinion, and he holds it subject to a definite method and body of principles.

A few sentences from the second volume of his 'Hovedströmninger' will illustrate what he conceives that method to be:-- "First and foremost, I endeavor everywhere to bring literature back to life.

You will already have observed that while the older controversies in our literature--for example, that between Heiberg and Hauch, and even the famous controversy between Baggesen and Oehlenschläger--have been maintained in an exclusively literary domain and have become disputes about literary principles alone, the controversy aroused by my lectures, not merely by reason of the misapprehension of the opposition, but quite as much by reason of the very nature of my writing, has come to touch upon a swarm of religious, social, and moral problems....

It follows from my conception of the relation of literature to life that the history of literature I teach is not a history of literature for the drawing-room.

I seize hold of actual life with all the strength I may, and show how the feelings that find their expression in literature spring up in the human heart.

Now the human heart is no stagnant pool or idyllic woodland lake.

It is an ocean with submarine vegetation and frightful inhabitants.

The literary history and the poetry of the drawing-room see in the life of man a salon, a decorated ball-room, the men and the furnishings polished alike, in which no dark corners escape illumination.

Let him who will, look at matters from this point of view;

but it is no affair of mine."

The boldness and even the ruthlessness which characterize much of the author's work were plainly foreshadowed in this outspoken introduction;

and he has grown more rather than less uncompromising during the quarter-century that has elapsed since they were spoken.

Matthew Arnold would have applauded the envisagement of literature as "criticism of life," but would have deplored the sacrifice of sweetness to gain increased intensity of light.

Brandes came back from contact with the European world full of enthusiasm for the new men and the new ideas,--for Comte and Taine, for Renan and Mill and Spencer,--and wanted his recalcitrant fellow-countrymen to accept them all at once.

They were naturally taken aback by so imperious a demand, and their opposition created the atmosphere of controversy in which Brandes has ever since for the most part lived--with slight effort to soften its asperities, but, it must be added, with the ever-increasing respect of those not of his own way of thinking.

On the whole, his work has been healthful and stimulating; it has stirred the sluggish to a renewed mental activity, and has made its author himself one of the most conspicuous figures of what he calls "det Moderne Gjennembrud"--the Modern Awakening.

[Illustration: Signature] BJÖRNSON

From 'Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century': Translated by Professor Rasmus B. Anderson.

It is only necessary to bestow a single glance upon Björnson to be convinced how admirably he is equipped by nature for the hot strife a literary career brings with it in most lands, and especially in the combat-loving North.

Shoulders as broad as his are not often seen, nor do we often behold so vigorous a form, one that seems as though created to be chiseled in granite.

There is perhaps no labor that so completely excites all the vital forces, exhausts the nerves, refines and enervates the feelings, as that of literary production.

There has never been the slightest danger, however, that the exertions of Björnson's poetic productiveness would affect his lungs as in the case of Schiller, or his spine as in the case of Heine; there has been no cause to fear that inimical articles in the public journals would ever give him his death-blow, as they did Halvdan, the hero of his drama 'Redaktören' (The Editor); or that he would yield, as so many modern poets have yielded, to the temptation of resorting to pernicious stimulants or to dissipation as antidotes for the overwrought or depleted state of the nervous system occasioned by creative activity.

Nothing has injured Björnson's spine; his lungs are without blemish; a cough is unknown to him; and his shoulders were fashioned to bear without discomposure the rude thrusts which the world gives, and to return them.

He is perhaps the only important writer of our day of whom this may be said.

As an author he is never nervous, not when he displays his greatest delicacy, not even when he evinces his most marked sensibility.

Strong as the beast of prey whose name [Björn=Bear] occurs twice in his;

muscular, without the slightest trace of corpulence, of athletic build, he looms up majestically in my mind, with his massive head, his firmly compressed lips, and his sharp, penetrating gaze from behind his spectacles.

It would be impossible for literary hostilities to overthrow this man, and for him there never existed that greatest danger to authors (a danger which for a long time menaced his great rival Henrik Ibsen), namely, that of having his name shrouded in silence.

Even as a very young author, as a theatrical critic and political writer, he had entered the field of literature with such an eagerness for combat that a rumbling noise arose about him wherever he appeared.

Like his own Thorbjörn in 'Synnöve Solbakken,' he displayed in early youth the combative tendency of the athlete; but like his Sigurd in 'Sigurd Slembe,' he fought not merely to practice his strength, but from genuine though often mistaken love of truth and justice.

At all events, he understood thoroughly who to attract attention.

An author may possess great and rare gifts, and yet, through lack of harmony between his own personal endowments and the national characteristics or the degree of development of his people, may long be prevented from attaining a brilliant success.

Many of the world's greatest minds have suffered from this cause.

Many, like Byron, Heine, and Henrik Ibsen, have left their native land; many more who have remained at home have felt forsaken by their compatriots.

With Björnson the case is quite different.

He has never, it is true, been peacefully recognized by the entire Norwegian people; at first, because the form he used was too new and unfamiliar; later, because his ideas were of too challenging a nature for the ruling, conservative, and highly orthodox circles of the land; even at the present time he is pursued by the press of the Norwegian government and by the leading official society with a fury which is as little choice in its selection of means as the bitterness which pursues the champions of thrones and altars in other countries.

In spite of all this, Björnstjerne Björnson has his people behind him and about him as perhaps no other poet has, unless it be Victor Hugo.

When his name is mentioned it is equivalent to hoisting the flag of Norway.

In his noble qualities and in his faults, in his genius and in his weak points, he as thoroughly bears the stamp of Norway as Voltaire bore that of France.

His boldness and his naïveté, his open-heartedness as a man and the terseness of his style as an artist, the highly wrought and sensitive Norwegian popular sentiment, and the lively consciousness of the one-sidedness and the intellectual needs of his fellow-countrymen that has driven him to Scandinavianism, Pan-Teutonism, and cosmopolitanism--all this in its peculiar combination in him is so markedly national that his personality may be said to offer a _résumé_ of the entire people.

None of his contemporaries so fully represent this people's love of home and of freedom, its self-consciousness, rectitude, and fresh energy.

Indeed, just now he also exemplifies on a large scale the people's tendency to self-criticism; not that scourging criticism which chastises with scorpions, and whose representative in Norway is Ibsen, in Russia Turgénieff, but the sharp bold expression of opinion begotten of love.

He never calls attention to an evil in whose improvement and cure he does not believe, or to a vice which he despairs of seeing out-rooted.

For he has implicit faith in the good in humanity, and possesses entire the invincible optimism of a large, genial, sanguine nature.

As to his character, he is half chieftain, half poet.

He unites in his own person the two forms most prominent in ancient Norway--those of the warrior and of the scald.

In his intellectual constitution he is partly a tribune of the people, partly a lay preacher; in other words, he combines in his public demeanor the political and religious pathos of his Norwegian contemporaries, and this became far more apparent after he broke loose from orthodoxy than it was before.

Since his so-called apostasy he has in fact been a missionary and a reformer to a greater degree than ever.

He could have been the product of no other land than Norway, and far less than other authors could he thrive in any but his native soil.

In the year 1880, when the rumor spread through the German press that Björnson, weary of continual wrangling at home, was about to settle in Germany, he wrote to me:--"In Norway will I live, in Norway will I lash and be lashed, in Norway will I sing and die."

To hold such intimate relations with one's fatherland is most fortunate for a person who is sympathetically comprehended by that fatherland.

And this is the case with Björnson.

It is a matter dependent on conditions deeply rooted in his nature.

He who cherishes so profound an enthusiasm for the reserved, solitary Michelangelo, and who feels constrained, as a matter of course, to place him above Raphael, is himself a man of a totally different temperament: one who is never lonely, even when most alone (as he has been since 1873 on his gård in remote Gausdal), but who is social to the core, or, more strictly speaking, a thoroughly national character.

He admires Michelangelo because he reveres and understands the elements of greatness, of profound earnestness, of mighty ruggedness in the human heart and in style; but he has nothing in common with the great Florentine's melancholy sense of isolation.

He was born to be the founder of a party, and was therefore early attracted to enthusiastic and popular party leaders, such as the Dane Grundtvig and the Norwegian Wergeland, although wholly unlike either in his plastic, creative power.

He is a man who needs to feel himself the centre, or rather the focus of sympathy, and insensibly he forms a circle about him, because his own nature is the _résumé_ of a social union.

Copyrighted by T. Y.

Crowell and Company, New York.

THE HISTORICAL MOVEMENT IN MODERN LITERATURE

From the Introduction to 'Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century' What I shall portray for you is a historical movement, having very completely the form and the character of a drama.

The six distinct literary groups that I intend to present to you are entirely like the six acts of a great play.

In the first group, the French emigrant-literature inspired by Rousseau, the reaction has already begun, but the reactionary currents are everywhere blended with the revolutionary.

In the second group, the half-Catholic romantic school of Germany, the reaction is growing; it goes further, and holds itself more aloof from the contemporary movement towards freedom and progress.

The third group, finally, formed of such writers as Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais in his orthodox period, Lamartine and Victor Hugo under the Restoration, when they were still firm supporters of the legitimist and clerical parties, stands for the reaction, impetuous and triumphant.

Byron and his associates make up the fourth group.

This one man reverses the action of the great drama.

The Greek war of liberation breaks out, a current of fresh air sweeps over Europe, Byron falls as a hero of the Greek cause, and his heroic death makes a deep impression upon all the writers of the Continent.

Just before the July Revolution all the great French writers turn about, forming the fifth group, the French romantic school, and the new liberal movement is marked by the names of Lamennais, Hugo, Lamartine, De Musset, George Sand, and many others.

And when the movement spreads from France into Germany, liberal ideas triumph in that land also, and the sixth and last group of authors I shall portray became inspired by the ideas of the July Revolution and the War of Liberation, seeing, like the French poets, in Byron's great shade the leader of the movement towards freedom.

The most important of these young writers are of Jewish origin, as Heine, Börne, and later, Auerbach.

I believe that from this great drama we may get a lesson for our own instruction.

We are now, as usual, forty years behind the rest of Europe.

In the literatures of those great countries the revolutionary stream long ago united with its tributaries, burst the dikes that were set to impede its course, and has been distributed into thousands of channels.

We are still endeavoring to check it and hold it dammed up in the swamps of the reaction, but we have succeeded only in checking our literature itself.

It would hardly be difficult to secure unanimous consent to the proposition that Danish literature has at no time during the present century found itself languishing as in our own days.

Poetical production is almost completely checked, and no problem of a general human or social character awakens interest or evokes any more serious discussion than that of the daily press or other ephemeral publication.

Our productivity has never been strongly original, and we now utterly fail to appropriate the spiritual life of other lands, and our spiritual deafness has brought upon us the speechlessness of the deaf-mutes.

The proof that a literature in our days is alive is to be found in the fact that it brings problems up for debate.

Thus George Sand brings marriage up for debate, Voltaire, Byron, and Feuerbach religion, Proudhon property, Alexander Dumas _fils_ the relations of the sexes, and Emile Augier social relations in general.

For a literature to bring nothing up for debate is the same thing as to lose all its significance.

The people that produce such a literature may believe as firmly as they please that the salvation of the world will come from it, but their expectations will be doomed to disappointment; such a people can no more influence the development of civilization in the direction of progress than did the fly who thought he was urging the carriage onward by now and then giving the four horses an insignificant prick.

Many virtues--as for example warlike courage--may be preserved in such a society, but these virtues cannot sustain literature when intellectual courage has sunk and disappeared.

All stagnant reaction is tyrannical;

and when a community has by degrees so developed itself that it wears the features of tyranny beneath the mask of freedom, when every outspoken utterance that gives uncompromising expression to free thought is frowned upon by society, by the respectable part of the press, and by many officials of the State, very unusual conditions will be needed to call forth characters and talents of the sort upon which progress in any society depends.

Should such a community develop a kind of poetry, we need not wonder overmuch if its essential tendency be to scorn the age and put it to shame.

Such poetry will again and again describe the men of the time as wretches; and it may well happen that the books which are the most famous and the most sought after (Ibsen's 'Brand,' for example) will be those in which the reader is made to feel--at first with a sort of horror, and afterwards with a sort of satisfaction--what a worm he is, how miserable and how cowardly.

It may happen, too, that for such a people the word Will becomes a sort of catchword, that it may cry aloud with dramas of the Will and philosophies of the Will.

Men demand that which they do not possess; they call for that of which they most bitterly feel the lack; they call for that which there is the keenest inquiry for.

Yet one would be mistaken were he pessimistically to assume that in such a people there is less courage, resolution, enthusiasm, and will than in the average of others.

There is quite as much courage and freedom of thought, but still more is needed.

For when the reaction in a literature forces the new ideas into the background, and when a community has daily heard itself blamed, derided, and even cursed for its hypocrisy and its conventionality, yet has remained convinced of its openness of mind, daily swinging censers before its own nostrils in praise thereof,--it requires unusual ability and unusual force of will to bring new blood into its literature.

A soldier needs no uncommon courage to fire upon the enemy from the shelter of an earthwork; but if he has been led so ill that he finds no shelter at hand, we need not wonder if his courage forsakes him.

Various causes have contributed to the result that our literature has accomplished less than the greater ones in the service of progress.

The very circumstances that have favored the development of our poetry have stood in our way.

I may in the first place mention a certain childishness in the character of our people.

We owe to this quality the almost unique naïveté of our poetry.

Naïveté is an eminently poetical quality, and we find it in nearly all of our poets, from Oehlenschläger through Ingemann and Andersen to Hostrup.

But naïveté does not imply the revolutionary propensity.

I may further mention the abstract idealism so strongly marked in our literature.

It deals with our dreams, not with our life....

It sometimes happens to the Dane on his travels that a foreigner, after some desultory talk about Denmark, asks him this question: How may one learn what are the aspirations of your country?

Has your contemporary literature developed any type that is palpable and easily grasped?

The Dane is embarrassed in his reply.

They all know of what class were the types that the eighteenth century bequeathed to the nineteenth.

Let us name one or two representative types in the case of a single country, Germany.

There is 'Nathan the Wise,' the ideal of the period of enlightenment; that is, the period of tolerance, noble humanity, and thorough-going rationalism.

We can hardly say that we have held fast to this ideal or carried it on to further development, as it was carried on by Schleiermacher and many others in Germany.

Mynster was our Schleiermacher, and we know how far his orthodoxy stands removed from Schleiermacher's liberalism.

Instead of adopting rationalism and carrying it on, we have stepped farther and farther away from it.

Clausen was once its advocate, but he is so no more.

Heiberg is followed by Martensen, and Martensen's 'Speculative Dogmatic' is succeeded by his 'Christian Dogmatic.'

In Oehlenschläger's poetry there is still the breath of rationalism, but the generation of Oehlenschläger and Örsted is followed by that of Kierkegaard and Paludan-Müller.

The German literature of the eighteenth century bequeathed to us many other poetic ideals.

There is Werther, the ideal of the "storm and stress" period, of the struggle of nature and passion with the customary order of society; then there is Faust, the very spirit of the new age with its new knowledge, who, still unsatisfied with what the period of enlightenment has won, foresees a higher truth, a higher happiness, and a thousandfold higher power; and there is Wilhelm Meister, the type of humanized culture, who goes through the school of life and from apprentice becomes master, who begins with the pursuit of ideals that soar above life and who ends by discerning the ideal in the real, for whom these two expressions finally melt into one.

There is Goethe's Prometheus, who, chained to his rock, gives utterance to the philosophy of Spinoza in the sublime rhythms of enthusiasm.

Last of all, there is the Marquis von Posa, the true incarnation of the revolution, the apostle and prophet of liberty, the type of a generation that would, by means of the uprising against all condemned traditions, make progress possible and bring happiness to mankind.

With such types in the past our Danish literature begins.

Does it develop them further?

We may not say that it does.

For what is the test of progress?

It is what happens afterward.

It has not been printed in this shape, but I will tell you about it.

One fine day, when Werther was going about as usual, dreaming despairingly of Lotte, it occurred to him that the bond between her and Albert was of slight consequence, and he won her from Albert.

One fine day the Marquis von Posa wearied of preaching freedom to deaf ears at the court of Philip the Second, and drove a sword through the king's body--and Prometheus rose from his rock and overthrew Olympus, and Faust, who had knelt abjectly before the Earth-Spirit, took possession of his earth, and subdued it by means of steam, and electricity, and methodical investigation.

Translation of W. M.

Payne.