Contemporary Danish Literature

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Title:     Contemporary Danish Literature
Author: Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen [More Titles by Boyesen]

The late Romantic authors of Denmark who lived on the traditions of Oehlenschläger's time and the æsthetical 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 personæ 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 naïve 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 Bergsöe (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 Bergsöe'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 Bergsöe'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 Bergsöe, 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 rôle of deus ex machina. Still more incredible is the part of benevolent Providence which he assigns to himself in "The Bride of Rörvig," 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 arrière pensée 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 rôle with which he here delights to impose upon you.

Altogether the best book which Bergsöe 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 Jöde (1845), Hjemlös (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 Jöde, 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 Tourguéneff'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 rôle. 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.[1] 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.

[1] Since this was written Drachmann has undergone a fresh transformation, and is said to have returned to the radical camp.

Völund 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.

[The end]
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's essay: Contemporary Danish Literature

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