Part 38

Strong as the beast of prey whose name [Björn=Bear] occurs twice in his; muscular, without the slightest trace of corpulence, of athletic build, he looms up majestically in my mind, with his massive head, his firmly compressed lips, and his sharp, penetrating gaze from behind his spectacles. It would be impossible for literary hostilities to overthrow this man, and for him there never existed that greatest danger to authors (a danger which for a long time menaced his great rival Henrik Ibsen), namely, that of having his name shrouded in silence. Even as a very young author, as a theatrical critic and political writer, he had entered the field of literature with such an eagerness for combat that a rumbling noise arose about him wherever he appeared. Like his own Thorbjörn in 'Synnöve Solbakken,' he displayed in early youth the combative tendency of the athlete; but like his Sigurd in 'Sigurd Slembe,' he fought not merely to practice his strength, but from genuine though often mistaken love of truth and justice. At all events, he understood thoroughly who to attract attention.

An author may possess great and rare gifts, and yet, through lack of harmony between his own personal endowments and the national characteristics or the degree of development of his people, may long be prevented from attaining a brilliant success. Many of the world's greatest minds have suffered from this cause. Many, like Byron, Heine, and Henrik Ibsen, have left their native land; many more who have remained at home have felt forsaken by their compatriots. With Björnson the case is quite different. He has never, it is true, been peacefully recognized by the entire Norwegian people; at first, because the form he used was too new and unfamiliar; later, because his ideas were of too challenging a nature for the ruling, conservative, and highly orthodox circles of the land; even at the present time he is pursued by the press of the Norwegian government and by the leading official society with a fury which is as little choice in its selection of means as the bitterness which pursues the champions of thrones and altars in other countries. In spite of all this, Björnstjerne Björnson has his people behind him and about him as perhaps no other poet has, unless it be Victor Hugo. When his name is mentioned it is equivalent to hoisting the flag of Norway. In his noble qualities and in his faults, in his genius and in his weak points, he as thoroughly bears the stamp of Norway as Voltaire bore that of France. His boldness and his naïveté, his open-heartedness as a man and the terseness of his style as an artist, the highly wrought and sensitive Norwegian popular sentiment, and the lively consciousness of the one-sidedness and the intellectual needs of his fellow-countrymen that has driven him to Scandinavianism, Pan-Teutonism, and cosmopolitanism--all this in its peculiar combination in him is so markedly national that his personality may be said to offer a _résumé_ of the entire people.

None of his contemporaries so fully represent this people's love of home and of freedom, its self-consciousness, rectitude, and fresh energy. Indeed, just now he also exemplifies on a large scale the people's tendency to self-criticism; not that scourging criticism which chastises with scorpions, and whose representative in Norway is Ibsen, in Russia Turgénieff, but the sharp bold expression of opinion begotten of love. He never calls attention to an evil in whose improvement and cure he does not believe, or to a vice which he despairs of seeing out-rooted. For he has implicit faith in the good in humanity, and possesses entire the invincible optimism of a large, genial, sanguine nature.

As to his character, he is half chieftain, half poet. He unites in his own person the two forms most prominent in ancient Norway--those of the warrior and of the scald. In his intellectual constitution he is partly a tribune of the people, partly a lay preacher; in other words, he combines in his public demeanor the political and religious pathos of his Norwegian contemporaries, and this became far more apparent after he broke loose from orthodoxy than it was before. Since his so-called apostasy he has in fact been a missionary and a reformer to a greater degree than ever.

He could have been the product of no other land than Norway, and far less than other authors could he thrive in any but his native soil. In the year 1880, when the rumor spread through the German press that Björnson, weary of continual wrangling at home, was about to settle in Germany, he wrote to me:--"In Norway will I live, in Norway will I lash and be lashed, in Norway will I sing and die."

To hold such intimate relations with one's fatherland is most fortunate for a person who is sympathetically comprehended by that fatherland. And this is the case with Björnson. It is a matter dependent on conditions deeply rooted in his nature. He who cherishes so profound an enthusiasm for the reserved, solitary Michelangelo, and who feels constrained, as a matter of course, to place him above Raphael, is himself a man of a totally different temperament: one who is never lonely, even when most alone (as he has been since 1873 on his gård in remote Gausdal), but who is social to the core, or, more strictly speaking, a thoroughly national character. He admires Michelangelo because he reveres and understands the elements of greatness, of profound earnestness, of mighty ruggedness in the human heart and in style; but he has nothing in common with the great Florentine's melancholy sense of isolation. He was born to be the founder of a party, and was therefore early attracted to enthusiastic and popular party leaders, such as the Dane Grundtvig and the Norwegian Wergeland, although wholly unlike either in his plastic, creative power. He is a man who needs to feel himself the centre, or rather the focus of sympathy, and insensibly he forms a circle about him, because his own nature is the _résumé_ of a social union.

Copyrighted by T.Y. Crowell and Company, New York.

THE HISTORICAL MOVEMENT IN MODERN LITERATURE

From the Introduction to 'Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century'

What I shall portray for you is a historical movement, having very completely the form and the character of a drama. The six distinct literary groups that I intend to present to you are entirely like the six acts of a great play. In the first group, the French emigrant-literature inspired by Rousseau, the reaction has already begun, but the reactionary currents are everywhere blended with the revolutionary. In the second group, the half-Catholic romantic school of Germany, the reaction is growing; it goes further, and holds itself more aloof from the contemporary movement towards freedom and progress. The third group, finally, formed of such writers as Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais in his orthodox period, Lamartine and Victor Hugo under the Restoration, when they were still firm supporters of the legitimist and clerical parties, stands for the reaction, impetuous and triumphant.

Byron and his associates make up the fourth group. This one man reverses the action of the great drama. The Greek war of liberation breaks out, a current of fresh air sweeps over Europe, Byron falls as a hero of the Greek cause, and his heroic death makes a deep impression upon all the writers of the Continent. Just before the July Revolution all the great French writers turn about, forming the fifth group, the French romantic school, and the new liberal movement is marked by the names of Lamennais, Hugo, Lamartine, De Musset, George Sand, and many others. And when the movement spreads from France into Germany, liberal ideas triumph in that land also, and the sixth and last group of authors I shall portray became inspired by the ideas of the July Revolution and the War of Liberation, seeing, like the French poets, in Byron's great shade the leader of the movement towards freedom. The most important of these young writers are of Jewish origin, as Heine, Börne, and later, Auerbach.

I believe that from this great drama we may get a lesson for our own instruction. We are now, as usual, forty years behind the rest of Europe. In the literatures of those great countries the revolutionary stream long ago united with its tributaries, burst the dikes that were set to impede its course, and has been distributed into thousands of channels. We are still endeavoring to check it and hold it dammed up in the swamps of the reaction, but we have succeeded only in checking our literature itself.

It would hardly be difficult to secure unanimous consent to the proposition that Danish literature has at no time during the present century found itself languishing as in our own days. Poetical production is almost completely checked, and no problem of a general human or social character awakens interest or evokes any more serious discussion than that of the daily press or other ephemeral publication. Our productivity has never been strongly original, and we now utterly fail to appropriate the spiritual life of other lands, and our spiritual deafness has brought upon us the speechlessness of the deaf-mutes.

The proof that a literature in our days is alive is to be found in the fact that it brings problems up for debate. Thus George Sand brings marriage up for debate, Voltaire, Byron, and Feuerbach religion, Proudhon property, Alexander Dumas _fils_ the relations of the sexes, and Emile Augier social relations in general. For a literature to bring nothing up for debate is the same thing as to lose all its significance. The people that produce such a literature may believe as firmly as they please that the salvation of the world will come from it, but their expectations will be doomed to disappointment; such a people can no more influence the development of civilization in the direction of progress than did the fly who thought he was urging the carriage onward by now and then giving the four horses an insignificant prick.

Many virtues--as for example warlike courage--may be preserved in such a society, but these virtues cannot sustain literature when intellectual courage has sunk and disappeared. All stagnant reaction is tyrannical; and when a community has by degrees so developed itself that it wears the features of tyranny beneath the mask of freedom, when every outspoken utterance that gives uncompromising expression to free thought is frowned upon by society, by the respectable part of the press, and by many officials of the State, very unusual conditions will be needed to call forth characters and talents of the sort upon which progress in any society depends. Should such a community develop a kind of poetry, we need not wonder overmuch if its essential tendency be to scorn the age and put it to shame. Such poetry will again and again describe the men of the time as wretches; and it may well happen that the books which are the most famous and the most sought after (Ibsen's 'Brand,' for example) will be those in which the reader is made to feel--at first with a sort of horror, and afterwards with a sort of satisfaction--what a worm he is, how miserable and how cowardly. It may happen, too, that for such a people the word Will becomes a sort of catchword, that it may cry aloud with dramas of the Will and philosophies of the Will. Men demand that which they do not possess; they call for that of which they most bitterly feel the lack; they call for that which there is the keenest inquiry for. Yet one would be mistaken were he pessimistically to assume that in such a people there is less courage, resolution, enthusiasm, and will than in the average of others. There is quite as much courage and freedom of thought, but still more is needed. For when the reaction in a literature forces the new ideas into the background, and when a community has daily heard itself blamed, derided, and even cursed for its hypocrisy and its conventionality, yet has remained convinced of its openness of mind, daily swinging censers before its own nostrils in praise thereof,--it requires unusual ability and unusual force of will to bring new blood into its literature. A soldier needs no uncommon courage to fire upon the enemy from the shelter of an earthwork; but if he has been led so ill that he finds no shelter at hand, we need not wonder if his courage forsakes him.

Various causes have contributed to the result that our literature has accomplished less than the greater ones in the service of progress. The very circumstances that have favored the development of our poetry have stood in our way. I may in the first place mention a certain childishness in the character of our people. We owe to this quality the almost unique naïveté of our poetry. Naïveté is an eminently poetical quality, and we find it in nearly all of our poets, from Oehlenschläger through Ingemann and Andersen to Hostrup. But naïveté does not imply the revolutionary propensity. I may further mention the abstract idealism so strongly marked in our literature. It deals with our dreams, not with our life....

It sometimes happens to the Dane on his travels that a foreigner, after some desultory talk about Denmark, asks him this question: How may one learn what are the aspirations of your country? Has your contemporary literature developed any type that is palpable and easily grasped? The Dane is embarrassed in his reply. They all know of what class were the types that the eighteenth century bequeathed to the nineteenth. Let us name one or two representative types in the case of a single country, Germany. There is 'Nathan the Wise,' the ideal of the period of enlightenment; that is, the period of tolerance, noble humanity, and thorough-going rationalism. We can hardly say that we have held fast to this ideal or carried it on to further development, as it was carried on by Schleiermacher and many others in Germany. Mynster was our Schleiermacher, and we know how far his orthodoxy stands removed from Schleiermacher's liberalism. Instead of adopting rationalism and carrying it on, we have stepped farther and farther away from it. Clausen was once its advocate, but he is so no more. Heiberg is followed by Martensen, and Martensen's 'Speculative Dogmatic' is succeeded by his 'Christian Dogmatic.' In Oehlenschläger's poetry there is still the breath of rationalism, but the generation of Oehlenschläger and Örsted is followed by that of Kierkegaard and Paludan-Müller.

The German literature of the eighteenth century bequeathed to us many other poetic ideals. There is Werther, the ideal of the "storm and stress" period, of the struggle of nature and passion with the customary order of society; then there is Faust, the very spirit of the new age with its new knowledge, who, still unsatisfied with what the period of enlightenment has won, foresees a higher truth, a higher happiness, and a thousandfold higher power; and there is Wilhelm Meister, the type of humanized culture, who goes through the school of life and from apprentice becomes master, who begins with the pursuit of ideals that soar above life and who ends by discerning the ideal in the real, for whom these two expressions finally melt into one. There is Goethe's Prometheus, who, chained to his rock, gives utterance to the philosophy of Spinoza in the sublime rhythms of enthusiasm. Last of all, there is the Marquis von Posa, the true incarnation of the revolution, the apostle and prophet of liberty, the type of a generation that would, by means of the uprising against all condemned traditions, make progress possible and bring happiness to mankind.

With such types in the past our Danish literature begins. Does it develop them further? We may not say that it does. For what is the test of progress? It is what happens afterward. It has not been printed in this shape, but I will tell you about it. One fine day, when Werther was going about as usual, dreaming despairingly of Lotte, it occurred to him that the bond between her and Albert was of slight consequence, and he won her from Albert. One fine day the Marquis von Posa wearied of preaching freedom to deaf ears at the court of Philip the Second, and drove a sword through the king's body--and Prometheus rose from his rock and overthrew Olympus, and Faust, who had knelt abjectly before the Earth-Spirit, took possession of his earth, and subdued it by means of steam, and electricity, and methodical investigation.

Translation of W.M. Payne.

SEBASTIAN BRANDT

(1458-1521)

In 1494, shortly after the invention of printing, there appeared in Basle a book entitled 'Das Narrenschiff' (The Ship of Fools). Its success was most extraordinary; it was immediately translated into various languages, and remained a favorite with the reading world throughout the sixteenth century. The secret of its popularity lay in its mixture of satire and allegory, which was exactly in accord with the spirit of the age. 'The Ship of Fools' was not only read by the cultivated classes who could appreciate the subtle flavor of the work, but--especially in Germany--it was a book for the people, relished by burgher and artisan as well as by courtier and scholar. Contemporary works contain many allusions to it; it was in fact so familiar to every one that monks preached upon texts drawn from it. This unique and powerful book carried the spirit of the Reformation where the words of Luther would have been unheeded, and it is supposed to have suggested to Erasmus his famous 'Praise of Folly.'

In its way, it was as important a production as Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.' The 'Narrenschiff' was like a glass in which every man saw the reflection of his neighbor; for the old weather-beaten vessel was filled with a crew of fools, who impersonate the universal weaknesses of human nature. In his prologue Brandt says:--

"We well may call it Folly's mirror, Since every fool there sees his error: His proper worth would each man know, The glass of Fools the truth will show. Who meets his image on the page May learn to deem himself no sage, Nor shrink his nothingness to see, Since naught that lives from fault is free; And who in conscience dare be sworn That cap and bells he ne'er hath worn? He who his foolishness decries Alone deserves to rank as wise. He who doth wisdom's airs rehearse May stand godfather to my verse!

* * * * *

"For jest and earnest, use and sport, Here fools abound, of every sort. The sage may here find Wisdom's rules, And Folly learn the ways of fools. Dolts rich and poor my verse doth strike; The bad finds badness, like finds like; A cap on many a one I fit Who fain to wear it would omit. Were I to mention it by name, 'I know you not,' he would exclaim."

Sebastian Brandt represented all that was best in mediæval Germany. He was a man of affairs, a diplomat, a scholar, an artist, and a citizen highly esteemed and reverenced for his judgment and knowledge. Naturally enough, he held important civic offices in Basle as well as in Strassburg, where he was born in 1458. His father, a wealthy burgher, sent him to the University of Basle to study philosophy and jurisprudence and to become filled with the political ideals of the day. He took his degree in law in 1484 at Basle, and practiced his profession, gaining in reputation every day.

In early youth he dedicated a number of works in prose and verse to the Emperor Maximilian, who made him Chancellor of the Empire, and frequently summoned him to his camp to take part in the negotiations regarding the Holy See. He was universally admired, and Erasmus, who saw him in Strassburg, spoke of him as the "incomparable Brandt." His portrait represents the polished Italian rather than the sturdy middle-class German citizen. His features are delicately cut, his nose long and thin, his face smooth, and his fur-bordered cap and brocade robes suggest aristocratic surroundings. No doubt he graced, by his appearance and bearing as well as by his richly stored mind, the dignity of Count Palatine, to which rank the Emperor raised him. He died in Strassburg in 1521, and lies in the great cathedral.

In addition to the pictures in the 'Ship of Fools' (some of which he drew, while others he designed and superintended), he illustrated 'Terence' (1496); the 'Quadragesimale, or Sermons on the Prodigal Son' (1495); 'Boëtius' (1501), and 'Virgil' (1502), all of which are interesting to the artist and engraver. In the original edition of the 'Ship of Fools,' written in the Swabian dialect, every folly is accompanied with marginal notes giving the classical or Biblical prototype of the person satirized.

"Brandt's satires," says Max Müller in his 'Chips from a German Workshop,' "are not very powerful, nor pungent, nor original. But his style is free and easy. He writes in short chapters, and mixes his fools in such a manner that we always meet with a variety of new faces. To account for his popularity we must remember the time in which he wrote. What had the poor people of Germany to read toward the end of the fifteenth century? Printing had been invented, and books were published and sold with great rapidity. People were not only fond, but proud, of reading. This entertainment was fashionable, and the first fool who enters Brandt's ship is the man who buys books. But what were the wares that were offered for sale? We find among the early prints of the fifteenth century religious, theological, and classical works in great abundance, and we know that the respectable and wealthy burghers of Augsburg and Strassburg were proud to fill their shelves with these portly volumes. But then German aldermen had wives and daughters and sons, and what were they to read during the long winter evenings?... There was room therefore at that time for a work like the 'Ship of Fools.' It was the first printed book that treated of contemporary events and living persons, instead of old German battles and French knights.

"People are always fond of reading the history of their own times. If the good qualities of the age are brought out, they think of themselves or their friends; if the dark features of their contemporaries are exhibited, they think of their neighbors and enemies. The 'Ship of Fools' is the sort of satire which ordinary people would read, and read with pleasure. They might feel a slight twinge now and then, but they would put down the book at the end, and thank God that they were not like other men. There is a chapter on Misers,--and who would not gladly give a penny to a beggar? There is a chapter on Gluttony,--and who was ever more than a little exhilarated after dinner? There is a chapter on Church-goers,--and who ever went to church for respectability's sake, or to show off a gaudy dress, or a fine dog, or a new hawk? There is a chapter on Dancing,--and who ever danced except for the sake of exercise?... We sometimes wish that Brandt's satire had been a little more searching, and that, instead of his many allusions to classical fools, ... he had given us a little more of the scandalous gossip of his own time. But he was too good a man to do this, and his contemporaries no doubt were grateful to him for his forbearance."