Georg Brandes

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Title:     Georg Brandes
Author: Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen [More Titles by Boyesen]

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 _élite 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 æsthetical 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 Æsthetics 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 æsthetical subjects ("Æsthetic Studies," 1868, "Criticisms and Portraits," 1870, and "French Æsthetics 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 Emigrés" 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 soupçon of partisanship. His treatment of Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël, Oberman, Madame de Krüdener, 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 "Génie 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" (Hovedströmningerne i det Nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur). The German translation is entitled Hauptströmungen 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 Tegnér (1878), Sören 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 Björnstjerne Björnson, 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 Björnstjerne Björnson. 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 Björnson, 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 Tourguéneff 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, Tourguéneff, and Tolstoï; of each of whom he gives, as it appears to me, a better account than M. de Vogüé in his book "Le Roman Russe," which gave him a seat among the Forty Immortals.

The significance of Dr. Brandes's literary activity, which has now extended over a quarter of a century, can hardly be estimated from our side of the Atlantic. The Danish horizon was, twenty years ago, hedged in on all sides by a patriotic prejudice which allowed few foreign ideas to enter. As previously stated, the people had, before the two Sleswick-Holstein wars, been in lively communication with Germany, and the intellectual currents of the Fatherland had found their way up to the Belts, and had pulsated there, though with some loss of vigor. But the disastrous defeat in the last war aroused such hostility to Germany that the intellectual intercourse almost ceased. German ideas became scarcely less obnoxious than German bayonets. Spiritual stagnation was the result. For no nation can with impunity cut itself off from the great life of the world. New connections might, perhaps, have been formed with France or England; but the obstacles in the way of such connections appeared too great to be readily overcome. Racial differences and consequent alienism in habits of thought made a rapprochement seem hopeless. It seemed, for awhile, as if the war had cut down the intellectual territory of the Danes even more than it had curtailed their material area. They cultivated their little domestic virtues, talked enthusiastic nonsense on festive occasions, indulged in vain hopes of recovering their lost provinces, but rarely allowed their political reverses to interfere with their amusements. They let the world roar on past their gates, without troubling themselves much as to what interested or agitated it. A feeble, moonshiny late-romanticism was predominant in their literature; and in art, philosophy, and politics that sluggish conservatism which betokens a low vitality, incident upon intellectual isolation.

What was needed at such a time was a man who could re-attach the broken connection--a mediator and interpreter of foreign thought in such a form as to appeal to the Danish temperament and be capable of assimilation by the Danish intellect. Such a man was Georg Brandes. He undertook to put his people en rapport with the nineteenth century, to open new avenues for the influx of modern thought, to take the place of those which had been closed. We have seen that he interpreted to his countrymen the significance of the literary and social movements both in England and in France. But a self-satisfied and virtuous little nation which regards its remoteness from the great world as a matter of congratulation is not apt to receive with favor such a champion of alien ideas. The more the Danes became absorbed in their national hallucinations, the more provincial, nay parochial, they became in their interests, the less did they feel the need of any intellectual stimulus from abroad; and when Dr. Brandes introduced them to modern realism, agnosticism, and positivism they thanked God that none of these dreadful isms were indigenous with them; and were disposed to take Dr. Brandes to task for disturbing their idyllic, orthodox peace by the promulgation of such dangerous heresies. When the time came to fill the professorship for which he was a candidate, he was passed by, and a safer but inferior man was appointed. A formal crusade was opened against him, and he was made the object of savage and bitter attacks. I am not positive, but am disposed to believe, that it was this crusade, not against his opinions only, but against the man himself, which drove Dr. Brandes from Copenhagen, and induced him, in October, 1877, to settle in Berlin. Here he continued his literary activity with unabated zeal, became a valued contributor to the most authoritative German periodicals, and gained a conspicuous position among German men of letters. But while he was sojourning abroad, the seed of ideas which he had left at home began to sprout, and in 1882 his friends in Copenhagen felt themselves strong enough to brave the antagonism which his æsthetical and religious heresies had aroused. At their invitation he returned to Denmark, having been guaranteed an income of four thousand crowns ($1,000) for ten years, with the single stipulation that he should deliver an annual course of public lectures in Copenhagen. Since then his reputation has spread rapidly throughout the civilized world; his books have been translated into many languages, and he would have won his way to a recognition, as the foremost of contemporary critics, if he had not in his later publications discredited himself by his open sympathy with anarchism.

In order to substantiate this it is only necessary to call attention to the fifth volume of his lectures entitled "Young Germany" (Det unge Tydskland, 1890), which betrays extraordinary intellectual acumen but also a singular confusion of moral values. All revolt is lauded, all conformity derided. The former is noble, daring, Titanic; the latter is pusillanimous and weak. Conjugal irregularities are treated not with tolerance but with obvious approval. Those authors who dared be a law unto themselves are, by implication at least, praised for flinging down their gauntlets to the dull, moral Philistines who have shackled themselves with their own stupid traditions. That is the tone of Brandes's comment upon such relations as that of Immermann to Eliza von Lützow.

But nowhere has he unmasked so Mephistophelian a countenance as in his essays on Luther and on an obscure German iconoclast named Friedrich Nietschke (Essays: Fremmede Personligheder, pp. 151-244). It is difficult to understand how a man of well-balanced brain and a logical equipment second to none, can take au sérieux a mere philosophical savage who dances a war-dance amid what he conceives to be the ruins of civilization, swings a reckless tomahawk and knocks down everybody and everything that comes in his way. There must lie a long history of disappointment and bitterness behind that endorsement of anarchy pure and simple. And it is the sadder to contemplate because it casts a sinister light upon Dr. Brandes's earlier activity and compels many an admirer of his literary art to revise his previous opinion of him. Can a man ever have been a sound thinker who at fifty practically hoists the standard of anarchy? A ship is scarcely to be trusted that flies such compromising colors.

That all development, in order to be rational, must have its roots in the past--must be in the nature of a slow organic growth--is certainly a fundamental proposition of the Spencerian sociology. It is the more to be wondered at that an evolutionist like Dr. Brandes, in his impatience at the tardiness of social progress, should lose his philosophic temper and make common cause with a crack-brained visionary. The kind of explosive radicalism which Nietschke betrays in his cynical questions and explanations is no evidence of profundity or sagacity, but is the equivalent of the dynamiter's activity, transferred to the world of thought. His pretended re-investigation of the foundations of the moral sentiments reminds one of the mud geysers of the Yellowstone, which break out periodically and envelop everything within reach in an indeterminate shower of mud. To me there is more of vanity than of philosophic acumen in his onslaught on well-nigh all human institutions. He would, like Ibsen, no doubt,

"Place 'neath the ark the torpedo most cheerfully;"

but torpedoes of his making would scarcely do the ark much harm. They have not the explosive power of Ibsen's. There are in every age men who, unable to achieve the fame of Dinocrates, who built the temple of the Ephesian Diana, aspire to that of Herostratos, who destroyed it. To admire these men is as compromising as to be admired by them.

In the essay on "Martin Luther on Celibacy and Marriage" Dr. Brandes derides with a satyr-like leer all traditional ideas of chastity, conjugal fidelity, and marital honor.

Though he pretends to fight behind Luther's shield the deftest thrusts are not the reformer's, but the essayist's own. Fundamentally, I fancy, this is an outbreak of that artistic paganism which is so prevalent among the so-called "advanced" Hebrews. The idea that obedience to law is degrading; that conformity to traditional morals is soul-crippling and unworthy of a free spirit; that only by giving sway to passion will the individual attain that joy which is his right, and that self-development which should be his highest aim, has found one of its ablest and most dangerous advocates in Georg Brandes.

[The end]
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's essay: Georg Brandes

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