It was evidently himself, or rather the Finnish part of himself, the author was exploring; it was in the mine of his own experience he was delving; it was his own heart he was coining. That may, in a sense, be true of every book of any consequence; but it was most emphatically true of "The Visionary." It is not to the use of the first person that this autobiographical note is primarily due; but to a certain beautiful intimacy in the narrative, and a naive confidence which charms the reader and takes him captive. With a lavish hand Lie has drawn upon the memories of his boyhood in the arctic North; and it was the newness of the nature which he revealed, no less than the picturesque force of his language, which contributed in no small degree to the success of his book. But, above all, it was the sweetness and pathos of the exquisite love story. Susanna, though as to talents not much above the commonplace, is ravishing. To have breathed the breath of such warm and living life into a character of fiction is no small achievement. It is the loveliness of love, the sweetness of womanhood, the glorious ferment of the blood in the human springtide which are celebrated in "The Visionary." The thing is beautifully done. I do not know where young love has been more touchingly portrayed, unless it be in some of the Russian tales of Tourgueneff.[15] The second-sight with which the hero, David Holst, is afflicted, introduces an undertone of sadness—a pensive minor key—and seems to necessitate the tragic denouement.

[15] Spring Floods, Liza, Faust.

The immediate success of "The Visionary" changed Jonas Lie's situation and prospects. He was first sent with a public stipend to Nordland for the purpose of studying the character, manners, and economic condition of the dwellers within the polar zone; and, like the conscientious man he is, he made an exhaustive report to the proper department, detailing with touching minuteness the results of his observations. The Norwegian government has always taken a strong (and usually very intelligent) interest in rising artists, musicians, and men of letters, and has endeavored by stipends and salaries to compensate them for the smallness of the public which the country affords. Jonas Lie was now a sufficiently conspicuous man to come into consideration in the distribution of the official panem et circenses. The state awarded him a largess of $400 for one year (twice renewed), in order to enable him to go to Italy and "educate himself for a poet;" and he was also made a beneficiary of the well-known Schafer legacy for the training of artists. In the autumn of 1871 he started with his wife and four children for Rome. It was in a solemnly festal frame of mind that he now resolved to devote the rest of his life to his real vocation, which at last he had found. This was what they had all meant—his gropings, trials, and failures. They had all fitted him for the life-work which was now to be his. The world lay before him as in the shining calm after storm.

He took his artistic training, as everything else, with extreme seriousness. With the utmost conscientiousness he started out with his Thomasine, morning after morning, to study the Vatican and the Capitoline collections. "Happy is the man," says Goethe, "who learns early in life what art means." But Jonas Lie was thirty-eight years old; and, as far as I can judge from his writings, I should venture to say that the secret of classical art has never been unlocked to him. It lies probably rather remote from the sphere of his sensations. His genius is so profoundly Germanic that only an ill-wisher would covet for him that expansion of vision which would enable him to perceive with any degree of artistic realization and intimacy the glorious serenity of the Juno Ludovisi and the divine distinction of the Apollo Belvedere.

The two books which were the first-fruits of the Roman sojourn were a disappointment to his friends, though in the case of the unpretentious collection called "Tales and Sketches from Nordland" (1872) there is no reason why it should have been. The public found that it was not on a level with "The Visionary," and by "The Visionary" Jonas Lie was bound to be judged, whether he liked it or not. That is the penalty of having produced a masterpiece, that one is never permitted to follow the example of bonus Homerus, who, as every one knows, sometimes nods. Jonas Lie was far from nodding in "The Barque Future" (1872). There was an abundance of interest in the material, and a delightful picturesque vigor in the descriptions of nature. But of romantic interest of the kind which the ordinary novel-reader craves, there was very little. A propos of "The Barque Future" let me quote a bit of general characterization which applies to nearly all the subsequent works of Jonas Lie.

"It is in this particular that Jonas Lie most distinctly diverges from all romanticism and romance-writing: His interest in practical affairs, his ability to see poetry in that which is contemporary. The sawdust in the rivers has never offended him, nor the Briton's black cloud of coal-smoke. The busy toil of office and shop is not prose to him. He penetrates to the bottom of its meaning—its significance to civilization."[16]

[16] Arne Garborg: Jonas Lie, p. 172.

"The Barque Future" is, as regards its problem, Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben ("Debit and Credit") transferred to Nordland. Instead of the noble house of Rothsattel we have the ancient and highly esteemed commercial firm of Heggelund, whose chief falls into the toils of the scoundrel, Stuwitz, very much as Baron Rothsattel was dragged to ruin by the Jew Veitel Itzig. But no more than Freytag can find it in his heart to award the victory to the Hebrew usurer, can Lie violate the proprieties of fiction by permitting Stuwitz to fatten on his spoil. He could not, like the German novelist, conjure up a noble gentleman of democratic sympathies and practical ability (like von Finck) and make him emerge in the nick of time as the heir of the ancient gentry, justifying the dignities which he enjoys in the state by the uses which he fulfils. In Norway there is no nobility; and Lie, therefore, had to make his able and industrious plebeian, Morten Jonsen (the equivalent of Anton Wohlfahrt in Soll und Haben) the inheritor of the future. He accordingly awards to him the hand of Miss Edele Heggelund; but not until he has put Jacob to shame by the amount and character of the work by which he earns his Rachel.

The reception of "The Barque Future" was far from satisfactory to its author. He grew apprehensive about himself. He could not afford another failure; nay, not even a succes d'estime. Accordingly he waited two years, and published in 1874 "The Pilot and his Wife," which made its mark. It is an every-day story in the best sense of the word, the history of a marriage among common folk. And yet so true is it, so permeated with a warm and rich humanity, that it holds the reader's attention from beginning to end. Then, to add to its interest, it has some bearing upon the woman question. Lie maintains that no true marriage can exist where the wife sacrifices her personality, and submits without a protest to neglect and ill-treatment. Happily we are not particularly in need of that admonition on our side of the ocean. The wife of the pilot, Salve Christensen, had once broken her engagement with him, having become enamored of the handsome naval lieutenant, Beck; but she recovers her senses and marries Christensen, whom she really loves. After her marriage she tries to do penance for the wrong she has done him by being, as she fancies, a model wife. But by submission and self-extinction, so alien to her character, she arouses his suspicion that she has something on her conscience; and, in his feeling of outrage, he begins to neglect and abuse her. When, at last, his maltreatment reaches a climax, she arises in all the dignity of her womanhood, and asserts her true self. Then comes reconciliation, followed by a united life of true equality and loving comradeship.

Such a mere skeleton of a plot can, of course, give no conception of the wealth of vivid details with which the book abounds. There is, however, a certain air of effort about it, of a strenuous seriousness, which is, I fancy, the temperamental note of this author.

"The Pilot and his Wife" besides reviving Lie's popularity also served to define his position in Norwegian literature. He had at first been assigned a definite corner as the "poet of Nordland," but his ambition was not satisfied with so narrow a province. In all his tales, so far, he has surpassed all predecessors in his descriptions of the sea; and the critics, when favorably disposed, fell into the habit of referring to him as "the novelist of the sea," "the poet of the ocean," etc. The Norwegian sailor, whom he may be said to have revealed in "The Pilot," came to be considered more and more as his property; and no one can read such tales as "Press On" (Gaa Paa) and "Rutland" without agreeing that the title is well merited. I know of no English novelist since Smollett, who produces so deep a sense of reality in his descriptions of maritime life. Mr. Clark Russell, who knows his ship from masthead to keel as thoroughly as Jonas Lie, and writes fully as clever a story, seems to me to have a lower aim, in so far as the novel of adventure, caeteris paribus, belongs on a lower level than the novel of character.

In the year 1874 the Norwegian Storthing conferred upon Jonas Lie an annual "poet's salary" of about six hundred dollars. This is supposed to supply a warranty deed to a lot on Parnassus. It removes any possible flaw in the title to immortality. Lie was now lifted into the illustrious triumvirate in which Bjoernson and Ibsen were his predecessors. Great expectations were entertained of his literary future. But, oddly enough, this official recognition did not have a favorable effect upon Lie. He felt himself almost oppressed by a sense of obligation to yield full returns for what he consumed of the public revenues. In 1875 he published a versified tale, "Faustina Strozzi," dealing with the struggle for Italian liberty. In spite of many excellences it fell rather flat, and was roughly handled by the critics. Even a worse fate befell its successor, "Thomas Ross" (1878), a novel of contemporary life in the Norwegian capital. It is a pale, and rather labored story, in which a young girl, of the Rosamond Vincy type, is held up to scorn, and the atrocity of flirtation is demonstrated by the most tragic consequences. There is likewise an air of triviality about "Adam Schrader" (1879); and Lie became seriously alarmed about himself when he had to register a third failure. Like its predecessor, this book is full of keen observations, and the sketches of the social futilities and the typical characters at a summer watering-place are surely good enough to pass muster. But, somehow, the material fails to combine into a sufficiently coherent and impressive picture; and the total effect remains rather feeble. In a drama, "Grabow's Cat" (1880), he suffered shipwreck once more, though he saved something from the waves. The play was performed in Christiania and Stockholm, and aroused interest, but not enough to keep it afloat.

It has been said of Browning that he succeeded by a series of failures, which meant, in his case, that his books failed to command instant attention, but were gradually discovered by the thoughtful few who by their appreciation spread the poet's fame among the thoughtless many. It was not in this way that Jonas Lie's failures conduced to his final success. "Thomas Ross," "Adam Schrader," and "Grabow's Cat" have not grown perceptibly in the estimation either of the critics or of the public since their first appearance. But they supplied their author a hard but needed discipline. They warned him against over-confidence and routine work. He had passed through a soul-trying experience, in its effect not unlike the one which Keats describes a propos of "Endymion:"

"In 'Endymion' I leaped headlong into the sea and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks than if I had stayed upon the green shore, took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure—would rather fail than not be among the greatest."

Jonas Lie reconquered at one stroke all that he had lost, by the delightful sea-novel "Rutland" (1881), and reinstated himself still more securely in the hearts of an admiring public by the breezy tale, "Press On" (1882). But after so protracted a sea-voyage he began to long for the shore, where, up to date he had suffered all his reverses. It could not be that he who had lived all his life on terra firma, and was so profoundly interested in the problems of modern society, should be banished forever, like "The Man Without a Country," to the briny deep, and be debarred from describing the things which he had most at heart. One more attempt he was bound to make, even at the risk of another failure. Accordingly in 1883 appeared "The Life Prisoner" (Livsslaven), which deserved a better fate than befell it. The critics found it depressing, compared it to Zola, and at the same time scolded the author because he lacked indignation and neglected to denounce the terrible conditions which he described. He replied to their arraignments in an angry but very effective letter. But that did not save the book. Truth to tell, "The Life Prisoner" is a dismal tale. It was, in fact, the irruption of modern naturalism into Norwegian literature. It reminds one in its tone more of Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment" than of "L'Assommoir." For to my mind Dostoyevski is a greater exponent of naturalism than Zola, whom Lemaitre not inaptly styles "an epic poet." The pleasing and well-bred truths or lies, to the expounding of which belles lettres had hitherto been confined, were here discarded or ignored. The author had taken a plunge into the great dumb deep of the nethermost social strata, which he has explored with admirable conscientiousness and artistic perception. Few men of letters would object to being the father of so creditable a failure. Lie, being convinced that his book was a good one, no matter what the wielders of critical tomahawks might say to the contrary, resolved to persevere in the line he had chosen and to pluck victory from the heels of defeat. And the victory came even the same year (1883), when he published what, to my mind, is the most charming of all his novels, "The Family at Gilje." That is a book which is taken, warm and quivering, out of the very heart of Norway. The humor which had been cropping out tentatively in Lie's earlier tales comes here to its full right, and his shy, beautiful pathos gleams like hidden tears behind his genial smile. It is close wrought cloth of gold. No loosely woven spots—no shoddy woof of cheaper material. Captain Jaeger and his wife, Inger-Johanna, Joergen, Grip, nay, the whole company of sober, everyday mortals that come trooping through its chapters are so delightfully human that you feel the blood pulse under their skin at the first touch. It is a triumph indeed, to have written a book like "The Family at Gilje."

From this time forth Jonas Lie's career presents an unbroken series of successes. "A Maelstrom" (1884), "Eight Stories," "Married Life" (Et Samliv), (1887), "Maisa Jons" (1888), "The Commodore's Daughters" and "Evil Powers" (1890), which deal with interesting phases of contemporary life, are all extremely modern in feeling and show the same effort to discard all tinsel and sham and get at the very heart of reality.

He had by this series of novels established his reputation as a relentless realist, when, in 1892, he surprised his admirers by the publication of two volumes of the most wildly fantastic tales, entitled "Trold." It was as if a volcano, with writhing torrents of flame and smoke, had burst forth from under a sidewalk in Broadway. It was the suppressed Finn who, for once, was going to have his fling, even though he were doomed henceforth to silence. It was the "queer thoughts" (which had accumulated in the author and which he had scrupulously imprisoned) returning to take vengeance upon him unless he released them. The most grotesque, weird, and uncanny imaginings (such as Stevenson would delight in) are crowded together in these tales, some of which are derived from folk-lore and legends, while others are free fantasies.

Before taking leave of Jonas Lie, a word about his style is in order. Style, as such, counts for very little with him. Yet he has a distinctly individual and vigorous manner of utterance, though a trifle rough, perhaps, abrupt, elliptic, and conversational. Mere decorative adjectives and clever felicities of phrase he scorns. All scientific and social phenomena—all that we include under the term modern progress—command his most intense and absorbed attention. Having since 1882 been a resident of Paris (except during his annual summer excursions to Norway or the mountains of Bavaria) he has had the advantage of seeing the society which he describes at that distance which, if it does not lend enchantment, at all events unifies the scattered impressions, and furnishes a convenient critical outpost. He does not permit himself, however, like so many foreigners in the French capital, to lapse into that supercilious cosmopolitanism which deprives a man of his own country without giving him any other in exchange. No; Jonas Lie is and remains a Norseman—a fact which he demonstrated (to the gratification of his countrymen) on a recent occasion. At the funeral of the late Professor O. J. Broch—a famous Norwegian who died in Paris—the chaplain of the Swedish legation made an oration in which he praised the departed statesman and scientist, referring to him constantly as "our countryman." When he had finished, Jonas Lie, without anybody's invitation, stepped quietly up to the coffin and in the name of Norway bade his countryman a last farewell. "The spirit came over Lie," says his biographer, "and he spoke with ravishing eloquence."

But why did he do such an uncalled-for thing, you will ask? Because there is a systematic effort on the part of Sweden to suppress the very name of Norway, and to give the impression, throughout the world, that there is no such nationality as the Norwegian. Therefore every Norseman (unless he chooses to be a party to this suppression) is obliged to assert his nationality in season and out of season. But Jonas Lie has, indeed, in a far more effective way borne aloft the banner of his country. His books have been translated into French, German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Russian, and Bohemian; and throughout Europe the literary journals and magazines are beginning to discuss him as one of the foremost representatives of modern realism.



HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN[17]

[17] A portion of this essay appeared originally in "The Dial" of Chicago.

Hans Christian Andersen was a unique figure in Danish literature, and a solitary phenomenon in the literature of the world. Superficial critics have compared him with the Brothers Grimm; they might with equal propriety have compared him with Voltaire or with the man in the moon. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scientific collectors of folk-lore, and rendered as faithfully as possible the simple language of the peasants from whose lips they gathered their stories. It was the ethnological and philological value of the fairy-tale which stimulated their zeal; its poetic value was of quite secondary significance. With Andersen the case was exactly the reverse. He was as innocent of scientific intention as the hen who finds a diamond on a dunghill is of mineralogy. It was the poetic phase alone of the fairy-tale which attracted him; and what is more, he saw poetic possibilities where no one before him had ever discovered them. By the alchemy of genius (which seems so perfectly simple until you try it yourself) he transformed the common neglected nonsense of the nursery into rare poetic treasure. Boots, who kills the ogre and marries the princess—the typical lover in fiction from the remotest Aryan antiquity down to the present time—appears in Andersen in a hundred disguises, not with the rudimentary features of the old story, but modernized, individualized, and carrying on his shield an unobtrusive little moral. In "Jack the Dullard" he comes nearest to his primitive prototype, and no visible effort is made to refine him. In "The Most Extraordinary Thing" he is the vehicle of a piece of social satire, and narrowly escapes the lot which the Fates seem especially to have prepared for inventors, viz., to make the fortune of some unscrupulous clown while they themselves die in poverty. In "The Porter's Son" he is an aspiring artist, full of the fire of genius, and he wins his princess by conquering that many-headed ogre with which every self-made man has to battle—the world's envy, and malice, and contempt for a lowly origin. It is easy to multiply examples, but these may suffice.

In another species of fairy-tale, which Andersen may be said to have invented, incident seems to be secondary to the moral purpose, which is yet so artfully hidden that it requires a certain maturity of intellect to detect it. In this field Andersen has done his noblest work and earned his immortality. Who can read that marvellous little tale, "The Ugly Duckling," without perceiving that it is a subtle, most exquisite revenge the poet is taking upon the humdrum Philistine world, which despised and humiliated him, before he lifted his wings and flew away with the swans, who knew him as their brother? And yet, as a child, I remember reading this tale with ever fresh delight, though I never for a moment suspected its moral. The hens and the ducks and the geese were all so vividly individualized, and the incidents were so familiar to my own experience, that I demanded nothing more for my entertainment. Likewise in "The Goloshes of Fortune" there is a wealth of amusing adventures, all within the reach of a child's comprehension, which more than suffices to fascinate the reader who fails to penetrate beneath the surface. The delightful satire, which is especially applicable to Danish society, is undoubtedly lost to nine out of ten of the author's foreign readers, but so prodigal is he both of humorous and pathetic meaning, that every one is charmed with what he finds, without suspecting how much he has missed. "The Little Mermaid" belongs to the same order of stories, though the pathos here predominates, and the resemblance to De la Motte Fouque's "Undine" is rather too striking. But the gem of the whole collection, I am inclined to think, is "The Emperor's New Clothes," which in subtlety of intention and universality of application rises above age and nationality. Respect for the world's opinion and the tyranny of fashion have never been satirized with more exquisite humor than in the figure of the emperor who walks through the streets of his capital in robe de nuit, followed by a procession of courtiers, who all go into ecstasies over the splendor of his attire.

It was not only in the choice of his theme that Andersen was original. He also created his style, though he borrowed much of it from the nursery. "It was perfectly wonderful," "You would scarcely have believed it," "One would have supposed that there was something the matter in the poultry-yard, but there was nothing at all the matter"—such beginnings are not what we expect to meet in dignified literature. They lack the conventional style and deportment. No one but Andersen has ever dared to employ them. As Dr. Brandes has said in his charming essay on Andersen, no one has ever attempted, before him, to transfer the vivid mimicry and gesticulation which accompany a nursery tale to the printed page. If you tell a child about a horse, you don't say that it neighed, but you imitate the sound; and the child's laughter or fascinated attention compensates you for your loss of dignity. The more successfully you crow, roar, grunt, and mew, the more vividly you call up the image and demeanor of the animal you wish to represent, and the more impressed is your juvenile audience. Now, Andersen does all these things in print: a truly wonderful feat. Every variation in the pitch of the voice—I am almost tempted to say every change of expression in the story-teller's features—is contained in the text. He does not write his story, he tells it; and all the children of the whole wide world sit about him and listen with, eager, wide-eyed wonder to his marvellous improvisations.[18]

[18] Brandes: Kritiker og Portraiter, p. 303.

In reading Andersen's collected works one is particularly impressed with the fact that what he did outside of his chosen field is of inferior quality—inferior, I mean, judged by his own high standard, though in itself often highly valuable and interesting. "The Improvisatore," upon which, next to "The Wonder-Tales," his fame rests, is a kind of disguised autobiography which exhibits the author's morbid sensibility and what I should call the unmasculine character of his mind,[19] To appeal to the reader's pity in your hero's behalf is a daring experiment, and it cannot, except in brief scenes, be successful. A prolonged strain of compassion soon becomes wearisome, and not the worthiest object in the world can keep one's charity interested through four hundred pages. Antonio, in "The Improvisatore," is a milksop whom the author, with a lavish expenditure of sympathy, parades as a hero. He is positively ludicrous in his pitiful softness, vanity, and humility. That the book nevertheless remains unfailingly popular, and is even yet found in the satchel of every Roman tourist, is chiefly due to the poetic intensity with which the author absorbed and portrayed every Roman sight and sound. Italy throbs and glows in the pages of "The Improvisatore"—the old vagabond Italy of pre-Garibaldian days, when priests and bandits and pretty women divided the power of Church and State. Story's "Roba di Roma," Augustus Hare's "Walks in Rome," and all the other descriptions of the Eternal City, are but disguised guide-books, feeble and pale performances, when compared with Andersen's beautiful romance.

[19] R. L. Stevenson in speaking of the "Character of Dogs" makes the following cruel observation: "Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe with an excruciating vanity and scouting even along the streets for the shadows of offence—here was the talking dog."—Memories and Portraits, p. 196.

The same feminine sentimentality which, in spite of its picturesqueness, makes "The Improvisatore" unpalatable to many readers, is still more glaringly exhibited in "O. T." and "The Two Baronesses." In "The Story of My Life" the same quality asserts itself on every page in the most unpleasant manner. The author makes no effort to excite the reader's admiration, but he makes constant appeals to his sympathy. Nevertheless this autobiography rivals in historic and poetic worth Rousseau's "Confessions" and Benvenuto Cellini's "Life." The absolute candor with which Andersen lays bare his soul, the complete intentional or unintentional self-revelation, gives a psychological value to the book which no mere literary graces could bestow. I confess, until I had the pleasure of making Andersen's acquaintance, "The Fairy Tale of My Life" impressed me unpleasantly. After I had by personal intercourse possessed myself of the clew to the man's character, I judged differently. Andersen remained, until the day of his death, a child. His innocence was more than virginal; his unworldliness simply inconceivable. He carried his heart on his sleeve, and invited you to observe what a soft, tender, and sensitive heart it was. He had the harmless vanity of a child who has a new frock on. He was fidgety and unhappy if anybody but himself was the centre of attraction; and guilelessly happy when he could talk and be admired and sympathized with. His conversation was nearly always about himself, or about the kings and princes and lofty personages who had graciously deigned to take notice of him. He was a tuft-hunter of a rare and curious sort; not because he valued the glory reflected upon himself by royal acquaintances, but because the pomp and splendor of a court satisfied his thirst for the marvellous. A king seemed to him, as to the boy who reads his fairy-tales, something grand and remote; and in invading this charmed sphere he seemed to have invaded his own fairy-tales, and to live actually in the fabulous region of wonders in which his fancy revelled. He conceived of his life as a fairy-tale, and delighted in living up to his own ideal of living. The very title of his autobiography in Danish (Mit Livs Eventyr) shows this conclusively; and it ought to have been rendered in English "The Fairy-Tale of My Life." "The Story of My Life," as Mr. Scudder has translated it, would have been in the original "Mit Livs Historie," a very common title, by the way, for an autobiography, while Mit Livs Eventyr is entirely unique.

The feeling of the marvellous pervades the book from beginning to end. The prose facts of life had but a remote and indistinct existence to the poet, and he blundered along miserably in his youth, supported and upheld by a dim but unquenchable aspiration. He commiserated himself, and yet felt that there was something great in store for him because of his exceptional endowment. Every incident in his career he treated as if it were a miracle, which required the suspension of the laws of the universe for its performance. God was a benevolent old man with a long beard (just as he was depicted in old Dr. Luther's Catechism) who sat up in the skies and spent his time chiefly in managing the affairs of Hans Christian Andersen as pleasantly as possible; and Hans Christian was duly grateful, and cried on every third or fourth page at the thought of the goodness of God and man. Sometimes, for a change, he cried at the wickedness of the latter, and marvelled, with the naivete of a spoiled child, that there should be such dreadful people in the world, who should persist in misunderstanding and misrepresenting him. Those who were good to him he exalted and lauded to the skies, no matter how they conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity. Some of the most mediocre princes, who had paid him compliments, he embalmed in prose and verse. Frederick VII. of Denmark, whose immorality was notorious, was, according to Andersen, "a good, amiable king," "sent by God to Danish land and folk," than whom "no truer man the Danish language spoke." And this case was by no means exceptional. The same uncritical partiality toward the great and mighty is perceptible in every chapter of "The Fairy-Tale of My Life." It was not, however, toward the great and mighty alone that he assumed this attitude; he was uncritical by nature, and had too soft a heart to find fault with anybody—except those who did not like his books. Heine's jocose description of heaven as a place where he could eat cakes and sweets, and drink punch ad libitum, and where the angels sat around raving about his poetry, was probably not so very remote from Andersen's actual conception. His world was the child's world, in which there is but one grand division into good and bad, and the innumerable host that occupies the middle-ground between these poles is ignored. Those who praised what he wrote were good people; those who ridiculed him were a malignant and black-hearted lot whom he was very sorry for and would include in his prayers, in the hope that God might make them better.

We may smile at this simple system; but we all remember the time when we were addicted to a similar classification. That it is a sign of immaturity of intellect is undeniable; and in Andersen's case it is one of the many indications that intellectually he never outgrew his childhood. He never possessed the power of judgment that we expect in a grown-up man. His opinions on social and political questions were naive and quite worthless. And yet, in spite of all these limitations, he was a poet of rare power; nay, I may say in consequence of them. The vitality which in other authors goes toward intellectual development, produced in him strength and intensity of imagination. Everything which his fancy touched it invested with life and beauty. It divined the secret soul of bird and beast and inanimate things. His hens and ducks and donkeys speak as hens and ducks and donkeys would speak if they could speak. Their temperaments and characters are scrupulously respected. Even shirt-collars, gingerbread men, darning-needles, flowers, and sunbeams, he endowed with physiognomies and speech, fairly consistent with their ruling characteristics. This personification, especially of inanimate objects, may at first appear arbitrary; but it is part of the beautiful consistency of Andersen's genius that it never stoops to mere amusing and fantastic trickery. The character of the darning-needle is the character which a child would naturally attribute to a darning-needle, and the whole multitude of vivid personifications which fills his tales is governed by the same consistent but dimly apprehended instinct. Of course, I do not pretend that he was conscious of any such consistency; creative processes rarely are conscious. But he needed no reflection in order to discover the child's view of its own world. He never ceased to regard the world from the child's point of view, and his personification of an old clothes-press or a darning-needle was therefore as natural as that of a child who beats the chair against which it bumped its head. In the works of more ambitious scope, where this code of conduct would be out of place, Andersen was never wholly at his ease. As lovers, his heroes usually cut a sorry figure; their milk-and-water passion is described, but it is never felt. They make themselves a trifle ridiculous by their innocence, and are amusing when they themselves least suspect it. Likewise, in his autobiography, he is continually exposing himself to ridicule by his naive candor, and his inability to adapt himself to the etiquette which prevails among grown-up people. Take as an instance his visit to the Brothers Grimm, when he asked the servant girl which of the brothers was the more learned, and when she answered "Jacob," he said, "Then take me to Jacob." The little love affair, too, which he confides seems to have been of the kind which one is apt to experience during the pinafore period; a little more serious, perhaps, but yet of the same kind. It is in this vague and impersonal style that princes and princesses love each other in the fairy-tales; everything winds up smoothly, and there are never any marital disagreements to darken the honeymoon. It is in this happy, passionless realm that Andersen dwells, and here he reigns supreme. For many years to come the fair creatures of his fancy will continue to brighten the childhood of new generations. No rival has ever entered this realm; and even critics are excluded. Nevertheless, Andersen need have no fear of the latter; for even if they had the wish, they would not have the power, to rob him of his laurels.

Hans Christian Andersen was born in the little town of Odense, on the island Fuenen, April 2, 1805. His father was a poor shoemaker, with some erratic ambitions, or, if his son's word may be trusted, a man of a richly gifted and truly poetic mind. His wife was a few years older and a good deal more ignorant than himself; and when they set up housekeeping together, in a little back room, they rejoiced in being able to nail together a bridal bed out of the scaffolding which had recently supported a dead nobleman's coffin. The black mourning drapery which yet clung to the wood gave them quite a sense of magnificence. Their first child, Hans Christian, grew up amid these mean surroundings, constantly worried by the street boys, who made a butt of him, and tortured him in the thousand ingenious ways known to their species. He had no schooling to speak of; but, for all that, was haunted, like Joseph, by dreams foreshadowing his future greatness. Guided by this premonition he started, at the age of fourteen, for Copenhagen, a tall, ugly, and ungainly lad, but resolved, somehow or other, to conquer fame and honor. He tried himself as a dancer, singer, actor, and failed lamentably in all his debuts. He could not himself estimate the extent of his own ignorance, nor could he dream what a figure he was cutting. Undismayed by all rebuffs, though suffering agony from his wounded vanity, he wrote poems, comedies, and tragedies, in which he plagiarized, more or less unconsciously, the elder Danish poets. Mr. Jonas Collins, one of the directors of the Royal Theatre, became interested in the youth, whose unusual ambition meant either madness or genius. In order to determine which it might be, Mr. Collins induced King Frederic VI. to pay for his education, and after half a dozen years at school Hans Christian passed the entrance examination to the University. Mr. Collins continued to assist him with counsel and deed; and his hospitable house in Bredgade became a second home to Andersen. There he met, for the first time, people of refinement and culture on equal terms; and his morbid self-introspection was in a measure cured by kindly association, tempered by wholesome fun and friendly criticism. He now resolved to abandon his University studies and devote his life to literature.

I have no doubt it would have alarmed the gentle poet very much, if he had been told that he belonged to the Romantic School. To be classified in literature and be bracketed with a lot of men with whom you are not even on speaking terms, and whom, more than likely, you don't admire, would have seemed to him an unpleasant prospect. That he drew much of his inspiration from the German Romanticists, notably Heine and Hoffmann, he would perhaps have admitted; but he would have thought it unkind of you to comment upon his indebtedness. In his first book, "A Pedestrian Tour from Holmen Canal to the Eastern Extremity of Amager" (1829), he assumed by turns the blase mask of the former and the fantastically eccentric one of the latter; both of which ill became his good-natured, plebeian, Danish countenance. For all that, the book was a success in its day; and no less an authority than the aesthetic Grand Mogul, J. L. Heiberg, hailed it as a work of no mean merit. It strikes us to-day as an exhibition of that mocking smartness of youth which often hides a childish heart. It was because he was so excessively sentimental and feared to betray his real physiognomy that he cut these excruciating capers. His other alternative would have been mawkishness. His vaudeville, "Love on the Nicholas Tower," which satirizes the drama of chivalry, is in the same vein and made a similar hit. A volume of "Poems" was also well received. But in 1831 he met with his first literary reverse. A second collection of verses, entitled "Phantasies and Sketches," was pitilessly ridiculed by Henrik Hertz, in his "Letters from the Dead." Andersen's lack of style and violations of syntax were rather maliciously commented upon. If Gabriel's trump had sounded from the top of the Round Tower, it would not have startled Andersen more. He was in despair. Like the great child he was, he went about craving sympathy, and weeping when he failed to find it.

"I could say nothing," he writes in "the Fairy-Tale of My Life," "I could only let the big, heavy waves roll over me; and it was the common opinion that I was to be totally washed away. I felt deeply the wound of the sharp knife; and was on the point of giving myself up, as I was already given up by others."

This is one of the numerous exhibitions of that over-sensitiveness to criticism which caused him such long and continued suffering. His mind was like a bared nerve, quivering with delight or contracting with violent pain. Utterly devoid, as he was, of self-criticism, he regarded his authorship as something miraculous, and held God (who apparently supervised each chapter) responsible for the fate of his books. "If the Lord," he writes in solemn earnest to a friend, "will take as good care of the remainder as he has of the first chapters, you will like it."[20] There was to him no difference between his best and his worst. It was all part of himself, and he could scarcely conceive of any motive for finding fault with it, except personal malice, envy, animosity.[21] This did not, however, always prevent him from associating with the malevolent critic, as for instance in the case of Hertz, with whom he presently established pleasant relations.

[20] P. Hansen: Illustreret Dansk Litteratur Historic, vol. ii., p. 477.

[21] I derive this impression not only from the Autobiography, but from many conversations. An account of My Acquaintance with Hans Christian Andersen will be found in The Century Magazine, March, 1892.

In 1831 Andersen made his first trip abroad. "By industry and frugality," he says, "I had saved up a little sum of money, so I resolved to spend a couple of weeks in North Germany."

The result of this journey was the book "Shadow Pictures," which was followed in 1833 by "Vignettes on Danish Poets," and a chaplet of verse entitled "The Twelve Months of the Year." It is quite true, as he affirms, that in his "Vignettes," he "only spoke of that which was good in them" [the poets]; but in consequence there is a great lack of Attic salt in the book. In 1833 he went abroad once more, visited Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, and sent home the dramatic poem "Agnete and the Merman," the comparative failure of which was a fresh grief to him. After his return from Rome (1835) he published his "Improvisatore," which slowly won its way. It was the reputation this novel gained abroad which changed public opinion in Denmark in its favor. A second novel, "Only a Fiddler" (1837), is a fresh variation of his autobiography, and the lachrymose and a trifle chaotic story, "O. T." (being the brand of the Odense penitentiary) scarcely deserved any better reception than was accorded it.

It is a curious thing that misconception and adversity never hardened Andersen or toughened the fibre of his personality. The same lamentable lack of robustness—not to say manliness—which marked his youth remained his prevailing characteristic to the end of his life. And I fancy, if he had ever reached intellectual maturity, both he himself and the world would have been losers. For it is his unique distinction to have expressed a simplicity of soul which is usually dumb—which has, at all events, nowhere else recorded itself in literature. We all have a dim recollection of how the world looked from the nursery window; but no book has preserved so vivid and accurate a negative of that marvellous panorama as Andersen's "Wonder Tales for Children," the first collection of which appeared in 1835. All the jumbled, distorted proportions of things (like the reflection of a landscape in a crystal ball) is capitally reproduced. The fantastically personifying fancy of childhood, where does it have more delightful play? The radiance of an enchanted fairy realm that bursts like an iridescent soap-bubble at the touch of the finger of reason, where does it linger in more alluring beauty than in "Ole Lukoeie" ("The Sandman"), "The Little Mermaid," or "The Ice-Maiden"? There is a bloom, an indefinable, dewy freshness about the grass, the flowers, the very light, and the children's sweet faces. And so vivid—so marvellously vivid—as it all is. Listen to this from "Five in a Pea-Pod:"

"There were five peas in one pod. They were green, and the pod was green; and so they thought that the whole world was green. And that was just as it should be. The pod grew and the peas grew; they accommodated themselves to circumstances, sitting all in a row."

Or take this from "Little Tuk:"

"Yes, that was Little Tuk. His name wasn't really Tuk, but when he couldn't speak plain, he used to call himself so. It was meant for Charley; and it does very well, when one only knows it."

Or this incomparable bit of drollery from Hjalmar's dream in "The Sandman:"

"There came a terrible wail from the table-drawer where Hjalmar's school books lay. 'Whatever can that be?' said the Sandman. And he went to the table and opened the drawer. It was the slate which was in convulsions because a wrong number had got into the sum, so that it was fairly falling to pieces. The slate-pencil tugged and jumped at the end of its string, as if it had been a little dog that wanted to help the sum. But he could not. There was a great lamentation in Hjalmar's copy-book, too; it was quite terrible to hear. On each page the large letters stood in a row, one underneath the other, and each with a little one at its side. That was the copy. And next to these were a few more letters, which thought they looked just like the others. These were the ones Hjalmar had written. But they lay down as if they had tumbled pell-mell over the pencil lines upon which they were to stand.

"'Look, this is the way you should hold yourselves,' said the copy, 'sloping this way with a bold swing.' 'Oh, we should be very glad to do that,' answered Hjalmar's letters, 'but we can't. We are so weakly.' 'Then you must take medicine,' said the Sandman. 'Oh, no, no,' cried they, and straightway they stood up so gracefully that it was a pleasure to look at them."

This strikes me as having the very movement and all the delicious whimsicality of a school-boy's troubled dream. It has the delectable absurdity of the dream's inverted logic. You feel with what beautiful zest it was written; how childishly the author himself relished it. The illusion is therefore perfect. The big child who played with his puppet theatre until after he was grown up is quite visible in every line. He is as much absorbed in the story as any of his hearers. He is all in the game with the intense engrossment of a lad I knew, who, while playing Robinson Crusoe, ate snails with relish for oysters.

Throughout the first series of "Wonder Tales" there is a capital air of make-believe, which imposes upon you most delightfully, and makes you accept the most incredible doings, as you accept them in a dream, as the most natural thing in the world. In the later series, where the didactic tale becomes more frequent ("The Pine Tree," "The Wind's Tale," "The Buckwheat"), there is an occasional forced note. The story-teller becomes a benevolent, moralizing uncle, who takes the child upon his knee, in order to instruct while entertaining it. But he is no more in the game. A cloying sweetness of tone, such as sentimental people often adopt toward children, spoils more than one of the fables; and when occasionally he ventures upon a love-story ("The Rose-Elf," "The Old Bachelor's Nightcap," "The Porter's Son"), he is apt to be as unintentionally amusing as he is in telling his own love episode in "The Fairy-Tale of My Life." However, no man can unite the advantages of adult age and childhood, and we all feel that there is something incongruous in a child's talking of love.

It is a curious fact that his world-wide fame as the poet of childhood never quite satisfied Andersen.[22] He never accepted it without a protest. It neither pleased nor sufficed him. He was especially eager to win laurels as a dramatist; and in 1839 celebrated his first dramatic success by a farcical vaudeville entitled "The Invisible at Sprogoee." Then followed the romantic drama "The Mulatto" (1840), which charmed the public and disgusted the critics; and "The Moorish Maiden," which disgusted both. These plays are slipshod in construction, but emotionally effective. The characters are loose-fibred and vague, and have no more backbone than their author himself. J. L. Heiberg thought it high time to chastise the half-cultured shoemaker's son for his audacity, and in the third act of "A Soul after Death," held him up to ridicule. Andersen, stabbed again to the heart, hastened away from home, "suffering and disconcerted." But before leaving he published "A Picture-Book without Pictures", (1840), which is attached to the American edition of his "Stories and Tales," and deserves its place. The moon's pathetic and humorous observations on the world she looks down upon every evening of her thirty nights' circuit have already become classic in half-a-dozen languages. The little girl who came to kiss the hen and beg her pardon; the ragged street gamin who died upon the throne of France; the Hindoo maiden who burned her lamp upon the banks of the Ganges in order to see if her lover was alive; the little maid who was penitent because she laughed at the lame duckling with a red rag around its leg—who does not know the whole inimitable gallery from beginning to end? The tenderest, the softest, the most virginal spirit breathes through all these sketches. They are sentimental, no doubt, and a trifle too sweet. But then they belong to a period of our lives when a little excess in that direction does not trouble us.

[22] For verification of this statement I may refer to his indignant letter a propos of the statue that was to be raised to him in Copenhagen, in which he was represented surrounded by listening children: "None of the sculptors," he wrote, "have known me; none of their sketches indicate that they have seen what is characteristic in me. Never could I read aloud when anybody was sitting behind me or close up to me; far less if I had children on my lap or on my back, or young Copenhageners lying all over me. It is a facon de parler to call me 'the children's poet.' My aim has been to be the poet of all ages; children could not represent me."

In 1842 Andersen gave to the world "A Poets' Bazaar," a chronicle of his travels through nearly all the countries of Europe. In 1844 the drama "The King is Dreaming," and in 1845 the fairy comedy "The Flower of Fortune." But his highest dramatic triumph he celebrated in the anonymous comedy "The New Lying-in Room," which in a measure proved his contention that it was personal hostility and not critical scruples which made so large a portion of the Copenhagen literati persecute him. For the very men who would have been the first to hold his play up to scorn were the heartiest in their applause, as long as they did not know that Andersen was its author. Less pronounced was the success of the lyrical drama "Little Kirsten" (1846); and the somewhat ambitious epic "Ahasverus" comes very near being a failure. The next ventures of the versatile and indefatigable poet were the novel "The Two Baronesses" (1849), and the fairy comedies "More than Pearls and Gold" (1849), adapted from a German original, "The Sandman"[23] (1850), and "The Elder Tree Mother" (1851). The comedies "He was not Born" (1864), "On Langebro" and "When the Spaniards were Here" (1869), complete the cycle of his dramatic labors. But the most amusing thing he did, showing how incapable he was of taking the measure of his faculties, was to write a novel, "To Be or Not to Be" (1857), in which he proposed once and forever to down the giant Unbelief, prove the immortality of the soul, and produce "peace and reconciliation between Nature and the Bible." It was nothing less than the evidences of Christianity in novelistic form with which he designed to favor an expectant world. "If[24] I can solve this problem," he naively wrote to a friend, "then the monster materialism, devouring everything divine, will die." But rarely was a bigger Gulliver tackled by a tinier Liliputian. The book not only fell flat, but it was only the world-wide renown and the good intention of its author which saved it from derision.

[23] Danish, Ole Lukoeie.

[24] Hansen: Illustreret Dansk Litteratur Historie, ii. p. 560.

Though Andersen never attained in Copenhagen an uncontested recognition of his talent, honors both from at home and abroad were showered upon him. The fame which undeniably was his commanded respect, but scarcely approval. Heiberg made merry at his obscurity in the country of his birth and his celebrity beyond its boundaries, and represented him as reading "The Mulatto" to the Sultan's wives and the "Moorish Maiden" to those who were to be strangled, kneeling in rapture, while the Grand Eunuch, crowned his head with laurels. But in spite of obloquy and ridicule, Andersen continued his triumphant progress through all the lands of the civilized world, and even beyond it. In 1875 his tale, "The Story of a Mother," was published simultaneously in fifteen languages, in honor of his seventieth birthday. A few months later (August 4th) he died at the villa Rolighed, near Copenhagen. His life was indeed as marvellous as any of his tales. A gleam of light from the wonderland in which he dwelt seems to have fallen upon his cradle and to have illuminated his whole career. It was certainly in this illumination that he himself saw it, as the opening sentence of his autobiography proves: "My life is a lovely fairy-tale, happy and full of incidents."

The softness, the sweetness, the juvenile innocence of Danish romanticism found their happiest expression in him; but also the superficiality, the lack of steel in the will, the lyrical vagueness and irresponsibility. If he did not invent a new literary form he at all events enriched and dignified an old one, and revealed in it a world of unsuspected beauty. He was great in little things, and little in great things. He had a heart of gold, a silver tongue, and the spine of a mollusk. Like a flaw in a diamond, a curious plebeian streak cut straight across his nature. With all his virtues he lacked that higher self-esteem which we call nobility.



CONTEMPORARY DANISH LITERATURE

The late Romantic authors of Denmark who lived on the traditions of Oehlenschlaeger's time and the aesthetical doctrines of J. L. Heiberg, have gradually been passing away; and a new generation has grown up, which, though it knows Joseph, has repudiated his doctrine. A period of stagnation followed the disappearance of the Romanticists. The Sleswick-Holstein war of 1866, and the consequent hostility to Germany, cut off the intellectual intercourse between the two countries which in the first half of the century had been lively and intimate; and as, for a while, no new ties were formed, a respectable dulness settled upon the little island kingdom. People lived for the concerns of the day, earned their bread and butter, amused themselves to the best of their ability, but troubled themselves very little about the battles of thought which were being fought upon the great arena of the world. The literary activity which now and then flared up spasmodically, like flames over a smouldering ash-heap, flickered and half-expired for want of fresh sustenance. A direfully conventional romanticist, H. F. Ewald (1821-1892), wrote voluminous modern and historical novels, the heroines of which were usually models of all the copy-book virtues, and the heroes as bloodless as their brave and loyal prototypes in "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley." Instead of individualizing his dramatis personae this feeble successor of Ingemann and Walter Scott gave them a certificate of character, vouching for their goodness or badness, and trusting the reader to take his word for it in either case. Like many another popular novelist, he varnished them with the particular tint of excellence or depravity that might suit his purpose, stuffed their heads with bran and their bellies with sawdust, but troubled himself little about what lay beneath the epidermis. There was something naive and juvenile in his view of life which appealed to the large mass of half-educated people; and the very absence of any subtle literary art tended further to increase his public. Many of his books, notably "The Youth of Valdemar Krone" (Valdemar Krone's Ungdomshistorie), "The Swedes at Kronborg" (Svenskerne paa Kronborg), have achieved an extraordinary success. The former deals with contemporary life, while the latter expurgates and embellishes history after the manner of Walter Scott. Two subsequent novels, "The Family Nordby" and "Johannes Falk," are, like all of Ewald's writings, pervaded by a robust optimism and a warm Danish sentiment, which in a large measure account for their popularity with the public of the circulating libraries.

A lesser share of the same kind of popularity has fallen to the lot of an author of a much higher order—Wilhelm Bergsoee (born 1835). His voluminous novel "Fra Piazza del Popolo" (1860) made a sensation in its day, and "From the Old Factory" (1869), which constructively is a maturer book, is likewise full of fascination. The description of the doings of the artistic guild in Rome, which occupies a considerable portion of the former work, is delightful, though intermingled with a deal of superfluous mysticism and romantic entanglements which were then held to be absolutely indispensable. "In the Sabine Mountains" (1871), the scene of which is laid in Genazzano during the struggle for Italian independence, is a trifle too prolix; and its effect is lessened by the old-fashioned epistolary form. Signor Carnevale, the revolutionary apothecary, is, however, a very amusing figure, and would be still better if he were not caricatured. The tendency to screw the characters up above the normal—to tune them up to concert pitch as it were—interferes seriously with the pleasure which the book otherwise might yield.

The conception of art as something wholly distinct from and above nature animates all Bergsoee's productions. The theory of fiction which R. L. Stevenson has so eloquently propounded has found an able practitioner in him. For all that, I am indebted to Bergsoee's two Italian romances for a great deal of enjoyment, the afterglow of which still warms my memory. But that was long ago. A young man is apt to enjoy in a book quite as much what he himself supplies as that which the author has deposited therein. Each word is a key which unlocks a store of imprisoned emotions. The very word Italy has a magic which imparts to it a charm even in the geography. And Bergsoee, though he works, without suspicion of its decrepitude, the ancient machinery of Italian romance, is unaffectedly eloquent and unsophistically entertaining. The historic whisperings which he catches from the names, the ruins, the facial types, and the very trees and grass of Genazzano invest his letters from that picturesque neighborhood with a certain beautiful glow of color and a dusky richness of decay. The autobiographical form imposes, to be sure, an increasing strain on the reader's credulity, as the plot thickens, and we find ourselves, half-unexpectedly, involved in a lurid tale of monks, priests, disguised revolutionists, cruel, mercenary fathers, etc., and the Danish author playing his favorite role of deus ex machina. Still more incredible is the part of benevolent Providence which he assigns to himself in "The Bride of Roervig," where he saves the heroine's life by restoring to her a ring given to her lover, and thus assuring her that he is alive when she believes him dead. The autobiographical story (especially when the writer is a mere convenient supernumerary, designed, like the uncle from America in the old-fashioned melodrama, to straighten out the tangled skein), is apt to involve other difficulties than the mere embarrassment of having to distrust the author's assertion, or censure his indiscretions. The illusion is utterly spoiled by that haunting arriere pensee that this or that writer, whom you know perhaps at first or second-hand, or whose features, at all events, are familiar to you from pictures, never could or would have played the more or less heroic role with which he here delights to impose upon you.

Altogether the best book which Bergsoee has written is the autobiographical romance "From the Old Factory," the scene of which is laid in Denmark. This book evidently contains a great deal of genuine reminiscence, and is therefore devoid of that air of laborious contrivance and artificial intrigue which brings the foregoing novels into such unpleasant relationship with Wilkie Collins and his genre. The incidents of the hero's boyhood in the old porcelain factory, and his uncle's agitating experiments for the rediscovery of a lost process of glazing are saner and soberer and lie closer to the soil of common experience than the exploits of monks and pirates and revolutionists.

Among the notable men of the expiring Danish romanticism Meyer Aaron Goldschmidt (1819-1886) holds a leading position. A comic paper, Corsaren, which he edited (1840-1846) made a tremendous stir in its day; and its scathing wit and satire were not without influence upon current events. His two novels, En Joede (1845), Hjemloes (1857), and a large number of clever novelettes (Ravnen, Arvingen Flyveposten, etc.), are full of psychological subtleties, and often charmingly told. Flyveposten ("The Flying Mail") was translated into English (Boston and Cambridge, 1870) but attracted no particular attention. For all that, Goldschmidt, in spite of occasional prolixity, stands the test of time remarkably well. His Jewish stories, notably Maser, Aron og Esther, and En Joede, contain a higher order of work, though less dramatically effective, than that of Sacher-Masoch, and Emil Franzos, and the later Ghetto romancers. Goldschmidt's double nationality, as a Danish-born Jew, indicates his position and the source from which he drew his weakness and his strength. As a Jew he saw and judged the Danish character, and as a Dane he saw and judged the Jewish character with a liberality and insight of which no autochthon would have been capable. For all that his tales aroused anything but friendly feelings among his own people. They felt it to be a profanation thus to expose the secluded domestic and religious life of the children of Israel. It is to this sentiment that Dr. Brandes has given utterance in his protest against "perpetually serving up one's grandmother with sauce piquante."

An author who is born into an age of transition, when old faiths are passing away and new ones are struggling for recognition, is placed in a serious dilemma. Where he makes his choice by mere temperamental bias, he is apt to miss that element of growth which is involved in every spiritual struggle. But if, as is so frequently the case, he finds his choice in a measure made for him, his education, kinships, and worldly advantage identifying him with the established order, it takes a tremendous amount of courage and character to break away from old moorings and steer, without other compass than a sensitive conscience, toward the rosy dawn of the unknown. There was a desperate need of such men in Denmark in the seventies, when the little kingdom was sinking deeply and more deeply into a bog of patriotic delusion and spiritual stagnation. An infusion of new blood was needed—a re-establishment of that circulation of thought which keeps the whole civilized world in vital connection and makes it akin. No country can cut itself off from this universal world-life without withering like a diseased limb. The man who undertook to bring Denmark again into rapport with Europe was Dr. Georg Brandes, whom I have characterized at length in another essay. It was his admirable book, "The Men of the Modern Transition" (translated into German under the title 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 classified 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 noble 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 refreshing 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 space 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 Assyrian 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 principal 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 lustre 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 repolishing 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, entitled "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 multitude 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 pronounced 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 assertion 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 workmanship 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 institutions 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 title, "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, entitled "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 fishing 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 entitled "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.

Voelund 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 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 elite 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Emigres" 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 soupcon of partisanship. His treatment of Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael, Oberman, Madame de Kruedener, 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 "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, entitled "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. Dr. Brandes has so profound an admiration for the man who dares to rebel that he fails to do justice to the motives of society in protecting itself against him. It is not to be denied that the iconoclast may be in the right and society in the wrong; but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that such is the case. If society did not, with the fierce instinct of self-preservation, guard its traditional morality against such assailants as Byron and Shelley, civilization would suffer. The conservative bias of the Philistine (though not so outwardly attractive) is no less valuable as a factor in civilization than the iconoclastic zeal of the reformer. If the centrifugal force had full sway in human society, without being counteracted by a centripetal tendency, anarchy would soon prevail. I cannot (as Dr. Brandes appears to do) discover any startling merit in outraging the moral sense of the community in which one lives; and though I may admit that a man who was capable of doing this was a great poet, I cannot concede that the fact of his being a great poet justified the outrage. Nor am I sure that Dr. Brandes means to imply so much; but in all of his writings there is manifested a deep sympathy with the law-breaker whose Titanic soul refuses to be bound by the obligations of morality which limit the freedom of ordinary mortals. Only petty and pusillanimous souls, according to him, submit to these restraints; the heroic soul breaks them, as did Byron and Shelley, because he has outgrown them, or because he is too great to recognize the right of any power to limit his freedom of action or restrain him in the free assertion of his individuality. This is the undertone in everything Dr. Brandes has written; but nowhere does it ring out more boldly than in his treatment of Byron and Shelley, unless it be in the fifth course of his "Main Currents" dealing with "Young Germany."

These four courses of lectures have been published under the collective title "The Main Literary Currents in the Nineteenth Century" (Hovedstroemningerne i det Nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur). The German translation is entitled Hauptstroemungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Barring the strictures which I have made, I know no work of contemporary criticism which is more luminous in its statements, more striking in its judgments, and more replete with interesting information. It reminds one in its style of Taine's "Lectures on Art" and the "History of English Literature." The intellectual bias is kindred, if not the same; as is also the pictorial vigor of the language, the subtle deductions of psychical from physical facts, and a certain lusty realism, which lays hold of external nature with a firm grip.

In Dr. Brandes's "Impressions of Poland" I found an observation which illustrates his extraordinary power of characterization. The temperament of the Polish people, he says, is not rational but fantastically heroic. When I recall the personalities of the various Poles I have known (and I have known a great many), I cannot conceive of a phrase more exquisitely descriptive. It makes all your haphazard knowledge about Poland significant and valuable by supplying you with a key to its interpretation. It is this faculty Dr. Brandes has displayed in an eminent degree in his many biographical and critical essays which have appeared in German and Danish periodicals; as also in his more elaborate biographies of Benjamin Disraeli (1878), Esaias Tegner (1878), Soeren Kierkegaard (1877), Ferdinand Lassalle (1882), and Ludwig Holberg. The first of these was translated into English, and was also published in the United States. A second volume, entitled "Eminent Writers of the Nineteenth Century," was translated some years ago by Professor R. B. Anderson. The greater number of these highly finished essays were selected from the Danish volumes "The Men of the New Transition" (1884) and "Men and Works in Recent European Literature" (1883), and one or two from "Danish Poets" (1877). They give in every instance the keynote to the personality with which they deal; they are not so much studies of books as studies of the men who are revealed in the books. Take, for instance, the essay on Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson, which I regard as one of the finest and most vital pieces of critical writing in recent times. What can be more subtly descriptive of the very innermost soul of this poet than the picture of him as the clansman, the Norse chieftain, who feels with the many and speaks for the many; and what more beautifully indicative of his external position than this phrase: "To mention his name is like running up the flag of Norway"?

It seems peculiarly appropriate to follow up this essay with one on Ibsen, who is as complete an antithesis to his great and popular rival as could well be conceived. There is no bugle-call in the name Henrik Ibsen. It is thin in sound, and can be spoken almost with closed lips. You have no broad vowels and large consonants to fill your mouth as when you say Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson. This difference in sound seems symbolic. Ibsen is the solitary man, a scathing critic of society, a delver in the depths of human nature, sceptical of all that men believe in and admire. He has not, like Bjoernson, any faith in majorities; nay, he believes that the indorsement of the majority is an argument against the wisdom of a course of action or the truth of a proposition. The summary of this poet's work and personality in Dr. Brandes's book is a masterpiece of analytical criticism. It enriches and expands the territory of one's thought. It is no less witty, no less epigrammatic, than Sainte-Beuve at his best; and it has flashes of deeper insight than I have ever found in Sainte-Beuve.

The last book of Dr. Brandes's that has been presented to the American public is his "Impressions of Russia." The motto of this work (which in the Danish edition is printed on the back of the title-page) is "Black Earth," the significance of which is thus explained in the concluding paragraph:

"Black earth, fertile soil, new soil, wheat soil ... the wide, rich, warm nature ... the infinite expanses, which fill the soul with melancholy and with hope ... the impenetrable, duskily mysterious ... the mother-womb of new realities and new mysticism ... Russia, the future."

The prophetic vagueness of this paragraph, big with dim possibilities, conveys the very impression to which all observations and experiences in Russia finally reduce themselves. It is the enduring residue which remains when all evanescent impressions have lapsed into the background. It expresses, too, the typical mental attitude of every Russian, be he ever so Frenchified and denationalized. The word "Virgin Soil" was a favorite phrase with Tourgueneff when speaking of his country, and he used it as the title of his last novel. It seemed to him to explain everything in Russian conditions that to the rest of the world appeared enigmatical. The whole of Dr. Brandes's book is interpenetrated with this consciousness of the vast possibilities hidden in the virgin bosom of the new earth, even though they may be too deeply hidden to sprout up into the daylight for centuries to come. The Russian literature, which is at present enchaining the attention of the civilized world, is a brilliant variation of this theme, an imaginative commentary on this text. The second half of Dr. Brandes's "Impressions" is devoted to the consideration of Puschkin, Gogol, Lermontoff, Dostojevski, Tourgueneff, and Tolstoi; of each of whom he gives, as it appears to me, a better account than M. de Voguee in his book "Le Roman Russe," which gave him a seat among the Forty Immortals.