Heiberg. Andersen.

Hertz

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models, and particularly of Kotzebue. Foersom's admirable, and still classic, translation of Shakespeare, began to be printed in 1819, and prepared the way for better things. Then, in the fulness of time, appeared Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860), a man not merely of lively and exquisite fancy, but equipped, as perhaps no other Dane was then equipped, with the culture of Europe. In 1825 Heiberg brought to Copenhagen from Paris the form of the vaudeville, but clothed it with robes of delightful wit and fancy, combining an ironical observation of local manners with a delicate sense of poetry. It would be difficult to exaggerate what Heiberg did, as poet, playwright, journalist, and critic, to extend and modernise Danish taste, lifting it to a level with its neighbours, while preserving its essential independence.

The poets who immediately followed Oehlenschläger were somewhat eclipsed by the splendour and fulness of his output. But the lamp of Aladdin flickered and declined some time before the poet's bodily powers decayed, and there was found room for a new generation to assert itself. Of these there stand out five who deserve mention among the most eminent writers of the century; they are, in the order of their birth, Ludvig Adolph Bödtcher (1793-1874), Christian Winther (1796–1876), Henrik Hertz (1798–1870), Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), and Frederik Paludan-Müller (1809-76). These are the poets who representat its height the poetical genius of Denmark in the central years of the nineteenth century. Bödtcher and Winther were lyrists, Andersen the worldfamous fabulist, while Hertz and Paludan-Müller excelled in almost all branches of the art of poetry. It was Hertz who put his stamp on the romantic drama of the country, and he has the distinction of having influenced Ibsen more directly than any other writer. Paludan-Müller, doubtless the most accomplished poetical artist that Denmark has produced, summed up the tradition of his day, very much as Tennyson was doing in England and Victor Hugo in France. In 1870 all these five poets were still alive, and at the height of their influence, though they had almost ceased to write.

In prose there should first be mentioned the great philologist Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832), who insisted, more emphatically than any man before him, on the relationship between the language and manners of the ancient Scandinavian races and those of their living successors. He was followed, in his admirable work, by Petersen and Madvig. A glory of Danish science was Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851), the inventor of electro-magnetism, and an excellent author. But perhaps the most important prose-writer of this period was the philosopher Sören Aaby Kierkegaard (1813-55), whose value was scarcely recognised in his own day, as he threaded the streets of Copenhagen in meditation, but who has slowly risen, since his death, to be one of the principal stars in the Danish firmament. His chief contribution to philosophy bears the title Either Or. With these

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Beginnings of Norwegian national literature

exceptions, however, the glories of Danish literature during this period were mainly poetical. Here Denmark could compete on equal terms with any literature in Europe. But the revival of her prose, in which the personal genius of Georg Brandes has had a large share, belongs to the generation after 1870.

The intellectual condition of Norway, for a long time after the separation, was far less satisfactory than that of Denmark. Hitherto the writings of Norwegians had, in consequence of the identity of the language, been merged in Danish literature; and, although a large number of the leading writers of the eighteenth century, such as Holberg, Tullin, Fasting, Wessel, and Jonas Rein, had been Norwegians by birth, they no more formed a Norwegian literature than Swift and Berkeley formed an Irish literature. After 1814, the authors of Norway continued for some years to follow exactly in the steps of their Danish brethren, but with a great poverty of invention and under humiliating conditions. The immediate result of the separation was to impoverish all forms of intellectual life in Norway; and even the boasted expansion of the University of Christiania, which had been founded in 1811, did little at first to enrich the State. The jealous spirit in which the Norwegian politicians protected the vindicated independence of their country was in itself highly unfavourable to any international movement in the directions of literature, art, and science; while Norwegians were indignantly excluded from all participation in the intellectual successes of Denmark.

The official histories of Norwegian literature present to us the names of three patriotic poets who rose into local eminence at the moment of the separation. These are Konrad Nicolai Schwach (1793-1860), Henrik Anker Bjerregaard (1792-1842), and Mauritz Christopher Hansen (1794-1842). It is impossible for a foreign critic to regard these writers of political songs and occasional festival pieces with the indulgence given them in Norway, where, indeed, though they are still honoured as ancestors they are no longer read for pleasure. To compare these poets with their immediate Danish contemporaries is to throw a cruel light on the poverty of Norway. But there were two children in the nursery at the beginning of Norwegian independence who were destined to win for themselves a permanent position. Henrik Wergeland (1808-45) was the champion of Norwegian independence and the inspired darling of the people. By the critics of Copenhagen he was uniformly treated with neglect and ridicule, and he has, even to this day, received no cordial consideration from Danish writers. Treated in Norway as if he were King David and Victor Hugo rolled into one, and in Denmark as a raw poetaster, Wergeland exemplifies the difference of taste which at that time divided the countries. Without refinement, ignorant of all aesthetic art, Wergeland could but scandalise the delicate Danish critics; filled to the lips with a rough kind of lyric fire, pouring forth his odes, epics,

pantomimes, and hymns, all to the glory of Norway, he could but gratify a national susceptibility. Those who now judge his work with impartiality may see beneath his extravagance of form and turbidity of phrase a genuine poetical passion.

Under the infliction of so much noisy verse, Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807-73) long preserved an angry silence. But in 1834 he broke out with Norway's Twilight, a polemical poem in sonnets, which provoked a huge sensation. In the course of this diatribe, the young satirist exposed all the faults which disgraced the weltering confusion of Norwegian ideas, and in particular the chaotic literary taste of his fellow-citizens. The national vanity and the emphatic redundancy of the poets was pitilessly scourged in these brilliant sonnets, from the publication of which the literary history of Norway really takes its starting-point. Welhaven quitted satire, and published many volumes of original poetry, full of elegance and charm, but in Norway's Twilight he had performed his life's work. He was accompanied by Andreas Munch (1811-84), whom it was long the pride of the Norwegians to pit against Tennyson, Geibel, and Paludan-Müller. had something in common with each of these great writers, but it was reduced into timid and commonplace terms; his success was even less permanent than that of Wergeland and Welhaven. This school of Norwegian writers rose to its zenith about the year 1845, after which there was a gentle decline until the opposition set in of the group to which Ibsen and Björnson belonged.

one.

He

As in Denmark, so in Norway, the period was pre-eminently a poetical But there grew up a sense of the value of the ancient monuments of tradition and legend, and this took literary form in the folk-lore of Peter Christian Asbjörnsen (1812–85) and Jörgen Moe (1813–82), whose popular stories, written in collaboration, began to appear in 1841; these were continued and expanded for thirty years, forming at last a monument of national Norwegian prose, and a well into which future writers have dipped the buckets of their imagination. The best prose work done by Norwegians in these years was of an antiquarian character. Much is forgotten; but the philology of Ivar Aasen (1813-96), the popular songs collected by Magnus Brostrup Landstad (1802-80), the collection of dialects by Sophus Bugge (born 1833), the researches into Norwegian history of Rudolf Keyser (1803-64), and Peter Andreas Munch (1810-63) deserve remembrance.

From a European point of view, however, the interest in Norwegian literature begins with the coming of Ibsen and Björnson, the only authors whom Norway has contributed to the class which enjoys a universal publicity. Neither of these illustrious writers properly belongs to the period of which we are here recording the productions. Ibsen had passed through a long apprenticeship to Danish forms, and particularly to the romantic tragedies of Hertz. His full originality

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The youth of Ibsen and Björnson

was only asserted towards the closing years of this epoch. Björnson, whose Arne dates back to 1858, had, indeed, already enriched the literature of his country by a number of pathetic and romantic short stories of peasant life, far exceeding in beauty and skill anything performed in Norwegian prose before. But the Björnson we have known since, in the larger flights of his genius, was still unrecognised and hardly guessed at. He leaned slightly towards a movement which Ibsen always repudiated, the maalstræv or effort after the formation of a national language. Of this movement, the peasant poet, Aasmund Vinje (1818-70) was the protagonist, but he received little definite encouragement at the time, although at a later date the maal or patois was strenuously cultivated. Nor were the supremacy of Danish taste and the irksome provinciality of intellectual life in Norway successfully overcome until a date subsequent to that with which we here close.

In a general survey, we are struck by the difference between the classical development of a literature long nourished on tradition and cultivated upon conservative lines, and the rough emergence of one forced by political conditions to depend upon its own resources. Although these two literatures were composed in identically the same language, their differences and discords are far more noticeable than their similarity. There is a certain parallel in the relations between the literatures of Great Britain and the United States between the Revolution and 1800. The imitativeness and crudity of the early Norwegian writers bear a close resemblance to the jejune qualities of what Americans call the Colonial Period. It took Norway half a century of liberty to free herself from the servitude of style.

CHAPTER XXV

ROME AND THE VATICAN COUNCIL

(1846-1870)

ON June 17, 1846, Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, was proclaimed Pope under the name of Pius IX. The election, as generally happens, was the result of a compromise; the "Gregorians' would have preferred the late Secretary of State, Lambruschini; the reformers, Micara or Gizzi. Mastai was understood to have Liberal leanings, and to have been out of sympathy with his predecessor's policy. But his Liberalism, in no sense religious or theological, was matter of temperament rather than of principle, and dictated largely by circumstances. The system of repression, inaugurated under Pius VII by Pacca, and adopted unreservedly by the last three Popes, had broken down. Metternich himself had remonstrated against the medieval administration of Gregory XVI, which discredited absolutism; and, whatever his personal views or feelings, the new Pope could not but make efforts in the direction of reform. That his changes brought upon him the illwill of the Legitimist Governments was the result less of his Liberalism, which was but slight, than of the unreality of the European situation and, in particular, of the contradiction involved in the notion of a Pope-King.

The character of Pius IX has been variously estimated. It passed through more than one phase; and, while retaining certain leading qualities throughout, it was wanting in consistency. The abrupt change in his policy after 1848 gave the impression that Pius IX was a Liberal before, and a reactionary after, that date. It may be doubted whether he was ever by conviction either the one or the other. He had the obstinacy of a weak man; and the epileptic tendency which he never wholly lost was the key to his personality. His original aim was self-contradictory: the papal theocracy and the modern State were incompatibles; their union was the most impossible of dreams. A man

of sentiment rather than of fact, he moved in a world of signs and wonders: his credulity was abnormal, and his piety, sincere as it was, stood in no relation to the mind or facts of his time. He magnified his office; and, regarding opposition to his will as the unpardonable