Georg Brandes: A Pioneer of Comparative Literature and a Global Public Intellectual (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 210) 900452603X, 9789004526037

Citation preview

2024. Brill. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Copyright

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via AN: 3760480 ; Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Lasse Horne Kjldgaard.; Georg Brandes : A Pioneer of Comparative Literature and a Global Public Intellectual Account: uwmad

Georg Brandes

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft Series Editor Norbert Bachleitner, Universität Wien, Austria Founded by Alberto Martino Advisory Board Paul Ferstl, Universität Wien, Austria Rüdiger Görner, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Stephanie M. Hilger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA Achim Hölter, Universität Wien, Austria John A. McCarthy, Vanderbilt University Manfred Pfister, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Sven H. Rossel, Universität Wien, Austria Chenxi Tang, University of California at Berkeley, California, USA

volume 210

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/favl

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes A Pioneer of Comparative Literature and a Global Public Intellectual

Edited by

Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard

LEIDEN | BOSTON

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Cover illustration: Georg Brandes in his study in Copenhagen, 1890s. Photographer: Axel Hansen. The Royal Library, Denmark/Creative Commons (cc by-nc-nd). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bjerring-Hansen, Jens, editor. | Engberg-Pedersen, Anders, editor. | Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne, editor. Title: Georg Brandes : a pioneer of comparative literature and a global public intellectual / edited by Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2024] | Series: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 0929-6999 ; volume 210 | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023039652 (print) | LCCN 2023039653 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004526037 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004682191 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brandes, Georg, 1842-1927–Criticism and interpretation. | Critics–Denmark–Biography. | Intellectuals–Denmark–Biography. | Europe–Intellectual life–19th century. Classification: LCC PT8125 .B8 Z644 2024 (print) | LCC PT8125 .B8 (ebook) | DDC 801/.95092–dc23/eng/20231024 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039652 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039653

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0929-6999 isbn 978-90-04-52603-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-68219-1 (e-book) doi 10.1163/9789004682191 Copyright 2024 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Contents List of Figures vii Notes on Contributors

viii

Introduction “A Master of Productive Criticism” 1 Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard

Part 1 The Comparatist 1

The Fox and the Stork Georg Brandes and the Institutionalization of Comparative Literature Ben Hutchinson

2

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions Anders Engberg-Pedersen

3

Sexual Morality, Gender Equality, and Pioneering Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings 52 Sophie Wennerscheid

4

Georg Brandes and the Writing of Typological Literary History Lasse Horne Kjældgaard

5

“The Prose of Life” Brandes and the Concept of the Prosaic 97 Annegret Heitmann

6

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us” Cross-Cultural Literary Matchmaking in Georg Brandes’ Letters Julie K. Allen

33

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

81

113

19

vi

Contents

Part 2 The Public Intellectual 7

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet Georg Brandes and the Making of an Intellectual 141 Torben Jelsbak

8

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough Georg Brandes and Italy 167 Stefan Nygård

9

Brandes – Ibsen Rethinking the Modern Breakthrough Narve Fulsås

10

Between Deification and Rejection Georg Brandes as an Ambivalent Public Figure in the German-Speaking World 207 Monica Wenusch

11

The Domesticated European? Georg Brandes’ Impressions of Russia and his Russian Reception 228 Birgitte Beck Pristed

12

“The Universal Struggle for World Renown” Georg Brandes’ Global Literary Strategies 260 Jens Bjerring-Hansen

13

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism in his Later Writings 280 Søren Blak Hjortshøj

14

“The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe” Georg Brandes and the Young Generation in The World at War Martin Zerlang

15

Brandes after Nietzsche Aristocratic Radicalism vs. Human Rights 318 William Banks Index

189

335

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

301

Figures 4.1 4.2 11.1 and 11.2 11.3 and 11.4 11.5

Absolute frequency of “type” in Georg Brandes’ Main Currents 91 Topic-modeling of Main Currents 91 Cover and page opening of Zvezda’s coverage of Brandes’ first lecture in St. Petersburg 245 Brandes’ portrait under the header “Sem’ia” (Family). The photo caption reads “on the 25th anniversary of his professorship” 246 The lavishly decorated title page of Fuks’ 1902 edition of Brandes’ collected works 250

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Notes on Contributors Julie K. Allen is professor of Comparative Arts and Letters at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Her research focuses on northern European cultural history and questions of collective identity, cultural transmission, and migration. Georg Brandes was the subject of her first book, Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes & Asta Nielsen (2012). She revisited his troubled relationship with his wife Gerda in her recent article “Scenes from an Unhappy Marriage: ReReading the Relationship between Georg and Gerda Brandes,” in the anthology ‘Ja, jeg tæller min Troe hver Time.’ Studi nordici in memoria di Jørgen Stender Clausen (2022). William Banks received his PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin in 2013, and is currently a visiting scholar at Illinois State University. He is the editor and translator of Georg Brandes Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples. Collected Essays and Speeches (Wisconsin, 2020) and Georg Brandes and Harald Høffding, The Great Debate. Nietzsche, Culture and the Scandinavian Welfare Society (Wisconsin, 2023). Jens Bjerring-Hansen PhD, is associate professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Copenhagen and professor at Bergen University. Areas of research include Scandinavian literary history of the 18th and 19th century, the sociology of literature and cultural analytics. He is the author of Ludvig Holberg and the Book (in Danish 2015). Recent publications include the volumes Scandinavian Exceptionalism (2021, with T. Jelsbak and A. Mrozevicz) and Georg Brandes’ Main Currents. A Companion (2023, with L. Horne Kjældgaard). Jens BjerringHansen is the pi of the project Measuring Modernity. Literary and Social Change in Scandinavia 1870–1900 (2020–24). Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies, and Director of the Nordic Humanities Center. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a Dr. phil. in Neuere Deutsche Literatur from Humboldt Universität (cotutelle). His research centers on literature, aesthetics, war, and technology. He is the author of Empire of Chance. The Napoleonic

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Notes on Contributors

ix

Wars and the Disorder of Things (Harvard University Press, 2015), Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), and he has edited and co-edited numerous volumes, most recently War and Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Narve Fulsås is professor of modern history at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway. He has published on regional history, university history, historiography, cultural history, and book history. He was the editor of the annotated letter volumes in Henrik Ibsens skrifter (4 vols., 2005–2010). With Tore Rem he has written Ibsen, Scandinavian and the Making of a World Drama (2018) and edited Ibsen in Context (2021), both with Cambridge University Press. He is currently part of the research project “Made Abroad: Producing Norwegian World Literature in a Time of Rupture, 1900–1950.” Annegret Heitmann is retired professor of Nordic Philology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Areas of research include Scandinavian literature around 1900, intermediality, gender studies, autobiographies, aphorisms, and the reception of ballads in modern culture. Articles on e.g. Camilla Collett, Thomasine Gyllemborg, Henrik Ibsen, Jens Peter Jacobsen and Herman Bang. Selected book publications: Intermedialität im Durchbruch (2003), Landnahme. Anfangserzählungen der skandinavischen Literatur um 1900 (2010; with H. Eglinger); Am Rand. Zur Poetik des skandinavischen Aphorismus (2012; with K. Yngborn and A. Doll); “The Whole World.” Globalität und Weltbezug im Werk Karen Blixens/Isak Dinesens (2021). Søren Blak Hjortshøj is a postdoc at the Henrik Pontoppidan Center at the University of Southern Denmark. He is currently working on a book project, which he started while a postdoc at Université de Strasbourg from 2019–21, about the pietistic Protestant nation building role and roots of the Nordic welfare societies as read through Nordic literary history. He holds a PhD in History from Roskilde University, where he wrote his dissertation on the interrelated Jewish and cosmopolitan themes in Georg Brandes’ oeuvre, later published as the book: Son of Spinoza. Georg Brandes and Modern Jewish Cosmopolitanism (2021). Ben Hutchinson is an award-winning essayist and critic. Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent, UK, he is also a consultant editor at the Times Literary

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

x

Notes on Contributors

Supplement. His recent books include Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (oup, 2018), The Midlife Mind (Reaktion, 2020), and the forthcoming On Purpose (4th Estate, 2023). Torben Jelsbak is an Associate Professor of Nordic Literature at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. He researches in Danish and Scandinavian literatures in the interdisciplinary field between media and cultural history. Recent publications include Die skandinavische Moderne und Europa. Transmission – Exil – Soziologie (co-edited with Jens Bjerring-Hansen and Monica Wenusch, 2016), Dansk-tyske krige. Kulturliv og kulturkampe (co-edited with Anna Sandberg, 2020) and Scandinavian Exceptionalisms. Culture, Society, Discourse (co-edited with Jens BjerringHansen and Anna Estera Mrozewicz, 2021). Lasse Horne Kjældgaard is ceo of the Carlsberg Foundation and Professor of Danish Literature at University of Southern Denmark. He has authored several monographs on Danish literary and cultural history, including The Original Age of Anxiety: Essays on Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries (Brill, 2021), The Meaning of the Welfare State: When Literature Took the Floor – and Politicians Listened (in Danish, 2018) and The Soul after Death: The Modern Breakthrough of the Golden Age (in Danish, 2007). Stefan Nygård is a senior researcher at the Department of Philosophy, History and Art at the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. His previous work on the chapters’ theme of European North-South relations include the edited volumes Rethinking European Social Democracy and Socialism. The History of the Centre-Left in Northern and Southern Europe in the Late 20th Century (Routledge, 2022), The Politics of Debt and Europe’s Relations with the ‘South’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and Decentering European Intellectual Space (Brill, 2018). Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor in Russian Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a PhD from the Johannes-GutenbergUniversity of Mainz, Germany, awarded with distinction 2014. She is author of an illustrated monograph on contemporary Russian book design and print culture, The New Russian Book. A Graphic Cultural History (New Directions in

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

newgenprepdf

Notes on Contributors

xi

Book History, Palgrave, 2017). Her main research areas are print and media history with recent projects focusing on Cold War ‘book diplomacy’ and Soviet children’s books. Sophie Wennerscheid is Associate Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Copenhagen. Her main research interests include Scandinavian literature of the 19th century, sexuality and gender studies, literature and the environment, and literary food studies. She possesses deep expertise in the work of Søren Kierkegaard and other Golden Age writers. In recent years, she has published extensively on science fiction, speculative fiction, and ecocritical fiction concerned with the future of humanity. Her latest book publication is Sex machina: Zur Zukunft des Begehrens (‘Sex Machine: On the Future of Desire’), 2019. Her current research project is on food and agriculture in Danish literature. Monica Wenusch holds a Dr. phil. in Scandinavian Studies, she is lecturer of Scandinavian Studies at Vienna University and has taught at the universities of Göttingen and Greifswald. Her research centers on 19th and 20th-century Scandinavian literature, transnational aspects of literature, exile literature, interrelations between literature and the other arts. She is the author of “ich bin eben dabei, mir Johannes V. Jensen zu entdecken” Die Rezeption von Johannes V. Jensen im deutschen Sprachraum(Praesens, 2016) and “Alles kommt von Deutschland” Johannes V. Jensen und die Einflüsse aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum (Praesens 2023) as well as articles and edited and co-edited volumes on Scandinavian and German-language literature. Martin Zerlang is a professor of literature and modern culture at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively on the history of Danish literature and on Latin American literature. He has published books on urban culture, among these Zoom København (2017) and books on the bicycle (2018), the car (2021), and the train (2023) in Danish culture. He has edited and co-edited collections of essays on Representing London and on Fun City and articles on subjects such as Entertainment, Orientalism, World Expositions. Most recent publication: Writing the City Square: On the History and the Histories of City Squares (2023).

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

“A Master of Productive Criticism” Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Lasse Horne Kjældgaard “Criticism is the relentless pursuit of truth.1 It may not perform great feats, but it is of use. It leads the human spirit on its way; it plants fences and torches on the road. It clears and breaks new paths. For it is criticism that moves mountains, those of all authority, those of all prejudice, all the mountains of dead tradition.”2 By way of this rewording of the Gospel, the 27-year-old Georg Brandes lauded the French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve on his death in 1869, while also confessing his own indomitable belief in the power of criticism. With a prodigious output in the fields of literary, cultural, and political criticism, spanning over seven decades of energetic writing and lecturing, Brandes put this creed into practice. Not only as a destructive force, but also as a constructive one, criticism was his vocation. At the time of his death, in 1927, Brandes was hailed by the German author Thomas Mann as a “master of productive criticism.”3 Brandes had, by then, been internally nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 13 times without receiving it.4 Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was born in 1842 in Copenhagen – in the heyday of the so-called “golden age” of Danish literature and culture. Despite the dire economic conditions of the country, faith in – and national support for – art, science, and philosophy were strong. Eminent authors such as Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard achieved excellence in abundance during this decade, together with outstanding scientists such as Rasmus Rask and Hans Christian Ørsted. Significantly, Brandes was a product of this environment, which he would later comment upon and analyze with a combination of sympathy and antipathy. Growing up in a bourgeois, Jewish, secular family with a long history in Denmark, Brandes was familiar with both insider and outsider perspectives on the prevalent culture of Golden-Age Copenhagen. 1 Many of the chapters of this anthology were delivered as lectures at the 2019 Copenhagenconference The Global and Digital Georg Brandes, which was sponsored by the Carlsberg Foundation. 2 Brandes, Kritiker og Portraiter, 432. 3 Mann, “En Mester i produktiv Kritik.” 4 Jørgensen, Nærved og næsten. Danske Nobelpristabere fra Brandes til Blixen – en documentation, 49.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_002 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

2

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

Some have speculated that this experience of hybridity was foundational to the methodology of comparative literature that he would later develop.5 Georg Brandes’ father, Herman Brandes, worked as an importer and wholesaler of clothing, but was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1861. From then on, the youngest brother, Ernst Brandes, a stockbroker and businessman, supported the family financially. The middle brother, Edvard Brandes, was a scholar of Oriental studies, had a stint as a theater critic and playwright, and eventually became an incredibly influential publicist and a politician. He cofounded the daily newspaper Politiken in 1884, as well as the political party Det Radikale Venstre (The Danish Social Liberal Party) in 1905, both of which are still extant. Georg Brandes, on the contrary, remained independent of all institutions for his entire professional life, while frequently receiving help in mundane matters from his two younger brothers. Though all of them were fiercely ambitious, they were also persistently supportive of each other. Georg Brandes started out as a law student at the University of Copenhagen but switched to the field of aesthetics and literature. “All my instincts compelled me towards literature,” he wrote in his autobiography.6 In 1862, he won a prize for a treatise on the idea of destiny in Greek tragedy. From very early on, his professors regarded him as the man of the future and the natural heir to the chair of aesthetics. As a student, Brandes was steeped in German idealist – especially Hegelian – aesthetics and its Danish derivatives, while increasingly turning to the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and other Left Hegelians. In the middle of the 1860s, these interests were supplemented by French literary studies with sociological and positivistic inclinations. In 1870, Brandes defended his dissertation on the French critic Hippolyte Taine, French Aesthetics in Our Time (Den franske Æsthetik i vore Dage). On encountering Taine, Brandes would later write in his autobiography: “Through him I found my innermost being, which my Danish-German university training had cloaked.”7 In addition, he was influenced by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose work The Subjection of Women he translated into Danish in the year of its original publication, 1869. Mill’s utilitarianism and social liberalism took Brandes further away from the tenets of German idealism that had been his intellectual point of departure. Upon completing his doctoral studies, Georg Brandes embarked on a grand European tour lasting 15 months, visiting and befriending prominent authors and academics in France, England, Switzerland, and Italy. The journey afforded 5 Gibbons, “Georg Brandes. The Reluctant Jew”; Hjortshøj, Son of Spinoza. Georg Brandes and Modern Jewish Cosmopolitanism. 6 Brandes, Levned, vol. 1, 64. 7 Ibid., 201.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

3

him knowledge and inspiration for the lecture series that he launched at the University of Copenhagen upon his homecoming, in November 1871. A young generation of Scandinavian authors soon rallied around Brandes’ call for a new kind of worldly, debate-provoking literature. In Danish history, these lectures – Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature – are often regarded as a watershed moment, marking the emergence of a new epoch: the so-called “Modern Breakthrough.” “The whole literary era is fused with his work of criticism,” Gunnar Ahlstrøm has remarked.8 Brandes’ provocative comments on the stagnant condition of Danish literature and culture also won him numerous enemies. Instead of qualifying Brandes for a professorship, the lectures derailed his academic career in Denmark. In 1872, he applied for the professorship in aesthetics and was firmly rejected by the faculty committee of the University of Copenhagen. After that, Brandes was never employed by any university on a full-time basis or even on ordinary terms, although he earned the title of “extraordinary professor” at the University of Copenhagen in 1902. Instead, he made a living from his pen and from public lecturing. In 1877, seeking larger audiences and literary markets, he left Denmark for Germany and stayed there for six years in voluntary exile, promoting Scandinavian literature and introducing new ideas and authors to Scandinavia. From 1883 he was based in Copenhagen again but continued to travel extensively, constantly expanding his circuits and establishing networks. As a public intellectual, Brandes became an institution in his own right, not only in his home country of Denmark, but also on a European and, indeed, global scale. As a citizen of an empire that had been reduced to a small nation, Brandes was able to move and mediate between the literary and intellectual cultures of the great European powers from a position many regarded as insignificant or even “neutral.” The Austrian cultural historian Egon Friedell dubbed Brandes “the general agent of European literature.”9 In a similar vein, Friedrich Nietzsche called him “such a good European and missionary of culture” in a personal letter conveying his gratitude.10 Brandes authored the first major studies of both Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and he was instrumental in making the latter known. “Before Brandes drew attention to him, Nietzsche was almost completely disregarded in his homeland, read by few, and almost ignored by German critics,” Bertil Nolin has observed.11 In this respect, too, 8 9 10 11

Ahlström, Georg Brandes’ Hovedstrømninger. En ideologisk undersökning, 9. Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 5 [1931], projektgutenberg.de. Nietzsche, Briefe 1861–1889, 339. Nolin, Den gode europén. Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893 med speciell hänsyn till hans förhållande till tysk, engelsk, slavisk och fransk litteratur, 150. Brandes’ 1888

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

4

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

Brandes played a significant role in the process that Karl Löwith has called “the revolution in nineteenth century thought” from Hegel to Nietzsche – a revolution that Brandes not only witnessed but also helped to bring about.12 1

Brandes and Comparative Literature

The value of Brandes’ literary stock has fluctuated significantly over the years. A towering figure during his lifetime, he has been hailed as one of the forefathers of the field of comparative literature, even simply “le père du comparatisme.”13 When Brandes died in 1927, Thomas Mann famously referred to Main Currents as “the bible of young, intellectual Europe 30 years ago.”14 But Brandes’ passing also occasioned a rather different assessment of the work’s merits. Writing Brandes’ obituary, the critic Fernand Baldensperger stated that Brandes’ masterpiece was already outdated “because of its superficiality and because of the too fragile structure of its edifice” (Baldensperger 1927: 370). And indeed, the tremendous influence he wielded during his lifetime quickly dissipated after his death. In 1955 René Wellek offered a blunt summary of Brandes’ contribution to the field. While Wellek acknowledged Brandes’ “power of marshaling currents and movements,” he nevertheless concluded that the Danish critic was merely “a middleman without originality and substance” (Wellek 1955: 368–9, 357). Wellek’s assessment reflects the continued decline of the significance of Brandes’ work in literary studies. Compared with his high standing and near ubiquitous presence during his lifetime, Brandes’ influence has been negligible in the second half of the twentieth century. The first decades of the twenty-first century, however, have seen a resurgence of interest in his work. The rise of “World Literature” has given a new impetus to reflections on comparativity, and the attempts to trace its theoretical prehistory often revisit Brandes’ work, in particular his essay on world literature.15 What is the explanation for these contrasting opinions and shifting evaluations? Judging by contemporary scholarly standards, Brandes certainly

12 13 14 15

lectures on Nietzsche have recently been published. Brandes, Forelæsninger om Friedrich Nietzsche (1888), Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche (1888). Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought. Madsen, “World Literature and World Thoughts,” 65. Mann, “En Mester i produktiv Kritik.” See, e.g., Damrosch, Melas, and Buthelezi (eds), The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009; D’haen, Domínguez, and Rosendahl Thomsen (eds), World Literature: A Reader.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

5

muddied the waters. Operating in a grey zone between scholarship, popular dissemination, and political activism, he made himself an easy target for critics who found him unscholarly, amateurish, and opinionated even as they acknowledged the energy of his writing and his ability to summarize an oeuvre or a whole literary period with a striking turn of phrase. His critics do have point. Not only is his literary historiography marked by omissions, heavyhanded categorizations, and superficial scholarship; not only is it colored by personal and idiosyncratic opinions and shot through with errors large and small – but Brandes even copied numerous passages from other historiographic sources without attribution. If one critic could claim with some justification that Brandes’ concept of Romanticism was “as if it had been shot out of a pistol,” another might with equal justification accuse him of plagiarism.16 For these reasons it is all too easy to dismiss his work as merely that of a superficial middleman with too much to say and too little time to say it. Such an evaluation, however, would miss the deeper significance of Brandes’ work. Not only did he have an instrumental role in shaping the emerging field of comparative literature; his methods, his topics, and his commitment to social change are of surprising relevance and in many respects prefigure later developments within literary studies. From the vantage point of the present, Brandes comes into view as a curiously contemporary figure. In 1871, when Brandes launched his career with the lecture series Main Currents in European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, the field of comparative literature was still in its infancy. As an idea, comparative literature is usually traced back to the first half of the nineteenth century, to figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Madame de Staël, and Goethe, but from the 1870s onward the idea of comparativism began to acquire the solidity and security of institutions. In 1877 Hugo Meltzl founded the field’s first journal in Hungary, the Comparative Literary Journal, soon to be renamed Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum. Hutcheson Macauley Possnett published the book Comparative Literature in 1886, and in 1887 Max Koch founded the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte in Germany. In the US, Cornell University offered a course on “General and Comparative Literature” in 1871, just as Brandes was standing at the lectern in Copenhagen comparing the major works of European literature. And in 1890, the first Department of Comparative Literature was founded in America at Harvard University – the same year, incidentally, in which the sixth and final volume of Main Currents was published.

16

Lublinski, “Albert Geiger, Georg Brandes und ich,” 873.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

6

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

Brandes’ lecture series thus coincided with an important “comparative moment” in the history of literary criticism. But as Ben Hutchinson makes clear in Chapter 1 of this book, on Brandes’ role in the institutionalization of comparative literature, Main Currents not only coincided with this foundational moment for courses, journals, and departments of comparative literature; it was instrumental in shaping the general methodology of the field. Until then, literary criticism had been dominated by strong national biases paired with biographical and philological-genetic approaches. Brandes had little patience with the micrology of philologists sifting through drafts and editions to trace the internal development of a literary work’s genesis; nor was he satisfied with the limits set for literary analysis by the restrictions imposed by linguistic difference and political borders.17 Still wedded to a historical (Hegelian) template that gives Brandes’ comparativism its diachronic backbone, Main Currents abandons national divisions and philological approaches for a much more ambitious project. In 1871, Brandes thinks big in every way. The projected six large tomes are to encompass a historiographic vision of equal scope: to trace the battle of big ideas in the first half of the nineteenth century as they travel across national borders and fight it out on the main stage of Europe. Pitting freedom against authority, enlightenment against ignorance, and revolution against reactionary conservatism, Brandes proposes a large-scale literary history of the ideas, sensibilities, and social energies flowing across the Continent. This expansion in scale marks a significant shift of method within literary studies, but it also spells out a new understanding of the role of literature. Brandes scoffs at the trivial minutiae of the national philologists because, for him, literature partakes in a broader debate about the pressing social questions of its time. His famous statement that the only vital literature is “one that provokes debate”18 pertains both to the local social and political issues in a given national culture as well as to their larger transnational development. The task of the scholar, Brandes claims, can no longer be to trace the internal genesis of a given literary text and to treat literature as a quasi-fetish within an autonomous aesthetic sphere; instead it must be to place literary works in their social and international context and to trace through literature and by way of a new comparative method the development, vicissitudes, high and low points, and ultimate fate of major political and social ideas.

17 18

See, for example, his ridiculing of Professor Michael Bernays, a Goethe expert who, according to Brandes, “had cleansed Goethe’s Werther of original printing errors as well as of those that came later.” See Brandes, Levned, vol. 2, 136. Brandes, “The 1872-introduction,” 700.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

7

With Main Currents Brandes quickly established himself as an authority in the emerging field of comparative literature. In spite of its numerous shortcomings, his methodological experiment was a wager that paid significant dividends. From a contemporary point of view, however, it is other aspects of his work that appear either surprisingly original or immediately pertinent to the main questions that drive literary studies today. As Anders Engberg-Pedersen argues in Chapter 2, Brandes may be seen not merely as one of the founders of comparative literature, but as a forgotten ancestor of the theory and history of emotions. For Brandes’ central concept – the current – is even more capacious than one might initially think. It denotes big ideas, yes, but also, and equally, the whole emotional spectrum of feelings, moods, and sensibilities. As Brandes summarizes his project, his overarching goal is to present in outline “a psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century.”19 Brandes turns to literature rather than to political treatises, pamphlets, or other non-fictional documents precisely because literature constitutes an archive of the ideas and emotions of a given historical period. Comparing literary works across national borders allows him to sketch out a crucial historical phenomenon that usually evades the grasp of critical analysis – that is, the elusive realm of shared felt experience. When Raymond Williams in the middle of the twentieth century began developing his key concept of “structures of feeling,” he offered a more reflexive discussion and precise analysis of a phenomenon that Brandes had already sought to establish as an object of historical inquiry. The “emotional turn” and the widespread interest in “affect theory” in twenty-first-century literary and cultural studies are in some ways a revival of earlier attempts to grapple with these elusive but powerful phenomena. Contemporary scholars may therefore find useful theoretical and analytical models by taking up and reassessing Brandes’ old, but novel, concept of the “current.” There are other ways in which Brandes addresses contemporary concerns. Early in his career he played an important part in the women’s liberation movement. As part of his larger emancipation project and quest to free love from the fetters of restrictive religious and conservative social norms, Brandes was concerned with the status of women. As Sophie Wennerscheid explains in Chapter 3, however, Brandes’ assessment of women and his own role in women’s emancipation is complex and ambivalent. While boasting to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson that he had single-handedly brought the women’s movement to Scandinavia, he ignored the Scandinavian women whose work preceded his own translation of Mill’s The Subjection of Women. This contradictory stance 19

Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 570.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

8

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

can also be found in Main Currents, where a deep fascination with women who break the shackles of restrictive societal norms to live a life of passion and free love is counterbalanced by his frequent disparagement of the literary talent possessed by the female writers he discusses. In this way, Brandes emerges as a simultaneously engaged and myopic promoter of women’s culture and women’s rights across Europe. Some of Brandes’ thematic interests and methodological innovations point ahead to later developments in literary studies, but Main Currents also displays dead ends, revealing roads not taken, all the while suggesting new potentials for contemporary literary historiography. One way in which the larger sweep of Brandes’ comparative method is translated into a practical, analytical tool is through “the type.” Brandes used types – Chateaubriand’s René, Goethe’s Werther, Constant’s Adolphe – to condense broader and often variegated cultural tendencies into a singular, easily graspable form. As Lasse Horne Kjældgaard shows in Chapter 4, the type is a key organizing principle in the first volumes of Main Currents: a handy tool that allowed Brandes to pivot between the specificity of the individual text and the general culture of the period that he sought to characterize. While this form of typological literary history governs the early volumes of Main Currents, however, Brandes eventually abandoned it, and in later editions he even went back and revised his texts to diminish the importance of the type. What for Brandes became a dead end, however, might yet be an opportunity for alternative forms of literary historiography. A curious unit situated between the singularity of the individual character or author and the collectivity of groups, generations, or periods, the type features prominently in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and allows for both synchronic and diachronic comparisons. Typology may yet be a suggestive alternative to the traditional modes of writing literary history today. If Main Currents shows Brandes walking halfway down the path of literary typology only to retrace his steps, it also draws the silhouette of a road not taken. Given Brandes’ disdain for what he deems the otherworldly “moonshine” of German Romanticism and his veneration of socially engaged literature, one would expect that prose as a genre and the prosaic as an aesthetic category would be central to his project. An enthusiastic reader of Hegel early in his life, Brandes knew well the link Hegel established between the prosaic and the disenchanted world of modernity. And yet, as Annegret Heitman shows in Chapter 5, prose and a prosaic consciousness never become key concepts for Brandes’ literary analyses in Main Currents, nor, even, in his reflections on the literature of the Modern Breakthrough. The prosaic pervades his work, but it is perhaps too closely associated with disenchantment and austerity for him, and is thus at odds with the revolutionary fervor of Brandes’ ideological quest;

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

9

it never becomes an organizing principle of comparison like “the type” or “the current.” As Heitman makes clear, this unrealized potential becomes visible in (theoretical) hindsight when seen through the lens of Franco Moretti’s recent study of the nineteenth century, The Bourgeois Between History and Literature – a study that takes prose as its main genre of textual analysis and the prosaic as a central aesthetic category. In many respects a twenty-first-century heir to Brandes’ Main Currents, Moretti’s work precisely explores the lines of inquiry that Brandes suggested but never pursued. As these few examples show, Brandes was not only highly influential for the methods and critical protocols of comparative literature in his time; his central work prefigures several subsequent developments and remains a source of inspiration for alternative models of literary historiography that invite further exploration. Such a recuperation and reassessment of Brandes should not pave over the obvious flaws of his enterprise. But such shortcomings are also a testament to its scope and originality, as well as to Brandes’ willingness to leave behind the comfort and security of national-philological criticism in order to build the experimental laboratory of comparative literature. Main Currents is a radical experiment, and even though he outlined all six volumes from the beginning, he would continually revise both the theoretical underpinnings and the basic methodology as he progressed. Reading Main Currents is to observe all the struggles of methodological invention; it is to see the potentials and difficulties of comparative literary historiography unfold before your eyes. Over and above the continued thematic and theoretical relevance of Brandes, it is the practice of methodological experimentation – with everything that entails – that remains his enduring legacy. Brandes’ comparativism goes beyond literature, however. When he first outlined his project from the lectern at the University of Copenhagen in 1871, the new “comparative literary analysis” was indeed presented as method for reading the major texts of the leading European authors, but it was more than that. It was an instrument of cultural politics. Brandes held the view that cultures wither and die if they become too insular and remain ignorant of ideas and sensibilities from abroad. His approach to reading literature was the manifestation of a broader comparative agenda that sought to bring cultures together. In Main Currents the frequent literary surveys were intended to familiarize the Danish – and later global – public with foreign literature and the main intellectual currents that dominated abroad. But Brandes also served as a cross-cultural matchmaker in other ways. Receiving an estimated quarter of a million letters during the last four decades of his life, Brandes kept up a remarkable epistolary correspondence in four languages. As Julie K. Allen explains in Chapter 6, this correspondence had a function similar to that of his literary historiography: to

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

10

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

bring writers and thinkers together in order to make the foreign familiar and to allow them to reap the fruits of their differences. Brandes’ epistolary efforts reveal his broader transcultural agenda and mark the transition from his scholarly role in the realm of aesthetics to his other main calling – that of a public intellectual. 2

The Public Intellectual

Over and again, as exemplified by the testimonies of Mann, Nietzsche, and Friedell above, Georg Brandes was referred to as the quintessential “European.” Today, when both the concept of “Europe” as a cultural identity and the role of the “intellectual” as a public figure are challenged by global and national developments within politics, media, and cultural consumption, his case is worth revisiting. In fin de siècle Europe, Brandes was both an agent and a beneficiary of what Akira Iriye has called “cultural internationalism,”20 at the peak of which, around 1900, the particular modern understanding of the intellectual emerged: a public figure navigating between literary production and public intervention, between criticism and activism. In the context of the Dreyfus Affair, the term had arisen as a French neologism, intellectuel, which in 1899 Brandes adopted into Danish in his engaged journalistic coverage of the drama for Scandinavian newspapers.21 Thus, he had granted himself, and the Danish language, a designation for a particular social and cultural role. Eventually it would stick to him, bearing both positive and negative connotations. Alongside this activist strand of intellectual engagement, Brandes was an intellectual in a broader sense that is less time- and space-specific, and which aligns well with the so-called “cultural” usage of the term, identified by Stefan Collini: denoting an individual who is thought to possess “some kind of cultural authority” and “who deploy[s] an acknowledged intellectual position or achievement in addressing a broader non-specialist public.”22 In the same year as his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair, 1899, but in a more mundane context, a foreword to the first of 18 volumes of his collected works, Brandes portrays his literary ambitions in a way that resonates well with Collini’s description. In his own opinion, Brandes was the “type of writer that is placed in the border 20 21 22

Iriye, Cultural Internationalism. See Stender Clausen, Georg Brandes og Dreyfusaffæren. Collini, Absent Minds, 47. Besides the “cultural” sense of the term in current usage, Collini identifies two other senses: one “sociological” and one “subjective.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

11

region between science and art,” thus distancing himself from academic writing solely based on reason – and accordingly omitting his 1870 dissertation on Taine’s literary theories from the collection – rather than the faculties fueling his own writing: instinct, personality, and, most importantly, as the only quality he was convinced he possessed, a “pure, clear, and transparent” language.23 The defining moment for Brandes as a public intellectual, both in the activist and the cultural sense, happened in 1871 with the succès de scandale of his first series of lectures on Main Currents. His characteristic combination of a comprehensive perspective with a lucid style and frequent negligence of basic academic manners and practices of citation gave him a bad reputation, as we have heard.24 The same can be said of the manifesto-like rhetoric and theatrical stage setting deployed by Brandes – including the framing of his literary history as a “grand drama” – which Torben Jelsbak analyzes in Chapter 7. Through his communicative and performative style, Brandes built a reputation as an engaging writer and public speaker. The 1871 lecture, however, reveals not only Brandes’ goal of reaching an audience beyond academia; it also shows his activist aspirations. His call for a literature that “provokes debate” was directed at contemporary authors, and soon after the mobilization of a new, socially engaged literary generation in Scandinavia was evident. Perhaps the clearest example of his intellectual activism, broadly addressing intellectual repression and conformity, was in the preamble to the lecture, in which he states his “belief in the right to free inquiry and in the eventual victory of free thought”:25 a remarkably militant move from a young scholar aspiring to tenure, which must have planted a seed of disbelief among the gatekeeping professors in the lecture room. This book adds fresh perspectives on the formative years before the events of November 1871 by exploring Brandes’ intellectual and cultural baggage. In the making of an intellectual, reading, of course, plays an important role, as testified by previous research, which has mapped Brandes’ early influences – Taine, Sainte-Beuve, and John Stuart Mill, among others.26 In Chapter 13 Søren Blak Hjortshøj touches upon the stimulus from Spinoza’s philosophy of (free) thinking, as mediated by the controversial Copenhagen philosopher Hans Brøchner, while other chapters expand this perspective by addressing more 23 24 25 26

Brandes, “Forord,” i, iiv. An annoyed German scholar called Brandes an “Agitator” and a “Plagiator.” See Puls, “Literaturgeschichte.” Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 698. See Rubow, Georg Brandes’ Briller; Ahlström, Georg Brandes’ Hovedstrømninger; Fenger, Georg Brandes et la France; and Nolin, Den gode europén.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

12

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

performative influences on Brandes’ process of radicalization, stemming from travel and conversation in Italy in the time of the liberal revolution (Torben Jelsbak in Chapter 7 and Stefan Nygård in Chapter 8). Not least, however, these and other contributions to the book illuminate the structural constraints that shaped the choices made and opportunities that arose during Brandes’ intellectual trajectory. Brandes expected and was actively looking for trouble with the early lectures of Main Currents. He thus anticipated and performed the role not of a future professor, but of an independent intellectual in opposition to society. It is therefore tempting to regard Brandes as a heroic outsider, an early vindication of the twentieth-century narrative, which frames many debates on the role and status of the intellectual. It implies that true intellectuals are cloistered from social and political interference, or, in other words, members of what Karl Mannheim called the “unaffiliated intelligentsia” (freischwebende Intelligenz).27 Such a perspective governs many commentaries on Brandes, but it is worth pointing to decisive social, cultural, and psychological factors that brought his praxis as an intellectual down to earth and back into society, and that make his case even more interesting in terms of how it reflects the making and make-up of a European intellectual field. Building on Pierre Bourdieu, Torben Jelsbak relates Brandes’ precarious situation to the “deprofessionalization” of intellectual careers in France, as well as in other Western European countries – a development that Bourdieu regarded as a social prerequisite for the emergence of the intellectual class at a time characterized by an abundance of educated young men. At the same time increasing scientific specialization took place within academia, which disqualified Brandes’ broad, sweeping, and interdisciplinary approach. Thus, Brandes going freelance – or entering the precariat, if you will – was not only a result of individual decisionmaking; nor was it wholly due to specific ideological conflicts, whereby his intellectual career perhaps becomes even more exemplary and relatable. Also relevant is Brandes’ Jewishness, as a cultural factor that shaped his position as an intellectual. As Søren Blak Hjortshøj argues, Brandes’ continuous and failed struggles to establish a real, secure bourgeois position in Danish society can be explained by the interconnections of Jewishness and cosmopolitanism in his oeuvre and, not least, the often prejudiced reactions to these interconnections.

27

In a similar vein, the German intellectual historian Julian Roberts has discussed Mannheim’s concept with regards to Walter Benjamin, whose intellectual biography (very) roughly parallels Brandes’: academic refusal, journalism, exile. See Roberts, Walter Benjamin, 23–48.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

13

A cosmopolitan in-betweenness can be seen to underpin Brandes’ comparatist ideology, formulated in 1871, with its principle of focusing on foreign cultures and bypassing the national one. Looking at the trajectory of his intellectual career and activities, from then on his Danish identity was gradually complemented with a Scandinavian, a European, and, finally, but debatably, a global one, as Jens Bjerring-Hansen argues in Chapter 12. The contributions in this book map these stages, while also pointing to important complications in mediating, translating, and working across borders and cultures. Some of these complications were specific to a historical situation marked by the ongoing wave of globalization, while others are more closely connected to the hybridity of transnational space. The Berlin years were decisive for the development of Brandes’ journalism, as well as for his strong position in German-speaking Europe. Brandes also learned a necessary lesson in social agility and pragmatism, as Monica Wenusch shows in Chapter 10 by highlighting his co-operation with the conservative editor of the Deutsche Rundschau, Julius Rodenberg. In the following years, Brandes’ voice was heard in European newspapers, auditoriums, and banquets across cultural and political spectrums. His Italian friend and motivator Giuseppe Saredo’s prediction that someone of Brandes’ prominence would easily find his place in Berlin proved correct.28 But things were more complicated for Brandes the public intellectual than they were for Brandes the mediator, whose international reputation became tied to his role of bringing Ibsen and Nietzsche into the public consciousness. By illuminating the center– periphery logic at play in the relationship between the contested understandings of universal ideas and the location of individual actors in the European cultural space, Stefan Nygård explains this discrepancy as a structural condition, which Brandes to some extent learned to live with and profit from. “He knew perfectly well that only the hegemonic countries could afford to universalise their local debates,” Nygård argues. Awareness of the asymmetries between unevenly positioned spaces and places in what Pascale Casanova has termed the “world republic of letters”29 allowed for Brandes to act as a cultural broker in the system of world literature. Increasingly, however, he would step up and address the asymmetries on behalf of peripheries and minorities. This can be seen in his literary criticism. In his essay on “World Literature” from 1899 Brandes expressed his principal, as well as personal, bitterness about the ease with which a minor author from a

28 29

Saredo to Brandes, 2 May 1876, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1. Casanova, La République mondiale.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

14

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

dominant region could achieve international recognition compared to a major one from a dominated region. A similar stance was evident in his political journalism of the early 1900s, as has recently been documented by William Banks. Here, by appealing to universal human rights, he sided with suppressed peoples in regional conflicts all over the world.30 In Chapter 15, Banks scrutinizes the increasing tensions between Brandes’ scholarly and activist pursuits due to this engagement: “How Brandes at one and the same time could be an aristocratic radical and, essentially, a human rights advocate, amounts indeed to the central enigma of the critic’s life and work.” At times, however, the navigation between centers and peripheries, advocating cultural internationalism, proved difficult for Brandes. For instance, his strategic positioning in the relationship with Ibsen and other Scandinavian writers in the 1870s and 1880s was not free of “bigoted Copenhagen-centeredness,” as Narve Fulsås shows in Chapter 9. Brandes was also caught on the wrong foot in Russia. As demonstrated by Birgitte Beck Pristed in Chapter 11, his travel memoirs Impressions of Russia (1888) to some extent reinforced an essentialist “Euro-Orientalist” perception of the “subaltern” Russia Empire that was at odds with Brandes’ intentions to overcome narrow nationalist approaches to literary history and cultural analysis. Around the First World War, Brandes’ renown was global, relying on his merits as an intellectual in both the cultural sense and the critical sense. His 1913 lecture tour proved a hollow victory for Brandes the literatus, while his pacifist engagement in the war, as the “leading intellectual in one of the neutral nations that stood up against the warmongers,” as Martin Zerlang writes in Chapter 14, lead to a glorious defeat for Brandes the activist. So, Brandes was never just Brandes, but always a critic who wrote in and for a specific situation and a public that he was trying to influence. The present anthology follows and seeks to understand his trajectory through tumultuous times, as well as the insatiable critical spirit animating it. Brandes’ efforts and achievements are carefully analyzed in their numerous contexts – and with an eye on their legacy and continued relevance. Upon the sesquicentennial of the publication of the first volume of Main Currents, this book investigates the dual – and combined – roles of Brandes as a comparative literature pioneer and a global public intellectual.

30

Brandes and Banks, Oppressed People.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Introduction

15

Bibliography Ahlström, Gunnar: Georg Brandes’ Hovedstrømninger. En ideologisk undersökning. Lund & Copenhagen: c.w.k. Gleerup/Levin & Munksgaard, 1937. Brandes, Georg: Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1, edited by Paul Krüger. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1952. Brandes, Georg: Det unge Tyskland. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1890. Brandes, Georg: Kritiker og Portraiter, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1870. Brandes, Georg: Levned, vol. 2. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1907. Brandes, Georg: “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature),” introduced and translated by Lynn Wilkinson, pmla 132/3 (May 2017): 696–705. Brandes, Georg: “Forord,” in: Samlede Skrifter, vol. 1. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1899, i–vii. Brandes, Georg: Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples. Collected Essays and Speeches. Edited by William Banks. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. Brandes, Georg: Forelæsninger om Friedrich Nietzsche (1888), Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche (1888), edited by Per Dahl and Gert Posselt. Basel/Berlin: Schwabe Verlag, 2021. Casanova, Pascale: La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Clausen, Jørgen Stender: Georg Brandes og Dreyfusaffæren. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1994. Collini, Stefan: Absent Minds. Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Damrosch, David, Natalie Melas and Mbongiseni Buthelezi, eds: The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. D’haen, Theo, César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, eds: World Literature: a Reader. London: Routledge, 2013. Fenger, Henning: Georg Brandes et la France. La formation de son esprit et ses goûts littéraires (1842–1872). Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963. Friedell, Egon: Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 5 [1931]. projektgutenberg.de. Gibbons, Henry J.: “Georg Brandes. the Reluctant Jew,” in: The Activist Critic. a Symposium on the Political Ideas, Literary Methods and International Reception of Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980, 55–89. Hjortshøj, Søren Blak: Son of Spinoza. Georg Brandes and Modern Jewish Cosmopolitanism. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2020. Iriye, Akira: Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Löwith, Karl: From Hegel to Nietzsche. the Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, translated by David E. Green. New York: Columbia Press, 1964.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

16

Bjerring-Hansen et al.

Lublinski, Samuel. “Albert Geiger, Georg Brandes und ich,” Das Magazin für Litteratur 55 (September 1900): 867–877. Madsen, Peter. “World Literature and World Thoughts,” in: Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004, 54–75. Mann, Thomas: “En Mester i Produktiv Kritik,” Politiken, 20 February 1927. Nietzsche, Friedrich: Briefe 1861–1889, edited by Karl-Maria Guth. Berlin: Contumax, 2013. Nolin, Bertil: Den gode europén. Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893 med speciell hänsyn till hans förhållande till tysk, engelsk, slavisk och fransk litteratur. Uppsala: Svenska Bokförlaget/Nordtedts, 1965. Puls, Dr.: “Wie Georg Brandes deutsche Literaturgeschichte schreibt,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (1888): 1–24. Roberts, Julian: Walter Benjamin. London: Palgrave, 1983. Rubow, Paul: Georg Brandes’ Briller. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1932.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

pa rt 1 The Comparatist

∵

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 1

The Fox and the Stork

Georg Brandes and the Institutionalization of Comparative Literature Ben Hutchinson In March 1915, at the lowest point of the lowest of wars, the former prime minister of a major European country published an open letter denouncing a literary critic. The terms of this denunciation have gone down in literary history: inveighing against the supposed succor that the critic’s neutrality would give to Germany, Georges Clemenceau, who would soon return to office, begins and ends his letter with the rhetorical flourish “Adieu Brandes.”1 Yet the very existence of such a letter testifies to the astonishing esteem in which this critic was held across Europe, an esteem almost impossible to imagine a century later. How did a Danish scholar from the margins of the continent come to be treated as an equal by leading politicians? What did he do to attain such standing? Why did Georg Brandes – why does Georg Brandes – matter so much? One way to answer this question is to say that by the beginning of the twentieth century, Brandes had come to represent the very internationalism that the war had so catastrophically destroyed. Over the course of some 50 years of publications, Brandes had established himself as the leading mediator, the passeur par excellence, between the major European cultures. His position of neutrality during the war was intended to ensure his continuing ability to mediate between Germany and the Austro-Hungarian territories on the one hand and France, England, and the Scandinavian countries on the other. His position of neutrality was intended to protect, one might say, his ability to compare. Brandes’ working career as a critic – which ran from roughly 1870 until his death in 1927 – coincided with the formative years of comparative literature as a discipline. Arguably this verb does not do justice to his foundational influence, however. Brandes’ career did not just coincide with the emergence of the discipline; it helped create it, at least in the form it would take in its earliest decades of development. For better or for worse, the strange institution called

1 Clemenceau, “Adieu Brandes.” The article was also published the next day in the leading Danish newspaper Politiken.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_003 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

20

Hutchinson

comparative literature – its omnivorousness, but also its outer limits – owes an enduring debt to the Danish master. This essay proposes to demarcate the debt. What was the state of the discipline when the young critic began publishing in the late 1860s? As the British and French empires had expanded over the first half of the nineteenth century, so had their awareness of literatures and cultures beyond the European tradition. Knowledge may be power, but power is also knowledge: the more English (and German) scholars studied Sanskrit, and the more the French savants explored Egyptian and North African forms of expression, the less inclined their respective nations were to forgo their supposition of superiority. Lord Macaulay’s notorious remark of 1835 that “a single row of books in a European library is more valuable than Asian literature in its entirety” represents an extreme case – clearly there were exceptions to this assumption of Western pre-eminence, not least among Germanic philologists searching for a supposed Ursprache behind all Indo-European languages – but in general the colonial model of de haut en bas comparison prevailed. To be European was to inhabit the methodological, if not the moral, high ground.2 What this also meant, conversely, was that the linguistic traditions within Europe tended to be conceived as discrete entities. In the context of the “great game” of nineteenth-century imperialism, the competing countries played separately, if not in outright opposition to each other. When François-JosephMichel Noël and Guislain-François-Marie-Joseph de La Place advertised their Leçons françaises de littérature et de morale (1816) as a “cours de littérature comparée” they may in theory have introduced the term into Europe, but in practice they concentrated on a purely French tradition of receiving and imitating Classical literature. In the era of nation building that would follow, literary histories and compendia – one thinks of Gervinus’ monumental fivevolume Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (1835–42), or of similar overviews of English or Italian literature – sought to foreground the national, rather than the international context. Literature was competitive before it was comparative. After the failed revolutions of 1848, the young constitutional monarchy of Denmark quickly learned that non-intervention was the better part of valor. Following its defeat in the Second Schleswig War of 1864, the Danish government officially adopted the position of neutrality that would continue into the First World War. This position made Danish intellectuals a kind of Scandinavian counterpart to the Swiss, in that they were able to move freely 2 For a summary of this story, see Hutchinson, Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Fox and the Stork

21

and mediate between competing national powers and cultures. Throughout his long career, from the 1870s to the 1920s, Brandes was able to capitalize on this intermediary status: intimate with, but independent from, the major cultural centers of Paris, Berlin, and London, his marginal position assured him an ideal perspective as an intellectual go-between. Such, indeed, is the first and perhaps most telling way in which Brandes exemplifies the disciplinary emergence of comparative literature. For the history of the discipline suggests that comparative literature emerges, in the most literal sense of the phrase, as a story of marginal gains. This story played out in the final few decades of the nineteenth century. As we know, Brandes published the first four volumes of his Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur in Danish between 1872 and 1875 (two further volumes would follow by 1890); they then appeared in German as Die Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in ihren Hauptströmungen between 1891 and 1904, and in English as Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century between 1901 and 1905. By the time of Brandes’ death in 1927, translations of all six books had appeared in languages as disparate as Japanese, Russian, and Yiddish, with some of the volumes also having appeared in Czech, Finnish, French, and Polish. This startling international success – already in the early 1870s the young Brandes was attracting attention outside of Denmark – suggests the general hunger for a consciously “European” version of cultural history: at the height of colonialism, there was also, it would seem, a yearning for continentalism. The salient point, however, is that such continentalism emerged not at the center, but at the edges of Europe: the discipline of comparative literature as it developed in the 1870s and 1880s is characterized by a movement from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. The first ever journal of comparative literature was founded in 1877 at the margins of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in Transylvania. In collaboration with his older colleague Samuel Brassai, the 30-year-old scholar Hugó Meltzl created Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum as a forum for what he termed “the comparative principle,” inviting contributions in 10 official languages. Meltzl, like Brandes, was an ambitious young critic conversant with, but not native to, the major European tradition of Germanic culture. This position of the inside-outsider provided the perfect perspective from which to juxtapose the various continental cultures: steeped in their aesthetics, but not beholden to their politics, such inside-outsiders were the middlemen of multilingualism, the intermediaries of internationalism. Meltzl’s journal only lasted until 1888, but this brief decade of activity was

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

22

Hutchinson

enough for it to play a seminal role in forming what he termed “nothing less than the emerging discipline of the future: Comparative Literature.”3 Part of the reason for the demise of the Acta Comparationis was the emergence, in 1887, of a rival publication, Max Koch’s Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte. The first volume of Koch’s journal provides an illuminating snapshot of the state of the discipline. If Brandes’ name appears explicitly only four times in the volume – all in a lengthy, three-part essay by Alfred Biese on “The Aesthetic Animation of Nature in Ancient and Modern Poetry” – it is because by this point he has become an undisputed source, adduced as an unquestionable authority both on questions of evaluation (“with complete justification, Brandes and others have observed that the first part of Werther demonstrates a naïve relationship to nature, the second half a sentimental relationship”) and of attribution (off-hand references to Main Currents shore up Biese’s own argument).4 The broader point is in any case that Brandes’ methodology had become established as the default setting for comparison, as is apparent from the title of Koch’s journal alone. For the discipline as it emerged in the late nineteenth century should more properly be termed not comparative literature, but comparative literary history. We tend now to think of comparative literature in the modern academy as principally a synchronic affair across languages: author A is juxtaposed with author B; text C explores similar ideas to text D. But this is not how the discipline developed in its earliest years, since the philologists and linguists of the Romantic period – Sir William Jones, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel – generally preferred a diachronic approach, tracing the roots of modern languages back to their ancient ancestors (such as Sanskrit) in search of a supposed Ursprache behind all subsequent forms of expression. By the second half of the nineteenth century, in other words, “comparative literary history” was essentially a tautology: to compare was to historicize. Brandes’ Main Currents took this approach and applied it to modern literature, in the process channelling European literature – which by his own admission largely meant English, French, and German literature – into a single river with many tributaries. The introduction to the first volume gives a fair idea of his comparative methodology, or at least – and perhaps more tellingly – of what he understood this methodology to be. The central subject of his study, Brandes announces, is “the reaction in the first decades of the nineteenth century against the literature of the eighteenth, and the vanquishment 3 See Meltzl, “Present Tasks of Comparative Literature.” 4 Biese, “Die ästhetische Naturbeseelung in antiker und moderner Poesie,” 125–145, 197–213, 405–456. See p. 427 for statement cited (in my translation).

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Fox and the Stork

23

of that reaction.”5 This reaction, he argues, “can only be understood by a comparative study of European literature,” since such a study both maximizes the importance of other traditions and minimizes the importance of our own. His famous image of a telescope – “one end magnifies and the other diminishes” – implies, among other things, that Brandes is not seeking an Olympian perspective from outside of European literature, but rather consciously writes from within it.6 Minimizing “our own” national prejudices – in his case as a Danish, Scandinavian critic – becomes a key aim of Brandes’ conception of comparison. But how does he propose to do this? In a word: through literary history – understood, “in its profoundest significance, [as] psychology, the study, the history of the soul.” To demonstrate the stakes of his undertaking, Brandes turns to Aesop’s fable of the fox and the stork. If the fox ensures that the stork cannot eat his food by only providing soup in a flat dish (such that the stork’s long bill is rendered useless), the stork in turn invites the fox to eat out of a long, narrow vase (such that the fox’s tongue serves no purpose). Such, Brandes claims, is the relationship between the various European nations: an ancient tale of mutual – and willful? – misunderstanding. The role of the comparatist – which is to say, of the comparative literary historian – is to lay the table equally for both the fox and the stork. Brandes’ success as a maître d’ for this menagerie can be measured both by those who came after him and those who came before him. The quickest way to get a sense of the breadth of his reception is to survey citations of his work in contemporary journals. Between 1870 and 1900 – to take just these three decades as indicative of the spread of his influence – Brandes is mentioned 91 times in the various journals included in jstor.7 This number may not seem that high for a period of 30 years (it jumps to 337 if pursued up to the year of his death in 1927), but what is particularly striking is the kind of journals in which he is cited. They include publications dedicated to Archaeology, Art History, Asian Studies, Biological Sciences, British Studies, Classical Studies, Economics, Education, Geography, History, Language and Literature, Linguistics, Middle East Studies, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion,

5 For this and subsequent references to Brandes’ introduction, see Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. 1: “The Emigrant Literature.” 6 See Larsen, “Georg Brandes: The telescope of comparative literature.” 7 jstor search, “Georg Brandes,” 20 September 2019. https://www.jstor.org/action/doAdvance dSearch?searchType=facetSearch&sd=1870&ed=1900&q0=georg%20brandes&f0=all&c1 =AND&f1=all&c2=AND&f2=all&c3=AND&f3=all&c4=AND&f4=all&c5=AND&f5=all&c6 =AND&f6=all&acc=on&group=none&pagemark=cGFnZU1hcms9MQ%3D%3D.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

24

Hutchinson

and Sociology. Though literature and history inevitably return the lion’s share of the hits, the point is clear: Brandes’ work enjoyed an extraordinarily broad reception. Closer consideration of one of these articles – a survey essay from 1896 on the “essence, task, and significance of comparative literary history” – suggests that his contemporaries saw Brandes as part of an illustrious lineage. Taking the relationship between English and French literature as his example, Louis Betz begins with Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England (1858), proceeds to Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature (1863–1869) – a thinker on whom Brandes based much of his PhD thesis, French Aesthetics in our Time (1870) – and then comes, via various passing references to lesser-known critics, to an assessment of the “comprehensive and ingenious Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth-Century”: This work represents an achievement of cultural-historical importance for Denmark. It seems to me that Brandes, influenced by Hettner, has taken up the eighteenth-century idea of Enlightenment and successfully applied the motif of reaction and counter-reaction from the beginning of this century to the formation of the main literary currents.8 While Betz’s description of how the six volumes of Main Currents trace “reaction and counter-reaction” corresponds to Brandes’ own stated purpose, his passing reference to Hermann Hettner (1821–1882) goes beyond the bounds of anything mentioned by the critic himself. Others, too, made the comparison between the Danish and German critics (for instance Jean Sarrazin in his review of the fifth volume),9 suggesting that the similarities between their approaches were relatively obvious to their contemporaries. Hettner’s major work was a Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, published in three parts – devoted respectively to English, French, and German literature – between 1856 and 1870.10 Although Betz does not elaborate any further, the common point between Hettner and Brandes lies, methodologically speaking, in their shared reception of Hegel. Brandes’ defining idea of reaction and counter-reaction is nothing if not Hegelian, defining (literary) history as a “double current” that oscillates in quasi-dialectical manner between “reaction and progress,” fox and 8 9 10

Betz, “Kritische Betrachtungen über Wesen, Aufgabe und Bedeutung der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte,” 149. My translation. Sarrazin, “Review of Die Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in ihren Hauptströmungen, vol. 5: Die romantische Schule in Frankreich,” 163. Hettner, Literaturgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Fox and the Stork

25

stork.11 Comparative literary history, in the eyes of not only Brandes but also those of many of his contemporaries, was tantamount to a phenomenology of spirit, the only difference being that it culminated not in Hegel’s apartment in Berlin but in the much-mythologized Modern Breakthrough. This is not to say that Brandes was universally applauded within the international Republic of Letters. A startling instance of his negative reception occurred in 1888, when an article entitled “How Georg Brandes writes German literary history” appeared in the German journal Archiv. The impact of this article can be measured by its discussion on the other side of the Atlantic, in an extraordinary editorial in Modern Language Notes: The Danish essayist and critic, who has hitherto in certain circles passed for a great scholar, and who on account of the supposed profundity of his knowledge was allowed to express radical opinions and offensive criticism, is now suddenly exposed as a literary plagiarist of the worst sort. He has recently published a second edition of Die Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in ihren Hauptströmungen, the second volume of which, Die romantische Schule in Deutschland, Dr Puls subjects to a careful scrutiny. The result of the latter develops the fact that Brandes not only did not read the sources necessary for writing an original history of literature, such as he claims his to be, but that he has copied, in many passages verbatim, from the works of German investigators like Haym, Goedeke, Hitzig etc. Had Brandes concealed his fraud in the comparative obscurity of the Danish language he might never have been discovered. But he had his book translated into German […] It may not be an agreeable occupation to expose such frauds, but the interests of science and literary morality vigorously demand it.12 Whatever the merits of the case, the hectoring and self-righteous tone suggests an animus all too familiar to comparatists, namely that of specialists defending their turf. Brandes wrote about German literature from the perspective of an outsider both to the nation and to the discipline; little surprise, then, that the insiders should push back against his incursions. Brandes played a key role in establishing not only the discipline of comparative literature, it would seem, but also its enduring tensions.

11 12

Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. 1: “The Emigrant Literature,” Introduction. Karsten, Modern Language Notes, 216–217.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

26

Hutchinson

By the late 1880s, Brandes was moving away from writing broad-brush literary history, whether “original” or otherwise. One of the principal reasons for this was that he had discovered the work of a young philologist by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1889, Brandes published a study of Nietzsche’s thought entitled “Aristocratic Radicalism,” almost overnight bringing the previously obscure philosopher European renown.13 Not without controversy – he would be criticized for his supposed arrogance and elitism – Brandes took from Nietzsche a “great man” theory of history, which he then proceeded to apply, over the following decades, to a series of heroic individuals, composing monographs on Shakespeare, Goethe, Voltaire, and Michelangelo, to name but a few.14 The Hegelian model of history in the 1870s became subsumed into a Nietzschean model of biography in the 1880s: comparative literature, for Brandes, was now a phenomenology of aristocratic spirit. The 1880s were also, however, a time of travel for Brandes, and his nomadic lifestyle inevitably came to inform his view of how and what to compare. Between 1877 and 1883 he lived in Berlin, but he also traveled to Russia and to Greece, among other destinations, as well as living at various times in France and in Italy. In some of these countries he was welcomed – he gave lectures to audiences of thousands in New York, and was praised for his cosmopolitan outlook in post-imperial China – but in others (not least France, where he clashed with a number of Sorbonne professors over the Dreyfus Affair) he was dismissed as a generalist in an age of specialists.15 His approaches to these various countries – many of which he wrote books about – exemplify both his strengths and his weaknesses. His study of Russia, for instance (published in Danish in 1888 and in English in 1889), draws out “the two currents in Russian intellectual life, which at once strike every observer, the tendency towards Western Europe […] and the tendency inward, the national self-absorption.”16 The degree of generalization that this occasions finds expression in Brandes’ tendency to speak of “types” – “the Russian intelligence,” the “typical Polish nobleman” – in a manner that borders on what we might now see as racial profiling. At the same time, he comes down unambiguously on the side of internationalism, or at least the Western version of it: “the progressive Russian who desires the broadening and development of the nationality of his people […] soon comes to the conviction that the fragments of Western European culture in his land are always worth more than the unquestionable national roughness 13 14 15 16

See Brandes, Aristokratisk Radikalisme. See Larsen, p. 25, for a helpful summary of Brandes’ “great man” methodology. For more on Brandes and France, see Fenger, Georg Brandes et la France. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 98.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Fox and the Stork

27

and the equally national barbarity.”17 For all his attempts to transcend “national” borders, then, Brandes merely re-imposes the border at a transnational level, namely that of Europe. The West, for Brandes, is undoubtedly best. This prejudice equally betrays Brandes when he turns to consider the specificities of Russian literature. His preference for Turgenev over Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is rooted in the fact “that he is the one of those who has lived most in foreign lands,” particularly in France, where “he has plainly learned the art of setting his pictures in frame and glass.” (Brandes’ preference is not for France per se, but for the international perspective that it suggests; elsewhere, for instance, he is perfectly capable of reversing the roles and inveighing against inward-looking writers in France, noting that “there are two groups of writers in the generation of the 1830s, a small one that wrote for the whole earth and a larger one that wrote for France. I have only sought to throw light on the first group.”)18 The condescension towards Asia is barely concealed – “for the cultured people of Western Europe, he has peopled the great empire of the East with human beings of the present time” – and the clichés of the Russian “soul” are almost palpable: “the melancholy of Turgenev is, in its general form, that of the Slavic races in their weakness and sorrow.”19 For all his cosmopolitanism, in other words, this is comparative literature in its most Eurocentric form. Yet these weaknesses also tell us something about Brandes’ strengths. How, after all, is anyone supposed to grasp the immensity of Russia, much less an outsider? Brandes’ statement of purpose is worth citing in full, since it gives an insight into how he conceived the process of comparison more generally: At every single personality, every single trait, or every group of traits which is observed, we must ask ourselves, “could this not be found outside of Russia?” After that which is common to the human race has been determined, then that which is common to the Slavic races, then that which the aristocracy or peasants in all countries have in common, then comes the investigation into that which is peculiarly national.20 Brandes, we may infer from the methodology outlined here, conceives comparison as a process of drawing ever-decreasing circles. The tertium comparationis is triangulated by zooming in ever further: from humanity as a whole, to the Slavic part of it, to various socio-economic sub-groups, to the purely 17 18 19 20

Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 105. See Brandes, Main Currents, vol. 5, 460. My translation. All citations in this paragraph are from Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 272–273. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 82.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

28

Hutchinson

Russian. The art of the comparatist is to mark out these categories – to establish the frame(s) of reference for a given topic or question: this is not so much the hermeneutic circle (where the part anticipates the whole) as the comparative circle (where the whole anticipates the parts). After excluding “that which is common,” we are left with that which is “peculiar.” If Brandes’ method thus allows him – he supposes – to identify the “peculiarly national” by excluding the generically international, it is the adverb that gives the clue to his vision of comparison. The local is part of, but separate from, the global; it is “peculiar” – that is, unique – to its own micro-culture. This approach may seem surprisingly sociological, but it is very much of its time, echoing that taken by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett in the first ever monograph on comparative literature, published just two years earlier in 1886. A Dublin-born lawyer who emigrated to New Zealand – he too was writing from the margins of empire – Posnett claimed that “the proper order of our studies in comparative literature” is to pursue “the gradual expansion of social life, from clan to city, from city to nation, from both of these to cosmopolitan humanity.”21 Brandes takes the idea, it would seem, and inverts the direction of travel: where Posnett moves from the smallest to the largest circles, Brandes moves from the largest to the smallest. Expansionism, either way, remains the driving force. After his travels in the 1880s, in the 1890s Brandes settled into writing monographs on major figures of both contemporary and canonical literature. In the former category, his work on Ibsen (1899) was particularly influential in interpreting the playwright for a non-Scandinavian audience, not least because it took the unusual form of a series of “impressions” (1867, 1882, 1898) recording the parallel development of both author and critic.22 In the latter category, Brandes’ most significant single work of this period was no doubt his twovolume study of Shakespeare (1898),23 the first volume of which concentrated on a biographical approach to the plays, and the second on a more historical approach to the Elizabethan Age as a whole. The “great man” methodology of his previous studies – the phrase “great artist” is used four times in the onepage introduction alone – is thus complemented by a broader, contextual perspective, allowing Shakespeare to emerge against the background of both his contemporaries (Jonson, Marlowe) and his forbears (Rabelais, Montaigne). The international success of this venture sealed Brandes’ reputation in the

21 22 23

Posnett, Comparative Literature, 86. See Brandes, Henrik Ibsen. Björnstjerne Björnsen: Critical Studies. See Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Fox and the Stork

29

English-speaking world and paved the way for the subsequent translation of Main Currents. Despite all these major studies, however, Brandes’ most enduring contribution to the discipline of comparative literature from this period was arguably his brief article on “World Literature.” A slight, inconsistent piece, written in response to a request by the German journal Das literarische Echo and published in 1899 under the Goethean title “Weltliteratur,”24 the essay has nonetheless enjoyed a remarkably sustained afterlife, no doubt in part owing to its brevity and accessibility. Brandes begins by insisting on his inability to give a satisfactory definition of the term, and in many ways he is true to his word, oscillating somewhat arbitrarily between questions of status (he speaks of “world-famous works”) and of genre (he includes natural sciences and travel narratives in world literature, but not history). Translation he decries as a “lamentable necessity,” claiming – in a manner instructive of the late nineteenthcentury cultural hierarchies – that French is the language to which all writers aspire, with English and German taking second place. Those who write in minor languages are at an obvious disadvantage, he suggests, since they lack “the major weapon, a language” with which to compete on the world stage. Where marginality helps the comparatist, in other words, it hinders the author. Brandes does offer one important insight in this essay, however, and it anticipates not just the institutionalization of comparative literature but its practice. Why, he asks, did Hans Christian Andersen attain world fame where other, equally talented Danish contemporaries did not? The answer, he suggests, lies in his “general comprehensibility,” which allowed Andersen to speak, through his fairy tales, to readers far outside his own cultural sphere. Yet this success harbors a great danger, Brandes warns. For as authors start to realize the possibility of being read throughout the world, they “begin to write for an invisible, abstract public, and this does damage to literary production.” Zola, he claims by way of example, moved from the artistic success of the Rougon-Macquart series to the artistic failure of the Lourdes, Rome, Paris trilogy largely because he started to write, all too self-consciously, “for the whole world,” thereby losing his concrete sense of specificity and context. “Whatever is written for the whole world sacrifices strength and vigor for the sake of universal comprehensibility,” Brandes concludes; “it no longer carries the flavor of the soil.” What Brandes ends up outlining, then, is much more interesting than the pious sense of internationalism that often obtains in comparative literature.

24

Cited from Brandes, “World Literature,” 61–66. All subsequent references are to this source.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

30

Hutchinson

His vision for the future of the discipline amounts to a dialectic: “the world literature of the future will be all the more interesting, the more strongly its national stamp is pronounced.” To be international – or “transnational,” to use the term favored by contemporary comparatists – is also, firstly, to be national. In making his prophecy, Brandes not only anticipates the twenty-first-century craze for a kind of homogenized heterogeneity – whereby a little bit of local color is sprinkled over some form of (magical) realism and marketed as “world literature” – but he also situates himself within the grand tradition of comparatists warning against facile comparing. Brandes’ spiritual godfather, in this regard, might be Johann Gottfried Herder, whose anthropological investigations into the differences between cultural traditions were predicated upon identifying – and preserving – the Volksgeist of a given people (see, for instance, his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity [1797]). His godson, equally, might be Erich Auerbach, who warned, in his essay “The Philology of World Literature” (1952), of the dangers of flattening out all cultural differences into a reductive, globalized essentialism. For the true comparatist, in other words, one size does not fit all. Brandes’ article on Weltliteratur also had a more sinister afterlife, however. His prominence, and the equal weight that he gives to both sides of the dialectic (both national and international literature), led to his essay being seized upon by conflicting schools of criticism. Representative of this conflict, as Peter Goßens has shown, were the literary historians Richard M. Meyer (1860– 1914) and Adolf Bartels (1862–1945). The two antagonists held radically differing views on the value of literature and culture: where the Jewish Meyer advocated an international view of Weltliteratur as cosmopolitanism, the anti-Semitic Bartels’ view of culture was not just national but nationalist, even proto-Nazi in its insistence on the völkisch elements of art. Their continuing disagreement over how to interpret world literature reached its high (or low) point in 1913, the year in which both critics published histories of the subject.25 Although they inevitably take Goethe as their standard reference, they both refer to Brandes, too, illustrating not just the Danish critic’s ubiquity, but also his malleability: where Meyer emphasizes (what Brandes would call) the “whole world” as the legitimate purview of Weltliteratur, Bartels emphasizes its necessary “flavor of the soil.”26 Comparability is in the eye of the beholder.

25 26

See Meyer, Die Weltliteratur im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert; Adolf Bartels, Einführung in die Weltliteratur. For a summary of this debate, see Goßens, “Das Wetterleuchten der Weltliteratur,” 332–349.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Fox and the Stork

31

Brandes’ brief essay on world literature functions, then, as a microcosm of his canonical but contested standing in comparative literature. Within the – heavily Eurocentric – limits of his time, Brandes consistently highlighted the discipline’s defining polarity between difference and similarity, and between international and national frames of interpretation. Yet this studiedly scientific neutrality was open to misprision, as proven by both the aesthetic debate about world literature and the political debate about world war. For Brandes’ position of neutrality during the war was a reflection, in the final analysis, of his defining intellectual belief: namely, that we must listen to both sides of the quarrel. We must respect both the fox’s tongue and the stork’s bill, since only by comparing their differing perspectives can the food of culture be fully appreciated. Brandes’ enduring contribution to the development of comparative literature, in other words, was to practice it, to problematize it, and to prepare it for international consumption. Bibliography Bartels, Adolf: Einführung in die Weltliteratur (von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart) im Anschluss an das Leben und Schaffen Goethes. Munich: Callwey, 1913. Betz, Louis P.: “Kritische Betrachtungen über Wesen, Aufgabe und Bedeutung der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 18 (1896): 141–156. Biese, Alfred: “Die ästhetische Naturbeseelung in antiker und moderner Poesie,” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte 1 (1887): 125–145, 197–213, 405–456. Brandes, Georg: Die Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in ihren Hauptströmungen, vol. 5: “Die romantische Schule in Frankreich.” Leipzig: Veit & Comp, 1883. Brandes, Georg: Impressions of Russia, translated by Samuel C. Eastman. London: Walter Scott, 1889. Brandes, Georg: William Shakespeare: a Critical Study, translated by William Archer et al. London: Heinemann, 1898. Brandes, Georg: Henrik Ibsen. Björnstjerne Björnson: Critical Studies, translated by Jessie Muir and William Archer. New York: Macmillan, 1899. Brandes, Georg: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. 1: “The Emigrant Literature.” New York/London: Macmillan/Heinemann, 1906. Brandes, Georg: Friedrich Nietzsche. London: Heinemann, 1914. Brandes, Georg: Aristokratisk Radikalisme. Oslo: J. W. Cappelen, 1960. Brandes, Georg: “World Literature,” translated by Haun Saussy, in: The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, edited by Mbongiseni Buthelezi, David Damrosch and Natalie Melas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 61–66.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

32

Hutchinson

Clemenceau, Georges: “Adieu Brandes,” L’Homme enchainé, 29 March 1915. Fenger, Henning: Georg Brandes et la France. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963. Goßens, Peter: “Das Wetterleuchten der Weltliteratur. Eine Debatte um 1900,” Monatshefte 108/3 (201): 332–349. Hettner, Hermann: Literaturgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1856ff. Hutchinson, Ben: Comparative Literature: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. jstor: https://www.jstor.org/action/doAdvancedSearch?searchType=facetSearch&sd =1870&ed=1900&q0=georg%20brandes&f0=all&c1=AND&f1=all&c2=AND&f2 =all&c3=AND&f3=all&c4=AND&f4=all&c5=AND&f5=all&c6=AND&f6=all&acc =on&group=none&pagemark=cGFnZU1hcms9MQ%3D%3D. Accessed 20 September 2019. Karsten, Gustaf: Modern Language Notes 3/4 (April 1888): 216–217. Larsen, Svend Erik: “Georg Brandes: the Telescope of Comparative Literature,” in: The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011, 21–31. Meltzl, Hugo: “Present Tasks of Comparative Literature,” in: The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, edited by Mbongiseni Buthelezi, David Damrosch and Natalie Melas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 41–49. Meyer, Richard M.: Die Weltliteratur im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert: Vom deutschen Standpunkt aus betrachtet. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1913. Posnett, Hutcheson Macaulay: Comparative Literature. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886. Sarrazin, J.: “Review of Die Litteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in ihren Hauptströmungen, vol. 5: Die romantische Schule in Frankreich,” Zeitschrift für neufranzösische Sprache und Literatur 5 (1883): 162–172.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 2

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions Anders Engberg-Pedersen 1

Introduction

In his dissertation, Contemporary French Aesthetics, Georg Brandes at one point summarizes what he takes to be a fundamental insight of recent French thought: “The purpose of literature,” he writes, “is to sketch out and to preserve feelings.” And therefore, he continues, “history is at its base an examination of the soul.”1 Brandes’ statement ostensibly refers to the writings of Hippolyte Taine, but it captures the basic understanding that came to inform Brandes’ own approach to literature and to literary historiography in particular as it appears in his grand oeuvre, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. For Brandes, the particular significance of literature is that it preserves the traces of individual as well as collective feelings and moods in a given historical period. Across geographical borders and linguistic differences, literary works collectively constitute an archive of the emotions. Adopting a “comparative literary perspective,”2 Brandes has often been identified as a central figure in the development of comparative literature. The writing of Main Currents also coincided with the institutionalization of comparative literature as an independent field in Europe and the United States. Aside from a rekindled interest in Brandes’ writings on world literature, however, his work and even his principal achievement, Main Currents, fell into oblivion soon after his death. Recent developments in literary and cultural studies, however, should alert us to the innovative character of Brandes’ approach to literary historiography and to comparative literary studies. After the turn of the twenty-first century, studies of the “emotions” and their history have become a dominant trend among literary and cultural scholars, as well as historians. Whether conceptualized as feelings, affects, or moods, the emotions broadly conceived have emerged as significant objects of study in their own right as scholars have charted the philosophical history of vehement 1 Brandes, Den franske Æstetik i vore Dage, vol. 13, 247. 2 Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 8. Throughout this essay I refer to the Danish first editions of the six volumes of Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur, published between 1872 and 1890. All translations are my own.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_004 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

34

Engberg-Pedersen

passions, the cultural and political circulation of affects, or the literary history of mixed emotions.3 In some respects, this so-called “affective turn” is late to the game. As early as the 1950s, cultural theorist Raymond Williams sought to examine the nature and stake out the boundaries of a layer of experience steeped in emotions – what he called the “structures of feeling.” His sophisticated theoretical exploration of this concept may serve not only as a forerunner of the contemporary interest in the emotions, as has recently been suggested,4 but also as a foil for Brandes’ even earlier attempt to establish a new object of historical inquiry that takes seriously the historical, social, and literary role of the emotions.5 For Brandes not only regards the emotions as one of the central elements through which we may come to understand history; in Main Currents, his “comparative literary perspective” is the condition of possibility for discerning and writing a history of emotions.6 How, then, does Brandes conceptualize them? Delving into Main Currents, this essay outlines the overall concept of the emotions as developed across the six volumes and thereby seeks to recuperate a surprisingly innovative approach of some relevance for contemporary thematic and theoretical concerns.

3 See, for example, Fisher, The Vehement Passions; Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; and Berlant, The Female Complaint. I have examined the role of mixed emotions in visual war representations in Visualizing War: Emotions, Technologies, Communities. One of the most astute critical assessments of the affective turn is Ruth Leys’ “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” While much of the work in this tradition has sought to distinguish and develop the main terms of emotion, affect, and feeling into clearly demarcated categories (see e.g. Eric Shouse’s attempt to separate the terms in his brief essay “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” or Brian Massumi’s central distinction between affect and emotion in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation), several critics use the terms interchangeably. Some of the collected volumes that have appeared also move back and forth between the terms (see e.g. Harding and Pribram (eds), Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader; Gregg and Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader; and Wulff, The Emotions: A Cultural Reader). 4 See Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup’s introduction to the anthology Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture. 5 I wish to express my warm thanks to Frederik Tygstrup for suggesting the link to Raymond Williams. 6 Brandes obviously lived at a time when much of the conceptual apparatus that has sprung up as a result of the affective turn did not exist. Terminologically, Brandes consistently refers to Følelser – “feelings” – and Stemninger – “moods.” Throughout this essay I will employ the umbrella term “emotions” when speaking of feelings and moods as one, rather than “feelings,” which Brandes also uses as a more general term that encompasses both specific feelings and more intangible moods.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

2

35

Ideas and Emotions

When we think of the Brandes of Main Currents, we might easily consider him more an historian of ideas than a literary scholar. Indeed, in the introductory lecture to Main Currents of 1871 it soon becomes evident that Brandes is interested in the battle of big ideas: freedom, emancipation, and enlightenment one the one hand; authority, reaction, and ignorance on the other. As he declares: “the central subject of these lectures is the reaction in the initial decades of the nineteenth century against the literature of the eighteenth century, and the overcoming of that reaction.”7 Often less occupied with literature per se and more interested in the ideas that works of literature convey, Brandes’ literary analyses frequently follow in the slipstream of his account of the history of ideas. In this manner, the status of literature as empirical material in the scientific project is made apparent. As a historically situated cultural document, a work of literature for Brandes is a symptom – a surface phenomenon from which one can extrapolate the more deeply rooted movement of the history of ideas. Indeed, the reigning idea “stamps” all literary genres, “the epic, the novel, the poem, the ode, even the drama, with its distinguishing mark.”8 This has implications for Brandes’ methodology. In a passage on Victor Hugo he lays out his approach: In these initial odes of Hugo let us study less the poet than the age in which he came into existence. They go through the whole of France’s history from 1789 onward to 1825, and contain the entirety of the Restoration’s official system of views.9 From this perspective literature serves as an entry point into the wider history of ideas. Dissecting a literary text, Brandes cuts away the fictional layer to get to the underlying ideas of the age that the characters embody. And yet, Brandes is not exclusively or even primarily an historian of ideas. Literature also contains a different and more fundamental element. The works of Hugo, Byron, or Börne are indeed symptomatic of a series of clearly defined ideas, but also of more obscure and formless feelings and moods. Throughout Main Currents, Brandes repeatedly states that his primary task is “to provide an outline of the psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century.”10 By 7 8 9 10

Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 7–8. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 122. Ibid., 276. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 570.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

36

Engberg-Pedersen

reading “literary history as psychologically as possible,” Brandes believes that he can “grasp the movements of the soul, which farthest back, deepest down and in every case, prepare and bring forth literature into existence.”11 Once again Brandes reads literature symptomatically, but as empirical material literary texts take precedence over philosophical treatises and commentaries, or official papers. Such documents provide access to the ideas of an age, but literature offers insight into its feelings and moods. As Brandes had already asserted in his dissertation: “a superb poem, a good novel, the confession of a great man, all these are more instructive than letters of state or political treatises.”12 3

Emotions and Metonymy

In Main Currents “emotion” emerges as an aggregate concept. Like the currents in the title of the lecture series, the emotions flow in at least three distinct, but interconnected channels, with varying and steadily increasing volume. To grasp the central role that emotions play in Brandes’ literary historiography, it is therefore instructive to distinguish between individual emotions, group emotions, and period emotions. The concrete literary analyses that take up much of the six volumes show Brandes teasing out the variegated spectrum of emotions expressed in a given work of literature. He shows the prevalence of specific, concrete feelings in a poem or novel, tracking their sometimes subtle, sometimes major changes as the plot unfolds in order to arrive at a complete picture of the emotional anatomy of the text. Byron’s poetry is a case in point. Childe Harold, for example, consists of three basic moods: the “mood of solitude,”13 the “mood of melancholia,”14 and the “love of freedom.”15 While the first part of the poem is governed by the mood of solitude, it simultaneously harbors “the mood of melancholia” as well as “the love of freedom,” the poem’s second and third “foundational mood[s].”16 As the poem progresses, however, the hierarchy of these moods shifts as the “enthusiasm of freedom”17 bursts forth. Don Juan, meanwhile, is “a passionate political poem, full of anger, mockery, threats and

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 4. Brandes, Den franske Æstetik i vore Dage, vol. 13, 247. Brandes, Naturalismen i England, 422. Ibid., 425. Ibid., 428. Ibid., 425, 428. Ibid., 432.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

37

appeals.”18 After analyzing the many variations of “the fresh current of youthful passion’s warmth,” Brandes summarizes the whole poem as an outgrowth of Byron’s “indignation.”19 The aesthetic theory underpinning this conception of literature derives in part from the critical praxis of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. In a revolt against philosophical criticism, which had isolated the work from its historical context and from its authorial provenance just as the New Criticism of the twentieth century would do once again, Sainte-Beuve practiced a psychological criticism that traced the work back to the person and the personality of the author. For Brandes such a critical method constituted a wholly decisive shift that asserted the primacy of literary criticism over ordinary historical inquiry. Thus Sainte-Beuve’s reforms have made literary history, which until then had been an adjunct to actual historical studies, into its trailblazer, the most soulful, most lively form of history, because literature constitutes altogether the most interesting and richest material with which the historian can grapple.20 In this way, the diverse literary works that Brandes analyzes throughout Main Currents reveal the enthusiasm, the hatred, and the erotic spark, as well as the seraphic-platonic coldness, the languor, and the downcast self-deprecating attitude – in short, the variety of emotions that individual authors have felt and expressed at any given point. At times, an author may even express emotions that have yet to find a habitation in common language. In his Letters from Paris, for example, August Börne articulates “an emotion between friendship and love, for which language lacks words.”21 Individual authors, meanwhile, are characterized by the type of emotions they excel at describing in their works. Goethe is lauded for his ability to express simple, unmixed, healthy emotions, while Heine’s power resides in his ability to give voice to more modern mixed emotions.22 Yet Brandes was not satisfied with Sainte-Beuve’s pointillist criticism, which remained at the level of individual authors. In order to establish larger syntheses, Brandes took the further step of expanding the psychological approach from the individual to the collective. From the animating emotions of the 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., 502. Ibid., 503. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 494–495. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 112. Ibid., 228.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

38

Engberg-Pedersen

individual work he infers the emotions of the author, from which in turn he infers the emotions of a group. Indeed, each of the six volumes of Main Currents carries the title of one such collective. While volume two, The Romantic School in Germany, and volume five, The Romantic School in France, subsume sometimes tightly knit, but often very loosely connected, groups of authors under the formal label of a “school,” the other four volumes also indicate the existence of varying collectives – emigrés, the German Reformists, and the English Naturalists (the “greatest literary school our century has witnessed”).23 Even the scattered French writers in volume three who barely knew each other are viewed as a collective; upon their return to France, Brandes is keen to insist, they establish “a kind of school,” that is “the school of authority.”24 For some of these schools the criteria for membership are the more conventional ones of mutual acquaintance, regular meetings, exchange of ideas, and a commonality in style or topics. Here is Brandes, for example, on the Romantic school in France: “Their encounter is electric, with youthful haste they exchange their ideas, communicate their hatred, their sympathies and antipathies, and this wealth of feelings flows together like tributaries to a river.”25 In other groups, however, the members may at a superficial level seem “to have nothing in common.”26 The essential criterion lies deeper, in a shared “emotional sensibility.”27 As much as Brandes seeks to assert the existence of a broader emotional development by positing the existence of a group or school, his desire for straightforward presentation and his belief in the typicality or representativity of the preeminent figures of a given period always lead him to seek out individual characters. Metonymy therefore becomes his trope of choice. This goes for both authors and fictional characters. Prototypically emigré, Mme de Staël comes to stand in for the emigré authors as such; prototypically romantic, Caroline Schlegel sums up the romantic writers; and the Bourbon Restoration is given its poetic-religious expression in Mme de Krüdener.28 In the realm of fiction, a character such as Chateaubriand’s René serves as the “principal type” for the emerging revolutionary hero.29 Through this process of compression and expansion, and the transactions between individual and collective

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 593. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 96, 345. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 22. For the rather extraordinary incoherence of the “group” in volume six, see also Paulsen’s postscript, Det Unge Tyskland. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 421. The Danish term is Følelsesbevægethed. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 203. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 37.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

39

emotions, Brandes seeks to establish both the complex specificity of the emotions expressed at a given point in time, as well as their critical mass – the fact that these emotions are shared by a larger group of people beyond the individual author. Streams become rivers. But rivers also become the even more voluminous main currents of the title. In accordance with his stated mission to provide a complete psychology of the first half the nineteenth century, Brandes once again broadens the scope of his concept of emotions. A proper psychology of some 50 years of European history must go beyond individual authors, or a handful of them, and instead describe the emotional valences of entire historical periods. In the final volume, for example, he summarizes his project as a “study of the oppositional, finally revolutionary, emotions and thoughts in Germany from 1815 to 1848.”30 Again, the premise for such a study is the ability of given national literature to articulate and archive “the entire psychological sphere”31 of an age. A central criterion is the completeness of the national literature under investigation – a criterion that accordingly establishes a hierarchy of the main European literatures. Literatures like those of England or France, Brandes claims, comprise a sufficiently large number of significant works for an historian to determine “how the British and the French people have felt and thought in every historical period.”32 German literature, on the other hand, he deems too small due to its late arrival on the international scene, which then complicates the historian’s task (though that did not keep him from devoting two volumes to German authors). Not to mention Danish literature, in which he finds lacunae so large that they thwart any attempt at an appraisal of the emotional life of the country’s citizens.33 In spite of his pretensions to literary and psychological totality, Brandes was not one to delve into the vast archive of literature and thought to gain insight into the psychology of the masses, as a proper sociology of literature would do. He mostly stays within the salons. To make claims about the vast emotional landscapes of a period, he therefore resorts once again to metonymy. Focusing on towering literary figures such as Goethe, Chateaubriand, and Byron, as well as some less prominent, but still fairly well-known authors, he claims in these works to read the “signature of the period.”34 At once channeling, condensing, and representing the predominant emotions that circulate throughout society 30 31 32 33 34

Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 564–565. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 270. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 9. Ibid., 9. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 588.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

40

Engberg-Pedersen

at a given historical moment, these individual literary works give insight into the soul of the age. Since they are unable to cover the entirety of the emotional spectrum, however, individual emotions also come to stand metonymically for the rest of them. A long section in volume three on the erotic, for example, is justified by its representativity: “On the perception of the erotic you may, as on the most precise measuring instrument, register the force, the kind, and the temperature of the whole emotional life of an age.”35 In this metonymical fashion, then, by positing individual authors as representative of literary schools, literary schools as representative of entire historical periods, and individual emotions as representative of the broader emotional spectrum, Brandes outlines a broad sketch of the emotional character of a series of distinct historical periods as well as the breaks and shifts that occur when one emotional age morphs into another. 4

Brandes’ Psychology

The emotions thus figure prominently as a category in Main Currents. Indeed, big ideas and collective emotions form the twin components of Brandes’ system. Taken together they appear as two historical principles that feed into one another. The two principles are also baptized: Voltaire and Rousseau. With his usual flair for synthesis and simplification, Brandes condenses the entire intellectual life of the eighteenth century into “the principle of freedom or of brotherhood” represented, respectively, by Voltaire’s rationalism and Rousseau’s feeling. In Emigrant Literature the reaction began with Madame de Staël’s shift from Voltaire to Rousseau, with the reaction of feeling against reason.36 At the halfway point in The Reaction in France, the development continues with the Church’s reaction against feeling, until we reach another reversal with the emotional power of Byron in volume five and the revolutionary fervor that bookends volume six. History thus winds its way from the Kingdom of Reason through the Kingdom of Feeling back into the Kingdom of Reason, now in the

35

36

Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 251. The expansive power of Brandes’ metonymical logic has as its precondition the centripetal movement of compression and condensation. In the introduction to volume two Brandes explains: “The task is to lead every mood, feeling, or longing back to that group of moods to which it belongs. Together this group constitutes a soul.” Once this soul has been compiled into existence from the numerous moods and feelings, it then comes to serve as a representative for the many – the “character type.” Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 20. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 167.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

41

form of the authority principle,37 only to end on an emotional high in 1848 – the year of revolutions. Even as the relative predominance of ideas or emotions structures Brandes’ historical account, it is important to note the ways in which they are linked. In volume three, for example, the authority principle asserts its power not only in the world of ideas but just as much in the domain of feeling. Indeed, the entire reactionary movement is an attempt to contain an intense feeling – that of revolutionary enthusiasm. Brandes writes: And now it is as if all that which the heroes of the intellect have thought and for which they have suffered martyrdom could be shoved aside as useless and futile! As if that which had stirred up the noblest of hearts, that which had infused them with courage on the battlefield and on the scaffold, all that enthusiasm could now be bottled up anew like the genie in the bottle of the fairytale, and that the bottle could be permanently sealed by an Emperor and a Pope!38 The political and religious forces that join hands during the Concordat limit the freedom of feeling just as much as they limit freedom of thought. In the works of the main authors of the period – Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and Madame de Krüdener – eroticism, which Brandes considered the most important literary sentiment, withers into a pale and prudish Platonism when it is not repressed by a high moralism, and manifests itself only in the perverted forms of sin and shame: Eros becomes Satan himself.39 In Brandes’ view the renewed Catholic tendency either distorts the emotional experiential world of human beings into religious spiritualism or represses it entirely in the assertion of the authority principle. Whether it appears as active enthusiasm and warm-blooded eroticism or as the hatred and sin of the reaction, the spectrum of feeling offers as much insight into the past as the spectrum of ideas does. Even when feelings are suppressed by the reaction they constitute an essential object of study because they mark the presence of a widely shared experience that is distorted, garbled, and subjugated. In his account of German Romanticism Brandes criticizes its moonlight mood and its wallowing in emotion,40 but he nevertheless includes these emotions in order to give a complete account of the psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century. For 37 38 39 40

Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 101. Ibid., 87. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 260. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 309, 215.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

42

Engberg-Pedersen

Brandes “the concealed feeling and the abstract idea underlying everything”41 constitute the two elements that must be grasped simultaneously. In this more fundamental understanding of their relation, feelings and ideas do not simply follow one another in a macro-historical sequence. Rather, they make up the two basic modalities of human psychology. Brandes’ “psychology” thereby emerges as an unbroken continuum along which emotions morph into ideas, just as ideas are the more articulate products of reigning emotions. At the extremes of the emotional-ideological spectrum we find two compounded psychological states: at the one end Brandes yokes the ideas of reaction, authority, and conservatism to emotions such as prudishness, shame, and melancholia, while progressive ideas of freedom, emancipation, and revolution are inseparably entwined with enthusiasm, fervor, and eroticism; indeed – and this is one of Brandes’ more daring claims – the political ideas are these emotions, in more articulate form. Brandes’ own political commitments thus come to define the general character of his emotional preferences: powerful social emotions, whether in large collectives or in the intimate relation between two lovers, are valued highly, while personal, inward emotions are most often lampooned. His criticism of the moonlight mood and world-weary longing of German Romanticism is a case in point.42 Indeed, Brandes’ hierarchy of emotions is governed by a kind of emotional pragmatism. A central criterion for determining an emotion’s place in the hierarchy is its power to effect changes in the world. Not by chance does he end his study with the revolutionary fervor of 1848. “Melancholia,” on the other hand, he considers the “illness of the century,” or even a “cosmopolitical epidemic,”43 since it saps the power of (political) action from the people afflicted. Perhaps the most reviled emotion that features prominently during the Concordat is “shame.”44 The negative image of Brandes’ ideal of energetic, powerful, and effective emotions that flow outward from the individual to transform another individual or the larger social world, “shame” is an emotion through which an individual succumbs to the consciousness of social norms and injunctions, whereby the social curtails individual action and stamps a given act as transgressive and illegitimate. Far from being a driver of change, the authoritarian principle of reaction seeks to extinguish the worldtransforming emotions of its subjects, rendering them passive and docile. By contrast, Stendhal – one of the heroes in Brandes’ story – is singled out for his 41 42 43 44

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 309 et passim. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 64. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 272.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

43

love of “the ruthless energy in action as in feeling, energy whether it appears as the military commander’s brilliant irresistibility or as the boundless tenderness of women.”45 5

The Force of History

In Brandes’ historiography, then, the emotions are not simply called on stage in every second act as history swings between ever-new incarnations of Voltaire and Rousseau, that is, between the predominance of ideas and the predominance of emotions. As already suggested, ideas and emotions together constitute the fundamental material of Brandes’ system: the psychological matter that forms a permanent matrix for historical development.46 Of the two, ideas are easier to grasp. Usually they have sharp edges and clear origins, and their development can be traced relatively easily. Emotions, on the other hand, are much more diffuse entities. They are difficult to identify, localize, and track with any accuracy. Whether in the form of fluid moods or of somewhat more solid feelings, their contours are vague, and imperceptibly different emotions morph into one another or are superimposed as a compounded emotional layer of experience. This was the case, for example, during the French reaction: “thus the mood of the period, worn out but complex, full of disappointments, expectations, and an impulse toward personal reveries, is not a mood conducive to action, but to meditation and contemplation.”47 In spite of its multifaceted and elusive nature, however, Brandes asserts its central explanatory potential, for as he writes: “it is this popular mood that explains how Lamartine’s ‘Méditations’ could become the most beloved poems of the age.”48 Moreover, emotions do not just explain the literary preferences of the period. Brandes often regards them as the actual subject and force of history. An author like Ludwig Börne, for example, is merely a passive medium channeling a more foundational emotional energy: “Börne is here only an organ for a feeling that had seized the largest part of the many in Germany who were receptive to enthusiasm.”49

45 46 47 48 49

Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 317. This section builds on my postscript to volume three, The Reaction in France. The postscript offers more extensive reflections on the metaphor of the current, which is here only mentioned in passing. See Engberg-Pedersen, The Reaction in France. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 243. Ibid., 243. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 35.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

44

Engberg-Pedersen

In this manner moods and feelings constitute the intangible yet effective raw material of history. It was not the Prussian soldiers who drove Napoleon out of Germany in 1813; it was “national feeling.”50 And when Brandes describes how Napoleon reestablished the Concordat in 1801, he does not first and foremost point to external historical events. He seeks a psychological explanation: A change in external circumstances is always prepared by a change in moods, and further brings forth still more moods that correspond to the new circumstances. The moods and ideas that prepared the ground for the Concordat were, when it was established, granted full freedom to speak and to call forth similar moods. And since these moods and ideas now expressed themselves in literature, a new literary movement emerged that corresponded to the Concordat, translating it, so to speak, into the language of literature.51 Both history and literature are surface phenomena that emerge out of deeper sources – the moods of the period. Again we see how emotions and ideas are almost always closely entangled with one another. A mood can be a symptom of a pantheistic mindset,52 but ideas can also be the product of emotions. Brandes cites the famous assertion by William Wordsworth that the “influxes of emotions are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representations of all our past emotions.”53 In this understanding moods exist at a deeper level in the chain of causation; vague moods gradually take on form and become “more defined moods,” which in turn crystallize into still clearer “ideas,” which together constitute the conditions for the emergence of the Concordat. However fluid and vague feelings and moods might be, the alloy of emotions and ideas comes to bear a heavy explanatory burden as the ultimate ground of both history and literary hermeneutics. Taken together, moods, feelings, and ideas create history and explain literature. 6

Structures of Feeling

Even though Brandes often plagiarized long passages from other scholars, his grand attempt to synthesize emotions and ideas into a larger unity and to 50 51 52 53

Ibid., 21. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 93–94. Brandes, Naturalismen i England, 62. Ibid., 72.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

45

posit this unity as the engine of historical development is strikingly original. In the transactions between vague moods, complex feelings, and more defined ideas, we find in Main Currents a novel approach whose central innovation is to outline and make available for historical analysis a whole field of experience that usually evades historical capture. What Brandes labels a “psychology” is a collective phenomenon that encompasses and unites cognitive and emotional elements, which together constitute the elusive realm of a shared felt experience. If his literary analyses serve to make these experiences visible, then his gathering of individual authors into groups and schools, his at times tendentious emphases and omissions, and indeed his formal subdivision of the lecture series into six parts, are as many attempts to organize and structure this elusive but powerful phenomenon. The originality of Brandes’ approach may be gleaned not least from the fact that over 50 years would pass before a sustained attempt was made at developing a concept that could capture this layer of human experience. In 1954, in the text A Preface to Film, Raymond Williams first minted the concept “structures of feeling,” which he continued to fine-tune over the course of the following 30 or so years. Searching beneath, between, and around clearly articulated ideologies to make visible the living presence of the past, Williams repeatedly sought to articulate the parameters of his object of study, circling around it and offering ever new variations. Perhaps his most direct definition of “structures of feeling” is found in the book Marxism and Literature, from 1977: The term is difficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’. It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.54 The hazy realm that Williams outlines is the full-bodied and widely shared experience of an age.55 In this experiential layer of the past, emotions play a central role. Not simply opposed to rational thought, to the articulated expressions of ideas or more comprehensive ideologies, the interwoven continuities of emotions and ideas are marked for historical inquiry: “not feeling against thought, 54 55

Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” 23. I refer to the essay reprinted in Sharma and Tygstrup’s Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture. Williams’ alternative suggestion for a definition of the object he tries to circumscribe – “structures of experience” (23) – also underscores that he is addressing the full and integrated cognitive and emotional life of a given period.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

46

Engberg-Pedersen

but thought as felt and feeling as thought.”56 In an earlier text, Williams had already opposed the traditional separation of ideas and emotions, since it left historians blind to these intermediate, mixed phenomena of the felt quality of experience.57 Such experiences, however, precede the clear and distinct articulation of ideas. While they may later develop into fixed ideas, they exist only in embryonic, pre-articulate form at the margins of semantic availability. It is important to stress that Williams does not refer to a purely individual psychology. Straddling the subjective and objective, the individual and the collective, structures of feeling are distributed phenomena and as such they can be said to constitute a social reality with a loose, but present structure. Where does one find material evidence of this intangible realm of historical experience? For Williams its subtle marks are revealed first and foremost in language. The slow and gradual shifts in accents and rhythms of expressions often designated by the general concept of “style” display the broader shifts from one structure of feeling to another. The most salient appearance of these changes, however, is found in the language of literature.58 Williams not only turns to literature in his concrete analyses; he also grants literary works pride of place at the theoretical level. Literature is the historical source material that contains precisely that central, irreducible element which is absent from official documents – abstract belief systems, or common institutions. The contents, the very elements that make up literary works are these full-bodied lived experiences. Thus, when Williams analyzes the social energies of the early Victorian period, he turns to Dickens and Emily Brontë to espy the slow emergence of a new structure of feeling. In the interstices between the reigning ideology that specified the precarity caused by poverty as social failure, for example, literary texts instead evinced a new sensibility that showed precarity as a general condition, with poverty as one aggravating instance thereof. Only later would this sensibility develop into an alternative ideology with generalized explanations of the nature and effects of the social order.59 As far as I can ascertain, the British cultural theorist did not engage with the main work of the Danish literary historian, but the similarity of their projects 56 57 58

59

Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” 23. Matthews, “Change and Theory in Raymond Williams’s Structure of Feeling,” 185. As Williams writes in the earlier text “Literature in Relation to History”: “The change and continuity of language, often seen most clearly in its use in literature, forms a record of vitally important changes and developments in human personality. It is as much the record of the history of a people as political institutions and religious and philosophical modes.” Quoted in Matthews, “Change and Theory in Raymond Williams’s Structure of Feeling,” 185. Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” 25.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

47

is quite remarkable. Both Brandes and Williams seek to carve out a whole new field of study, a central part of the historical process that straddles emotions and ideas and links individual psychology with social collectives. Not merely an emotional matrix for the slow gestation of objective ideologies, Brandes’ “psychology” and Williams’ “structures of feeling” designate an historical phenomenon that is significant in its own right. In this realm the living presence of the past finds its articulation. In spite of the intangibility of these experiences, the aim of both thinkers is to identify the more general patterns that make of them more than random individual psychologizing. Brandes’ metonymical argumentation that links individuals to groups and to the wider historical period has its counterpart in William’s analysis of representative figures that connect experiences that might appear private and idiosyncratic with a broader social formation. To be sure, Williams is less heavy-handed and much more circumspect in his statements, but the theoretical conception that explains their critical praxis is informed by similar aims. This continuum between the individual and the social in turn allows for the larger macro-level periodizations that for both thinkers constitute their main contributions to our understanding of historical development. As a “cultural hypothesis” about “a generation or period,”60 a structure of feeling, in Williams’ terms, or the psychology of a school in Brandes’ terms, partitions history into a succession of distinct collective experiences. Thus Brandes can write that even though the revolutions of 1848 failed, the year nevertheless marks “the red dividing line” which “divides our century and makes an epoch.” For while actions failed to achieve their stated aims, the year had great psychological significance: “One feels, thinks, and writes differently in Europe before and after it.”61 Williams, from a Marxist perspective, links the rise of a new structure of feeling with the historical emergence of a new societal class or the developments within a given class. Ostensibly a literary scholar, Brandes to a large extent models the six principal collective psychologies of Main Currents on the conventional schema of well-established literary movements. But his early infatuation with Hegelian dialectics also shapes the macro-historical frame that governs the work. Although his enthusiasm cooled over the years while he was writing Main Currents,62 formally he remained faithful to the dialectical 60 61 62

Ibid., 24. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 564. When, in 1890, almost 20 years after the project was initially conceived, Brandes arrives at Hegel in the final volume, he can already write the history of Hegel’s faltering grip on the academic imagination, including his own. While Hegel was all the rage in Brandes’ student days, now his system “has collapsed [and] the all too delicate instrument of its

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

48

Engberg-Pedersen

thinking that sees historical development as a series of antithetical forces of actions and reactions that lead to further actions and new reactions, slowly driving the fundamental idea of freedom forward. As he describes his own version of Hegelianism in volume six: “world history was one continuous drama, one great drama of freedom.”63 In the overall composition of Main Currents, the units that structure the six acts of Brandes’ drama are endowed with a pendulum-like teleology that pushes the collective psychology forward in a “great rhythm of ebb and flow.”64 But here Brandes’ Hegelianism also reaches its limit. While he adopted Hegelian dialectics as a frame to tie his account together, he was sufficiently influenced by French thinkers such as Hippolyte Taine and Sainte-Beuve to reject Hegelian metaphysics. The substance that flows through the six volumes as the main currents of European history in the first half of the nineteenth century is the emotional-ideological substance of a collective, natural psychology, not the Hegelian Geist. The result is a curious mixture of content and form – French empiricism and Hegelian structure, or, lived experience on a formal mission toward freedom and revolutionary enthusiasm. The contrast between its rigid structure and its much more elusive and fuzzy content makes Brandes’ project appear rather clumsy when compared to Williams’ reserve and probing formulations, as he seeks to outline how feelings come to have an identifiable structure. Nevertheless, from their different perspectives they both establish the theoretical framework for a vast panorama of the variegated emotional and intellectual structures of experience as they emerge, dominate, disappear, or develop during the historical process. Ever since the first volumes of Main Currents began to appear in the 1870s, Brandes’ novel attempt at a comparative literary historiography has suffered a fair share of criticism. While some contemporary critics did acknowledge the whole new way of writing literary history that Brandes had invented, focusing on “the main changes in moods and mental currents” that shape literature instead of pursuing the minutiae of the philological and genealogical traditions at the time,65 already upon his death in 1927 his work was declared

63 64 65

methodology has broken apart in our hands, such that only a few great fundamental thoughts remain.” Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 310. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 310. Ibid., 570. The journal Deutsche Rundschau was the first to publish a complete review, praising not just the presentation but also Brandes’ distinctive method – his wholly original manner of writing literary history. Instead of approaching the works bibliographically or employing philology and genealogy to trace their internal development, the reviewer writes, Brandes focuses on the “restless mental labor” (die rastlose Gedankenarbeit) and “the

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

49

obsolete “because of the superficial level of its information and because of the all too fragile structure.”66 Moreover, Brandes’ claims to speak about a broader social experience were first severely criticized in 1900 by the author of the first sociological literary history, Samuel Lublinsky,67 only to be repeated by none other than René Wellek in 1955. Indeed, Wellek concluded that Brandes was merely “a middleman without originality and substance.”68 Once considered the father of comparative literature,69 Brandes surprisingly quickly lost his influence within the field of comparative literature, and in the wider world of letters. Excepting his essay on world literature, which remains a point of reference in that subfield of comparative literature, his work, including Main Currents, rarely forms a significant part of the conversation in the field. And yet, beneath his grand gestures, his lack of depth, his quick judgments, and his dated Hegelian formal schema, we can recover a strikingly original proposition that literary and cultural studies have only recently caught up with, which is that emotions should be taken as seriously as a collective historical force as ideas and ideologies. With his “main currents” Brandes was the first to establish collective units of experience based on emotions and ideas, to historicize them, and to posit literature as the primary source material for this history. Williams’ later work on the “structures of feeling” we may regard as a more circumspect attempt to explicate and theorize this phenomenon that has traditionally evaded the historian’s eyes, while the explosion of interest in the emotions in the twenty-first century has continued the exploration of the myriad ways that widely circulating affects shape collective thought and action. In light of these developments, Brandes emerges less as the amateurish middleman peddling opinionated literary summaries to the masses that he also was, and more as a visionary innovator whose project was far ahead of its time. At one point in the fifth volume of Main Currents Brandes describes what he takes to be the extraordinary modernity of Stendhal. In everything he did, Brandes writes, in all his novels and essays, Stendhal was a psychologist through and through: “He constantly examines and observes himself, he so to speak always keeps his hand on his pulse, registering with never-failing

66 67 68 69

main changes in moods and mental currents” (die maßgebenden Stimmungswechsel und Geistesströmungen) that condition the development of literature. Kreyssig, “Die Hauptströmungen der Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,” 140. Baldensperger, “Georg Brandes (1842–1927),” 370. See Lublinski, Literatur und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. His acerbic critique of Brandes appeared in Das Magazin für Litteratur in September 1900 under the title “Albert Geiger, Georg Brandes und ich.” Wellek, “The lonely Dane: Georg Brandes,” 368–369, 357. Madsen, “World Literature and World Thoughts,” 65.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

50

Engberg-Pedersen

composure his own condition as well as its causes and deriving from these excitations a chain of general ideas.”70 The modernity of Brandes was to transpose this praxis to the realm of comparative literary studies. Brandes’ mission was to record and systematize the elusive realm of experience that he could sense rushing by when taking the pulse of European literature. Bibliography Ahmed, Sarah: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Baldensperger, Fernand: “Georg Brandes (1842–1927),” Revue de littérature comparée 7 (1927): 368–371. Berlant, Lauren: The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Brandes, Georg: Emigrantlitteraturen. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1872. Brandes, Georg: Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1873. Brandes, Georg: Reactionen i Frankrig. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1874. Brandes, Georg: Naturalismen i England. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1875. Brandes, Georg: Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1882. Brandes, Georg: Det unge Tyskland. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1890. Brandes, Georg: Den franske Æstetik i vore Dage in Samlede Skrifter, vol. 13. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1903. Engberg-Pedersen, Anders: The Reaction in France, 2019. https://georgbrandes.dk /research/2introductions/engberg_hs3_1874_res_2introductions_en.html. Accessed 23 June 2021. Engberg-Pedersen, Anders and Kathrin Maurer, eds: Visualizing War: Emotions, Technologies, Communities. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. Fisher, Philip: The Vehement Passions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds: The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Harding, Jennifer and E. Deidre Pribram, eds: Emotions: a Cultural Studies Reader. New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2009. Kreyssig, F.: “Die Hauptströmungen der Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Deutsche Rundschau (October 1874): 139–141.

70

Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 320.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes and the History of Emotions

51

Leys, Ruth: “The Turn to Affect: a Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 434–472. Lublinski, Samuel: Literatur und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Verlag Siegfried Cronbach, 1899–1900. Lublinski, Samuel: “Albert Geiger, Georg Brandes und ich,” Das magazin für Litteratur (September 1900). Madsen, Peter: “World Literature and World Thoughts,” in Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004, 54–75. Massumi, Brian:. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NY, and London, Duke University Press, 2002. Matthews, Sean: “Change and Theory in Raymond Williams’s Structure of Feeling,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10/2 (2001): 179–194. Paulsen, Adam: Det Unge Tyskland, 2019. https://georgbrandes.dk/research/2introd uctions/paulsen_hs6_1890_res_2introductions_da.html. Accessed 23 June 2021. Sharma, Devika and Frederik Tygstrup, eds: Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Shouse, Eric: “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8/6 (2005). http://journal.media -culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Accessed 23 June 2021. Wellek, René: “The lonely Dane: Georg Brandes,” in A History of Modern Criticism: 1750– 1950, vol. 4, The Later Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955. Williams, Raymond: “Structures of Feeling,” in Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture, edited by Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, 20–25. Wulff, Helena: The Emotions: a Cultural Reader. Bloomsbury Academic, 2008.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 3

Sexual Morality, Gender Equality, and Pioneering Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings Sophie Wennerscheid In the introduction to his comparatist opus magnum, the lecture series Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (Hovedstrømninger i det 19. Århundredes Litteratur, 1872), Georg Brandes vigorously states that “the only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate.” This can be seen, he continues, in the following examples: “Sand opened up a debate on marriage, Voltaire, Byron, and Ludwig Feuerbach on religion; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on property; Alexandre Dumas the younger on the relationship between the sexes; and Émile Augier on social conditions.”1 Given the many references to male authors that dominate Brandes’ complete oeuvre, the reference to the French female novelist George Sand seems to be of secondary importance. The opposite, however, is true. Brandes’ call for a vital, socially committed literature goes hand in hand with his hope for a society in which love, sexuality, and the relationship between the sexes are radically rethought. It is, as Lynn Wilkinson aptly put it, “a new culture based on desire and energy”2 that Brandes advocated for. To realize such a culture, the Danish literature of the nineteenth century, backward and provincial in Brandes’ eyes, needed a complete makeover. In his lecture series Brandes argues that this could be accomplished by taking inspiration from the more progressive German, French, and English literature. “There is an almost complete lack of understanding of other cultures,” Brandes laments, “and this spiritual deafness has made us dumb, as deafness often does.”3 However, to set the emancipatory potential of Danish literature free, it was not enough simply to take European literature as a model. Rather, the aim must be to surpass it in terms of radicalism. To illustrate his point Brandes proposes rewriting Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 1774/1787). “One fine day, when Werther as usual was desperately 1 Brandes, “Introduction to Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature (1872),” 700–701. 2 Wilkinson, “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature),” 697. 3 Brandes, “Introduction,” 700.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_005 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

53

swooning for Lotte, it occurred to him that the bond between Albert and her meant all too little, and he stole her from Albert.”4 This literarily and morally audacious quest for “free love” is programmatic in nature. It forms the core of Brandes’ large-scale emancipation project, which combines a comparatist approach with ideas concerning the reform of sexual morality. However, as much as Brandes’ stance on gender and sexuality issues may be described as progressive and modern, his work is nevertheless characterized by a clearly androcentric point of view. It is his vigorous, masculine way of thinking, declared to be modern, that will advance the transformation of Danish society towards modernity, Brandes suggests. The extent to which this self-understanding led to Brandes’ more and more ambivalent attitude towards the question of women’s rights and a conflicted relationship with pioneering women writers will be examined in this article. In the course of my investigation, I will make use of the concept of the female complaint. The female complaint, that is, women’s complaint about their subordinate status in society and private life, is dominant in nineteenth-century women’s writing in Scandinavia and upset Brandes because he thought it undermined his mission of a vigorous, forward-looking, and modern society. As a result of this reservation, his approach to historical Continental women writers was fundamentally different from his approach to contemporary Nordic ones. While he clearly emphasized the social importance of the former, he was much more critical of the latter. To examine the paradox of Brandes’ support for particular kinds of female empowerment on the one hand, and his misgivings concerning most female Nordic writers on the other, I will first briefly explain the concept of the female complaint as developed by Lauren Berlant and reworked by Barbara Green. Afterwards, I will give a short overview of the debate about the emancipation of women before Brandes. Then, in the third and main part, I will examine the extent to which gender and sexuality are vital issues in Brandes’ writings. To prevent a hasty classification, the various roles Brandes took in the literary field need to be differentiated. The first to be examined is Brandes’ role as an early critic and translator of John Stuart Mill’s essay The Subjection of Women (1869). The second is Brandes’ role as a literary historian with a strong interest in comparative literature. Here, his lecture series Main Currents is of special importance. The third concerns Brandes’ involvement in the so-called morality feud, which took place throughout Scandinavia in the 1880s. Last to

4 Ibid., 702.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

54

Wennerscheid

be scrutinized will be Brandes as a literary critic of fiction by contemporary female writers. 1

The Female Complaint

In her 1988 article “The Female Complaint,” the American literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant makes the case for the “rupture of the private” in transforming “the patriarchal public sphere.”5 Only such a rupture might succeed in breaking up the centuries-old practice of restricting female influence to the private sphere. Berlant identifies “the female complaint” as the paradigmatic genre of this rupture. The female complaint is a literary women’s genre with historical roots in Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of epistolary poems presented as if they were written by women lamenting injustices inflicted on them by their lovers. Although an important tool in the fight against patriarchal structures, Berlant considers the female complaint an ambivalent genre. On the one hand, it serves to mediate the problems that arise from women’s position in patriarchal societies that “denied women power, privilege, and presence in the public and private spheres.”6 This means the female complaint is necessary to make the public aware of injustice. On the other hand, the female complaint “is a performative plea that implicitly holds no hope for change in the conditions of the author’s misery.”7 According to Berlant, women’s complaints will hardly change anything fundamental so long as their laments are about men to whom they are attached. Furthermore, it is problematic that under these circumstances it is easy for men to devalue women’s complaints as an expression of female hysteria. Berland concludes: “Public female protest discourse is always in danger of ending up like this, written as it is in a context in which it is always vulnerable to be so named: a nag, a whine, a complaint.”8 In her 2008 book The Female Complaint, concerned with American women’s culture of the 1950s, Berlant associates the concept of the female complaint with the concept of the intimate public. According to German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas the public sphere is “an arena for the perception, identification and treatment of problems affecting the whole of society.”9 The 5 6 7 8 9

Berlant, “The Female Complaint,” 253–254. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 244. Habermas, 300.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

55

public sphere turns intimate when the negotiation of problems does not concern the whole of society but only members of non-majority communities. In Berlant’s study this subset is comprised of women, who are supposed to have a common female identity based on a likewise supposed common experience. “What makes a public sphere intimate is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience.”10 As with the concept of the female complaint, Berlant considers the concept of the intimate female public to be ambivalent. On the one hand, it can be used to promote a mass-mediated consumer culture where women are invited to consume texts and other products marked as feminine. On the other hand, it engenders “kinds of insider recognition and cultural self-development.”11 As a space where stories of female complaint, discontent, and social suffering circulate, the intimate public is an affective space that enacts “a fantasy that my life is not just mine, but an experience understood by other women.”12 Berlant sees the female complaint as “juxtapolitical,” maintaining a proximity to the explicitly political or feminist discourse but limited because it too easily sees “the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough.”13 By contrast, literary scholar Barbara Green, discussing the feminist periodical press of the early twentieth century, attributes a more political impact to the concept. Building on Berlant’s findings, Green develops the notion of “the feminist complaint,” defining it as “a critique emanating from within an experience of the everyday.”14 Although Berlant’s and Green’s studies are engaged with the American women’s culture of the 1950s and British feminist papers of the early twentieth century respectively, the theoretical framework they develop can be applied to Brandes’ Scandinavian context. Here, as there, we find numerous women voicing complaint and discontent from an explicitly female point of view. In doing so, they create a resonant space that encourages other women to speak out too. The female complaint contributes to the emergence of an intimate public sphere, ultimately becoming a tool in the feminist struggle. This, however, leads to increasing irritation among men. How can it be that women are so unhappy with the way they are treated by society in general, and men in particular? Georg Brandes, as we soon will see, was one of these men 10 11 12 13 14

Berlant, The Female Complaint, viii. Ibid., xi. Ibid., x. Ibid., x. Green, 21.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

56

Wennerscheid

who became irritated by unhappy women. Before we turn to Brandes, however, a brief overview of the debate about the emancipation of women in the midnineteenth century is needed in order to see Brandes’ self-image as a pioneer of the Scandinavian women’s movement in a broader context. 2

First-Wave Feminism

Although women’s struggle for agency might be traced back to premodern societies,15 it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the “women’s question” “came to be integrated into the broader political, economic, and cultural reforms at an unprecedented level.”16 Probably the most important date in the emergence of the first wave of the feminist movement is July 1848. This was when the first Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, launching the women’s suffrage movement in the US.17 Just one year later, in 1849, the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer visited the US to learn more about the process of democratization and its impact on women’s liberation. Inspired by her experiences abroad, when back in Sweden in 1851 she engaged in several social and feminist activities. In 1856, she published her novel Hertha, or A Soul’s History: A Sketch from Real Life (Hertha, eller en själs historia: teckning ur det verkliga livet, 1856), raising the question of women’s maturity and sparking a fierce debate in Swedish society.18 Interestingly, however, in the novel it is not the female protagonist Hertha, but the male protagonist Yngve who comes back to Sweden with American ideas of emancipation. Hertha, on the other hand, at least at the beginning of the novel, is represented as complaining about her restricted life as a woman. The first words we hear from her in the novel are: “I think that this is a miserable world.”19 Another Scandinavian female writer, inspired by European authors such as George Sand, Emily Brontë, and Marguerite Blessington,20 who lamented the unfulfilling lives of women in clear terms was the young Mathilde Fibiger. In 1851, she published Denmark’s first feminist novel, Clara Raphael. Twelve Letters (Clara Raphael. Tolv Breve, 1851). Like Bremer’s novel, Clara Raphael

15 16 17 18 19 20

Ahuvia and Lauer, “The Premodern World.” Choi, “The Nineteenth Century.” McConnaughy (ed.), The Woman Suffrage Movement in America. A Reassessment. Forsås-Scott, “Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865).” Bremer, Hertha, eller En själs historia: teckning ur det verkliga livet. Busk-Jensen, Romantikkens forfatterinder, 970.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

57

generated a great deal of controversy.21 The same happened in Norway. There, it was the widely traveled Camilla Collett’s feminist novel The District Governor’s Daughters (Amtmandens Døtre, 1854–1855) that sparked a discussion about women’s position in society. Despite their different ages, education, and reputations, as authors these three Scandinavian women shared an ability to take the broader view. Inspired by travels abroad or by reading international women writers, they become part of a transnational feminist movement. The same applies to the Swedes Sophie Adlersparre and Rosalie Olivecrona who were the first editors of Sweden’s first feminist periodical, the Home Review (Tidskrift för hemmet), which ran from 1859 to 1885. Not only was this periodical “instrumental in the implementation of feminist change” in the North,22 but it also played an important role regarding a comparatist perspective. In its first nine years the periodical addressed Swedish women, but its focus broadened in 1868 when its subtitle changed from “dedicated to the Swedish woman” to “dedicated to Nordic women.”23 So, when Georg Brandes entered the debate on women’s rights at the end of the 1860s, it had been in full swing for a while, not only in the US and Europe, but also in Scandinavia. Nevertheless, in September 1887, at the peak of the socalled morality feud, Brandes wrote to his Norwegian colleague Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson to stress that it was him who had given rise to the women’s movement in the first place, and thus was eager to defend it. “I do not wish to see the woman’s movement – which I myself brought to the North singlehandedly and for years struggled for while being persecuted on all sides – destroyed by ignorant women.”24 Some days later Bjørnson took issue with Brandes’ view: “It was not you who raised the cause of women in the North; Mrs Collett did so long before you and she also brought knowledge of America.”25 Although Bjørnson rightly reminds his friend that he is not without female predecessors in the field of women’s emancipation, he cannot refrain from making the emancipation debate a debate among men. For from whom did Collett get her “knowledge of America”? It was none other than Bjørnson himself, who during his stay in Boston in 1880 had attended the women’s congress 21 22 23 24 25

Andersen and Busk-Jensen, Mathilde Fibiger – Clara Raphael: kvindekamp og kvindebevidsthed i Danmark 1830–1870. Forestier, “Constructive conflict in Swedish feminist periodical culture: a critical reassessment of Sophie Adlersparre and Rosalie Olivecrona’s ‘Editorial schism’ in Tidskrift för hemmet (1859–1885),” 533. Tidskrift för hemmet (tillegnad den svenska qvinnan; tillegnad Nordens qvinnor). Georg and Edvard Brandes, Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, vol. 4, 186. Ibid., 187.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

58

Wennerscheid

held there and enthusiastically reported on it in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.26 What Bjørnson, just like Brandes, deliberately overlooked, however, is that the beginning of the modern women’s movement was not initiated by men but by women. However, although Brandes clearly overestimated his pioneering role in the women’s movement, he made an important contribution to it. 3

First Traces of Brandes’ Interest in Gender Issues and his Translation of Mill’s The Subjection of Women

The first traces of Brandes’ interest in the question of women and gender can be found in a long article he published in 1865 on the acclaimed Danish Golden-Age salonnière and lady of letters Kamma Rahbek. In this text the young Brandes portrays Kamma Rahbek as a woman with “many powers.”27 According to Brandes, however, she did not develop her potential because she clung to her husband’s traditional worldview out of respect for him. Something that we will see more clearly in Brandes’ later portrayal of the women of German Romanticism in Main Currents is already evident here: Brandes is critically aware of hierarchical gender relations and their negative effect on female self-development. Brandes’ early concern with gender issues can also be seen in his theater reviews. In November 1867, when he reviewed Henrik Ibsen’s play Brand (1866) in Danish Monthly Magazine (Dansk Maanedsskrift), he praised the representation of its strong female characters. Less positive, by contrast, was his view of Bjørnson’s drama The Newlyweds (De nygifte, 1865), which ends with a marriage. Brandes criticizes this ending as too romantic, since “it is at the altar where real life begins.”28 A little later Brandes wrote an enthusiastic review of Leonora Christine’s A Memory of Lament (Jammersminde, 1869), a personal and dramatic account of her painful life as a political prisoner in seventeenthcentury Denmark, completed in 1674 but first uncovered and published in 1869. Danish women should read this text, Brandes recommends, to see what “the noblest and most educated of their sex had written.”29

26 27 28 29

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Dagbladet, 16 November 1880. Brandes, “Kamma Rahbek,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 1, 204. Brandes, “Det kongelige Theater. Bjørnson: ‘De nygifte’,” 192–193. Cf. Welsch, Feminism in Denmark: 1850–1875. Brandes, “Litteratur,” 391.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

59

Private letters from this period also show Brandes’ concern about the relationship between the sexes, rigid sexual morality, and repressed sensuality, especially in women. His relationship with the unhappily married Caroline David might also have contributed to his experience of marriage as a problematic institution.30 In addition, experiences from travels abroad were of vital importance. On his journey through Italy in the early 1870s, for example, Brandes perceived the Italian women as sensually liberated from moral constraints, and thus as an antithesis to the sensually repressed Scandinavian woman.31 More decisive than these private experiences, however, might have been Brandes’ intense study of John Stuart Mill’s seminal essay The Subjection of Women (1869). Strongly inspired by his wife, the women’s rights advocate Harriet Taylor Mill, who in 1851 had already published the essay “Enfranchisement of women,”32 the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women in early 1869. It was an immediate success; Brandes began translating the book into Danish as soon as he got hold of it, and managed to publish just a few months later. Brandes never doubted that his translation was of the greatest importance. More than 30 years later, in his autobiography Reminiscences of My Childhood and Youth (1906), he stresses: “In November 1869, I published Mill’s book in Danish and in this manner introduced the modern woman’s movement into Denmark.”33 Later, he explains that his plan was initially to discuss “the subordinate position of women in society” by adopting as a starting point “Søren Kierkegaard’s altogether antiquated conception of woman.” But then he learned that Mill had a much better approach to this topic. “I felt Mill’s superiority to be so immense and regarded his book as so epoch-making that I necessarily had to reject my own draft and restrict myself to the translation and introduction of what he had said.”34 Indeed, the intellectual acuity of Mill’s essay and the vigour with which he put forward his thoughts made the book an ideal starting point for the debate

30 31 32

33 34

Fenger, Den unge Brandes indtil 1872. Veisland, “Georg Brandes and the Modern Project.” In his autobiography, Mill explains that “all that is most striking and profound in what was written by me belongs to my wife, coming from the fund of thought that had been made common to us both by our innumerable conversations and discussions on a topic that filled so large a place in our minds.” Autobiography, 166. Brandes, Reminiscences of My Childhood and Youth, 206. Ibid., 206.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

60

Wennerscheid

on women’s equality. From the very beginning Mill condemns gender inequality in the strongest possible terms, explaining that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.35 As sharply as Mill denounces the patriarchal structures of society enshrined in law, he also attacks the belief in the natural inferiority of women: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”36 Only when both sexes have equal opportunities to develop their faculties freely may natural differences between men and women be discovered. Until then, it would be a mere adherence to prejudices, habits, and conventions to think men superior to women. Mill’s critical engagement with the habits and conventions that naturalized the inequality of women and men had a strong impact on Brandes. As we will see later in his Main Currents, combating prejudices became of utmost importance to him. In other respects, however, Brandes differs from Mill. Mill insistently reminds his readers that few women writers “dare tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear,”37 and thus need men’s unreserved support. Brandes, however, tends to hold back with this kind of support. Instead of referencing Bremer, Collett, and Fibiger in his preface to the translation of Mill’s book, as might have been expected, he fails to mention any female forerunner of women’s liberation, at least not explicitly. Instead, he seems to fall back on an idea of Fibiger’s without crediting her. In Fibiger’s epistolary novel Clara Raphael, the novel’s protagonist, in her fifth letter to her friend Mathilde, states: “But only what is true and free is truly beautiful. As long as we are excluded from independent development, as long as we are subject to prejudice, we cannot live according to our purpose.”38 In his preface, Brandes likewise speaks out in favor of the unconstrained development and growth of women:

35 36 37 38

Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 38–39. Ibid., 46. Fibiger, Clara Raphael. Minona, 42.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

61

Nothing is beautiful except that which unfolds without compulsion. Nothing is beautiful except that which is true and just. That which is subdued, that which is crippled, that which is artificially restrained, is always ungraceful, and equally ungraceful are those things which choke, which restrain, and which subdue.39 Although there is no proof that this passage was inspired by Fibiger, the almost identical wording is striking. In addition, it seems a little strange that Brandes preceded his preface with a motto from a poem by Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Heiberg, one of the most important cultural figures of the time, had initially written a supportive preface to Clara Raphael, but later, when the novel was heavily criticized for its emancipatory idea, he kept silent. About 20 years after Brandes had published Mill’s book in Danish, Mathilde Fibiger’s niece, Margrethe Fibiger, found this strange, too. In 1891, she published a biography of her aunt in which she discreetly pointed out both Heiberg’s and Brandes’ ambivalent roles in relation to Fibiger’s pioneering role in the debate over emancipation. “By a strange irony of fate – for one hardly dares to take it for a joke of the translator? – this book is also handed over to the Danish reading world with a prelude by Heiberg.”40 When Brandes, on the occasion of Margrethe Fibiger’s publication, responded with an article on “Mathilde Fibiger and J.L. Heiberg” in the daily newspaper Politiken in January 1892, he draws the reader’s attention to the fact that Heiberg had not included the preface to Clara Raphael in his collected writings. He also criticizes Heiberg for not having defended the young Mathilde Fibiger in the later Clara Raphael feud. When it came down to it, Brandes stresses, Heiberg “let his lady down.”41 So while Brandes very clearly names Heiberg’s shortcomings here, he passes over his own lack of commitment to Fibiger.42 While Margrethe Fibiger was critical of Brandes not mentioning Mathilde Fibiger in his work, Mathilde Fibiger herself responded enthusiastically to the publication of Brandes’ translation of Mill. Although it is not clear if she read the book itself, or just about it, her attitude towards the book is unambiguous. In December 1869 she wrote: The article in Fædrelandet has interested me particularly, because I find expressed therein an idea which has long been my secret favorite, that 39 40 41 42

Brandes, “Forord,” John Stuart Mill: Kvindernes Underkuelse, v. Fibiger, Clara Raphael. Mathilde Fibiger. Et Livsbillede, 220. Brandes, “Mathilde Fibiger og J.L. Heiberg,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 15, 299. Busk-Jensen, “Mathilde Fibiger. Forfatterportræt.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

62

Wennerscheid

men and women must learn from childhood to regard each other as comrades – in the best sense of the word […]. That such a book has been published, and that a Danish man has stood in the breach and honestly made himself its spokesman at home, is a greater joy than I ever thought I should experience!43 Other feminists of the time reacted positively to Brandes’ publication, too. The Danish author Renna Hauch, who had discussed the woman’s question with Brandes prior to his translation, wrote to him: “You do not know how deep an impression it has made on me and how much it has clarified for me.”44 Furthermore, Aasta Hansteen, a young Norwegian painter and a pioneer in the Norwegian women’s movement, sent Brandes an enthusiastic letter, making his – or rather Fibiger’s? – words her own: “Your statement: only freedom and the free are truly beautiful, speaks to me from the heart. The spirit of enslavement and the fear of enslavement which the long state of slavery has produced in women are very powerful, but it will melt like snow in the sun now that the word of liberation is spoken.”45 Likewise, female literary critics with a feminist agenda spoke out in favor of the book. In the Norwegian newspaper Morgenbladet, Camilla Collett defended Mill’s ideas in an article titled “Emancipation.”46 And in 1872, in Last Papers, a collection of articles and reflections in which she complains about men’s lack of support in the women question, she mentions “Dr Brandes, who with a warm and engaging preface has introduced Stuart Mill to us”47 as an important exception. What is more, in 1871 the Norwegian literary critic, and later co-founder of the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights (Norsk Kvinnesaksforening), Mathilde Schjøtt anonymously published Lady Friends’ Discourse on the Subjection of Women (Venindernes samtale om kvindernes underkuelse, 1871), a work of fiction with a clearly didactic purpose. In the book three female friends ponder the question of whether women can produce great literature at all, or whether they might even write better than men because they are able

43 44 45 46 47

Quoted in Fibiger, Clara Raphael. Mathilde Fibiger. Et Livsbillede, 220–221. Quoted in Fenger, Den unge Brandes, 167. Aasta Hansteen to Georg Brandes, 15 October 1870, quoted in Dahlerup, Det moderne gennembruds kvinder, 95. Cf. Iversen, “When Instinct Looms.” Collett, Sidste Blade. Erindringer og Bekjendelser. Anden og tredie Række, 59. In her Collected Writings (Skrifter, vol. 4), however, published in 1893, where this article is reprinted, Collett deleted the reference to Brandes.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

63

to express female experiences in more true ways. As one important example, they praise George Sand, whose characters “have a psychological truth and power unsurpassed, or not even reached, by any male writer.” Sand can, the character named Fanny continues, “write like a genius, and she does it in a language so sparklingly crystal clear, so perfect in beauty and power, that all living male writers, if they all together would compete with her, could not write as she does.”48 After Fanny has ended her speech, her friend Julie supports her by praising Camilla Collett’s literary style. “Men couldn’t write like women. At least none of our writers use a language like that of the author of The District Governor’s Daughters.”49 Scandinavian women writers of the time draw attention to the fact that there were several female colleagues both outside and within Scandinavia who with great literary skill lamented the subordinate position of women in society. Brandes, however, turned a blind eye to the debate over emancipation among contemporary women within Scandinavia in the years to come. Instead, he became much more interested in historical Continental women writers, from Madame de Staël to Rahel Varnhagen. His lecture series Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature bears eloquent witness to this. 4

Brandes as an Advocate for Strong Women in Main Currents

Georg Brandes’ reputation as a leading figure in comparative literature studies comes from his lecture series Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. Originally published in six volumes between 1872 and 1890, the series was released in revised and translated editions between 1891 and 1898. The first edition, addressed to a Danish audience, aimed to awaken Danish culture from its slumber by comparing it with the more progressive cultural and political movements in Germany, France, and England. In the later editions Brandes broadened his focus, addressing readers from all over Europe.50 In the course of these revisions, he not only removed some polemical remarks and restructured his ideas to make them more appropriate for a European public, but also made some changes in terms of the question of emancipation. In the first volume, Emigrant Literature, Brandes pays special attention to the French author and political theorist Germaine de Staël, commonly known as Madame de Staël. Before turning to de Staël, however, Brandes is concerned 48 49 50

Schjøtt, Venindernes samtale om kvindernes underkuelse, 31–32. Ibid., 33. Dahl, “The Textual History of Main Currents.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

64

Wennerscheid

with a series of male characters who are unhappily in love with young women, for instance Goethe’s Werther. He then pays attention to Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe in Adolphe (1816), who falls in love with an older woman, Ellénore. This woman was partly modelled on Madame de Staël, with whom Constant had a romantic affair. Brandes describes Ellénore as “a completely new type of woman,” namely “the woman of thirty,”51 a term which he took from Balzac to characterize a mature, active, and passionately loving woman. While female characters like Goethe’s Clärchen might love regardless of societal consequences, but do so out of instinct, Brandes stresses that Ellénore acts in full awareness of what she is doing. She challenges society, and her passion is reflective and strong enough to break the unhappy bond with Adolphe. Brandes concludes: Long before Balzac, long before George Sand, there occurs the struggle of woman in literature, her struggle with the status quo and with society, and Eleonore comes to represent this struggle, because she is modelled on the most powerful female figure of the century, on the woman who fought the greatest battle ever fought by a woman in world history with a purely spiritual weapon, in a word, on Mme. de Staël.52 In the 11th chapter of Emigrant Literature, Brandes starts his hymn to Madame de Staël by examining her literary debut, the epistolary novel Delphine (1802), which concerns the female protagonist’s restricted opportunities to love freely. In the Danish edition, Brandes presented the book as a work “which was considered the most immoral and shameful contribution to the justification of divorce,”53 while in the later English edition he more straightforwardly calls the novel “a justification of divorce.”54 The individual’s confrontation with a society hidebound by convention, or as Brandes vigorously puts it, “the female genius in open battle with society,”55 is also the key issue in Madame de Staël’s second novel, Corinne, or Italy (Corinne, ou l’Italie, 1807). It tells the story of Corinne, who has left her homeland, England, to live a free and self-determined life as a singer in Italy. She falls in love with the Englishman Oswald, who returns her love but cannot fully commit to the vivacious Corinne. Trapped in his Protestant sexual morality 51 52 53 54 55

Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 162. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 135. Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 96. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 135.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

65

and his patriarchal view of womanhood, he abandons Corinne and marries a more appropriate Englishwoman. In the English version of his lecture, Brandes explains: Oswald marries “a wife after the English recipe, reserved, ignorant, innocent, silent, a fair-haired, blue-eyed incarnation of domestic duty.”56 In the earlier Danish version of Brandes’ analysis, the concept of domestic duty had been pivotal. Making use of a comparatist argument, Brandes argues that domestic duty is an old-fashioned concept that needs to be deconstructed. His reasoning is as follows: only when one’s own culture is compared with other cultures can one become aware of the relativity of their supposedly universal moral concepts. Since people in the North appreciate a cosy, warm home due to their harsh winters, they have developed the idea that domesticity is a virtue, and a virtue that is embodied and ensured by women. In countries where people do not need artificial warmth to feel comfortable, by contrast, concepts of home and domesticity play a less important role: “in the full magnificence of sunlight, all the beautiful ideals, duties and virtues reveal themselves to be – not untrue but relative.”57 In the English version, Brandes broadens the focus of his argument and emphasizes comparative literature as a means leading “to national self-critique and to emancipation from national prejudices.”58 Using Madame de Staël as a prime example, he explains that her importance in cultural history is due not only to her portrayal of the Italian woman as “a model of independence,”59 but also to her fundamentally comparative approach. In her outstanding writings on various cultures “she enabled the French, English, and German peoples to take a comparative view of their own social and literary ideas and theories.”60 Brandes’ fascination with women who defy societal norms in order to live according to their idea of a free and passionate love is also evident in the second volume of his lecture series, The Romantic School in Germany (Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 1873). Here, however, his interest is not primarily in female authors but in women who have played an important role in male authors’ work. In the third chapter in the Danish version, which, with reference to a poem by Friedrich Schiller, is entitled “Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft,” and the first one in the English edition, “The pioneers of romanticism,” there is a long passage on Charlotte von Kalb’s relation to Schiller. Brandes also discusses in detail Jean Paul, who took von Kalb as a model for the character Linda in his 56 57 58 59 60

Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 141. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 151. Jelsbak, “Brandes before Main Currents.” Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 141. Ibid., 136.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

66

Wennerscheid

novel Titan (1800–1803). Based on these two authors’ depictions of Charlotte von Kalb, Brandes portrays her as a woman with a strong aversion to matrimony and highlights her statement that “Love needs no laws.”61 Similarly, he emphasizes that free-spirited Pauline Wiesel, and especially the Jewish women Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Hertz, and Dorothea Schlegel, all spoke out against any coercion in matters of love. When it comes to male authors, things look different. Brandes on the one hand stresses that Friedrich Schlegel in his controversial novel Lucinde (1799) is critical of the institution of marriage, and counterposes to it the ideal of romantic love. On the other hand, he criticizes Schlegel for getting lost in a world of art. Brandes concludes that “the women of this period” are more virile than the men because “they persist in treating from the social standpoint questions which the men desire to treat only from the literary.”62 However, Brandes expresses ambivalence towards the literary talent of the women. Although he repeatedly quotes from their published letters, thus giving them a voice,63 he underlines that they were superior to their partners “in everything but talent.”64 At the end of his article, he laments the fact that the women in question ultimately succumbed to the romantic attitudes of their partners. The ideal of free love, Brandes concludes, will not come to fruition “until the intellectual and social emancipation of woman has advanced so far that she is independent of social prejudices, knows her own needs, and is in a position to supply them.”65 Brandes’ clear words in favor of women’s liberation from society’s expectations aroused mixed feelings among his readers. While younger women felt encouraged by his ideas, older male authors reacted with indignation. A good example of this is H.C. Andersen, who, while reading volume two of the series, made the following entry in his diary on 1 August 1874: “Reading Brandes’ book, he says nothing reprehensible himself, but by quoting he sows poison in other writings, he promotes free love, the abolishment of marriage, and these are lectures mostly for young girls.” Two days later, he notes: “Miss Hariette holds on to it and him.” And finally, on 4 August, he writes: “Ended Brandes’ book; there is a German poem, it lies like a flower in the book, a horny flower. A young girl

61 62 63 64 65

Brandes, The Romantic School in Germany, 25. Brandes, The Romantic School in Germany, 88. Sandberg, “The Romantic School in Germany (1873). An introduction to the background, themes and reception of the book.” Brandes, The Romantic School in Germany, 96. Ibid., 108.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

67

who is randy and longs to be embraced by ein süsser Knabe and is angry with her mother because she must not expose the beauties nature has given her.”66 Throughout the next three volumes, Brandes repeatedly refers to gender issues and women writers, but no longer gives them a central place. In volume three, The Reaction in France (1903) (Reactionen i Frankrig, 1874), he mentions Barbara Juliane de Krüdener. In volume four, Naturalism in England (1903) (Naturalismen i England, 1875), he refers to Teresa Guiccioli. And in volume five, The Romantic School in France (1904) (Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 1882) Brandes makes fun of “the School of Balzac” for furthering conventional morality, highlighting George Sand’s bold treatment of moral questions instead. In volume six, Young Germany (1905) (Det unge Tyskland, 1890), published eight years after volume five, the women’s question is broached again. However, Brandes’ tone is more critical than before, not to say contemptuous. Although he devotes much energy to describing Rahel Varnhagen, Bettina von Armin, and Charlotte Stieglitz as “great women who ruled men’s minds during the period under consideration,” he stresses that none of them “produced a work of art; not one of them even attempted to. […] Their natures are unplastic, evasive; the contours of their spiritual lives are blurred and indistinct.”67 In Brandes scholarship, the thesis has been put forward that his attitude to women’s issues changed due to his negative experience in the so-called morality feud.68 Disappointed by the seemingly reactionary stance of his female contemporaries on issues of sexual morality, the argument goes, Brandes distanced himself from the women’s movement in its entirety. Although this argument is not completely wrong, the struggles of the 1880s are complex and require closer examination. 5

Brandes’ Role in the Morality Feud

The debate on sexual morals engaged many of the leading Scandinavian intellectuals and authors. Reaching its peak in the mid-1880s, it had begun years before. In 1877, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson addressed women’s disquiet in marriage 66

67 68

H.C. Andersen, Andersens Dagbøger 1873–1875, 300–301. The poem Andersen refers to is taken from Novalis’ fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). While Brandes had praised the poem as “lovely” (The Romantic School in Germany, 266), Andersen seems to be shocked by it. Brandes, Young Germany, 277–278. Bredsdorff, Den store nordiske krig om seksualmoralen.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

68

Wennerscheid

in his novel Magnhild. Two years later, in his play Leonarda (1879), he again put the issue on the agenda. Henrik Ibsen did the same in his drama A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879). The key question here was whether it really should it be enough for women to be the playmates of their husbands, or whether they had the right, or maybe even the duty, to live independently. While in A Doll’s House Ibsen was mostly concerned with the issue of a woman’s personal development, two years later, he made sexuality a subject of discussion. In his play Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881) he relates a dead husband’s pre- and extramarital relationships and his wife’s later efforts to deal with the devastating consequences of them. Although both of Ibsen’s plays stirred up violent rows, it was not Ibsen but Georg Brandes’ brother Edvard Brandes who, in his play A Visit (Et besøg, 1882), dared to take a new look at the subject of premarital sexuality – though as an issue not of male but of female sexuality. A Visit is about a man who considers himself progressive, but when he finds out that his wife had a premarital affair, he is upset. The play’s message that women ought to be entitled to the same sexual freedom as men elicited a heated controversy. It found its most outspoken criticism in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s play A Gauntlet (En hanske, 1883), in which the young girl Svava refuses to marry someone who is not as chaste as she is. Bjørnson’s argument in favor of premarital male chastity gave rise to manifold protest, especially among men. The Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg launched a literary attack on Bjørnson’s view of chastity in “The Rewards of Virtue” (Dygdens lön), which was part of the short story collection Married (Giftas, 1884). By telling the story of a man who practices chastity, albeit at the expense of his health, Strindberg argues for sexual needs to be lived out freely. In the same year, the Norwegian author Arne Garborg published a collection of stories, Stories and legends (Forteljingar og Sogur, 1884), in which he challenged Bjørnson’s sexual morals. After Garborg had set out the theme of his book in a letter to Brandes, Brandes supported his friend and colleague by publishing a long essay on Garborg’s authorship in the Danish magazine The Spectator (Tilskueren) in January 1885. In the last part of this essay, Brandes praises Garborg for lampooning “lay preachers who seem more and more stuck in the task of improving the quality of the celibacy of the nonmarried.”69 In this context, he pays special attention to Garborg’s story “Youth” (Ungdom), an ironic account of the young Jens, who is engaged to a young lady but enters into a relationship with 69

Brandes, “Arne Garborg,” 20.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

69

a cheerful peasant girl. When Jens’ fiancée sends him Bjørnson’s A Gauntlet and admonishes him to question himself, he breaks off the engagement. In accordance with Garborg, Brandes makes the case for male sexual drives to be set free. Asceticism, “as practiced by the great majority of unmarried women of the higher classes, is unfortunate, unnatural, a sacrifice which is often brought to a worthless prejudice.”70 What both Brandes and Garborg overlook in their critique of female reluctance to lustfully act out sexuality, however, is that this reluctance was not so much a tribute to morality but the consequence of a specific female experience. Unwanted pregnancies and the corresponding social consequences on the one hand, and aversion to a male body that only knows its own pleasure on the other, made women experience sexuality as a threat.71 In fiction, this physical discomfort of women is portrayed in a particularly strong way in the Norwegian Amalie Skram’s novel Constance Ring (1885) and the Swede Victoria Benedictsson’s novel Money (Pengar, 1885). Entering marriage without any sexual knowledge, Money’s female protagonist is profoundly shocked on her wedding night, when she experiences the husband as a disgusting beast – a dragon that destroys the woman’s body. Later, she becomes attracted to her smart and handsome cousin Richard but rejects surrendering to the force of her own sexuality. Finally, she breaks off her marriage and decides to work as a gymnastics teacher in Germany. The novel ends triumphantly, describing Selma as a woman full of vitality: “And her whole being was filled with the youthful selfishness that cries, ‘Move along, please, I want to live!’”72 Brandes later distanced himself from this novel. He also had strong reservations about another text that discussed female sexuality from a female perspective: the Swede Mathilde Malling’s controversial short story “Pyrrhic Victories” (Pyrrhussegrar, 1886). Mathilde Kruse, whose married name was Malling but who was known in her day under the pseudonym Stella Kleve, was an educated and widely traveled woman. She debuted with her short story “Flirtations” (1884), which she later expanded into her debut novel Berta Funcke (1885). In November 1886, Malling, under her pseudonym Stella Kleve, published “Pyrrhic Victories” in the Swedish women’s journal Forward (Framåt). “Pyrrhic Victories” is about a young woman named Märtha, who is diagnosed as being terminally ill. The doctor identifies her erotic fantasies, which she never lived out but always tried to repress, as the reason for her illness. Märtha 70 71 72

Brandes, “Arne Garborg,” 22. Iversen, “When Instinct Looms.” Benedictsson, “Pengar,” Samlade Skrifter av Ernst Ahlgren, vol. 3, 239.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

70

Wennerscheid

recognizes that her supposed victories are Pyrrhic victories, that is, ones that take such a heavy toll on the victor that they are tantamount to defeat. What makes the short story special, in both feminist and literary terms, is first the critique of restrictive sexual morality, but even more so the explicit portrayal of female desire. Looking back on her life, Märtha’s past erotic experiences and fantasies that had been sparked by physically attractive, good-looking men come to life again: “How the blood rushed and burned in her veins, how the strength grew in her young body!”73 A year after Malling’s short story caused a stir in Sweden, it also triggered a heated debate in Denmark. In April 1887, the Danish feminist Elisabeth Grundtvig, in an article published in the Danish Women’s Society’s magazine Women and society (Kvinden og samfundet), considered “Pyrrhic Victories” a text in which “the sensuous moment in love” drives real love away.74 Moreover, Grundtvig further criticized her Swedish colleague for ignoring the fact that due to “centuries of chastity” women today have a “more chaste nature than men.”75 A little later, Grundtvig repeated her ideas in a lecture held for the Danish Women’s Society and made the case for men taking the chaste woman as a role model to develop their “higher nature.”76 Several women joined Grundtvig’s argument,77 while others warned against exaggerating spirituality. “I guess we’re no angels,”78 the Danish artist Charlotte Sannom slightly mischievously corrects her fellow females. It is this wording that Brandes took as the starting point for his harsh attack on Elisabeth Grundtvig and other female writers. He published three articles attacking these women’s sexual morals. In the first article, entitled “Angels” (Engle), Brandes used the pseudonym “Lucifer” and made fun of the women’s claim that they are moral, but no angels. Yes, indeed, he answers back: women are angels, because they negate their sexuality. However, he wonders, where then do the children come from? The women’s understanding of sexuality as pure spirituality “supports all the old and beautiful legends of the stork. […] But it may be a little at odds with the natural science which certain ‘apostles of free love’ insist upon.”79 In his second article, “The Eighth Commandment” 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Malling, “Pyrrhussegrar,” 5. Grundtvig, “Erotik og Kvinder. Et Par Ord om og i Anledning af Stella Kleves ‘Pyrrhussejre’,” 33–37. Ibid. Grundtvig, “Nutidens sædelige Lighedskrav.” Aggersborg, “Det sædelige Lighedskrav.” Sannom, “Et Bidrag til Forhandlingen om det sædelige Lighedskrav.” Brandes, “Engle,” 455.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

71

(Det ottende bud), Brandes characterizes Grundtvig’s article on sexual equality as silly and embarrassing, simple-minded and loose. And, even worse, Grundtvig’s focus on the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” leads her to ignore the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”80 The person against whom false testimony was given here is, of course, Brandes himself. Portraying him as immoral, as Grundtvig did, means distorting the facts. The only thing he wanted to point out, Brandes defends himself with obvious eagerness, was that an excessive demand for chastity would put a stop to all emancipatory tendencies. As women like Elisabeth Grundtvig adhered to traditional ideas of female chastity, her attitude cannot be considered “modern” in Brandes’ sense. Nevertheless, as a woman who made her voice heard, she contributed significantly to the modernization of Danish society. It is her “female complaint” in Lauren Berlant’s sense that helps to ensure that public space becomes a modern space of female debate culture and self-empowerment. Brandes’ concept of modernity therefore proves to be a rather male, biased concept of modernity. 6

Brandes as Literary Critic

When in 1883 Brandes published his book Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Literary Portraits (1886) (Det Moderne Gjennembruds Mænd. En Række Portrætter, 1883), he considered only male authors to be representatives of the “modern style of mind,”81 among others Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen, and Erik Skram. This gender bias roused Danish literary scholar Pil Dahlerup’s anger and motivated her to bring to the fore a broad range of Danish women writers who debuted in the time Brandes identified as the Modern Breakthrough, that is, 1871 to 1891, but had been overlooked by him, or even deliberately excluded from his canon of modern authors. In addition, Dahlerup accused Brandes of having discouraged contemporary women writers by not reviewing their books, arguing that Brandes “prefers women who write love stories to women who write about rebellion and women’s art.”82 Dahlerup’s assertions have not gone unchallenged. In a critical comment on her thesis, Hans Hertel stressed that Brandes’ reason for not including female writers in Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century was not due to its patriarchal bias but because he only included already renowned authors. Such 80 81 82

Brandes, “Det ottende bud.” Brandes, Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Literary Portraits, vii. Dahlerup, Det moderne gennembruds kvinder, 89.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

72

Wennerscheid

renowned authors, however, were not to be found among the female authors of the time.83 Some years later, in his Brandes biography, Jørgen Knudsen countered Dahlerup’s claim that Brandes failed to review any female authors. He concedes that this might be true for the period from 1871 to 1891. But after 1891, Knudsen stresses, Brandes reviewed a surprising number of books by women.84 In 2004, the Norwegian literary scholar Janet Garton backed Knudsen’s argument by pointing out that the decisive factor for Brandes was an author’s significance, not her gender. More specifically, concerning Brandes’ relation to Amalie Skram, Garton argues that his reluctance to review any of Skram’s novels was because she had “developed a different view of literature’s mission.”85 Skram’s focus on women’s miserable lives simply did not fit with Brandes’ interest in socially engaged literature. This heated debate illustrates that it is no easy undertaking to specify Georg Brandes’ attitude to gender issues. Not only did his attitude change several times in the course of his long life; it also changed according to whom he was speaking and in what role he was doing so. This ambiguity is particularly evident in his work as a literary critic. To make matters worse, the huge number of reviews he wrote makes it almost impossible to discern clear patterns. However, as the following examination will show in more detail, one pattern stands out. In line with the tendency seen so far, namely that Brandes has a pronounced aversion to anything related to “female complaint,” it is mainly books by and about “strong women” that he writes positively about. More specifically, he finds it difficult to praise texts by female authors in which the relationship between the sexes is lamented as one of oppression. In contrast, he is much more sympathetic to texts in which strong women, despite their difficult social situation, do not blame men for their problems. Furthermore, he shows the greatest respect for strong women who succeed in the world of science. And he seems particularly fond of female authors who do not overvalue their abilities, but rather evaluate women’s creative achievements with reservation. From the wealth of material reflecting these trends, I have selected for closer examination those that are particularly interesting from a comparative perspective: Brandes’ reviews of books by Swedish women authors. In December 1887 Brandes published a long article on “Ernst Ahlgren (Fru Victoria Benedictsson),” starting with a critical account of her novel Money: “Money is a rather brave book, but it ends in a showdown, and there 83 84 85

Hertel, “Det moderne gennembruds kvinder. En kritisk kommentar.” Knudsen, Georg Brandes: symbolet og manden 1883–1895, 526–531. Garton, “Georg Brandes og nordiske kvinneforfattere: Amalie Skram og hennes samtidige,” 206.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

73

have now been so many showdowns between woman and man in literature that we are tired of them.”86 Even more dismissively, he characterizes Mrs Marianne as “a cautious book and much too broad.”87 He much prefers Benedictsson’s collection of short stories, Folk life and Short Stories (Folklif och Småberättelser, 1887), which he praises as “worthy of a genuine artist.” He also praises her “sense of humor” and compares her “boldness to portray real life” with that of established Danish male authors like Henrik Pontoppidan.88 At the end of the article, commenting on Benedictsson’s short story “Dispute” (Tvist, 1886), which gives a critical account of the relation of the sexes, his tone becomes contemptuous again. Perhaps, he speculates derisively, Benedictsson published this text in the Danish periodical The Spectator (Tilskueren) “to give the Danes a proof of what she cannot and must not write.”89 Two years later, in 1889, Brandes introduced the Danish public to Russian mathematician and writer Sonja Kovalevsky, who in 1885 was appointed a professor of mathematics at Stockholm University. Brandes portrays her as “a great example of the genius so uncommon in women in the field of exact science.”90 In a second article, published in 1892, Brandes praises Kovalevsky’s latest novel Vera Vorontzof, a gripping account of a young woman’s love that is as irrational as it is self-sacrificing. Brandes is clearly touched by a story that is told “with a sober and modest artistry.”91 In the same year, Brandes also reviewed Anne-Charlotte Leffler’s collection of short stories From Life (Ur lifvet, 1890), which he characterizes as “a piece of psychology of very high rank”.92 Likewise, he is impressed by Leffler’s biography (1892) of her friend Kovalevsky. Brandes’ comparative and cross-cultural approach is reflected in his praise of the book as one that “comes around with breath of a richer external and internal life than that which is generally lived in the Nordic countries, and the reading public should thus overcome the prejudice against buying Swedish books, which is still prevalent in Denmark; for writings like this should be read in the original language.”93 At the end of his long article, Brandes notes that Leffler, originally a feminist, became an author critical of feminism. Influenced by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Mill’s The Subjection of Women and “the polemical attitude against the male sex taken by several 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

Brandes, “Ernst Ahlgren (Fru Victoria Benedictsson),” 679. Ibid. Ibid., 680. Ibid., 681. Brandes, “Sonja Kovalevsky,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3, 682. Ibid., 685, 687. Brandes, “Anne-Charlotte Leffler,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3, 689. Ibid., 691–692.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

74

Wennerscheid

women writers, which had something contagious about it,” her work first had “an aggressive tone,” but later, Brandes stresses, did she break with the restrictive feminist framework and wrote “beyond any program.”94 In 1893 Brandes wrote a detailed review of Selma Lagerlöf’s debut novel The Story of Gösta Berling (Gösta Berlings saga, 1891), which he admires for its “unique tone” and “the originality of style.”95 At the very end of the review, however, Brandes patronizingly recommends that Lagerlöf write more realistically in the future. In the same year, Brandes also provided his Danish readers with a long portrait of the Swede Ellen Key, who had just published an essay on her recently deceased friend Anne-Charlotte Leffler. Brandes praises Key’s study as a mixture of empathetic defence and clear criticism. On the one hand, Key shows “with how many difficulties and prejudices such an unpretentious authoress had to contend in the narrow-minded society,” but on the other, she also names “the obvious limits of women’s creative abilities.”96 That Brandes is aligned with Key’s rather conservative view of women can also be seen in his review of her collection of articles, Tankebilder, published in 1899. Brandes introduces Key as a woman who occupies “a leading and central position in Swedish literature,”97 explaining that such an intellectual but nevertheless passionate and warm-hearted female writer is missing in Denmark. Brandes is particularly enthusiastic about Key’s historical knowledge, on the one hand, and her moderate view of gender relations, on the other: Most clearly her nature reveals itself to the reader when she talks about women. She has the highest ideas about the role of women in the order of human life, and she has the most human ideas about it. One cannot speak more beautifully, more purely, and more bluntly of the relations between man and woman than she has done.98 Similarly, in his 1895 review of Swedish novelist Mathilda Malling’s historical novels A Novel about the First Consul (En roman om förste konsuln, 1894) and The Governor’s Wife (Guvernørens Frue, 1895), Brandes stresses both the author’s historical approach and her ability to represent loving women. While Brandes downplays Malling’s early feminist authorship by calling the debate about “Pyrrhic Victories” a bagatelle, and the women’s magazine Forward which had 94 95 96 97 98

Ibid., 697, 699. Brandes, “Selma Lagerlöf,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3, 715. Brandes, “Ellen Key,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3, 701. Ibid., 704. Ibid., 707.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

75

published the short story a “poor, little Swedish magazine,”99 he elaborates more positively on Malling’s new books, published after a break of six years. Concerning Brandes’ comparatist approach, it is remarkable how much he emphasises the fact that the books were Swedish, but published in Copenhagen, and that he is therefore happy “that Denmark has a small share in it.”100 At the end of his overall very positive review, he engages in a downright literarypolitical act by expressing his hope that “this good novel [will] soon be published in Danish.”101 The patterns of appreciation and rejection worked out so far can also be found in many of Brandes’ other reviews. A few selected examples will illustrate this before concluding. In 1904 Brandes publishes a collective review of the Russian author Anna Aníchkova, presented by Brandes under her pen name Ivan Strannik, and the French writer Jeanne Marni. Both women had written novels that Brandes explicitly presents as “women’s books.” What he likes about these books is that the passionate female protagonists suffer from the insensitivity of their husbands, but are nevertheless portrayed as passionate and strong.102 This fascination with strong female characters is also reflected in many of Brandes’ later reviews of Danish novels. In 1894, he reviewed Erna JuelHansen’s novel Terese Kærulf (1894), presenting the female protagonist as an “utterly precious and brave little human being”103 who fights against inner and outer problems but never loses faith in the possibility of liberation, and thus finally succeeds in reconciliating love and work. Likewise, in his review of Agnes Henningsen’s play The Unconquerable (Den Uovervindelige, 1904), he portrays Henningsen’s female protagonist as “a rich and joyful woman” who is strong but nevertheless “conveys a sweet friendliness.”104 7

Conclusion

Although, for reasons of clarity and differentiation, a distinction has been made between Brandes’ various roles – translator, literary historian with a strong comparatist interest, advocate of morally unrestricted sexuality, and 99 100 101 102 103 104

Brandes, “Mathilda Malling,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3, 710. Ibid., 708. Ibid., 711. Brandes, “Kvindebøger,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 14, 301. Brandes, “Erna Juel-Hansen,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 15, 312. Brandes, “Agnes Henningsen (Den Uovervindelige),” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 15, 280.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

76

Wennerscheid

literary critic – these roles merge into one another. In nearly every text Brandes wrote he tried to promote authors whose work “exemplified his call for activist literature.”105 This effort is evident in his translation of Mill’s text on women’s emancipation, as well as in his account of European literature between the French Revolution and 1848. His polemic contributions to the debate on sexual morality in the 1880s had the same goals. He challenged entrenched structures and habits to advance the unfettered development of the individual and therefore of society. However, although Brandes saw himself as a supporter of the women’s movement, in his Main Currents the only female author he treats in any details is Madame de Staël, who fits with his idea of a socially critical author. He cannot find any significant woman writer in his own time who was ready to support his view of modernity, especially in the North. While Brandes supported certain forms of female empowerment, especially when it came to women of the past, he was prejudiced against women writers who championed the cause of women differently than the way he thought was right. Women writers who complained, who demanded strict sexual morality, or who poignantly criticized gender inequality were anathema to him. However, it was these women’s voices, raised for the empowerment of women, who made a significant contribution to transforming the public sphere into a more gender equitable one. New topics and perspectives on women’s issues emerged and the tone of the public debate became more intimate. Although women writers like the Swede Victoria Benedictsson and the Dane Elisabeth Grundtvig did not align with Brandes’ understanding of “modern love,” they undoubtedly pursued something that we consider modern today. By venturing out into the literary public arena and sparking debates across the Nordic countries, they made it more multi-voiced and more international. To sum up, Brandes’ attitude towards gender issues in general and to women who made their voices heard in public in particular was neither unambiguous nor unchangeable. On the contrary. It changed, not least depending on the role he was playing in the literary field at a given time. To complete the picture shown here, however, it would have been necessary to examine many more of his roles. For example, Brandes’ extensive correspondence deserves closer attention. Furthermore, Brandes’ relationship with the women in his private circle, his wife and his mother, would also be interesting to examine. And what exactly is his relationship to men in general, and to male authors in particular? To Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, for example, or to H.C. Andersen, whom he

105

Allen, “Georg Brandes in Berlin: Marketing the Modern Breakthrough in Wilhelmine Germany,” 468.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

77

reproached for their own ambivalences and gender-related insecurities? And finally, what about Brandes’ relationship to himself – to his own masculinity and sexuality?106 These important questions remain to be addressed on another occasion. Bibliography Aggersborg, Pauline: “Det sædelige Lighedskrav,” Kvinden og Samfundet 3/5 (1887): 105–108. Allen, Julie K.: “Georg Brandes in Berlin: Marketing the Modern Breakthrough in Wilhelmine Germany,” Scandinavian Studies 61/4 (2019): 459–481. Andersen, Tine and Lise Busk-Jensen: Mathilde Fibiger – Clara Raphael: kvindekamp og kvindebevidsthed i Danmark 1830–1870. Copenhagen: Medusa, 1979. Benedictsson, Victoria [Ahlgren, Ernst]: Pengar [1885], Samlade Skrifter av Ernst Ahlgren, vol. 3. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1919. Berlant, Lauren: “The Female Complaint,” Social Text, 19/20 (1988): 237–259. Berlant, Lauren: The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne: “Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson,” Dagbladet, 16 November 1880. https: //www.nb.no/items/67314750e99f13a310fc26dd39774f1f1f?page=0. Brandes, Georg: “Kamma Rahbek” [1865, 1868], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 1. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1899, 187–214. Brandes, Georg: “(on Bj. De nygifte),” Illustreret tidende, 28 February 1869, 192–193. Brandes, Georg: “(on Jammers Minde),” Illustreret tidende, 8 August 1869, 391. Brandes, Georg: “Forord,” in: John Stuart Mill, Kvindernes Underkuelse. Paa Dansk ved Georg Brandes. Anden Udgave. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1869, iii–ix. Brandes, Georg: “Introduction to Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature [1872],” translated by Lynn R. Wilkinson, pmla 132/3 (2017): 698–705. Brandes, Georg: “Arne Garborg,” Tilskueren 2/1 (1885): 1–24. Brandes, Georg: Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. Literary Portraits. Translated by Rasmus B. Anderson. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1886. Brandes, Georg: “Ernst Ahlgren (Fru Victoria Benedictsson)” [1887], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900, 679–681. Brandes, Georg: “Engle” [1887], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 13. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1903, 452–455.

106

Von Schnurbein, “Fienden i speilet – maskulinitet og jødiskhet hos Georg Brandes.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

78

Wennerscheid

Brandes, Georg: “Det ottende bud” [1887], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 13. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1903, 455–461. Brandes, Georg: “Sonja Kovalevsky” [1889, 1893], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900, 682–688. Brandes, Georg: “Anne-Charlotte Leffler” [1889], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900, 689–699. Brandes, Georg: “Mathilde Fibiger og J.L. Heiberg” [1892], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 15. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905, 298–302. Brandes, Georg: “Ellen Key” [1893, 1899], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900, 700–707. Brandes, Georg: “Selma Lagerlöf” [1893], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900, 715–718. Brandes, Georg: “Erna Juel-Hansen” [1894], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 15. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905, 311–314. Brandes, Georg: “Mathilda Malling” [1895], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900, 708–714. Brandes, Georg: The Emigrant Literature. London: William Heinemann, 1901. Brandes, Georg: The Romantic School in Germany. London: William Heinemann, 1902. Brandes, Georg: The Romantic School in France. London: William Heinemann, 1904. Brandes, Georg: Young Germany. London: William Heinemann, 1905. Brandes, Georg: “Kvindebøger” [1904], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 14. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1904, 300–302. Brandes, Georg: “Agnes Henningsen (Den Uovervindelige)” [1904], Samlede Skrifter, vol. 15. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905, 278–298. Brandes, Georg: Reminiscences of My Childhood and Youth [1906]. Memphis: General Books, 2010. Brandes, Georg and Edvard: Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, vol. 4, edited by Morten Borup. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1939. Bredsdorff, Elias: Den store nordiske krig om seksualmoralen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1973. Bremer, Fredrika: Hertha, eller En själs historia: teckning ur det verkliga livet [1856], edited by Åsa Arping and Gunnel Furuland. Stockholm: Svenska vitterhetssamfundet, 2016. Busk-Jensen, Lise: Romantikkens forfatterinder, 3 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009. Busk-Jensen, Lise: “Mathilde Fibiger. Forfatterportræt.” https://tekster.kb.dk/text/adl -authors-fibiger-p-root. Dahl, Per: “The Textual History of Main Currents,” 2019. https://georgbrandes.dk/resea rch/1papers/dahl_mc_textualhistory_res_1papers_en.html. Dahlerup, Pil: Det moderne gennembruds kvinder. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1984. Fenger, Henning: Den unge Brandes indtil 1872. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1957.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Women Writers in Brandes’ Comparative Writings

79

Fibiger, Mathilde: Clara Raphael. Minona. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/Borgen, 1994. Fibiger, Margrethe: Clara Raphael. Mathilde Fibiger. Et Livsbillede. Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsens Forlag, 1891. Forestier, Eloise: “Constructive conflict in Swedish feminist periodical culture: a critical reassessment of Sophie Adlersparre and Rosalie Olivecrona’s ‘Editorial schism’ in Tidskrift för hemmet (1859–1885),” Women’s History Review 30/4 (2020): 533–554. Forsås-Scott, Helena: “Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865),” in: Swedish Women’s Writing: 1850– 1995, Women in Context. Atlantic Highlands: Athlone Press, 1997, 34–51. Garton, Janet. “Georg Brandes og nordiske kvinneforfattere: Amalie Skram og hennes samtidige,” in: Olav Harsløf, Georg Brandes og Europa. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2004, 203–213. Green, Barbara: Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life Women and Modernity in British Culture. Springer International Publishing and Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Grundtvig, Elisabeth: “Erotik og Kvinder. Et Par Ord om og i Anledning af Stella Kleves ‘Pyrrhussejre’,” Kvinden og Samfundet 3/2 (1887): 33–37. Grundtvig, Elisabeth: “Nutidens sædelige Lighedskrav,” Kvinden og Samfundet 3/4 (1887): 81–93. Habermas, Jürgen: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burge. Cambridge Massachusetts: The mit Press, 1989. Hertel, Hans: “Det moderne gennembruds kvinder. En kritisk kommentar,” Kultur and Klasse 13/49 (1984): 116–126. Iversen, Irene: “When Instinct Looms,” Nordic Women’s Literature (2011). https://nor dicwomensliterature.net/2011/10/03/when-instinct-looms. Jelsbak, Torben: “Brandes before Main Currents.” 2019. https://georgbrandes.dk/resea rch/1papers/jelsbak_BrandesBeforeMC_res_en.html. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes: symbolet og manden 1883–1895. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994. McConnaughy, Corrine M., ed.: The Woman Suffrage Movement in America. A Reassessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Sandberg, Anna: “The Romantic School in Germany (1873). An introduction to the background, themes and reception of the book.” 2019. https://georgbrandes.dk /research/2introductions/sandberg_hs2_1873_res_2introductions_en.html. Sannom, Charlotte: “Et Bidrag til Forhandlingen om det sædelige Lighedskrav,” Kvinden og Samfundet 3/5 (1887): 109–112. Schjøtt, Mathilde: Venindernes samtale om kvindernes underkuelse. 1872. Schnurbein, Stefanie von: “Fienden i speilet – maskulinitet og jødiskhet hos Georg Brandes.” Unpublished manuscript.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

80

Wennerscheid

Veisland, Jørgen: “Georg Brandes and the Modern Project,” Studia Humanistyczne Agh 10/1 (2011): 75–86. Welsch, Erwin Kurt: Feminism in Denmark: 1850–1875. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1973. Wilkinson, Lynn R.: “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature),” pmla 132/3 (2017): 696–698.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 4

Georg Brandes and the Writing of Typological Literary History Lasse Horne Kjældgaard An often-noted feature of the opening lectures of Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature is the variety of roles Georg Brandes assumes: that of the novice, asking the audience for forbearance with his lack of experience; that of the dramatist, staging a play of literary history unfolding in six acts; that of the doctor, diagnosing the pathologies of the epoch; and that of the scientist, tracing structures and changes in literary and cultural history. All of these masks are metaphors ripe with meaning and methodological implications, some of which are at odds with each other. It is acceptable for a dramatist to see himor herself as a doctor; but you would not, I guess, want your physician to see him- or herself as a playwright, dramatizing your illness. This is just a crude way of saying that Brandes’ self-declarations are complex and by no means unproblematic. Attention has been given to each of these poses by scholars. Here I wish to focus on the last one mentioned above – the scientific guise that Brandes occasionally adopts, which is a composite professional identity. As a literary historian, Brandes compares himself with several kinds of scientists in his lectures. In the second volume of the Main Currents lectures, The Romantic School in Germany (Danish 1873; English 1902), Brandes likens himself to both a biologist and a medical doctor: “Just as the botanist must handle nettles as well as roses, so the student of literature must accustom himself to look, with the unflinching gaze of the naturalist or the physician, upon all the forms taken by human nature, in their diversity and their inward affinity.”1 With a variation of the Classical Terentian citation Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, Brandes asserts that nothing should be alien to the literary scholar, who must dare to look into all aspects of humanity represented in literature, including the gloomier ones. A similar professional creed had already been presented in the first volume of Main Currents, The Emigrant Literature, where Brandes demands of the 1 Brandes, The Romantic School in Germany, 3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_006 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

82

Kjældgaard

critic a keen eye for following the evolution of literature in a scientific manner: “The literary critic passing from one variety to another of the type of a certain period,” he states programmatically, “resembles the scientist tracking some structure through its metamorphoses in the different zoological species.”2 In making this analogy, Brandes ties his endeavor to one of the most successful scientific disciplines of the age, zoology, and especially the fields of comparative anatomy and comparative embryology, from which Charles Darwin had collected much evidence to support his theory of evolution.3 However, when recapitulating his protocol of investigation in the second volume of Main Currents, Brandes makes it sound like a mineralogical enterprise: “As I follow the more important literary movements from country to country, studying their psychology, I attempt to condense the fluid material by showing how, from time to time, it crystallizes into one or another definite and intelligible type.”4 This new metaphor draws upon yet another scientific discipline, that of geology, which was the other main purveyor of evidence in the emergence of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century. The “deeper movements in literature,” [“de dybere bevægelser i Litteraturen”] as Brandes called them in the original Danish, were flowing around like a kind of literary lava – they were the currents that provided the title for his grand enterprise. But sometimes this “fluid material” would organize itself into solid formations and make literary mountains that rose to prominence. I will return to the name of these formations shortly. But first let me note that it is not difficult to understand why Brandes would want to borrow authority from the disciplines of botany, zoology, and geology, in which great and compelling advances had been made in his time, supporting Darwin’s accomplishments and the paradigm shift they occasioned. Darwin himself had been trained in exactly these three disciplines, and drew on extensive knowledge from them in his revolutionary work On the Origin of Species (1859). Analogies like these therefore matched the ambitions of Brandes’ enterprise. The scientific rhetoric goes hand in hand with that “revolt of the human spirit” which Henrik Ibsen, in a letter incited by the possible consequences of the Franco-Prussian War, had encouraged Brandes to spearhead, and which he pursued persuasively with Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.5 2 3 4 5

Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 63. See Kohn, The Darwinian Heritage, particularly chapters 17 and 18. Brandes, The Romantic School in Germany, 3. Ibsen to Brandes, 20 December 1870, quoted from Georg and Edvard Brandes, Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, vol. 4, 204.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

GB and the Writing of Typological Literary History

83

It is tempting, on this basis, to see Brandes as a precursor to contemporary theorists of literary evolution, for instance Franco Moretti. When speaking of the theoretical ancestry of recent Darwinian approaches to literary history, names like Ferdinand Brunetière and Alexander Veslovsky are, however, much more likely to come up. This is not unfair to Brandes. As we shall soon see, Brandes’ metaphors may also be regarded as a rhetorical mask concealing a more traditional idealistic aesthetic theory. That is one possible reason why contemporary literary theorists interested in learning from evolutionary science do not count Brandes as a canonical source of inspiration, let alone a founding father. Brandes was no die-hard literary Darwinist. Indeed, he was more than that. 1

The Instrumentality of the Type

But how did Brandes proceed? What was the object of study in his investigations that corresponded to the “structure […] in the different zoological species” or to the crystallization of liquids? How did he translate the sciences of botany, zoology, and geology into the field of literary history? The quotations above all point to the same answer: “the type,” that is, fictional characters who incarnate the great historical movements as detected, described, analyzed, and synthesized by Brandes. They were the solid formations arising from the sea of currents that Brandes sought to capture and comprehend. This chapter will examine the type as a device introduced by Brandes in the opening lecture and used especially in the first volume of Main Currents. He uses the type to embody and synthesize multiple literary and cultural tendencies – and to move relatively freely between life and literature. As early as Brandes’ programmatic 1870 piece on Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry iv, Part 1, the concept of the type is called upon to demonstrate the ties between infinitesimal detail and infinite vastness that this character expresses. At this time, Brandes defined his aesthetic ideal as a marriage between these two fundamental concepts of modern calculus, stating the importance of realist detail in the literary depiction of characters: So deep are the roots of Hotspur’s character. Eccentric in externals, he is at bottom typical. The untamed and violent spirit of feudal nobility, the reckless and adventurous activity of the English race, the masculine nature itself in its uncompromising genuineness, all those vast and infinite forces which lie deep under the surface and determine the life of a whole period, a whole people, and one half of humanity, are at work

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

84

Kjældgaard

in this character. Elaborated to infinitesimal detail, it yet includes the immensities into which thought must plunge if it would seek for the conditions and ideals of a historic epoch.6 As a type, Hotspur was interpreted by Brandes as a paradigmatic example of his class, his nationality, his gender, and the entire period: “all those vast and infinite forces […] are at work in this character.” This is a clear indication that Brandes’ typological interests antedate the Main Currents projects, where he would attempt to explore its potentials much further. The “type” is, indeed, one of the two central units in Brandes’ writing of literary history in Main Currents, at least to begin with. It is a category that he prioritizes over individual authors, genres, periods, generations, and so on within the first volume of Main Currents, The Emigrant Literature. The other main unit in this first volume is the “group,” which is supplemented in later volumes by the “school,” as is evident from their individual titles: The Romantic School in Germany, The Romantic School in France. The former is primarily used to refer to fictional characters, and the latter to constellations of authors. It is safe to say that Brandes’ mode of presentation in the first volume is mainly typological. As Bertil Nolin noted in his book on Brandes from 1965, The Good European, “the whole of The Emigrant Literature is a study of a series of types.”7 The most important types in the series are René, from Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity (1802), Werther, from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Saint Preux from Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), Molière’s misanthrope Alceste, from The Misanthrope, or the Cantankerous Lover (1666), and Adolphe from Benjamin Constant’s novel of the same name (1816). These are the most conspicuous literary characters that Brandes treats as types in the first volume of Main Currents. Four of them come from French literature, which befits the topic of the volume – so-called emigrant literature – while the most significant of them, Werther, comes from a German source. Strange as it may seem, Goethe, who never himself experienced involuntary exile, is a prominent figure in the volume.8

6 Brandes, William Shakespeare. A Critical Study, 194. In Brandes’ Kritiker og Portraiter (295), the Danish wording is almost the same. 7 Norlin, Den gode europén: Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893, 319. Where not otherwise noted, translations are my own. 8 For a study of the profound significance of Goethe in Brandes’ work, see Rømhild, Georg Brandes og Goethe.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

GB and the Writing of Typological Literary History

85

But why does Brandes put an emphasis on the type as the primary organizing tool in The Emigrant Literature? How can we understand the allure of the type to Brandes? One explanation is the immediate illustrative quality of types. The literary characters mentioned were probably well known to Brandes’ audience, and they therefore offered him a canonical fictional universe to work with. He was able to deftly detach these characters from their literary works and insert them into the drama of literary history that he staged. Furthermore, this made it possible for Brandes to treat the content of these works rather casually, masking his rather superficial knowledge of them. “Brandes had only read four or five books of the group of authors he intended to lecture on,” Paul V. Rubow once remarked.9 When Brandes begins to imagine alternative – “counter-fictional” – plots for these works, as he sometimes does, his literary history reads as a kind of fan fiction. Such leeway to freestyle was another benefit that the typological method offered him. A third explanation is that the type is an efficient carrier of feelings that are hypostasized as exemplary emotions of the age. Take Goethe’s Werther, for instance, about whom we are told that he “gives expression not merely to the isolated passion and suffering of a single individual but to the passions, longings, and sufferings of a whole age.”10 Werther’s feelings were not the emotional eruptions of a particular individual but representative of much larger and less tangible entities. Such links between type and time in terms of emotions are frequent in the volume, and they show us how well the type worked in the pursuit of Brandes’ ambition to write a kind of literary history of the fluctuating emotions that had swept over and transformed Europe since the first French revolution. Yet a fourth reason is that the type, rather miraculously, could be brought to combine both the dialectical and the evolutionary dimensions of Brandes’ method. The dialectical approach is evident from his division of each literary type into two versions: an ideal form and a distorted caricature. But types also behave in another way in Brandes’ writing of literary history: they evolve and mutate; they live and they die. In other words, they behave like species do in the course of evolution. His types were thus following two models of development that many saw, and still see, as incompatible or even antagonistic: that of evolutionary theory and that of dialectical logic. Typology allowed Brandes to make a compromise between them. Similarly, Brandes was not concerned 9 10

Rubow, Georg Brandes’ Briller, 129. This has been further documented by Fenger in Georg Brandes’ Læreår: Læsning, Idéer, Smag, Kritik, 389. Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 20.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

86

Kjældgaard

with the non-teleological character of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is hard to reconcile with his own liberalistic master narrative of emancipation and progress.11 A fifth reason is that the type could be weaponized in Brandes’ battle against the stagnation of contemporary Danish intellectual and literary life – his campaign to spread the “fear of missing out” among his countrymen. This is a main theme that is announced in the introductory lecture. Symptomatically, Danish literature had been unable to generate any types that were not either “abstractly idealizing” or “abstractly caricatural,” Brandes asserts: “It seems as though we will never succeed in expressing anything typical except in the form of idealizing abstractions or idealizing caricatures.”12 Since the turn of the nineteenth century, Danish literature had been caught in a polarizing pattern, moving from one extreme to the other, generating types that were either too positive or too negative – and constantly missing the mark, so to speak. The ideal figures created by Adam Oehlenschläger, not least Aladdin, and by B.S. Ingemann in his historical novels were followed by a number of negative types: “Heiberg collects character traits from his vaudevilles to compose a portrait of a Copenhagen philistine in A Soul after Death; Paludan-Müller writes his masterpiece, Adam Homo, strictly speaking the only typical Danish novel and one that has something to teach a foreigner: it contains in quintessential form all the feebleness and wretchedness of the reactionary period in European history,” Brandes proclaimed condescendingly.13 This was all that Danish literature could contribute in this act of his drama of European literary history – limpness and miserableness. Brandes’ judgment radiates even from the adverb used in the Danish original, “abstractly,” used twice before, in “abstractly idealizing” and “abstractly caricatural.” This adverb conveys the main problem with Danish literature: that life and literature had been decoupled, so that “one would have to be extremely naive to believe that these types have any relation to our life,” as Brandes writes of the canonized characters of Danish Golden-Age literature.14 The type thus has an additional function, furnishing Brandes with an instrument capable of measuring distances between life and literature.

11 12 13 14

See Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and NineteenthCentury Fiction, Chapters 3 and 4. Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature),” 704. Ibid. Ibid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

GB and the Writing of Typological Literary History

87

These are five of the factors that we may use to explain Brandes’ penchant for typology in the first volume of Main Currents: the illustrative qualities of types, the freedom they gave him to improvise, their emotional conductivity, their peculiar combination of a dialectical and evolutionary logic, and, finally, their snap deployment in the campaign against Danish Romantic literature. All this amounts to an attempt to answer the question of which functions the type performs in Brandes’ writing of literary history. 2

The Genealogy of Brandes’ Typology

We might pose a different question, which does not relate to the instrumental qualities of the type but is more definitional in kind: what characterizes the types that Brandes employs? In what sense did he use the word? What is typical about Brandes’ “types”? René Wellek, who did not think highly of Brandes,15 has observed that the “type as a term has a complex history.”16 He has tried to resolve this confusion by pointing to two lineages in the history of the use of the term: one going back to the German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling, where type means a “great universal figure of mythical proportions,” and another going back to the French authors Honoré de Balzac and George Sand, taking the term in the sense of “social type.”17 That is, one tradition goes back to the philosophy of German idealism, and another to French literary realism. Both of these currents, if you will, were important to Brandes. His connection to the first line goes via Hegel and particularly via Søren Kierkegaard, who often excelled in cataloguing literary types expressing the various conundrums and existential complications that intrigued him. Just think of the impressive parade of literary figures called forth in the first part of Either/Or (1843), such as Antigone, Niobe, Marie Beaumarchais, Margrethe, Donna Elvira, et cetera. The main quality of these types is that they are emanations of spiritual or religious forces, and Kierkegaard never refrained from stressing their “mythical proportions.” In Kierkegaard’s evocations of great literary – or often biblical – characters, their realism is an irrelevant feature. Rather, he employs these characters to communicate paradoxes that concepts cannot capture completely. There is no doubt that Brandes drew much inspiration from Kierkegaard’s giving such characters a new life in his own writings. 15 16 17

Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 357–369. Ibid., 41. Ibid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

88

Kjældgaard

Interestingly, the Danish literary critic P.L. Møller, who was one of Kierkegaard’s greatest adversaries, and in certain respects a precursor of Brandes in Danish literary criticism, had used the “type,” in the idealistic sense and as an indicator of quality, in his book on Modern Comedy in France and Denmark (Det nyere Lystspil i Frankrig og Danmark, 1858). The ability to transfigure individuals into types was a sign of literary excellence in Møller’s history of comedy. This had become increasingly difficult with the growing emphasis on individualism in modern drama: “First and foremost, modern comedy […] seeks to provide an interesting action, and at the same time to preserve the interest and probability of the represented action, [it] produces individual characters instead of types, necessarily losing in ideal power and comic intensity what it has gained in reality, multitude and diversity,” he declared.18 The French dramatist Eugène Scribe was a representative of this development, which had also made its impact on Danish literature. In Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s vaudevilles from the beginning of the 1830s, “one only encounters vividly perceived figures, including perhaps some characters, but no longer any types,” Møller contended.19 The capacity for generating types had, Møller argued, moved to other kinds of artistic expression than drama, one of them being the novel, exemplified by the case of Balzac. He thus explicitly identified the second typological tradition, according to Wellek, which is derived from French literary realism. This tradition claims to distill its types out of social reality. Types in this sense are sociological specimens, or class representatives. They do not originate from spiritual forces but rather evolve from the tenets of a community. Balzac was the most prominent representative and practitioner of this kind of typology and claimed that he found his types in society like zoologists (such as Buffon) found different species in nature, declaring that diversity in society is much greater than in nature: “patient investigators have shown us how interesting are the habits of animals, those of each kind, are, at least to our eyes, always and in every age alike; whereas the dress, the manners, the speech, the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a citizen, a priest, and a pauper are absolutely unlike, and change with every phase of civilization,” Balzac wrote in the preface to The Human Comedy (1842).20 Such were the lifelike and very specific social types that he wanted to study and portray in his novels. 18 19 20

Møller, Det nyere Lystspil i Frankrig og Danmark, 45. Ibid., 201. Balzac, “L’avant-propos de la Comédie humaine,” cited from the translation “Author’s Introduction,” Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1968/1968-h/1968 -h.htm.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

GB and the Writing of Typological Literary History

89

It is easy to see how this understanding of what a type is – or should be – forms the foundation of Brandes’ accusations of abstractness against Danish Golden-Age literature. It is obvious that Oehlenschläger, Ingemann, Heiberg, and Paludan-Müller were not interested in botanizing and depicting social reality in the same manner as Balzac. But at the same time, Brandes resorted to the idealistic notion of the type in his summoning, in the first volume of Main Currents, of a series of literary characters who are all considered epiphenomena in relation to the emotional waves – the currents – which they exemplify. He oscillated, in other words, between the two understandings of what a type is – between idealism and realism. This confusion is not simply Brandes’ own. He inherited it from his greatest source of inspiration in this matter, the French critic Hippolyte Taine, on whom Brandes had written his doctoral dissertation as a theoretical warmup to his Main Currents project. In fact, French aesthetic theory was also very much infused with exactly the kind of philosophical idealism Brandes wanted to turn away from. In 1830, Charles Nodier had published an important essay on literary types in Revue de Paris, “Des Types en littérature.”21 Nodier argued that the invention of literary types that took on a life of their own was the mark of the true creative genius, and he invoked Chateaubriand’s René and Goethe’s Werther as two of his prime examples. Taine later adopted this focus on types. Wellek writes that “Almost all of Taine’s interest in literature focuses on fictional characters because characters are to him the concrete-universal itself, the type, the ideal. The type […] is the most important result of art.”22 That was how Taine saw the type in his important treatise from 1867 with the telling title De l’Idéal dans l’art (On the ideal in art). In this respect, Taine was as much a Hegelian as his Danish disciple. Anticipating Brandes’ bipartitioning, Taine worked with a triadic conception of types (realistic, characteristic, and ideal), which he also – like Brandes – connected with temporal processes and ideas of evolution in literature. So, the type was not at all an easy tool for Brandes to work with, since his general desire was to move away from idealist aesthetics toward a more positivistic approach to literature. Both as a theoretical concept and as a practical tool for writing literary history, it was difficult. And we may note here that similar difficulties were later encountered by György Lukács, when he took up the “type” as “one of the central problems of aesthetics,” as he called it in the first

21 22

Nodier, “Des Types en littérature.” Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 4, 41.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

90

Kjældgaard

volume of his Aesthetics from 1963.23 In the preface to his Studies in European Realism, Lukács wrote: The central criterion of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations. What makes a type a type is not its average quality, not its mere individual being, however profoundly conceived; what makes it a type is that in it all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development, in the ultimate unfolding of the possibilities latent in them, in extreme presentation of their extremes, rendering concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs.24 Such weddings between “the general and the particular” were, after all, easier to celebrate in theoretical discourse than to demonstrate in practical criticism – for Lukács as well as for Brandes. In fact, it was so thorny that Brandes already began giving up this focus on typology by the second volume of Main Currents. In his main introduction to Main Currents that accompanies the new digital edition, Per Dahl writes that: In the course of the six volumes Brandes found it increasingly difficult to maintain the typological matrix, and in looking at the formulations in the revised editions it is often apparent that the abstract ideas and movements that originally functioned as the frame were rewritten as concrete influences and thoughts. This is why many of the thematic chapter headings of the first editions were replaced with author names in the second editions.25 Thus, Brandes not only gave up on his typological ambitions; he also went back and redacted these ambitions when he made revisions of the work for subsequent editions. Reorganizing Main Currents in terms of author names instead of types served to enhance its usefulness as a handbook and, consequently, its marketability. This also becomes evident when the work is examined using digital literary analysis. Table 1 shows the absolute frequency of the word “type” and its different inflected or derived forms in the six volumes of Main Currents. 23 24 25

Quoted from Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 7, 237. Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 6. Dahl, “Hovedstrømningers teksthistorie,” www.georgbrandes.dk.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

GB and the Writing of Typological Literary History

91

figure 4.1 Absolute frequency of “type” in Georg Brandes’ Main Currents

figure 4.2 Topic-modeling of Main Currents

There is no question which of them is the winner: the number of occurrences peaks in volume one, which contains more than double the number of types than volume two, which again includes more uses of the word than the remainder of the volumes. Table two shows a topic modeling of Main Currents, centered around the names of some of the prominent types – René, Werther, Faust – coupled with the word “type.” The x axis is the chronological sequence of the publication of Main Currents, and the peak you see at the beginning of

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

92

Kjældgaard

the axis is again an indication of Brandes’ declining interest in typology over the 18 years it took him to complete Main Currents. 3

The Woman of Thirty

Furthermore, considering it rigorously and more substantially, there is only one type in the first volume of Brandes’ Main Currents that comes close to Balzac’s ideal of the social type. And this type is, in fact, derived from a Balzac novel. Interestingly, she is the only female type in Brandes’ typological gallery, and the only one who is denoted not with a proper name but with a generic appellation: “the woman of thirty,” la femme de trente ans, alluding to the title of the Balzac novel from 1842. “It is in reality an entirely new female type which is here presented to us, a type which many years later Balzac appropriates, styles ‘la femme de trente ans,’ and varies with such genius that he may be said to be its second creator,” Brandes explains, thus stressing the truthfulness of this type.26 She is the older woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man – not as a prelude to marriage but as an alternative to it. In doing so, she enters into conflict with societal norms concerning love, gender, and marriage, juxtaposing hypocritical ideals with social reality. As such, la femme de trente ans did not offer Brandes a mirror, as did many of his other types, who are world-weary young men. In spite of this, he was emotionally and biographically very invested in this type, also because this kind of erotic relationship resembled the liaison between himself and his lover at the time, Caroline David, who was married, 10 years older, and a mother of six.27 She was not at the time a femme de trente ans, but a femme de trente-neuf ans. Nevertheless, she matches in many other respects this type, which Brandes depicts with love, solidarity, and with humor free from sarcasm. Let me illustrate the latter with the dialogue invented by Brandes to display the age discrimination in contemporary literature. It is about a young girl who invokes the various literary genres, which are – very tellingly – personified as male figures. Coyly, she is knocking on their door:

26 27

Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 80. According to Henning Fenger, “One does not understand much of Brandes in the period 1867–1872, if one does not know this relationship, which is the secret code to his critical works, and especially to the lectures of 1871 and 1872.” Georg Brandes’ Læreår: Læsning, Idéer, Smag, Kritik, 119–120.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

GB and the Writing of Typological Literary History

93

‘Who knocks?’ shouts drama in its deep voice. ‘Who is there?’ cries the novel in gentler tones. ‘It is I,’ answers tremblingly the girl of sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the bright smile, and the gentle glance. […] It is I! I am innocent youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts, of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!’ Thus speaks the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: ‘We are busy with your mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we can make something out of you.’28 Beneath this unfortunate jest lies an important transformation of the type of protagonist that was venerated by the literature of the Modern Breakthrough: the experienced woman who calls the deceptions and bigotry of society to account. This type could help implement the literary shift of focus from dreams to reality that Brandes called for. In terms of typological analysis, Brandes’ portrait of la femme de trente ans is a highlight of Main Currents. It probably added to the great focus on this type found in a number of notable works of the Modern Breakthrough – think of Ibsen’s Nora or Hedda Gabler, for instance, who are not repetitions but variations of this particular type. From these examples it would seem that Brandes’ typology made an impact in the life of literature, at least, but what about the practice of literary history? 4

The Potentials of Typology

On the basis of the preceding observations, we may conclude, rather laconically, that typology seems to have been a dead end for Brandes. He did not pursue the typological method much further in Main Currents, and he only used it briefly elsewhere, as for instance in his observations on the role of the medical doctor in the literature of the Modern Breakthrough in his book The Men of the Modern Breakthrough from 1883. Nevertheless, it was a most interesting dead end, as attested by the literary effects of la femme de trente ans. Realizing this, one might wish that Brandes had had romantic experiences with a wider array of social types that could have inspired his literary history, such that there would have been more types like “the woman of thirty” in the 28

Ibid., 81.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

94

Kjældgaard

first volume. That would have made Main Currents even more innovative and experimental than it is. It would probably also have altered its status within the field of literary historiography. Brandes’ Main Currents stands today as a paradigm of narrative literary history. David Perkins famously used it for that purpose in his 1992 book Is Literary History Possible? Commenting upon Brandes’ introductory remarks on the dramatic composition of Main Currents, Perkins remarked “His words indicate how much he was imbued with the conviction that literary history should have the structure and interest of a work of literature.”29 This conviction itself is both inspiring and equivocal. But the typological opening of Main Currents – in the introductory lecture and the first volume – may also offer inspiration for today’s search for new modes of writing literary history that seek to defy the conventionality of narrative literary history – or perhaps just to address other elements than the usual ones mentioned before: individual authors, genres, periods, generations, and so on. Typology may be used for many purposes, scholarly as well as pedagogical. Ideally, typology allows literary history to be more closely connected not only with the fictional universes of literature itself but also with the historical and social forces that condition them. There is a host of types in European literature, in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries too, that deserve further exploration. Think of “the little man” – the kleiner Mann from Hans Fallada’s 1932 novel, who was omnipresent in the literature of the 1930s, and who reappeared in Danish literature in the 1960s. Or all the angry young men in the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, who also heralded important changes in culture. Or, yet, all the anti-heroines of the 1990s chick lit genre, going back to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary. By focusing on such types, which are much more than famous literary characters, one could write new kinds of literary and cultural histories. Or one could make comparative investigations of the dispersal and different interpretations of the type in national literatures and individual works. We could do as Brandes suggested – track the “structure through its metamorphoses,” both diachronically and synchronically. As regards the kleiner Mann, for instance, there is a number of odd variations based on this type in Danish literature, including a crime novel by Hans Scherfig (Den forsvundne Fuldmægtig, The Missing Bureaucrat, from 1938) and a musical comedy with a happy ending (Kjeld Abell’s Melodien der blev væk, The Melody that got lost, 1935), both of the them with lost-and-found plots.30 Or, if you take

29 30

Perkins, Is Literary History Possible?, 29–30. See Rømeling, “Den lille mand” i 30’ernes litteratur.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

GB and the Writing of Typological Literary History

95

the angry young men, who first appeared as a movement in British literature, then it is interesting to see how this type – and the primary emotion it articulated: anger – was transformed by Ole Wivel and Leif Panduro into a product or side effect of the welfare state.31 Or, turning to the protagonist of the chick lit genre, there is the odd creature of Mette Mæt in the 2004 novel Fra Smørhullet, From the Land of Milk and Honey, by Kirsten Hammann, who brilliantly plays with and makes a travesty of this type and the generic and cultural codes that surround it.32 These are just a few examples – rarities found in the cabinet of Danish literature – that I render here to demonstrate that we can still find inspiration in Georg Brandes’ writing of literary history in his Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature. Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de: “L’avant-propos de la Comédie humaine” (1842–48). Cited from the translation “Author’s Introduction,” Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org /files/1968/1968-h/1968-h.htm. Beer, Gillian: Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Brandes, Georg: Kritiker og Portraiter. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1870. Brandes, Georg: The Emigrant Literature. (1906) [1901]. Quoted from www.georgbran des.dk. Brandes, Georg: The Romantic School in Germany. (1906) [1902]. Quoted from www .georgbrandes.dk. Brandes, Georg: William Shakespeare. a Critical Study. London: William Heinemann, 1905. Brandes, Georg and Edvard: Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, edited by Morten Borup, vol. 4. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1939. Brandes, Georg: “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature),” translated by Lynn R. Wilkinson, pmla 132/3 (May 2017): 696–698. Dahl, Per: “Hovedstrømningers teksthistorie,” www.georgbrandes.dk.

31 32

See Kjældgaard, Meningen med velfærdsstaten: Da litteraturen tog ordet – og politikerne lyttede, 188–191. See, for instance, Sharma, “Privileged, Hypocritical, and Complicit: Contemporary Scandinavian Literature and the Egalitarian Imagination.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

96

Kjældgaard

Fenger, Henning: Georg Brandes’ Læreår: Læsning, Idéer, Smag, Kritik. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1955. Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne: Meningen med velfærdsstaten: Da litteraturen tog ordet – og politikerne lyttede. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2018. Kohn, David, ed.: The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Møller, P.L.: Det nyere Lystspil i Frankrig og Danmark. Copenhagen: Gad, 1858. Nodier, Charles: “Des Types en littérature,” Revue de Paris, 1830. Norlin, Bertil: Den gode europén: Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893. Uppsala: Svenska Bokförlaget, 1965. Perkins, David: Is Literary History Possible?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Rubow, Paul V.: Georg Brandes’ Briller. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag, 1927. Rømeling, Hans: “Den lille mand” i 30’ernes litteratur. Copenhagen: Studenterrådets Forlag og Tryk, 1974. Rømhild, Lars Peter: Georg Brandes og Goethe, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1996. Sharma, Devika: “Privileged, Hypocritical, and Complicit: Contemporary Scandinavian Literature and the Egalitarian Imagination,” in: Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 56, no. 4, 2019. Wellek, René: A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 4. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Wellek, René: A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 7. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 5

“The Prose of Life”

Brandes and the Concept of the Prosaic Annegret Heitmann In the context of a topical wave of interest in the idea of world literature and its renewed conceptualization, Georg Brandes’ contribution to this field of studies has been highlighted in several publications.1 As a widely read cosmopolitan scholar, he not only had the necessary knowledge to write a comprehensive comparative literary history; he also reflected on principles of methodology and developed memorable theses. All this is shared by one of our contemporary scholars of world literature, whose works offer a number of parallels to Brandes’ writings. In some ways, he might seem to be a pupil of the scholar to whom this volume is devoted. I am referring to the ItalianAmerican scholar Franco Moretti, who is best known for his method of “distant reading,”2 a founding concept of the digital humanities, but who also later wrote a study of The Bourgeois Between History and Literature,3 which can serve as a topical point of comparison to Brandes’ Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.4 Like Brandes’ monumental work, it is a literary history of the nineteenth century; like Brandes’ text it is concentrated mainly, though not exclusively, on French, German, and English literatures; and again like Brandes, Moretti wishes to outline a teleology – a dominant line or a narrative. As he deals with the whole century, starting with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and ending with Ibsen’s late plays, his choice of texts is somewhat different, but there are overlaps in their references to central texts by Goethe, Walter Scott, and Balzac. The crucial similarity, though, lies in the two scholars’ methodology and conception of literature: in their decision to link literary texts and sociopolitical development, reading literature as a reflection of and contribution to social movements and change and thus outlining their development. In Main Currents it is the underlying pursuit of freedom, reality, and truthfulness which 1 See, for instance, Madsen, “World Literature and World Thoughts: Brandes/Auerbach,” 54–75; Larsen, “Georg Brandes. The telescope of comparative literature,” 21–31. 2 The idea was first formulated in Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature.” 3 Moretti, The Bourgeois Between History and Literature. 4 Hereafter referred to as Main Currents. All translations into English are my own.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_007 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

98

Heitmann

gives Brandes his decisive tool for evaluation; in Moretti it is the development of the bourgeoisie, where freedom is mainly economically defined and therefore highly ambivalent. Although there are striking similarities in Brandes’ and Moretti’s understanding of literature as a social indicator and an important participant in the formation of society, there is one crucial difference. Moretti’s history of “the bourgeois century,” as he calls it, is decidedly a history of prose. He investigates prose literature and prose style, the characteristics of which he finds in certain keywords, borrowing Raymond Williams’ idea of social history as a history of concepts.5 The keywords of nineteenth-century prose are usefulness, efficiency, comfort, convenience, seriousness, and gravity. They all add up to the basic idea of austerity, rationality, and the prosaic as the dominant characteristics of the bourgeois nineteenth century. Moretti sees a correspondence between style and social development: between prosaic efficacy and the spirit of capitalism.6 In this respect he is referring back to Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, which also links the “non-rhythmic rigour”7 of prose style to the depiction of the world in the novel. Just like Moretti, his predecessor Brandes aimed to establish a correspondence between literary texts and social developments. What he is searching for in French, German, and English literatures in the Main Currents, but also in his investigations of Danish and Norwegian authors in The Men of the Modern Breakthrough and other texts, is first and foremost a commitment to reality. Throughout he confronts the sense of reality he seeks with unrealistic idealism, which is most devastatingly described in The Romantic School in Germany, where “reality is thinned out until it evaporates in a perfumed atmosphere,” but it is also diagnosed in the Danish literature of his own day, which he famously described as dealing not with life, but with dreams.8 His well-known credo that literature should provoke debate encapsulates his insistence on this sense of realism. The basic principle of Main Currents is thus a contrast between “the romantic and unrealistic,” the “utter absence of reality” on the one hand and the depiction of reality, “real life,” on the other.9 The teleological drive of Brandes’ “six acts of a great drama,” as he called it, is towards truth and commitment, freedom, and a sense of reality.10 In the volume about 5 6 7 8 9 10

Williams, Culture and Society, xiii. Moretti, The Bourgeois, 17 et passim. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 58. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 254; Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 17. Brandes, Reactionen i Frankrig, 14; Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 22; Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 5. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 12.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Prose of Life

99

Young Germany he quotes Hegel: “What is rational, is real. And what is real, is rational” – for him this serves as a guideline.11 Recent work on Brandes generally sees him as one of the founding fathers of comparative literature; they recognize the teleological drive towards reality and freedom he advocated, and they acknowledge his methodology as influenced by Hegel’s ideas. Sven Erik Larsen wrote that Brandes was “a comparatist with a focus on literature, old and new, as a cultural force in a contemporary perspective, but also a comparatist who bridged between literary studies and topics of broader cultural and political nature.”12 Sven Møller Kristensen has in several publications characterized Brandes as a “citoyen,” who combined “the literary and the political” and strove “for the truthful” and “the topical engagement”; he diagnoses a dependence on Hegel.13 That Hegelian philosophy influenced Brandes’ thinking has, as far as I know, never been disputed. Bertil Nolin, who has worked extensively on the intellectual influences that shaped Brandes’ ideas, says that he “began as a disciple of Hegel and Vischer.”14 Peter Madsen characterizes Brandes’ approach as dialectic in the Hegelian sense and states that “The idea of history as progressive realization of the idea of freedom […] he absorbed from Hegel.”15 There seems to be general agreement about this view; it is also shared by the biographer Jørgen Knudsen and various literary historians. Franco Moretti likewise refers to Hegel in his study of “the bourgeois.” As I have already pointed out, the starting point of his analysis is the definition of a specific prose style using certain “keywords,” such as useful, efficient, and earnest. Moretti claims that prose is the language of the bourgeoisie and that their style and their life is prosaic.16 Thus the word entails a double meaning: prose is not only a way of writing, a style, or a genre; this rhetorical term has also come to mean a diagnosis of culture – a description of the state of the world. We talk about the prosaic as something plain and everyday. The Dictionary of the Danish Language (ods)17 gives its first sense of the word as “1) den almindelige form for talt ell. skrevet sprog, den ligefremme tale og skrivemaade, uden metrisk opbygning; […] ubunden stil” (the general form of spoken or written language,

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 19. Larsen, “Georg Brandes,” 23. Møller Kristensen, “Aktivisten Georg Brandes,” 14–15. Nolin, Georg Brandes, 36. A fuller study of the intellectual influences on Brandes is his Den gode européen. Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893. Madsen, “World Literature,” 67. Moretti, The Bourgeois, 181 et passim. Ordbog over det danske sprog (https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=prosaisk).

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

100

Heitmann

the straightforward speech and way of writing, without metrical structure; […] non-metrical style). The second sense is “2) udtr. for en (alt for) jævn, triviel, hverdagsagtig tænke- ell. handlemaade, optræden olgn” (expression for a (much too) plain, trivial, everyday way of thinking and acting, conduct etc.). And it gives as an example “the men of our time have sunk into the deepest prose,” from Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s Poetical Works. The adjective “prosaic” has in this sense become part of our everyday speech; the ods lists jævn og nøgtern, hverdagsagtig, aandløs, and banal as synonyms. The same connotations can be found in German or English; the oed lists plain, matter-of-fact, commonplace, tame, and dull. We talk about prosaic people, prosaic life, prosaic evenings, or a prosaic dress. Prose and the prosaic are here equated with everyday life: with things, persons, or events that are real and useful but plain, austere, unadorned, and simple. This meaning of the word is in evidence from the eighteenth century onwards. In the nineteenth century, Hegel uses it in his Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art as the foundation for a self-description of modern life, which has become widely known. He bases his characterization of the modern world on the difference between poetry and prose, which according to him constitute “two different spheres of thought.”18 In this sense, the antithesis of poetry and prose for many thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented a discursive figure that could be used to express a whole variety of differences.19 The dichotomy is transferred from the distinction between speech or writing in verse and in prose (“gebundener und ungebundener Rede”)20 to a wide range of cultural fields, encompassing historical, moral, political, social, and medial dichotomies. Karlheinz Barck even accords the function of a “litmus test” to this dividing line.21 For Hegel the “prosaic consciousness” was a key characteristic of the modern world. He links what he calls “modern” to the emergence of the modern state and the development of bourgeois society, which has freed itself from traditional constraints and norms, replacing them with an orientation towards useful and matter-of-fact goals. In this respect the prosaic is equivalent to a state of demythologization – a narrative of disenchantment. On the one hand, the ordinariness of everyday life makes progress and processes of emancipation possible. On the other, the orientation of bourgeois society towards rationality, pragmatism, and economic goals establishes new sets of rules and routines, 18 19 20 21

Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, 976. Mülder-Bach, “Einleitung.” Barck, “Prosaisch – poetisch,” 87. Ibid., 94.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Prose of Life

101

which make the individual dependent on and part of a bigger structure. As a kind of law of the prosaic, Hegel mentions “literal accuracy, unmistakable definiteness, and clear intelligibility.”22 The individual “as he appears in this world of prose and everyday is not active out of the entirety of his own self and his resources, and he is intelligible not from himself, but from something else.”23 He is part of an order and “stands in dependence on external influences, laws, political institutions, civil relationships, which he just finds confronting him.”24 The age of heroes and of ideals is over. It has been displaced by contemporary prosaic conditions: “This is the prose of the world, as it appears to the consciousness both of the individual himself and of others: – a world of finitude and mutability, of entanglement in the relative, of the pressure of necessity from which the individual is in no position to withdraw.”25 These designations bring about a dual challenge for literature: the representation of the disenchanted prosaic world in an adequate form of prose. The style of prose and the genres of prose writing have to develop modes of aesthetic expression to fit the prose of life. Prose is therefore both the medium and the object of the literary representation of the modern world.26 This line of thought is not limited to Hegel’s Aesthetics. Other famous theoreticians of the nineteenth century formulated similar ideas about the dichotomy of prose and poetry. Most interesting are Theodor Mundt’s book Die Kunst der deutschen Prosa (The Art of German Prose; 1837)27 and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s speech given at the academy in Berlin in 1835, entitled “Charakter der Sprachen. Poesie und Prosa” (The Character of Languages. Poetry and Prose).28 Unlike Hegel, who hoped to transcend the prosaic state of the world through his idealist philosophy, Mundt stresses the emancipatory qualities of prose, and liberation from the restraints of tradition.29 Later theoreticians like Adorno, Bachtin, Benjamin, Sartre, and Moretti continue to use the poetry– prose distinction and stress the semantic expansion of the term, in the transfer of the rhetorical concept to conditions of thought and to a diagnosis of culture.30 In Adorno’s dictum “Prose is the ineradicable reflex of the disenchantment of the world in art, and not just its adaptation to narrow-minded 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Hegel, Hegel´s Aesthetics ii, 1005. Hegel, Hegel´s Aesthetics i, 149. Ibid. Ibid., 150. Mülder-Bach, “Einleitung,” 7. Mundt, Die Kunst der deutschen Prosa. Ästhetisch, literaturgeschichtlich. von Humboldt, “Charakter der Sprachen. Poesie und Prosa.” Mundt, Die Kunst, 34. Barck, “Prosaisch – poetisch,” 109–111.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

102

Heitmann

usefulness,”31 the social and the aesthetic aspects of the concept of prose are characteristically intertwined. But the division was not restricted to philosophy; it became a common way of talking about a certain manner of living. Poul Martin Møller writes about “the housewifely bustling and the prosaic remarks of the miller’s wife” (1855), while Søren Kierkegaard discusses “prosaic rationality” (1843), and Karl Gjellerup calls “marriage […] a pretty prosaic refuge” (1891).32 Georg Brandes also uses the terms prose and prosaic in this way, for example when he writes about “the ‘prose’ of life” in the second volume of Main Currents.33 In The Romantic School in France he states: It is not human rights, but the rights of the heart which they understand, and they do not fight against the injustice of life, but its prose. The relationship between society and the individual genius does not – like in France – take the form of a conflict between the revolutionary freedom of the individual and the traditional social necessity, but that of conflict between the individual’s wishes as poetry and politics and social rules as prose.34 Here Brandes clearly refers to the Hegelian distinction between poetry and prose as two different spheres of consciousness, and to prose as “the state of affairs in the world of today.”35 My question now is whether and how Brandes, who was obviously familiar both with Hegel’s philosophy and with the basic ideas derived from Hegel’s antithesis of poetry and prose, used this as a guideline or an argument in his Main Currents. It would be a fitting tool insofar as it assumes a close connection between literature and society, and also presupposes a teleological progression, albeit towards disillusionment. This is the way the idea of prose is used by Moretti much later, with a critical perspective on the ambivalences of the development of the bourgeois and the prosaic world. I would like to find out whether there are traces of ideas about prose and the prosaic in Brandes’ Main Currents, and whether they are used to highlight the literary development towards modernity.

31 32 33 34 35

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 76. Examples given in ods (https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=prosaisk). Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 68. Ibid., 66–67. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, vol. 1, 193.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Prose of Life

103

It is hardly surprising that references to the prosaic do not occur very frequently in the first two volumes. They are primarily devoted to idealistic authors of poetry, especially the volume on German Romanticism; the authors are characterized by their poetic view of the world, which Brandes criticizes for being remote from reality. He rejected the romantic “aberrations of phantasy,” and diagnosed that they wrote “poetry squared, poetry about poetry.”36 Wackenroder’s poetry is “atmosphere and mere sound” while Schlegel’s Lucinde, so Brandes claims, “could not produce any social results.”37 In his disdain for the school, Brandes could be quite witty: “But the sonnets, the tercets and ottava rime can only barely hide the shapelessness of the contents. When the mist is so thick that you can cut it with a knife, then the Romantics cut it into 14 bits and call it a sonnet.”38 When Novalis writes a novel “in which everything in the end dissolves into poetry,” this is an aesthetic ideal directly opposed to Brandes’ program, as well as to the concept of the prosaic.39 “Since, as it says in one of Novalis’ fragments, the present sky and earth are of a prosaic nature and our time an era of usefulness, a poetic day of judgement has first to come about, an enchantment has to be broken, before new life can begin to flourish.”40 With remarks like this, Novalis too, just like Schlegel or Goethe, contributed to the lively prose–poetry debate of the time; Brandes’ analysis takes this up and uses it as a background for his criticism of the romantic concept of the “poetry of infinity.” Several times throughout the volume on The Romantic School in Germany, Brandes uses prose and the prosaic as a foil against which the character of the Romantic poets is projected. On Schlegel’s Lucinde, he writes: “Against a background of the deepest disdain for the prose of reality and all relations of bourgeois society, the main characters of the book figure as speaking silhouettes.”41 Similarly, his view of Hoffmann’s story Der goldene Topf operates with the poetry–prose distinction in order to stress that the Romantic diction is remote from reality: Read, for example, Hoffmann’s tale about ‘The Golden Pot’ and listen to how the voices sound out of apple baskets, how the leaves of the juniper bush and flowers sound and sing, how bell-pulls turn into snakes in front 36 37 38 39 40 41

Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 75; Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 76. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 136, 83. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 257. Ibid. Ibid., 83.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

104

Heitmann

of one’s eyes, etc. The stark and strange effect comes into being especially as it is against the background of the utterly flat prose of life, piles of legal documents, tea- and coffee pots, so that the ghosts draw near to us.42 The reality and the prose of life, here in the sense of everyday banality, form a social background, which is incompatible with the poetic world of the Romantics. Only when Brandes’ narrative arrangement of literary history reaches The Romantic School in England do we find traces of prose as style and as a literary form of expression, and we encounter them in what may be an unexpected context. It is the poet William Wordsworth, known for his nature poetry, who chooses his topics – according to Brandes – “from daily life.” For the first time in Brandes’ narrative, we find a commitment to themes from prosaic everyday life.43 Because of its frequent and detailed depictions of nature, Brandes calls this school Naturalism, but specific to Wordsworth is his disapproval of “poetic affectation” and his mode of expression, which aims to “approach the prosaic expression of reality.”44 He tried to use the language of the ordinary people in the countryside, integrating their vocabulary into his poetry. The basis for this practice, Brandes explains, was Wordsworth’s belief that there is no essential difference between prose and poetry. Brandes discusses and criticizes this view, which, according to him, mixes up prose and “spoken language”: It is already a strange naturalist confusion that Wordsworth uses the words spoken language and prose without distinction. Good prose is already cleansed of the empty and meaningless repetitions, the insecure and stammering expressions, which poor education and confusion never fail to bring with them, and far too many of which Wordsworth has unfortunately just integrated in his poems.45 Brandes wants to preserve the stylistic differentiation of poetry and prose, and when he characterizes Wordsworth’s poetics as prosaik (playing on the word poetik), this is a funny, but also pejorative statement from Brandes’ point of view. The next time Brandes takes up the topic of the prosaic is in connection with one of the few English prose writers he treats. Even though he considers 42 43 44 45

Ibid., 208. Brandes, Naturalismen i England, 88. Ibid., 106–107. Ibid., 108–109.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Prose of Life

105

Walter Scott’s novels as bringing about “an extraordinary progress with regard to the conception of history and with regard to the depiction of bourgeois life,” he finds them “lacking in ideas.”46 He criticizes them for being uneducated and mere entertainment: “A book which is meant to keep its reputation throughout a whole century does not only have to be poetically conceived, but artistically carried through in every detail, something for which Scott from the moment he started to write prose, never gave himself time.”47 There are “few and simple elements from reality” in the novels, so there is obviously no approach to reality and the prosaic in Scott, even in his prose texts.48 In part, Brandes puts this down to the genre of the historical novel, whose sujet the novelist fails to master in his view. The last two volumes of the Main Currents contain more intense discussions of prose writing, mainly in the passages about Balzac, Beyle, and Merimée in volume five and of course in the chapters about Heine in volume six. In the introductory description of social developments between 1824 and 1848 in France, Brandes puts emphasis on the new bourgeois society, which is dominated by economic interests, by useful work, and by useful deeds; it thus characterizes the modern, prosaic world. But authors like George Sand and Théophile Gautier “hate and escape, in the name of the everyday, the prosaic, the ordinary,” both as far as their characters and their language is concerned.49 They resort to an effusive and fanciful style and thus fail to depict “hard reality.”50 George Sand does not, as she intended, give a picture “of life as it is,” but only “a female enthusiast’s picture of reality.”51 It is only Balzac who “survived the most stubborn fight to get French prose into his power.”52 He is a modern spirit and his novel La peau de chagrin depicts “the reality of his time,” painting a “comprehensive picture of modern society.”53 This full view of the contemporary society has to include facts about its economic basis – it has to talk about money: “It was unheard of in a novel to talk about money as a main issue; many called it prosaic and raw.”54 At this point, Brandes again uses the Hegelian equation of prose style and a diagnosis of culture that is dominated by austerity and rationality. He writes 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., 181, 191. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 187. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 34. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 184–5. Ibid., 232. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 248.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

106

Heitmann

about “the prosaic plutocracy in the July monarchy” and about Père Goriot as representing the reality of its time.55 He says that La Comédie Humaine depicts the psychology of the French social classes, real places and their architecture, real flats and their furniture, and real people, as it deals with journalists, lawyers, stockbrokers, and fashion-retailers.56 The descriptions are based upon careful observation of details, and the perception resembles the perspective of a natural scientist, Brandes argues. When he concludes “Nothing in the poetic is in itself too small or too large: I am able to read a heroic poem in a hairdresser’s struggle for life,” this recalls Hegel’s dictum that the times of heroes, Gods, and knights is over, and they have been replaced by the modern individual.57 In the long passage in Hegel’s Aesthetics about the end of heroism, he stresses the difference between punishment and revenge – between the norms and laws of the modern state vis à vis the subjective claims of virtue and the vigour and strength of the “right and the just.”58 When Brandes mentions a modern heroic poem about a hairdresser, these ideas resonate in his argument. But on the other hand, he does not call this new literature prosaic, sticking instead to his characterization of it as poetic: “nothing in the poetic is in itself too small or too big.” Even though he is describing the new prosaic times and Balzac’s bourgeois setting and themes, he does not integrate his writings into a history or aesthetic of the prosaic, nor into a line of realistic novelists from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens and Stendhal. His point of reference is the poetic, which for him is a term that denotes literature in general, as Møller Kristensen has pointed out.59 Stendhal is the next important author in his presentation; he is praised for his psychological portraits but criticized for his style. The argument relating to the prosaic is taken up again with the next author, Mérimée, who is lauded for his prose style. Brandes retells the anecdote according to which Victor Hugo formed an anagram out of the name Prosper Mérimée, which was both “striking and flattering” – M. Première Prose.60 His style is characterized as “sober,” detailed, and shaped by “strict exactitude and solidity of the depiction of the factual.”61 As Møller Kristensen has pointed out, Mérimée represented Brandes’ ideal of a prose style:62 he was a master of restriction – of simplicity, 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Ibid., 254. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 277. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, vol. 1, 186. Møller Kristensen, Georg Brandes. Kritikeren, liberalisten, humanisten, 28. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 345. Ibid., 345, 359. Møller Kristensen, Georg Brandes, 21.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Prose of Life

107

objectivity, precision, and clarity: “The prose he writes is the least lyrical which exists. If the sentence ‘One is not a poet without poetry’ were true, one would have to deny Mérimée the title of poet.”63 Brandes notes his “poetic positivism” and characterizes his writing with the words: “the naked fact […] the sharply drawn detail” and “the most compressed and most energetic language.”64 Not only is his style prosaic; the “dark, brownish tone” which dominates his writing as well as the absence of any kind of heroism correspond to the Hegelian category of the prosaic, and Brandes even calls the author Mérimée himself “prosaic”: “as prosaic as he is, he climbed the little hill not without emotion.”65 An interesting detail in this characterization is Brandes’ emphasis on the anecdotal mode of narration as a special feature of the prosaic: “Yes, the anecdote is the natural form of his thoughts; he thinks in anecdotes.”66 Thus, he not only mentions an important generic feature of prose writing but goes on to add a self-characterization of his own way of writing – of his own prose style, which is full of anecdotes as a confirmation of reality and everyday life. But to pursue this thought further would require another argument and another article. The last volume of the Main Currents is dedicated to Young Germany, where Hegel himself and of course also Heinrich Heine play a crucial part. Theodor Mundt is also given a place in Brandes’ representation of the German school, but his important book on prose is not explicitly mentioned, unless we interpret the following sentence as a reference to it: “Mundt proclaimed this worship of prose veritably as the gospel of the new time.”67 The Hegelian equation of the prosaic and modern life resonates in Brandes’ sentence about Heine, that “the spirit of modernity almost shines through in his prose.”68 He stresses Heine’s fidelity to reality, and his way of writing as truly modern – “His manner of writing is entirely modern: everything perspicuous, everything visualized” – and when he argues that his style is “a weapon in the literary struggle,” he even equates prose style, modernity, and social commitment.69 Heine succeeds where Wordsworth had failed: in “the introduction of the prosaic into the poetic.”70 This is due to his historical position “at the transition from Romantic

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Brandes, Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig, 362. Ibid., 362, 357, 364. Ibid., 363–364, 368. Ibid., 357. Brandes, Det unge Tyskland, 322. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 209.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

108

Heitmann

transfiguration of reality to the pessimistic sense of reality which occurred in this era.”71 My search for traces of the idea of the prosaic in Brandes’ Main Currents demonstrated that the Hegelian idea of the prosaic age of modernity forms a basis for his characterization of a number of the authors he discusses, that the equation of modern life and the prosaic consciousness is being used, but that it nevertheless does not become a guideline for his enquiry into the development of European literary history into modernity. The traces are few and far between – prose and the prosaic are clearly not at the center of Brandes’ concerns. Although strong sympathies for the prosaic style are evident, for Brandes the prosaic does not develop into a major aesthetic category. He works with but does not stress the prose–poetry dichotomy to support his ideas or to outline an aesthetic of disenchantment in the prosaic world. There may be several reasons for this. First of all, there is Brandes’ aesthetic program, whose central concept was always an idea of the poetic. In his famous article “The Infinitely Small and the Infinitely Large in Poetry” (1869),72 he emphasized the importance of the role of detail in literature, the concreteness of seemingly inconspicuous observation, which can carry the weight of abstract thoughts, emotions, and ideas. It is these details that evoke the senses, which paint reality, and which implicitly permit generalizations. This aesthetic ideal is elaborated with reference to a Shakespearean drama – it might therefore refer to either prose or poetry, but Brandes calls this ideal “poetic,” so the term remains at the center of his concept of literature, independent of the genre. Secondly, and more importantly, there is the historical restriction that determined his choice of texts and authors. As he wanted to show the development of literature in the first half of the nineteenth century – the prehistory of modern literature as it were – he mainly chose authors of poetry and rather neglected novelists. The prosaic age and the dominance of prose becomes more clearly visible as the century progresses, even though Hegel had outlined his ideas in the 1820s and they were published in the 1830s. But in Main Currents Brandes can hardly be said to use the category of the prosaic as a positive marker, as we have seen. It is a foil referring to the social reality of the modern world, but

71

72

Ibid. There is one sentence much earlier on in the narrative of the Main Currents which indicates an equation between the prosaic and modernity, but it occurs in a citation of Novalis, who states that “‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’ is in a certain way thoroughly prosaic and modern” (Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland, 256). Brandes also points to the inherent modernity of the prosaic – to the prosaic as a diagnosis of modern culture – which the Romantic poet himself rejected. Brandes, “Det uendeligt Smaa og det uendeligt Store i Poesien,” 279–297.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Prose of Life

109

it is not developed into a poetological category or an aesthetic equivalent of the social world. When it comes to the literature of his own time, though, the prosaic could well be a useful category. This becomes especially clear when we look – as the most fitting example – at his portrayal of an author like Henrik Ibsen, who can only be understood in the context of the prosaic. Not only for Moretti, who has his book on the bourgeois culminate in a chapter on Ibsen, but also for many others, Ibsen is one of the leading and most innovative representatives of the prosaic. “Yes, Ibsen is ugly, common, hard, prosaic, bottomlessly bourgeois,” Henry James wrote to Julian R. Sturgis as early as 1893.73 His dramatic setting, his characters, his language, and his ideas are all expressions of a prosaic world, which mirrors the life and the style of the bourgeoisie, their aims and claims, as well as their lies and their immorality. He depicts what Moretti calls a “grey area,”74 a murky sphere of disloyalty and half-truths – not illegal, but not ethical either. The dramatic technique with which Ibsen achieves this could perfectly well be described in terms of “the infinitely small and the infinitely large”: language and gestures are individualized, yet bearers of meaning; the settings are concrete, yet signals of the time; the conflicts are far-reaching, but taken from everyday life. From 1877 onwards, when he published his first contemporary drama in prose, Ibsen dedicated himself to a dark and joyless world which has regularly been called prosaic.75 It is a plain world of businessmen, lawyers, and engineers, of banks, steam ships, and insurances, of grey clothes and dull weather. It is decisive, though, that under the surface of everyday life, deception, lies, guilt, fears, and failures are hidden; that the simple words Ibsen’s characters use are often polyvalent signs; and that the ordinary, recognizable language has a hidden layer – a space in which topical discourses resonate, challenge, and contradict each other. This structural excess of meaning, founded in a palimpsestic presentation of incompatible fields of discourse, is the key characteristic of Ibsen’s prose. The wide repertoire of citation sources employed not only authenticates the respective fields of discourse, but also has a disenchanting effect in subjecting them to reciprocal scrutiny. In this way, Ibsen develops a specifically prosaic aesthetics to fit a prosaic age. Moretti sees Ibsen as the culmination of “the prose of capitalist history,”76 who through the depiction of the grey area shows the unresolved dissonances of bourgeois life.

73 74 75 76

James, The Letters of Henry James, 212. Moretti, The Bourgeois, 169. Heitmann, “Doppelbödige Alltäglichkeit. Henrik Ibsens Prosa.” Moretti, The Bourgeois, 186.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

110

Heitmann

Obviously, Brandes knew Ibsen extremely well. He wrote about him several times during the history of their long acquaintance and friendship. The Collected Works of 1899–1910 contain three articles on Ibsen, written in 1866, 1882, and 1898, to which Brandes added an introduction. It is well known that there are striking similarities between the works and aims of these two great Scandinavian writers of the nineteenth century; there are important parallels in their ideas, which Brandes himself highlights in these articles. First, the fight for freedom and individualism is the main driving force behind their works, and there is a social commitment and a desire for innovation. There is also the ideal of cosmopolitanism, which they share, and their critical stance on religion and authorities. And finally there is their dedication to reality, which Brandes stresses several times in his articles on Ibsen. He discusses the abyss between ideal and reality, which is shown in Brand,77 he mentions that Ibsen positions reality against “fantastic imagination,”78 and he praises Hedda Gabler as “realistic.”79 But throughout all this explication, he never operates with the category of the prosaic, which is so distinctive of Ibsen’s dramas. He talks about Ibsen’s “faithfulness to reality,”80 praising his technical virtuosity81 and his “understanding of human beings,”82 mainly by concentrating on a thorough characterization of the dramatis personae. But while he searches for ideals throughout, he does not seem to acknowledge that specifically prosaic techniques can be a complex aesthetic means of both depicting and uncovering the contemporary world. Similarly, in his treatments of Schandorph, Drachmann, J.P. Jacobsen, Edvard Brandes, and other contemporaries, there are no reflections on the prosaic as an art form. Brandes sometimes mentions and characterizes their prose as a stylistic means, but he does not thematize the development of this representation of the prosaic world into an expression of the time. In conclusion, the “greyness” of the prosaic remains unpoetic for Brandes: his goal is a realistic yet poetic description of the world. Scholars like Bengt Algot Sørensen and Walter Baumgartner have noted Brandes’ shortcomings in relation to the literature of Naturalism;83 one might complement their findings by 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Brandes, Samlede Skrifter, vol. 3, 294. Ibid., 316. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 339. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 333. Algot Sørensen, “Georg Brandes als deutscher Schriftsteller”; Baumgartner, “Georg Brandes’ Zola-Aufsatz in der Deutschen Rundschau 1888 als Beitrag zur Verkennung und Abwehr des Naturalismus.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Prose of Life

111

referring to the much wider and somewhat older concept of the prosaic, which Brandes – as my survey aimed to show – knew perfectly well and worked with, but whose aesthetic potential he did not pursue. In the sense in which Hegel outlined it, it might have been an adequate tool to show precisely the desired correspondence between modernity in literature and society, between social and literary developments, in the nineteenth century. The engagement to truthfulness which Brandes advocated, as well as the depiction of problems of everyday life, demanded an aesthetic of the prosaic, which built upon a convergence of the prosaic world and prose style. Modern literature becomes a mirror of prosaic life when it builds upon a narrative of disenchantment, and when its style reflects the consciousness of austerity and disillusionment. To say it, once again, with Adorno: “Prose is the ineradicable reflex of the disenchantment of the world in art, and not just its adaptation to narrow-minded usefulness.” Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W.: Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert HullotKentors. London/New York: continuum, 2002 [1970]. Baumgartner, Walter: “Georg Brandes’ Zola-Aufsatz in der Deutschen Rundschau 1888 als Beitrag zur Verkennung und Abwehr des Naturalismus,” in: Den politiske Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen: 146–168. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1973. Barck, Karlheinz: “Prosaisch – poetisch,” in: Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, 7 vols, edited by Karlheinz Barck et al. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010, vol. 5, 87–112. Brandes, Georg: “Det uendeligt Smaa og det uendeligt Store i Poesien,” Illustreret Tidende (1869): 279–297. Brandes, Georg: Emigrantlitteraturen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1872. Brandes, Georg: Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1873. Brandes, Georg: Reactionen i Frankrig. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1874. Brandes, Georg: Naturalismen i England. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1875. Brandes, Georg: Den romantiske Skole i Frankrig. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1882. Brandes, Georg: Det unge Tyskland. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1890. Brandes, Georg: Samlede Skrifter, 18 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1899–1910. Hegel, G.W.F.: Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford University Press, 1975.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

112

Heitmann

Heitmann, Annegret: “Doppelbödige Alltäglichkeit. Henrik Ibsens Prosa,” in: Prosa Schreiben. Literatur, Geschichte, Recht, edited by Inka Mülder-Bach et al. Munich: Fink, 2019, 157–174. Humboldt, Wilhelm von: “Charakter der Sprachen. Poesie und Prosa,” in: Über die Sprache. Reden vor der Akademie, edited by Jürgen Trabant. Tübingen/Basel: A. Francke, 1994, 183–200. James, Henry: The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by Percy Lubbock. London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. Larsen, Sven Erik: “Georg Brandes. The Telescope of Comparative Literature,” in: The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. London/New York: Routledge, 2012, 21–31. Lukács, Georg: The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1974 [1914–15]. Madsen, Peter: “World Literature and World Thoughts: Brandes/Auerbach,” in: Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast. London et al.: Verso, 2004, 54–75. Møller Kristensen, Sven: “Aktivisten Georg Brandes,” in: Den politiske Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1973, 14–15. Møller Kristensen, Sven: Georg Brandes. Kritikeren, liberalisten, humanisten. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1980. Moretti, Franco: “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan/Feb 2000): 54–68. Moretti, Franco: The Bourgeois Between History and Literature. London et al.: Verso, 2013. Mülder-Bach, Inka: “Einleitung,” in: Prosa Schreiben. Literatur, Geschichte, Recht, edited by Inka Mülder-Bach et al. Munich: Fink, 2019, 1–11. Mundt, Theodor: Die Kunst der deutschen Prosa. Ästhetisch, literaturgeschichtlich, gesellschaftlich. Berlin: Contumax, 2010 [1937]. Nolin, Bertil: Den gode européen. Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893. Stockholm: Norstedts, 1965. Nolin, Bertil: Georg Brandes. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. Ordbog over det danske sprog. https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog. Sørensen, Bengt Algot: “Georg Brandes als deutscher Schriftsteller,” in: Den politiske Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1973, 127–145. Williams, Raymond: Culture and Society. London: The Hogarth Press, 1993 [1958].

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 6

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

Cross-Cultural Literary Matchmaking in Georg Brandes’ Letters Julie K. Allen Although he spent much of his life critiquing literature, Georg Brandes – unlike his brother Edvard – did not write literary texts that might have earned him a place in a national literary canon. Instead, he wrote dozens of biographies, historical surveys, newspaper articles, political commentaries, and many other non-fiction prose texts that spoke to the challenges and concerns of the world in which he lived. While Brandes’ works were undeniably influential when they appeared, their context-specificity rendered them largely obsolete within a few decades, which can make it difficult to evaluate Brandes’ legacy on the basis of his published works alone. Moreover, as Klaus Bohnen has noted, the literary focus of Brandes’ professional publications was frequently overshadowed by the furor aroused by his outspoken advocacy of causes such as sexual liberation, women’s emancipation, and secularization, while the scholarly repute of his works suffered from a reputation for haphazardness, superficiality, and occasionally plagiarism.1 Yet alongside his professional, public writing, Brandes wrote thousands of private letters to hundreds of correspondents in a dozen countries that offer a different, more intimate view of him as both an author and a critic. Neil Christian Pages explains: Supported by numerous translations, extensive travels, and personal contacts, [Brandes’] work reached an international public. In private, Brandes’ correspondence documents a life of intellectual exchange with a range of the leading minds of the day: John Stuart Mill, Strindberg, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Clemenceau, and Nietzsche, to name only a few.2 Brandes’ letters disprove Rene Wellek’s famous dismissal of him as “a middleman without originality or substance,” an allegation that disregards not only 1 Bohnen, “Ein Kulturvermittler der Jahrhundertwende: Georg Brandes in seiner deutschen Korrespondenz.” 2 Pages, “On Popularization: Reading Brandes Reading Nietzsche,” 164.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_008 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

114

Allen

the skill, knowledge, talent, time, and effort that went into the cross-cultural relationships that Brandes so carefully fostered through his letters, but also the resulting enrichment of European literary development. While his lectures and publications directed fairly general conclusions at random recipients, in his letters Brandes strategically cultivated connections between specific authors, drawing, for example, in an 1870 letter, the attention of French scholar Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) to the works of Danish author Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860) and recommending, in 1888, that the Danish author Sophus Schandorph (1836–1901) read the French historian Ernest Renan’s Histoire du people d’Israel (1887). This chapter will demonstrate how Brandes used his extensive correspondence to bring writers and thinkers from different national traditions into contact with each other, introducing them to each other’s works and drawing them into a transnational dialogue about literature, aesthetics, and society. One could describe this task using Friedrich Nietzsche’s quasi-religious description, in an 1887 letter, of Brandes as “such a good European and culture missionary,”3 though Brandes himself protested the appellation. Alternately, instead of foregrounding the pedantic, as Nietzsche does, Brandes’ role could be characterized as that of a cross-cultural intellectual matchmaker, who aimed to put authors he admired in contact with authors from other cultures who could offer a contrasting perspective. Either way, the transcultural, comparative quality of Brandes’ epistolary efforts to close the gap between cultures that conceive of each other as “foreign” is both highly significant for the development of comparative literary studies as a discipline and one of his most enduring accomplishments. 1

The Value of a Comparative Approach

Appreciating Brandes’ correspondence requires an understanding of why he placed such importance on making cross-cultural literary connections, particularly in the 1870s and early 1880s. In that early period of his career, Brandes was convinced of the capacity of literature for encapsulating and disseminating cultural memory, whereby certain texts function essentially as compressed knowledge of a particular culture. From his French mentor Hippolyte Taine Brandes had adopted the view of historical development as a kind of social psychology, in the sense that “the life of individual people, as well as that of

3 “Ein solcher guter Europäer und Cultur-Missionär”; Nietzsche, Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3.5, 205.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

115

entire nations, could be understood on the basis of three fundamental determining factors, which were labelled: ‘race’, ‘moment’ and ‘milieu.’”4 Literary texts illuminate those elements, revealing the interplay of race and milieu in a particular historical-cultural moment and place. Henk van der Liet explains that Brandes approached the authors and works he studied “in such a way that life and work of the respective authors were closely linked together and illustrated each other. The texts he studied were treated as expressions of the circumstances under which they were produced, reflecting general historical and social conditions as well as taking the individual author’s private background into account.”5 Toward the end of the century, Brandes abandoned this bottomup view of authors as representative of the masses in their countries in favor of the “radically aristocratic,” top-down notion of the “great writer as a conduit” for transformative ideas.6 This position also motivated him to bring great writers together, as was the case with his mediation between August Strindberg and Friedrich Nietzsche, in order that they might inspire each other, on an individual rather than a collective level, to greater achievements. Viewed from this perspective, Brandes’ efforts in his correspondence to facilitate certain authors’ awareness of exemplary texts from other national traditions can be understood as an attempt to bring different worldviews into conversation with each other, in order to shape the way cultural narratives are constructed and disseminated in literary texts and to influence the individual writer’s development. As he explained to German author Paul Heyse (1830– 1914) on 23 December 1872, In all true books the popular spirit or the spirit of the age is astir; the more the book contains the ideas of its time, the better and livelier it will be. All good books sum up an age, the best sum up an epoch, the less important a fashion. In my view great minds cannot be divorced from their time. They are determined by specific surroundings, by a specific milieu, and for that reason have all the greater effect. Everything calls on an author to be in harmony with his time […]. How does one recognize the works which sum up an age? By the fact that they alone are remembered. The others are forgotten. Time is the first and best critic and criticizes on our behalf.7 4 Van der Liet, “Georg Brandes as a literary intermediary,” 97. 5 Ibid., 97–98. 6 Stern, “Strindberg’s Encounter with Nietzsche: The Conflation of Autobiography and History,” 165. 7 “In allen wahren Büchern ist der Volksgeist oder Zeitgeist rege, das Buch ist um so viel besser, um so viel lebendiger je mehr es von den Ideen seiner Zeit enthält. Alle gute Bücher sind

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

116

Allen

Brandes’ assertion that time alone would determine which books are remembered as being most in harmony with their times is somewhat disingenuous in light of his own tireless exertions to promote particular books and authors, but this passage makes it clear that in recommending certain authors or books to specific correspondents, Brandes was trying to introduce them to the cultural moment and historical specificity of other authors and their books – to the “ideas of the time” and the particular contexts that they represented. The closest twenty-first-century equivalent of Georg Brandes’ role in the late nineteenth-century European literary world may well be that of a social media influencer, a role that has been defined by the Digital Marketing Institute as a consumer of a product “who has established credibility in a specific industry, has access to a huge audience, and can persuade others to act based on their recommendations.”8 Brandes was a masterful marketer, who knew how to “sell” particular authors and literary styles, most famously the realistic literature of the so-called Modern Breakthrough – a movement that took its name from one of his essay collections. Beginning in his late twenties, Brandes built his credibility as a literary critic and his authority as a cultural influencer in two ways: first, through formal public lectures and publications, exemplified by but by no means limited to his path-breaking six-volume survey Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature); and second, through his extensive private correspondence with authors, scholars, and public figures across Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the UK (and, to a very limited extent, the US and Asia). What links Brandes’ essay collections, such as Moderne Geister (Modern Spirits, 1882) and Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd (The Men of the Modern Breakthrough, 1883), and his biographies of eminent artists, politicians, and thinkers from Disraeli to Michelangelo to Jesus, is their common goal of mediating between cultural traditions by highlighting the contributions of particular individuals that might be of use to audiences in a different time and/or Resumeen einer Periode, die besten von einer Epoche, die weniger bedeutende von einer Mode. Es kommt mir vor, als ob es gar nicht Geister giebt, die ausserhalb der Zeit stehen. Sie sind von gewissen Umgebungen, von einer bestimmten milieu [sic] bestimmt und wirken dadurch um so viel gewisser. Alles fordert einen Schriftsteller auf, mit seiner Zeit zu stimmen […]. Wie man die Werke kennt, die die Zeit ausdrücken? Dadurch dass sie allein stehen bleiben. Die anderen werden vergessen. Die Zeit ist die [sic] erste und beste Kritiker und kritisirt [sic] uns Andern vor.” Krüger, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 3, 13–14; Jones, Georg Brandes. Selected Letters, 34. 8 Rivera, “9 of the Biggest Social Media Influencers on Instagram,” https://digitalmarketingin stitute.com/en-eu/blog/9-of-the-biggest-social-media-influencers-on-instagram, accessed June 13, 2019.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

117

place. In developing this cross-cultural approach, Brandes contributed to the creation of comparative literature both as an academic discipline and as a way of seeing the world. Brandes articulated his belief in the value of this approach in 1872 in the introduction to the first volume of Main Currents, where he famously asserts “The comparative study of literature has the double advantage of bringing the foreign closer to us so that we can understand it, and of distancing us from our own, so that we can see it in context. We don’t see what is too close or too far away from the eye.”9 In Brandes’ view, the comparative approach was crucial in allowing readers to perceive the value and significance of the texts they encountered, particularly with regard to their function as windows into the cultures that produced them, by putting them into dialogue with texts they were already familiar with. This approach was impossible, however, if one never encountered texts from other cultures, languages, and literary traditions, so much of what Brandes did was introduce his audiences to such texts, as the surveys that make up the six volumes of Main Currents illustrate. Beginning his career just after the three tumultuous wars that led to German unification and the fateful alienation of many European countries from each other, Brandes notes dryly in the first volume of Main Currents that, “Until now, nations have in literary matters stood aloof from one another and only to a very limited extent been able to understand the productions of others.”10 While there had of course been cross-cultural literary interaction between individual countries for centuries – exemplified within Brandes’ own cultural context by the Danish king’s sponsorship of Friedrich Gottfried Klopstock in the second half of the eighteenth century, the German-language texts produced by Danish authors such as Jens Baggesen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the wholesale importation of German Romantic ideas into Denmark and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales into Germany in the nineteenth century – there were few avenues by which audiences could come to know the works of foreign authors in a systematic way.11 In contrast to the 9

10 11

“Den sammenlignende Litteraturbetragtning har den dobbelte Charakter at nærme det Fremmede til os saaledes, at vi kunne tilegne os det, og at fjerne vort Eget fra os saaledes, at vi kunne overskue det. Man seer hverken hvad der ligger for nær eller altfor fjernt.” Brandes, “Indledning til hovedstrøminger i det nittende aarhundredes litteratur,” 1–2; “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur,” 698. “Hidtil have de forskjellige Nationer i litterær Henseende staaet hinanden temmelig fjernt og kun i ringe Grad vist sig i Stand til at tilegne sig hinandens Frembringelser.” Brandes, “Indledning,” 87–88; Brandes, “Introduction,” 698. Studies of these other border-crossers include Eaton, The German influence in Danish Literature in the xviii century (1929); Sandberg, En grænsegænger mellem oplysning og romantic: Jens Baggesens tyske forfatterskab (2015); and Möller-Christensen, Den gyldne trekant. H. C. Andersens gennembrud i Tyskland 1831–50 (1992).

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

118

Allen

dominant narrative of the Modern Breakthrough as a textbook case of the periphery speaking to the center,12 analyzing Brandes’ letters reveals that he worked in both public and private spheres to create a transnational, translingual web of connections that would bring foreign texts and cultures closer to authors and readers in many different countries. Brandes knew that marketing must be tailored to its audiences in order to be effective. Most of his works were published in Danish and while they were translated into German, French, Chinese, and other languages, he had little control over who was able to read them. By contrast, in his letters, he was able to direct a particular reader’s attention to specific, exemplary texts and authors. From his early introduction of Heiberg to Taine to his mediation of Søren Kierkegaard’s works to Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s to Strindberg, Brandes made targeted connections between his correspondents and specific thematic, stylistic, and philosophical innovations in national and linguistic traditions other than their own. In his 1922 monograph on Brandes, American journalist Julius Moritzen (1863–1946) describes Brandes’ particular talent as interpreting not just “the North to Europe,” but also “Europe to itself,” in particular by drawing attention to the brilliance and relevance of Zola, Maupassant, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Brandes’ advocacy, Moritzen asserts, “brought these great writers and their works in sharp outline to the knowledge of circles of the North and West when they had previously been little more than strange and hard names.”13 For individual authors, separated by language, geography, and, in some cases, time, Brandes’ recommendations served as a conduit to the works of their unknown peers. 2

Brandes as a Letter-Writer

Given the controversy and hostility that his published works had aroused in Denmark, Brandes knew how difficult it could be to persuade people en masse, and how painful it is to be the target of public scorn for airing unpopular or provocative opinions, which is why letter-writing played such a central role in his personal and professional life. The noted French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) confessed that he would have preferred writing letters to the essay genre that he pioneered, speculating that “I should have been more diligent and more confident had I had a judicious and indulgent friend whom 12 13

Fulsås and Rem, “From Periphery to Center: The Origins and Worlding of Ibsen’s Drama,” 48. Moritzen, Georg Brandes in Life and Letters, xi.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

119

to address, than thus to expose myself to the various judgments of a whole people.”14 Both Brandes and Montaigne understood that to feel confident about the reception of one’s ideas, communication needs to be up close and personal, ideally face to face but at the very least coming from a trusted source. Letters function in many ways like essays, but directed at a trusted recipient rather than a potentially hostile public. Harold Binkley defines the familiar letter as “a relaxed, intimately personal communication from one orderly mind to another mind congenial in some respect,”15 which makes it clear that it is not just the letter-writer but also the addressee who is decisive for how a letter is composed and how it is received. In writing letters, Brandes participated in an established ritual of both communication and socialization that was integral to the way information circulated in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and America. The social centrality and massive scope of letter-writing before the digital age can seem incomprehensible today, when communication is instant, ephemeral, and often informal, but it was an indispensable venue for intellectual interactions between writers in Brandes’ lifetime. As Michael Robinson explains, “The kind of full and immediate exchange of opinions on which these writers relied was related to the practical exigencies of letter-writing, its cost, the ease with which letters could be posted and the frequency and dependability of the service that delivered them.”16 Over the course of the nineteenth century, technological advances increased the speed with which letters could circulate and reduced the cost of sending them. While a letter sent in the early 1800s could take up to six months to make it from Copenhagen to Hammerfest in Norway, the transit time was reduced to a few weeks by mid-century, while postal deliveries in Copenhagen and Stockholm increased from a weekly to a daily service, and ultimately to four to eight deliveries a day by the 1880s.17 With the establishment of comprehensive postal networks and standard postage rates in the mid-nineteenth century, frequent, rapid correspondence over long distances was no longer prohibitive. Brandes took full advantage of the efficient, affordable postal system of his time. It is perhaps an understatement to say that he was an avid letter-writer. For more than 50 years he received, on average, 30 letters a day, as a result of 14 15 16 17

Binkley, “Essays and Letter-Writing,” 343. Brandes’ eighteenth-century role model, the Dano-Norwegian author Ludvig Holberg, wrote essays in the form of fictional letters in his Epistles, 1748–54. Binkley, “Essays and Letter-Writing,” 348. Robinson, “‘The Great Epistolick Art’: An Introduction,” 15. Ibid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

120

Allen

which he spent hours sorting, reading, and answering letters, many of them requests for information or assistance in some way or another. Brandes biographer Jørgen Knudsen estimates that Brandes received as many as a quarter of a million letters during the last 40 years of his life, of which he preserved at least 15,000 from 2,500 correspondents, or approximately one in 20 – presumably the ones he took the time to answer.18 Despite his complaints about spending hours each day writing letters, Brandes kept up this massive correspondence in at least four languages (Danish, French, German, and Italian) for nearly six decades, in large part to help prevent the tragedy, as he commented to Henrik Pontoppidan in a letter dated 7 July 1902, “that the few men sharing the same or very similar intellectual interests never meet!”19 By his own account, he accepted far too many requests and answered too many letters, even when doing so hampered his professional writing productivity, but he seems to have derived great satisfaction from the kind of intimate, sociable communication letters facilitate. No complete edition of Brandes’ vast correspondence exists, though many valuable partial collections have appeared, including Morten Borup and Torben Nielsen’s six volumes of Brandes’ letters to his parents;20 Paul Rübow’s four volumes of Brandes’ correspondence with various individuals in France, Italy, Great Britain, Russia, and Germany;21 Morten Borup et al.’s eight volumes of Brandes’ correspondence with Nordic authors and scientists;22 and dozens of articles and books focusing on particular conversations between Brandes and, for example, his brother Edvard, Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Kropotkin, Amalie Skram, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arno Holz, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Sudermann, and many others.23 Only a tiny fraction of Brandes’ letters have been translated 18 19 20 21 22 23

Knudsen, “‘I too believe in the good effect of hypnosis’: Georg Brandes and his Correspondence,” 66. “At de Par Mænd, der har samme eller beslægtede aandelige Interesser, aldrig ses!” Georg Brandes to Henrik Pontoppidan, 7 July 1902, http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/sec lit/secbreve/brandes_georg/1902_07_07.html; Jones, Selected Letters, 185. Borup, Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene 1859–71; Nielsen and Borup, Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene, 1872–1904. Krüger, Correspondance de Georg Brandes. Borup, Bull, and Landquist, Georg og Edv. Brandes. Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd. Seibæk, Edvard og Georg Brandes’ brevveksling 1866–77; Bergel, Ein Briefwechsel. Georg Brandes und Arthur Schnitzler; Lyhne and Norup, Anarkismens tid: en brevveksling mellem Peter Kropotkin og Georg Brandes; Garton, Amalie Skram. Breveksling med andre nordiske forfattere; Bohnen, “Brandes und Hauptmann: Spuren einer produktiven Rezeption”; Bohnen, “Georg Brandes und Arno Holz. Unveröffentliche Briefe zwischen 1890 und 1896”; “Europäisches Bewußtsein in der Krise. Unveröffentlicher Briefwechsel zwischen Stefan

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

121

into English, most of them in W. Glyn Jones’ collection of selected letters, though some of his correspondents, notably the British scholar Edmund Gosse, originally wrote to him in English (at least until they learned Danish). Brandes’ preserved correspondence is noteworthy not only for its staggering size, but also for the diversity of men and women from different countries that he corresponded with. Van der Liet notes that Brandes “paired his fine sensitivity for issues with an impressive intellectual mobility and understanding of how social networks operate. Brandes was a prolific and extremely epistolary writer, helping him to maintain – and use – an enormous infrastructure of friends and acquaintances effectively.”24 Looking at the first 100 of Brandes’ correspondents whose surnames begin with the letter T and whose letters have been preserved in the Brandes archive, Knudsen determines that this small sample includes 12 authors, 14 wives or widows of authors and artists, 20 editors, 5 professors, 5 students, 3 publishers, 3 teachers, and a representative smattering of other professions, including a barber, 2 nurses, a theosophist, and a perfume vendor from Tunisia. These 100 correspondents – 26 of whom were women – wrote to him from 17 countries, ranging from Iceland to Persia.25 Corresponding with friends, authors, editors, publishers, and fans was clearly a source of great personal satisfaction for Brandes, but it was also a major component of his professional life as well, not only because many of his correspondents wrote to ask for professional advice or assistance, but also because of the hybrid public-private nature of the letter as a genre. Letters appear, on the one hand, to resemble spontaneous, intimate conversations, but, on the other, they are profoundly self-conscious, deliberately composed physical artifacts, often intended to introduce strangers to each other. Elizabeth MacArthur warns that “Letters are as much fictional constructions as they are transparent reflections. Letter writers do not merely observe; they transform them, whether consciously or unconsciously, into written texts whose organization, style, vocabulary, and point of view generate particular meanings.”26 Every letter is a result a series of choices – of addressee, format, persona, attitude – that the writer has made in order to accomplish whatever action the letter is designed to achieve. No later than the seventeenth century, epistolary communication in Europe had developed its own customs and expectations, codified in letter-writing manuals, illustrated in epistolary novels,

24 25 26

Zweig und Georg Brandes”; “Hermann Sudermann und Georg Brandes. Ein unveröffentlichter Briefwechsel.” Van der Liet, “Literary intermediary,” 99. Knudsen, “Georg Brandes and his Correspondence,” 67. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives. Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form, 118.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

122

Allen

and reinforced through frequent practice (or transgression). In his first letter to the Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) in 1869, 27-yearold Brandes complains about the 37-year-old Bjørnson’s discourteous tone in the latter’s first letter, explaining, after an aggressively deferential salutation of “Høistærede!” (Most honored), “In Denmark it is common practice for anyone addressing a private letter to someone else to write in a courteous tone, with no trace of hauteur, almost as to an equal, whether the person concerned is important or insignificant. […] From your letter I assume that correspondents in Norway make fewer demands and have less pride.”27 In this case, Brandes may have overreacted to Bjørnson’s bluntness (despite his use of the formal De pronoun), but his response reminds us that letters are accompanied by formal expectations according to their purpose, though those expectations may vary between countries, genders, social classes, and eras. Moreover, although generally written for private, immediate consumption, letters are often preserved, collected, and published for an entirely different audience. For hundreds of years, letters have been passed around families and communities, reprinted in newspapers, or collected in volumes. For the millions of emigrants who left Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, letters were the only way of maintaining contact with the homelands, friends, and families they left behind. For authors, letters provide access to a virtual community that transcends time and space,28 as well as to sympathetic listeners, opportunities for experimenting with stylistic variations, and a place to try out ideas for later publication. Famous examples of letter collections that blur the line between public and private include Rainer Maria Rilke’s Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet, 1929), comprised of the established poet’s 10 letters to the cadet and aspiring poet Franz Xavier Kappus that were published by Kappus three years after Rilke’s death; Franz Kafka’s Briefe an Milena (Letters to Milena, 1952), a collection of love letters Kafka wrote to a married woman who later died in the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück, which her friend, the literary critic Willy Haas, to whom she had given the letters in 1939, published after the war; and Strindberg’s Han och hon (He and She, 1919), a selection of the letters he exchanged with his

27

28

“Det er nemlig i Danmark Skik, at Enhver der i et privat Brev henvender sig til en Anden, taler i en høflig Tone, uden Overlegenhed, næsten som til en Ligemand, hvad enten den Paagjælende er betydelig eller lille. […] Jeg slutter af Deres Brev, at man i Norge stiller færre Fordringer og har mindre Stolthed.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 4.1, 7–8; Jones, Selected Letters, 18–19. Pohl, “‘Perfect Reciprocity’: Salon Culture and Epistolary Conversations.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

123

future wife Siri von Essen in 1875–1876 that he had attempted to publish as an epistolary novel in 1886. Brandes was acutely aware of the likelihood that his letters could be made public and took steps to control the narrative they could tell. The majority of the letters he preserved are dated after 1900, suggesting that he became more cognizant of their role in his legacy as he aged. Since almost none of his letters to his various lovers have survived, Knudsen speculates that Brandes asked them to burn them after reading in order to keep his love life somewhat private.29 One of Brandes’ lovers, the Swedish novelist Victoria Benedictsson, admitted to him in 1887 “It is stupid of me to be as frank with you as I have been, isn’t it? One should never bring letters into the world, as they are like children: you can never predict the troubles they’ll burden you with.”30 Yet despite the dangers inherent in committing his thoughts and emotions (however carefully phrased and edited) to paper, Brandes needed the sense of community that his correspondence provided – it gave him access to indispensable professional networks and psychological relief. Within the virtual community encompassed by his correspondence, Brandes was able to introduce his friends to each other’s works, to weave a disparate, far-flung group of writers and thinkers into a network, and to leverage those connections into advancing the kind of realistic, socially engaged literature he regarded as crucial for dealing with the existential challenges posed by the modern world. In his letters, Brandes tends to be gentler, less confrontational, and more diplomatic than in his lectures; he is free to focus more on the sharing of knowledge and ideas than on defending his ideas against hostile critiques. In his necrology of Brandes in the Danish newspaper Politiken, German author Thomas Mann described him as “a master of productive criticism, who created enthusiasm and inspired, instead of tearing down and destroying.”31 This description applies particularly well to Brandes the letter-writer. In Bohnen’s view, Brandes’ correspondence forms the foundation of his entire literary program, revealing “the network of connections to public literature promoters,

29 30

31

Knudsen, “Georg Brandes and his Correspondence,” 76. “Det är dumt att vara så öppenhjertig som jag är imot er. Icke sant? Bref borde man aldrig sätta i verlden, ty det är med dem som med barn: man kan aldrig beräkna hvilke förargelser de komma att vålla en.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 6, 222–223. Unless otherwise noted, all translations into English are my own. “Ein Meister produktiver Kritik, der begeistert und entflammt, statt niederzureißen und zu vernichten.” Quoted in Sandberg, “Suggestibilität und Widerspruch. Thomas Manns Auseinandersetzung mit Brandes,” 157.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

124

Allen

literary producers, and influential cultural representatives” that gave Brandes’ literary judgments their extraordinary reach.32 In return, Brandes’ pen pals, particularly those outside Denmark, provided him with invaluable emotional and intellectual support in periods when his ongoing feud with his countrymen rendered his life in Copenhagen unbearable. In response to a letter from Paul Heyse, whom he hardly knew at the time, he lamented, on 12 November 1872, “I am at home now, and my life here is cheerless. Finding all paths to the public blocked is a feeling which you can probably not readily appreciate.”33 The following year, in July 1873, he painted a similar but more vivid picture for British poet and critic Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), in response to a question about the reception of his latest book: “You ask what people in Copenhagen will say to my latest book? Answer: Nothing, nothing at all. Not a dog has barked at it, not a newspaper has mentioned its appearance; in this way as much damage as possible is done to it.”34 His discouragement and bitterness are unmistakable in these letters, as is his tendency to blame his hostile reception on the narrowness of his countrymen’s horizons. In December 1872, he explains to Heyse that “My dear fellow countrymen are incredibly naïve in their malice, or malicious in their naivety. Everything here is provincial, the entire countryside a petty and obscure place where everyone knows and talks about everyone else.”35 In reaching out across borders, especially in his letters written in German and French, Brandes was able both to distance himself from the claustrophobia-inducing cultural duck pond of the too-familiar and to speak to a larger audience than a purely Danish one. As he lamented to French art historian Georges Noufflard (1846–1897) in a September 1880 letter, “When you write in Danish, Europe knows nothing of you.”36 32 33

34 35

36

“Das Netz der Beziehungen zu den öffentlichen Literaturpropagatoren, den Literaturproduzenten und einflußreichen Kulturrepräsentanten.” Bohnen, “Kulturvermittler,” 210. “Sie können sich nicht leicht vorstellen, wie sehr ihre gute und freundliche Worte mich gerührt haben. Es ist mir, als hätte ich einen Freund gewonnen, und ich habe nicht viele. […] Jetzt bin ich zu Hause und mein Leben hier ist trist. Es ist ein Gefühl, dass Sie sich gewiss nicht recht vorstellen können, alle Wege zum Publicum verschlossen zu finden.” Krüger, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 3, 8; Jones, Selected Letters, 33. “De spørger, hvad man vil sige til min sidste Bog i Kbh? Svar: Ingenting, ingen Verdens Ting. Ingen Hund har gjøet ad den, intet Blad nævnt, at den var kommet, saaledes skades den saa meget som muligt.” Krüger, Correspondance, vol. 2, 15; Jones, Selected Letters, 39. “Meine liebe Landsleute sind von einer unglaublichen naiven Boshaftigkeit oder boshaften Naivetät [sic]. Alles hier ist provinziell, das ganze Land ein Krähwinkel, wo Alle von einander wissen und plaudern.” Krüger, Correspondance, vol. 3, 13; Jones, Selected Letters, 34. “Quand on écrit en Danois, l’Europe ne sait rien de nous.” Krüger, Correspondance, vol. 1, 101; Jones, Selected Letters, 109.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

125

Brandes’ efforts to draw the threads of the foreign closer to each other through his transnational and transcultural friendships gave him a relatively safe outlet for critiquing his native land and culture without public backlash, and trying to change it, one writer at a time. Svend-Erik Larsen argues that Brandes was especially concerned with the often conflicting connections between a national culture and its transnational context, without which any conception of its local particularity would prove to be an illusion. Any attempt in literature and culture to seal off a local culture from the world at large and deny its complicity with it became subject to his acid attacks. Particularly in his home country, Denmark, he frowned on the inwardness of nationalism and individual self-sufficiency, which were in marked contrast to the critical national and individual self-awareness that he advocated.37 In Brandes’ view, an overly introspective approach to culture led to stagnation and decay. In line with his declaration in the introduction to Main Currents that “we don’t see what is too close or too far away from the eye,” Brandes’ epistolary matchmaking efforts supported his belief that a far-sighted perspective on cultural change and context is crucial to the healthy development of national cultures and the literary traditions that represent them. 3

Making Transnational Intellectual Connections

In his correspondence Brandes strove not just to develop his own relationships with individuals, but also to make meaningful connections between his correspondents and the literary cultures they were contributing to creating. Bringing writers and thinkers together, making them aware of each other and each other’s ideas, appears to have been Brandes’ favorite hobby, as well as an integral part of his professional agenda. In a letter to Bjørnson on 8 February 1878, in which he defended J.P. Jacobsen’s novel Marie Grubbe against Bjørnson’s apparent disapproval, Brandes confessed, “I have a kind of passion for personal contact; if I had been able, I would have introduced Stuart Mill to the German philosophers (and personally acted as interpreter for them, for he knew no German), and at this moment I would like to bring you from Aulestad and 37

Larsen, “The Telescope of Comparative Literature,” 21.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

126

Allen

Jacobsen from Montreux here into my room.”38 Nearly a quarter of a century later, in June 1902, he reported to Henrik Pontoppidan that he had just spent 80 days in Paris, where he “got to know several thousand people, a few dozen of whom quite well, which is worth something in itself […]. I prefer to learn from people instead of books.”39 In facilitating conversations, even if only epistolary ones, between his various correspondents Brandes aimed to inspire them and himself to take a progressive approach to literary and social innovation. Against this background, the literary recommendations Brandes makes in his letters to far-flung correspondents transcend casual conversation and take on an unusual intensity, reflecting the intellectual stakes of his matchmaking. His efforts at mediating between cultures have much in common with translation, which Brandes also undertook on occasion. As Lawrence Venuti and many other theorists of translation agree, translation is not merely a semantic transference of meaning from one language to another – it is a cultural and literary process subject to many different factors.40 The cultural specificity of individual texts and authorships requires framing to make them accessible for people outside those discourse spheres, and it is this framing at which Brandes particularly excelled. For example, in an early letter written in Paris, a 28-year-old Brandes attempts to convey his gratitude to Taine for the mentoring he has received by introducing him to Johan Ludvig Heiberg, as a representative of Danish dannelse (education). On 1 June 1870, Brandes writes: Sir, I have the honor of sending you the enclosed short article written by J. L. Heiberg against Marmier, which I have had sent from Denmark. The author is one of those who have done most for the education of their people this century. A poet, a critic, a philosopher – in all these spheres he has been a true benefactor to the nation.41

38

39

40 41

“Jeg har en Slags Lidenskab for personligt Samkvem; havde jeg kunnet, så havde jeg ført Stuart Mill sammen med de tydske Filosofer (og selv tjent som Tolk imellem dem, thi han kunde ikke tydsk) og i dette Øjeblik førte jeg da Dem og Jacobsen fra Aulestad og Montreux her ind i min Stue.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 4.1, 19; Jones, Selected Letters, 76. “Jeg lærte flere tusinde Mennesker at kjende og deriblandt, hvad der jo alene er noget værd, en Snes eller et par Snese Mennesker ret nøje […]. Det er mig kjært at lære af Mennesker istedenfor af Bøger.” Georg Brandes to Henrik Pontoppidan, 21 June 1902, http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secbreve/brandes_georg/1902_06_21.html. Venuti, Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. “Monsieur! J’ai l’honneur de vous envoyer ci-joint le petit article de J.-L. Heiberg contre Marmier que j’ai fait venir du Danemark. L’auteur est un des hommes qui pendant ce siècle a fait le plus pour l’éducation de son people. Poète, critique, philosophe – sous toutes

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

127

The subtext of this recommendation seems to be Brandes’ belief that Heiberg exemplifies the virtues that Taine himself valued, which would render the former’s article both appealing and useful to the latter. Many of Brandes’ epistolary conversations from the 1870s and 1880s contain similar introductions designed to offer insights into different cultural contexts and literary works. In a letter dated 22 December 1873, Brandes recommends several German literary works to Edmund Gosse, among others Friedrich Spielhagen’s In Reih und Glied, which he describes as “min Yndling blandt de tydske Romaner” (my favorite among German novels), Paul Heyse’s Kinder der Welt, and the poem Der König von Sion by Robert Hamerling. He explains his choices with the aside: “I believe that these three books give a good (and favourable) picture of modern Germany. Heyse is my personal friend; […] he has a most gracious Talent. As a novelist he is, I believe, surpassed only by Turgeniew [sic], with whom I am enthralled.”42 His correspondence with Gosse reveals Brandes’ willingness to solicit recommendations in addition to making them, which demonstrates more humility and vulnerability than one tends to associate with the public Brandes. In one of his earliest letters to Gosse, from 15 July 1873, Brandes asks Gosse to tell him about himself and to share his thoughts about English literature, confessing, Anything you might like to tell me about modern English literature would be of great interest to me. I have but little knowledge of it. For I read English, especially poetry, with difficulty, as I did not learn the language at school but have since had to teach it myself. I have read various things by [Algernon Charles] Swinburne, and I know roughly what he stands for, but has he not recently become strangely heavy and affected in his form. I feel so. At times he is almost incomprehensible to me on account of his lack of clarity. Do tell me what are his best works, and who is grouped around him.43

42

43

les forms il a été un vrai bienfaiteur de la nation.” Krüger, Correspondance, vol. 1, 3; Jones, Selected Letters, 22–23. “Jeg synes at disse tre Bøger give et godt (og favorabelt) Billede af det moderne Tydskland. Heyse er min personlige Ven; […] det er et højst elskværdigt Talent. Som Novellist synes det mig at han kun overgaaes af Turgèniew, dont je suis fou.” Krüger, Correspondance, vol. 2, 22; Jones, Selected Letters, 40–41. “Alt, hvad De maatte ville sige mig om moderne engelske Litteratur interesserer mig i høieste Grad. Jeg kjender kun lidet til den. Thi jeg læser Engelsk, især Vers, med Besvær, da jeg ei har lært Sproget i Skolen, men senere har maattet lære mig det selv. Af Swinburne har jeg læst adskilligt og jeg kjender saa omtrent hans Tendents; men er han ei nu paa Slutningen bleven underligt tung og forskruet i sin Form? Jeg synes det. Undertiden er han mig næsten uforstaaelig ved sin Mangel paa Klarhed. Fortæl mig hvis De vil, hvad der

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

128

Allen

Gosse fulfilled this request in his next letter, describing his own poetic ambitions, his correspondence with Ibsen, and meetings in Copenhagen in 1872 with writers such as H.C. Andersen and Frederik Paludan-Müller, as well as chastising Brandes for describing Swinburne as “affected (forskruet); this I think he is not, but he is often turbid, violent and obscure. But he has magnificent powers, and a wealth and delicacy of versification that is very rare in any age. He is our central figure in poetry today.”44 Replying on 20 February 1874, Brandes thanks Gosse for the information about Swinburne, noting “I find him interesting but he seems to be very difficult to understand.”45 Regardless of how much he had understood of Swinburne’s work, Brandes had no hesitation in sharing his newfound enthusiasm for Swinburne with Noufflard in a letter dated 24 February 1874: “If you read English, try the Songs before Sunrise by A.C. Swinburne, who seems to me to be an English [Charles-Marie-René] Leconte de Lisle. There is a very rare power there, and a serene manly beauty.”46 Brandes’ decision to compare Swinburne, a British author with whom Noufflard had little familiarity, to the French poet Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894), functions as a way of bringing the foreign closer to Noufflard. In his troubled friendship with Bjørnson, Brandes struck a similarly pedagogical tone on occasion. In a February 1878 letter, after noting that Bjørnson was likely better acquainted with modern literature than he himself, Brandes nevertheless offers unsolicited advice about what Bjørnson should read to gain insight into French culture via French literature. He begins: I would like to draw your attention to the brothers Goncourt in French literature. (They are two novelists who have always only worked together until one of the brothers died recently.) Read their Renée Mauperin, Germinie Lacerteux, and then all their novels if you like them. […] They have been written extremely conscientiously; the artistic form is not so finely chiseled as so often in French authors, but behind it lies the strictest observance of reality and an exquisite sense of observation; a wealth of study and thought. One learns something from them.47

44 45 46 47

er det Bedste af ham og hvem der grupperer sig om ham.” Krüger, Correspondance, vol. 2, 16; Jones, Selected Letters, 39. Krüger, Correspondance, vol. 2, 19. Jones, Selected Letters, 44. Jones, Selected Letters, 45. “Jeg vil gjøre Dem opmærksom paa Brødrene Goncourt i den franske Litteratur. (Det er to Romanforfattere, der altid kun havde arbeidet sammen, indtil for kort siden da den ene Broder døde). Læs af dem Renée Mauperin, Germinie Lacerteux og efterhaanden alle deres Romaner, hvis De synes om dem. […] De er udført med den yderste Sandhedskærlighed

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

129

With this praise for the Goncourts’ ability to depict reality, Brandes seems to be encouraging Bjørnson to orient his own works in a more realistic direction, building on the success of his two successful social dramas from 1874, En fallit (Bankruptcy) and Redaktøren (The Editor). He goes on to recommend Émile Zola as the quintessential French realist writer, with an annotated reading list for Bjørnson’s bedside table: The most talented novelist in France today is Emile Zola, a first-rate talent, but susceptible to aberration and lapses of taste like all innovators. I recommend La fortune des Rougons [sic] (from the time of the coup d’état, excellent) and the latest, the famous L’Assommoir (the life of French workers during the Second Empire), at times offensive in the realm of its descriptions, but the most outstanding achievement so far in realistic art. Then his Son excellence M. Rougon – splendid; Rougon is more or less a description of Roubert, and the novel’s heroine reflects the character of the Empress. This, too, is a masterly portrait of an age. Zola has presented us with the inside story of the Empire (1851–70) in novel form; we Scandinavians lack a similar portrayal of our more recent history.48 From Brandes’ perspective, Zola would, despite the occasional vulgarity of his works, be a valuable resource for Bjørnson as an example of how to tell the “inside story” of a country “in novel form.” By making an explicit connection to the (in Brandes’ well-known view, dismal) state of literature in Scandinavia, Brandes seems to be inviting Bjørnson to take a page out of Zola’s book and write such an account for his own country or region. It is not clear that Bjørnson welcomed or trusted Brandes’ suggestions for his literary edification, for a few days later, on 8 February 1878, Brandes wrote again to justify his recommendations. He cautions Bjørnson, with whom he had only recently reconciled after a bitter quarrel earlier in the decade, to be patient and open-minded in approaching texts that Brandes recommended as characteristic of the age: Be prepared at first for loathing the books I admire, as you will perhaps do for some time to come. I am afraid that our artistic tastes are totally different, although I have the hope that we might find some common

48

og yderst fin Iagttagelse; en Rigdom af Undersøgelser og Tanker. Man lærer noget deraf.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 4.1, 14. Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 4.1, 14–15; Jones, Selected Letters, 74.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

130

Allen

ground. […] Zola is brutal, audacious, so ruthless that – however ridiculous it might sound – he had incurred a public condemnation from Swinburne, who finds him indecent and filthy. But he is a true genius. Just read La fortune des Rougon.49 This exchange with Bjørnson illustrates the challenge Brandes faced in trying to broaden his peers’ literary horizons, especially with regard to texts they found offensive or off-putting, even if the artistic merit and/or intellectual value of the works seemed incontrovertible to him. Despite Brandes’ pleas for patience and a gradual rapprochement via literature, he and Bjørnson struggled for another decade to reconcile their ideological and aesthetic views, as Bjørnson’s pointed public attacks on Brandes during the so-called Sædelighedsfejde (morality feud) of the 1880s reveal, after which their friendship came to an abrupt end. Brandes was not afraid to change his own mind, however, and one can track his changing attitudes toward his own work through the shifts in the kinds of text he writes – from literary-critical texts aimed at a Danish audience, exemplified by his 1869 study of Hans Christian Andersen and his 1877 biography of Søren Kierkegaard, to more sociohistorical texts directed at a wider European audience, such as his 1878 monograph on Lord Beaconsfield, and finally to his explicitly politically engaged speeches and writings about such diverse topics as German imperialism, the Armenian genocide, discrimination against Jews in Poland, and the oppression of Schleswig-Holstein. Writing to Sophus Schandorph in April 1888, Brandes confessed: I am becoming more radical, less historically minded, and ever more aristocratic in my aesthetical and historical views. I no longer believe one iota in the theory that great men are some concentrated mass, created from below, the expression of the multitude, etc. Everything comes from the great, everything seeps down from them. I have rejoiced over the powerful inner life I am leading, and over the ferment in my ideas. Stagnation is terrible, and sloughing is the sign of real, essential youth.50 49

50

“Vær forberedt paa at De rimeligvis i første Øjeblik vil afskye de Bøger, jeg beundrer, maaskee ogsaa senere. Jeg er bange for at vor kunstneriske Smag gaaer til forskjellige Sider, skjøndt jeg har et Haab om at vi kunde mødes. […] Zola er brutal, dumdristig, saa hensynsløs, at han har – saa latterligt det lyder – paadraget sig en offentlig Fordømmelsesdom af Swinburne, der finder ham uanstændig og smudsig. Men han er et virkeligt Geni. Læs blot La fortune des Rougons.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 4.1, 21–22; Jones, Selected Letters, 78. “Desuden bliver jeg mere radikal, mindre historisk, og stedse mere aristokratisk i æsthetiske og historiske Synsmaader. Jeg troer ikke mere for en Døjt paa at de store Mænd er

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

131

In 1922, Moritzen lauded Brandes for precisely this intellectual pliability, exclaiming “He has never hesitated to change his theories nor to raise a new battle flag, and in his long life he has passed through many different stages. He has been a radical collectivist with Taine, a radical individualist with Michelangelo and Goethe, and a radical aristocrat with Nietzsche. He has been independent and international always, but reactionary never.”51 As he presents himself in his letters, Brandes is a lively, outspoken correspondent, who does not pretend to neutrality, but frames his literary suggestions in terms of their relevance to his own fluid aesthetic and ideological priorities, as his initial dislike and later praise for J.P. Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880, published in English as Siren Voices, 1896) illustrates. Brandes’ correspondence with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) illustrates his movement toward his theory of great men as the impetus of social change. He first began corresponding with Nietzsche in November 1887 after receiving a copy of his Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) from Nietzsche’s publishers, which they had presumably sent in the hope that Brandes would work his influencer magic on Nietzsche’s reputation and promote the dissemination of his works. As with his solicitation of insights into British literature from Gosse, Brandes initially approached Nietzsche from a position of humility, as a student at the feet of the master, writing to Nietzsche: “It is an honor for me to be known to you, and to be known in such a way, that you should wish to gain me as a reader.”52 Brandes immersed himself in the study of Nietzsche’s work, although he admitted to the author that “I do not completely understand what I have read; I still do not always know where you want to go.”53 Still, as with his recommendation of Swinburne to Noufflard as soon as he got Gosse’s response, Brandes began almost immediately to promote Nietzsche’s work, writing to Paul Heyse in December 1887 that “you have a philosopher in Germany by whom I set great store, and who has recently written well and profoundly on ascetic ideals; it is Friedrich Nietzsche in his book Zur Geneaologie der Moral. He seems to me to be the most brilliant thinker in

51 52 53

concentreret masse, skabes nedenfra, er Udtryk for Hoben osv. Alt kommer fra de Store, Alt siver fra dem nedefter. Jeg har glædet mig over det stærke indre Liv, jeg fører, og over Gjæringen i mine Ideer. Stilstand er frygtelig og Hamskifte er den egentlige, væsentlige Ungdom.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 3, 234; Jones, Selected Letters, 154. Moritzen, Life and Letters, xii. “Es ist mir eine Ehre, von Ihnen gekannt zu sein, und solcherweise gekannt, dass Sie daran gedacht haben, mich als Leser zu gewinnen.” Nietzsche, Briefwechsel, vol. 3.6, 120. “Ich verstehe noch nicht völlig, was ich gelesen habe; ich weiss nicht immer wo Sie hinaus wollen.” Nietzsche, Briefwechsel, vol. 3.6, 120.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

132

Allen

Germany.”54 A few months later, in April 1888, he both asked Taine’s opinion of Nietzsche and recommended that Sophus Schandorph read Nietzsche, with the endorsement, “His views correspond so very closely to my own that I find him outstandingly good, the only philosopher living today whom I can use. We have been in contact for a few years. He has an ill-sounding name and is still unknown. He’s called Friedrich Nietzsche. But he is a genius.”55 Schandorph thanked Brandes for the recommendation, commenting on how difficult it was to understand Nietzsche’s ideas from the published summary of Brandes’ lecture on him, and promised to read his works, noting “I am also thirsting for new sources.”56 Likewise, Brandes encouraged Nietzsche, in the 22 letters they exchanged before Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in 1889, to read Ibsen, Strindberg, and Kierkegaard. Yet Brandes’ promotion of Nietzsche – primarily through the public lectures he gave at the University of Copenhagen in 1888 and the essay “Friedrich Nietzsche: En Afhandling om aristokratisk Radikalisme” that appeared in the literary journal Tilskueren in 1889 – was problematic on several fronts, not least because so many of Nietzsche’s positions – about women’s emancipation, equality, democracy, rationality, and so on – were diametrically opposed to the causes Brandes had spent the previous decades fighting for. Pages criticizes Brandes’ “elitist, anti-democratic propagation of Nietzsche at the expense of the cause of liberal democracy and social progress” and argues that Brandes’ status as both a “disciple [of Nietzsche] and the hopeful originator of a political and literary program” led him to “abandon […] the critical objectivity crucial to his status as a critic and betray […] both his public and his reputation as the arbiter of the literary tastes of his day.”57 In contrast to J.P. Jacobsen’s work, which Brandes promoted despite what he considered its aesthetic deficiencies for the sake of its usefulness to the realistic literary cause, Brandes’ instrumentalization of Nietzsche’s philosophy ran the risk of undermining, even co-opting, his entire activist agenda. Brandes appears to have eventually recognized the problematic aspects of his uninhibited promotion of Nietzsche, though he was still proud of his role 54 55

56 57

“I har i Tyskland en Filosof, som jeg vurderer højt og som nylig har skrevet meget godt og dybt og asketiske Idealer, det er Fr. Nietzsche i sin Bog: Zur Genealogie der Moral. Han synes mig den aandfuldeste af Tysklands Tænkere.” Krüger, Correspondence, vol. 3, 293. “Hans Anskuelser stemmer saa stærkt overens med mine, at jeg finder ham fortræffelig, den eneste nulevende Filosof, jeg kan bruge. Vi have staaet i Forbindelse i et Par Aar. Hans Navn er ildeklingende og han er endnu ubekjendt. Han hedder Friedrich Nietzsche. Men han er et Geni.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 3, 234; Jones, Selected Letters, 154. “Jeg smægter ogsaa efter friske Kilder.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 3, 236. Pages, “Reading Brandes Reading Nietzsche,” 171, 165.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

133

as mediator. In a letter to Strindberg in December 1888, Brandes initially noted “I am pleased to have brought two as important men as you and him together and to have made my contribution to your understanding each other.”58 Fifteen months later, however, Brandes cautioned Strindberg “Whatever you do, you must not immerse yourself so in Nietzsche. There is an element in him which can be used, and another which leads feeling and thought astray. As a poet you are not distrustful enough of ideas.”59 In this case, however, the consequences of Brandes’ matchmaking were already out of his hands. Strindberg’s sense of having been enriched by his intellectual blind date with Nietzsche comes across clearly in the vivid analogy of fertilization he uses in a letter to Brandes’ brother Edvard in September 1888: “Meanwhile, the uterus of my spiritual life has received a terrible unloading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s seed, so that I feel intoxicated like a dog in heat. That was my man!”60 Writing to Brandes, in December 1888, Strindberg used more conventional political and religious terminology, praising Nietzsche as the herald of the downfall of Europe and Christianity, the awakening of the Orient and its reclamation of its noble rights, to which it has the most ancient claim. […] Nietzsche is for me the modern spirit that dares to preach the rights of the strong, the clever against those of the stupid, the small (the democrats), and I can imagine the suffering of the great spirit under the violence of the many little ones during this time of general indignation and condemnation. And I salute in him the liberator, and end as his catechumen my letters to literary friends thus: read Nietzsche.61

58 59 60 61

“Det glæder mig at have ført to saa betydelige Mænd som Dem og ham [Nietzsche] sammen og at have bidraget mit til at De kom til at forstaa hinanden.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 7, 295; Jones, Selected Letters, 160. “De maa endelig ikke fordybe Dem saaledes i Nietzsche. Der er et Element i ham, som er at bruge, et andet, som leder Følelsen og Tanken vild. De er som Poet ikke mistroisk nok overfor Idégange.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 7, 299; Jones, Selected Letters, 164. “Emellertid mitt aandsliv har i sitt uterus mottagit en förfärlig sädesuttömning af Friedrich Nietzsche, så at jag känner mig full som en hynda i buken. Det var min man!” Landquist, 133; Stern, “Strindberg’s Encounter with Nietzsche,” 168. “Bebådaren af Europas och Kristendomens undergång, Orientens vaknande och återinträdende i sina rättigheter såsom adeln hvilken har de äldsta anorna. […] Nietzsche är mig därför den modern anden som vågar predika den starkes, den klokes rätt gentemot de dumma, de små (demokraterna), och jag kan tänka den store andens lidanden under de manga smås våld under denna tid af allmän forkäringning och fördumning. Och jeg helsar i honom befriaren, och slutar såsom hans katekumen mina bref till litterära vänner så: läs Nietzsche.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 7, 294.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

134

Allen

Strindberg identified so strongly with Nietzsche – despite Brandes’ reminder that Nietzsche’s anti-Christian position could not possibly impress the man who had been known for so long as “the Anti-Christ of the North”62 – that he promoted his works to all of his own correspondents. However, Nietzsche’s descent into insanity had a sobering effect on both Brandes’ and Strindberg’s enthusiasm for his work. In early January 1889, Strindberg sent several of Nietzsche’s letters to Brandes, one of them signed “Nietzsche Cæsar,” and asked Brandes’ advice about how to respond. Brandes agreed that Nietzsche must indeed be daarekistegal (“raving mad”), which he regarded as “a great tragedy. Such an exquisite spirit, so rare, so rich – struck down by megalomania!”63 By April 1890, Strindberg and Brandes agreed that “one must go through (be pollinated by) N. and then free yourself of him.”64 At the end of the day, such cross-fertilization was all Brandes could hope for with any of the intellectual matches he made in his letters – that his correspondents would come away enriched but still independent from their encounter with different viewpoints and literary styles. 4

A New Way of Seeing

Through these representative examples, this chapter has demonstrated how integral Brandes’ correspondence was for his professional and private lives. Making connections between people, opening their eyes to the value of the foreign and thus to the possibilities and flaws inherent in their own culture, was the air Brandes breathed. He believed the infusion of new ideas from other literary traditions would revitalize his country’s literature and inspire his author friends, but he himself also needed access to the foreign to maintain his own sanity. As he writes in the introduction to Moderne Geister (1882), which contains literary-historical sketches of Paul Heyse, Hans Christian Andersen, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, Esaias Tegnér, Gustave Flaubert, Frederik PaludanMüller, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Brandes insisted that choosing to write a book in German about authors from six different countries did not mean that he loved his country or his mother tongue any less than his monolingual compatriots. On the contrary, he argues, 62 63 64

“Nordens Antikrist.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 7, 295. “En stor Ulykke. En saa ypperlig Aand, saa sjælden, saa rig – ramt af Højhedsvanviddet!” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 7, 297. “Man skall gå igenom (befruktas af) N. och sedan rensa sig ifrån honom.” Borup, Georg og Edv. Brandes, vol. 7, 301.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

135

The author of this book, who is absolutely not a chameleon and has in no wise given up his mother tongue […] knows very well that a person can only exercise significant influence there where he was born and where he was educated by and for its conditions. He does not have the ambition to become a German writer in the actual sense. In the present book, as in other texts, his intention has simply been to write for Europe in the German language, e.g. to treat his subject matter differently than he would have to for a purely Scandinavian audience.65 In short, what Brandes hoped to be able to do with his book in German was distance himself from his own culture and his Danish readers enough to show them the world through a different set of lenses than either he or they were used to. Being able to see things from a different perspective cultivates empathy and facilitates innovation, making old things seem new again and new things possible. By “bringing the foreign closer” to his readers, Brandes was not trying to make them abjure their national cultures or languages any more than he could shed his own. He was simply trying to give them access to a new way of seeing. Bibliography Bergel, Kurt, ed.: Ein Briefwechsel. Georg Brandes und Arthur Schnitzler. Bern: Francke, 1956. Binkley, Harold C.: “Essays and Letter-Writing,” pmla 41/2 (1926): 342–361. jstor, www. jstor.org/stable/457439. Bohnen, Klaus: “Brandes und Hauptmann: Spuren einer produktiven Rezeption,” in: Leben-Werk-Lebenswerk. Ein Gerhart Hauptmann-Gedenkbank, edited by Edward Bialek et al. Legnica, Poland: Orbis linguarum, 1997, 77–85.

65

“Der Verfasser dieses Buches, der durchaus kein Chamäleon ist und seine Muttersprache keineswegs aufgegeben hat […] weiss recht wol, dass der Mensch nur da wo er geboren, wo er durch und für die Verhältnisse gebildet ist, erheblichen Einfluss ausüben kann. Er hat auch nicht den Ehrgeiz, ein deutscher Schriftsteller im eigentlichen Sinne sein zu wollen. In dem vorliegenden Buch, wie in anderen Schriften, ist seine Absicht einfach die gewesen, in deutscher Sprache für Europa zu schreiben, d.h. seine Stoffe anders zu behandeln als er es für ein blos skandinavisches Publicum tun würde.” Brandes, Moderne Geister. Moderne Geister. Literarische Bildnisse aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vi.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

136

Allen

Bohnen, Klaus: “Ein Kulturvermittler der Jahrhundertwende: Georg Brandes in seiner deutschen Korrespondenz,” Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge, Festschrift Viktor Zemgac, Beiheft 5 (1999): 205–219. Bohnen, Klaus: “Europäisches Bewußtsein in der Krise. Unveröffentlicher Briefwechsel zwischen Stefan Zweig und Georg Brandes,” Orbis Litterarum 33 (1978): 220–237. Bohnen, Klaus: “Georg Brandes und Arno Holz. Unveröffentliche Briefe zwischen 1890 und 1896,” in: Stationen-Stationer. Festschrift für Axel Fritz, edited by Eva Lambertsson Björk and Elin Nesje. Halden, Norway: Høgskolen i Østfold, 2000, 109–120. Bohnen, Klaus: “Hermann Sudermann und Georg Brandes. Ein unveröffentlichter Briefwechsel,” in: Åndelige rum /Geistige Räume. Festskrift til Wolf Wucherpfennig, edited by Karin Bang and Uwe Geist. Roskilde: Roskilde Universitetscenter, 2002, 21–38. Borup, Morten, ed.: Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene 1859–71, 3 vols. Copenhagen: Det danske sprog- og litteraturselskab, 1978. Borup, Morten, Francis Bull and John Landquist, eds: Georg og Edv. Brandes. Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, 8 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1939–42. Brandes, Georg: “Indledning til hovedstrøminger i det nittende aarhundredes litteratur,” in: Samlede værker. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900, vol. 4, 1–13. Brandes, Georg: Moderne Geister. Literarische Bildnisse aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Berlin: Rütten und Loening, 1882. Brandes, Georg: “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur,” translated by Lynn Wilkinson, pmla 132/3 (2017): 696–705. Eaton, J.W.: The German influence in Danish Literature in the xviii century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929. Fulsås, Narve and Tore Rem: “From Periphery to Center: The Origins and Worlding of Ibsen’s Drama,” in: Decentering European Intellectual Space, edited by Marja Jalava, Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang. Boston: Brill, 2018, 43–64. Garton, Janet, ed.: Amalie Skram. Breveksling med andre nordiske forfattere. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 2005. Jones, W. Glyn: Georg Brandes. Selected Letters. Norwich, UK: Norvik Press, 1990. Knudsen, Jørgen: “‘I too believe in the good effect of hypnosis’: Georg Brandes and his Correspondence,” in: Nordic Letters 1870–1910, edited by Michael Robinson and Janet Garton. Norwich, UK: Norvik Press, 1999, 65–86. Krüger, Paul: Correspondance de Georg Brandes, 6 vols. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1966. Landquist, John, ed.: Georg och Edv. Brandes Brevväxling med Svenska och Finska Författere och Vetenskapmän. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1939.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

“Bringing the Foreign Closer to Us”

137

Larsen, Svend-Erik: “The Telescope of Comparative Literature.” The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. London: Routledge, 2012, 21–31. Lyhne, Vagn and Lis Norup, eds: Anarkismens tid: en brevveksling mellem Peter Kropotkin og Georg Brandes. Copenhagen: Det poetiske bureau, 2019. MacArthur, Elizabeth: Extravagant Narratives. Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1990. Möller-Christensen, Ivy York: Den gyldne trekant. H. C. Andersens gennembrud i Tyskland 1831–50. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1992. Moritzen, Julius: Georg Brandes in Life and Letters. Newark, New Jersey: D. S. Colyer, 1922. Nielsen, Torben and Morten Borup, eds: Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene, 1872–1904, 3 vols. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich: Briefwechsel, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 23 vols, edited by Giorgio Colli and Norbert Miller. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1975–2004. Pages, Neil Christian: “On Popularization: Reading Brandes Reading Nietzsche,” Scandinavian Studies 72/2 (2000): 163–179. Pohl, Nicole: “‘Perfect Reciprocity’: Salon Culture and Epistolary Conversations,” Women’s Writing 13/1 (2006): 139–159. Robinson, Michael: “‘The Great Epistolick Art’: an Introduction,” in: Nordic Letters 1870–1910, edited by Michael Robinson and Janet Garton. Norwich, UK: Norvik Press, 1999, 11–32. Rivera, Carla: “9 of the Biggest Social Media Influencers on Instagram,” https://digita lmarketinginstitute.com/en-eu/blog/9-of-the-biggest-social-media-influencers-on -instagram. Accessed 13 June 2019. Sandberg, Anna: En grænsegænger mellem oplysning og romantic: Jens Baggesens tyske forfatterskab. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2015. Sandberg, Hans-Joachim: “Suggestibilität und Widerspruch. Thomas Manns Auseinandersetzung mit Brandes,” Nerthus 3 (1972): 119–163. Seibæk, Eva, ed.: Edvard og Georg Brandes’ brevveksling 1866–77. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1972. Stern, Michael Jay: “Strindberg’s Encounter with Nietzsche: the Conflation of Autobiography and History.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California-Berkeley, 2000. Van der Liet, Henk: “Georg Brandes as a literary intermediary,” Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistik 25/1 (2004): 93–110. Venuti, Lawrence: Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge 2013.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

pa rt 2 The Public Intellectual

∵

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 7

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

Georg Brandes and the Making of an Intellectual Torben Jelsbak The publication of Emigrant Literature, the first series of lectures on Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, delivered at the University of Copenhagen in November and December of 1871, constitutes a pivotal event in Georg Brandes’ life and career.1 In fact, from a certain point of view this lecture series may be regarded as the decisive moment in the making of Brandes as an intellectual. As the Danish literary scholar Paul V. Rubow has put it, Emigrant Literature was “the bravest action” taken by Brandes in his life as a public figure,2 but for the same reason also the single work that for better or worse came to seal his fate and his ensuing career as a literary scholar, critic, and journalist. The series was conceived as a part of a career plan that would make the brilliant young doctor a university professor, but instead it provoked a public scandal that effectively foreclosed a promising academic career. This makes Brandes and Emigrant Literature an excellent case for a study of the emergence of the modern intellectual as a public figure and social category in a Scandinavian context. To analyze Brandes’ intellectual trajectory, or route to becoming an intellectual, I will make use of theoretical concepts and perspectives taken from the French tradition of intellectual history, represented by scholars such as JeanLouis Fabiani, Christophe Charle, and Gisèle Sapiro,3 drawing on the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. From this tradition of scholarship, I adopt the concept of the prophet as a way of describing and analyzing the social role and modus operandi of the late nineteenth-century intellectual or politically engaged writer. This approach focuses especially on the kind of authority or appeal (in a rhetorical sense) that characterizes the voice of the intellectual in public discourse. In the last part of the article, I will focus specifically on 1 Parts of this article are based on my contribution to Bjerring-Hansen, Jens & Lasse Horne Kjældgaard (eds.): Georg Brandes’ Main Currents: A Companion. Copenhagen: U Press, 2023 (in press). 2 Rubow, De franske, 21. 3 Cf. Fabiani, Les philosophes; Charle, Les intellectuels; Sapiro, Les écrivains.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_009 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

142

Jelsbak

the polemic and prophetic style used by Brandes in Emigrant Literature, by emphasizing some parallels between the opening lecture and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto. 1

The Scandal of Emigrant Literature, 1871–1872

In its totality, Georg Brandes’ Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (given as public lectures in Copenhagen 1871–1887, and published 1872–1890) is an ambitiously designed six-volume comparative history of the major lines of development in nineteenth-century European literature and identity. It chronicles how the worldly ideals of freedom of the French Revolution of 1789 turned into their opposites, thus leading to European Romanticism, a Catholic renaissance, and empire, and ultimately how reason and freethinking overcame this reaction in a new movement leading onward toward the European revolutions of 1848. Emigrant Literature is the first movement – the first act – in this historical drama, which played out among the French émigré writers driven into exile by the repercussions of the French Revolution. The project of Main Currents, as outlined in Brandes’ introductory lecture, was theoretically innovative in its cross-national and comparative approach to its topic, treating nineteenth-century French, German, and English literatures as an interwoven complex. Furthermore, the project was innovative and provocative in that it introduced a modern scientific perspective on culture, nations, and history, inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution and Hippolyte Taine’s positivist aesthetics. But if we are to understand fully the radicalism of Brandes’ work and the controversy it caused, it is necessary to place the book in the local Danish context in which it was conceived. Emigrant Literature was not only literary history, but also a cultural-political intervention: an act of rebellion directed at contemporary Danish literature, which according to Brandes had become mired in Romanticism and thus now found itself in a state of lethargy – lagging 40 years behind Europe. This also implied an attack on the dominant national self-understanding of Denmark itself, more closely defined as the national-liberal cultural ideology with its peculiar synthesis of Christianity, conservative sexual morality, and love of fatherland. Brandes’ program of comparative literary study was meant to “correct” established national orientations by promoting an international outlook,4 and its famous battle cry that literature should “provoke debate”5 made 4 Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 7. 5 Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 15.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

143

Brandes himself the standard bearer of a process of historical development that concerned not only literature, but the entirety of the social order and the modernization of the culture in a broad sense. Brandes’ cosmopolitan agenda of cultural modernization required an especially volcanic character in the historico-political context of Denmark in 1871–1872. Following the defeat to Prussia and Austria in the Second Schleswig War in 1864, the Danish state had lost the duchies of Holstein, Lauenburg, and Schleswig, a loss corresponding to a third of its territory and 40% of the state’s population. As a consequence, the country found itself in a kind of spiritual state of shock. Furthermore, a number of topical political events added to the provocative potential and impact of Brandes’ lectures. Of seminal importance were of course the events of the Paris Commune in March–May 1871, which the ruling bourgeois classes in other European countries had followed anxiously. In the months before Brandes’ first lecture, socialism had also made its first appearance in Denmark. In September, Copenhagen had witnessed the outbreak of strikes and riots at Denmark’s largest and most important enterprise in the iron industry, Burmeister & Wain (b&w), and in October a Danish Section of The International Workingmen’s Association (iwa) – “The First International” (1864–1876) – was founded. As Henning Fenger has pointed out, these events had the effect that public opinion in Denmark, still almost exclusively dominated by a national-conservative press, took a move towards the right, violently refusing any act or statement that might be associated with socialism.6 Together, these circumstances form the political context of the reception of Emigrant Literature. The lectures filled up university auditoria, yet they also gave Brandes the reputation of rabble rouser and blasphemer, and when the book came out in early 1872 its author was subjected to charges of indecency, unscientific practice, and even socialism. The French word pétroleuse, used by the national-liberal politician and editor of the daily Fædrelandet (Fatherland), Carl Ploug,7 to describe Brandes, sums up the character of the contemporary Danish reception of Emigrant Literature. Pétroleuses was the term employed during the Paris Commune for the female terrorists who used petroleum as a means of setting fires. Leading members of Danish society perceived Brandes’ liberal agenda of emancipation and cosmopolitanism as an attack on the very pillars of society: the nation, Christianity, and marriage as social institution.8 This was the reason why a majority of conservative professors in the faculty of 6 Fenger, Den unge Brandes, 199–203. 7 Anon., Fædrelandet, 17 February 1872. 8 Juncker, “Debatten,” 27–31.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

144

Jelsbak

philosophy opposed the appointment of Brandes to the vacant professorship in aesthetics, for which he was otherwise the obvious candidate.9 As a consequence Brandes had to bid farewell to a secure and respected bourgeois livelihood as a state-appointed professor. Yet another result of this affair was that a group of young radical writers, among them J.P. Jacobsen and Holger Drachmann, gathered around Brandes, who thus became the informal ideological leader of a new literary movement soon to be known as “The Literary Left” due to its affiliations with the major Danish oppositional Liberal Party (Venstre). In the years to come, Brandes’ call for social debate in literature would also inspire a new Naturalist wave in Scandinavian literature and theater, with Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and August Strindberg as its most prominent figures. Emigrant Literature is thus also normally seen as the birth certificate of the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature, as Brandes himself would later label the phenomena in the book Det moderne Gjennembruds Mænd (The Men of the Modern Breakthrough) from 1883. Finally, the scandal of Emigrant Literature was decisive for Brandes’ career on yet another level. Not only did it prevent him from receiving the vacant professorship in aesthetics at the university; he also became subject to a years-long blockade in a majority of the Copenhagen newspapers and journals, in which he had previously earned his living as a literary critic and theater reviewer. This state of affairs compelled Brandes to make his living as an independent journalist in the German press and – like several other modern Scandinavian writers in the period – to exile himself from his homeland and settle down in Berlin, for the period between 1877 and 1883.10 Over the following decades, however, the expansion of the German-language literary market allowed Brandes to establish himself as a leading European literary critic and mediator between European literatures – a “guter Europäer und Cultur-Missionär” (“a good European and cultural missionary”), as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called him in a private letter in 1887.11 2

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

The statements by Plough and Nietzsche provide us with two contemporary perceptions of the figure of the nineteenth-century intellectual. Plough’s dismissive description of Brandes as a pétroleuse stresses the oppositional and 9 10 11

Larsen, Professoratet. Sørensen, Georg Brandes; Bohnen, Georg Brandes; Allen, “Brandes as a German Journalist.” Brandes, Correspondance, vol. 3, 441.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

145

subversive bias of the intellectual, often associated with Left-wing political activism. Of course, this designation also served the polemic purpose of creating an image of Brandes as a persona non grata, an enemy of society who was unsuited to hold office as a servant of the state. Nietzsche’s more sympathetic description of the “guter Europäer und Cultur-Missionär” refers to a later point in Brandes’ intellectual career. It reflects his international reputation in 1887 as a cultural mediator between European literatures, whilst the latter part of the description (“missionary”) may be read as an allusion to the peculiar style of Brandes’ agitation. Emigrant Literature became a public scandal not only because of its radical ideas of secularism, cosmopolitism, and emancipation, but also – and perhaps primarily – because of the polemic and prophetic style used by Brandes to stage his endeavor. Breaking with the traditional academic format, Brandes’ introductory lecture was framed as a kind of manifesto, exposing striking similarities with the style of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto. Using a powerful rhetoric of rupture and revolution, Brandes staged himself as an advocate of an irreversible Hegelian logic and telos in the history of ideas. There was no socialism in Brandes’ reform program and he did not, like Marx and Engels, evoke the industrial proletariat as the general subject of nineteenth-century history. Yet the activist and prophetic tone of the lectures, together with the peculiar political context of Denmark in 1871–1872, gave Brandes’ conservative opponents the impression that the specter of communism had entered the Copenhagen University auditorium. It may seem odd to describe Brandes’ role as an intellectual in religious terms – as a missionary or prophet. Why this sacralization of the discourse of the nineteenth-century intellectual? Was not Brandes first of all a secular and anti-clerical liberal working to liberate Danish and Scandinavian culture from the burdens of Lutheran religion? To explore this paradox, I will analyze Brandes’ intervention with Emigrant Literature from the perspective of the French tradition of intellectual history, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory. Before addressing Brandes’ early career and the case of Emigrant Literature, I will outline the main elements of this theoretical framework and its historical-empirical basis in the French intellectual history of the nineteenth century. 3

The Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Field

In French intellectual history there is a tradition of describing the nineteenth-century intellectual as a prophet of modernity. Hence, in

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

146

Jelsbak

Christophe Charle’s and Laurent Jeanpierre’s La vie intellectuelle en France (2016), the first half of the first volume, covering the period 1815–1880, bears the title “The Age of the Prophets” (Le temps de prophètes). The term “prophet” here refers to the oppositional role played by French writers, philosophers, and savants as advocates for political freedom and civic rights (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to education, and so on) in the period succeeding the restoration of the monarchy in 1815. Yet the use of the term also reflects a more general process of secularization in the period – in which secular forces gradually took over the sacral or spiritual power in culture and society that had previously belonged to the church. The emergence of the modern press was pivotal for this development, and a prerequisite for the creation of the intellectual as a public figure – as famously described by the scream of the prophet in Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris: “La presse tuera l’église” (“The Press will kill the church”).12 In the second half of the century, this process accelerated with the general increase in education, the development of the modern sciences, and the emergence of a new mass market for literary and intellectual goods facilitated by the industrialization of print. The title of the second part of La vie intellectuelle en France, “Le temps des groupements” (The Age of Grouping), covering the years 1860–1914, refers to a growing politicization and commercialization, in which writers, artists, and other cultural producers began organizing themselves into groups and collectives, following the model of political parties or cooperative enterprises. This is also the period in which the originally political genre of the manifesto was introduced to the literary and artistic field by radical writers and artists as a powerful means of positioning themselves and defining new positions within the field. On the new market of cultural goods, writers and intellectuals were faced with challenges that were not political, but rather social and economic in nature. One challenge to the traditional elite status of the savant came from an increase in the number of middle-class men receiving an academic education. As noted by Pierre Bourdieu in Les règles de l’art, a social prerequisite for the emergence of the new literary market in the period was the excess or overproduction of educated men in France, as well as in other Western European countries. The expansion of academic education created an unforeseen supply of intellectual labor, “a true army of intellectual reserves,”13 which could not be absorbed by the state and public administration. This development formed

12 13

Charle, Les intellectuelles, 81. Bourdieu, Les règles, 88.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

147

the basis for perhaps the most distinctive and influential trait of French intellectual life in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the deprofessionalization of intellectual careers. In this period, the term “the intellectuals” came to signify a new class of intellectual workers who were not employed by the state as clergymen, public officers, or civil servants – but who had to earn their livings as independent writers or producers in the expanding market for cultural goods. Deprofessionalization is of course relevant to Brandes’ career. Yet the term may also be understood in a broader sense, referring to a general disruption in the traditional academic disciplines, and frequent migrations of modern intellectuals across disciplines, in the period. The two major sources of inspiration for Brandes’ philosophical positivism, Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, were both exemplary in that their philosophical innovation took place outside the institutions of academic philosophy.14 Renan was a professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France, while Taine taught aesthetics at the École des Beaux-Arts. Both were scholarly generalists with a broad interdisciplinary approach to their objects of study, working across fields such as philosophy, social and human science, and literary studies. And both had a fairly weak attachement to the universities of their time, while their books attained a considerable audience among the general public. The same pattern occurs in Brandes’ career as a literary journalist, writing for a non-academic audience. With the emergence of a new mass market for cultural products, it became possible not only to earn a living but even to become rich and famous from cultural production, yet the growing competition and industrialization in the field also created new forms of precarity and proletarization among the new social class of intellectual workers. The editors of La vie intellectuelle en France distinguish between an optimistic period, 1860–1880, during which French intellectuals felt themselves aligned with the political progress and democratization of culture, and a later period towards the end of the century characterized by an increasing distaste among intellectuals regarding the vulgarity of mass culture. This change of attitudes in the late nineteenth-century intellectual field has an exact equivalent in Brandes’ intellectual development in the period between Emigrant Literature and his seminal lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Aristocratic Radicalism” of 1889–1890. Whereas the Brandes of 1871–1872 was inclined to the optimism and progressive ideals of J.S. Mills’ utilitarian philosophy, the Brandes of 1889–1890 had lost his faith in social democracy and

14

Fabiani, Les philosophes.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

148

Jelsbak

advancements for the masses, instead seeking a kind of asylum in the aristocratic and “heroic” ideals of Nietzsche’s philosophy.15 Another challenge to the status of the nineteenth-century intellectual came from increasing specialization within the modern sciences at the turn of the twentieth century, leading to the creation of new disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology. The model of Taine and Renan was rejected as outdated and pre-scientific by a new genre of scholars.16 For instance, the founding father of sociology in France, Émile Durkheim, saw the subjective and psychologizing approach of Taine and Renan as an obsolete counter-image of, rather than a precursor to, his discipline. In the introduction to De la division du travail social (1893), he derogatorily denounces the “dilettantism” of the “noble man” of previous times.17 This development may be seen as the background for the emergence of the very influential late nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of the modern intellectual as a politically engaged writer intervening in the formation of public opinion in favor of an ideal and universal course. The pivotal event in this chapter of French intellectual history is of course the Dreyfus Affair of 1897–1899, in which Émile Zola wrote his famous open letter (“J’accuse”) to the President of the Republic, defending Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew who had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice by the state. Zola was also among the co-signers of the collective “Manifeste des intellectuels” published in the French daily L’Aurore on 14 January 1898, in which a group of prominent writers and journalists – among them Anatole France and a young Marcel Proust – invested their prestige and symbolic capital as writers and artists in the political battle for justice and legal rights. The Dreyfus Affair was of seminal importance for French political and intellectual life in the following years, not only serving as a catalyst for a series of political reforms (such as the secularization of primary education and the separation of State and Church) but also leading to an extensive mobilization of intellectuals in new collective platforms, journals, and associations dedicated to the defense of civic rights and the struggles of suppressed peoples.18 Although it played out in France, the Dreyfus Affair was an international media event, with repercussions in most other European countries. As recently pointed out by William Banks, Brandes’ activity as a

15 16 17 18

Brandes, “Aristokratisk Radikalisme.” Richard, “Taine et Renan,” 401. Durkheim, La division, 5. Duclerc, “L’affaire Dreyfus,” 413–418.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

149

political journalist in the early 1900s, arguing for human rights and on behalf of suppressed peoples, must also be seen against the backdrop of the affair.19 4

The “Prophet” as an Analytical Category

Zola’s emblematic intervention in the Dreyfus Affair became constitutive of the influential twentieth-century idea and ideal of the modern intellectual as a moral guide or watchdog of society. As recently suggested by Gisèle Sapiro in her book Les écrivains et la politique en France (2018), this idealized form of political engagement may be analyzed by using a sociological concept of the prophet, as originally defined by Max Weber in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922) and later developed by Bourdieu.20 Weber’s definition especially concerns the prophet’s oppositional or heretic status vis à vis the church as institution. To emphasize his point, he compares two competing actors in the field of religion: the clergyman and the prophet. A common feature of the two is the ideological character of their discourses, each proposing a coherent vision of the world. But they differ in the kind of authority with which they speak. Whereas the clergyman speaks on behalf of the church and with all the accumulated authority of this institution, the prophet speaks on behalf of himself and a future order of things. The legitimacy and authority of his discourse reside in its emotional appeal, and in the charisma of the speaker. Bourdieu defines the prophet as “l’homme des situations de crise, où l’ordre établi bascule et où l’avenir tout entier est suspendu” (“a person acting in situations of crisis and radical change in which the social order collapses and the future as a whole is suspended”).21 Gisèle Sapiro offers a more detailed definition, summing up the most important points from Weber and Bourdieu, while also adding an important aspect concerning the prophet’s social function as a spiritual leader. The prophet, Sapiro writes, s’oppose au corps sacerdotal professionnel selon une série d’oppositions structurantes. Du point de vue de la temporalité, il oppose le discontinue au continu, l’extraordinaire à l’ordinaire, au quotidien et au banal. Du point de vue de fondement de l’autorité, il oppose le charisme à la légalité, l’inspiration à la formation et à la compétence certifiée; il tire son autorité du public, de la communauté émotionnelle que forment ses 19 20 21

Brandes, Human Rights, 24. Bourdieu, “Une interprétation,” 3–21; “Genèse,” 295–334. Bourdieu, “Genèse,” 331.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

150

Jelsbak

disciples plutôt que de sa fonction et de sa position dans la hiérarchie ecclésiastique. Ce type d’autorité implique de relations fortement personnalisées, caractéristiques de la secte, à l’opposé de l’interchangeabilité qui caractérise le fonctionnement bureaucratique d’une organisation comme l’Église. Le message prend une forme émotionnelle plutôt que rationnelle et pédagogique. Il est hérétique, en rupture avec l’ordre établi et avec l’orthodoxie du message du prêtre.22 (“opposes himself to the professional clerical body in a series of structural oppositions. From a temporal perspective, he contrasts the discontinuous with the continuous, the extraordinary with the ordinary, the familiar and the banal. From the perspective of the foundation of authority he contrasts charisma with legality, inspiration with scholarly formation and competence; he asserts his authority in the public by means of the emotional community formed by his disciples rather than by means of his function and his position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This type of authority relies strongly on personal relations similar to those in a sect, as opposed to the interchangeable structure characterizing a bureaucratic organization such as the church. The discourse takes a form that is emotional rather than rational and pedagogic. It is heretical, in rupture with the established order and the orthodoxy of the discourse of the clergyman.”) Connoisseurs of Brandes’ Main Currents and the principles governing its narrative of nineteenth-century European literature (the dialectic shifts between revolution and reaction, and thus the principles of emancipation and authority; and the schism between passion and creativity on the one hand and orthodoxy and aesthetic formalism on the other) will recognize many facets of this definition, which may also be applied to Brandes’ position as an intellectual in 1871–1872. The concept of the prophet, as developed by Weber, Bourdieu, and Sapiro, has the advantage not only that it allows a sociological analysis of Brandes as public intellectual, but also that it offers us a tool to analyze the peculiar manifesto-like tone used by Brandes to stage his endeavor in Emigrant Literature. Yet, in order to understand fully Brandes’ sociological and rhetorical situation – the position from which he spoke when embarking on his first series of lectures in November 1871 – it is necessary to add some background concerning his life and career prior to Emigrant Literature. 22

Sapiro, Les écrivains, 27.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

5

151

Brandes before Main Currents

Brandes’ intellectual and academic years of apprenticeship, which are summarized in detail by Henning Fenger and Jørgen Knudsen,23 played out between different disciplines and institutions – between the university and the press, and between aesthetics and philosophy. As a student of aesthetics, Brandes was trained in the idealist and speculative Hegelian theory that at the time was the dominant system for all academic work on literature and art in Northern Europe. The methodology of speculative aesthetics concentrated on relating works of art to abstract concepts such as the beautiful and the noble, or the tragic and the comic, and thereafter evaluating the works based on how well they agreed with the concepts. In 1864 Brandes defended his Masters’ thesis, which aimed to “Determine the reciprocal relationship between the pathetic and the symbolic in general, in order thereby to illuminate the contrast between Shakespeare’s tragedies and Dante’s Divine Comedy.”24 Alongside his academic training, however, from 1865 Brandes had begun supporting himself as a theater reviewer for the Copenhagen newspaper Dagbladet and the weekly Illustreret Tidende. This work began orienting Brandes’ criticism towards more worldly and socially engaged interests and questions, evident in the way his abstract Hegelian conceptual prose yielded to a more concise and polemical style. It was in his role as polemicist and social debater that Brandes made his literary debut in 1866 with the publication of the pamphlet Dualism in Our Recent Philosophy. This pamphlet was a contribution to the great philosophical debate of the time, on the relation between faith and knowledge, which emerged in the wake of the historical and philological critique of the Bible and of Christianity conducted by Left Hegelians such as Ludwig Feuerbach and David F. Strauss. New life was breathed into the debate in the 1860s with the appearance of Ernest Renan’s La Vie de Jésus (1863), which on the basis of a study of historical sources denied the Christian dogma of Jesus’ divinity. At the same time, the Christian worldview was challenged by the emerging natural sciences and natural history, most prominently Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, presented in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). The formal occasion for Brandes’ intervention in this discussion involved his former teacher at the university, the philosophy professor Rasmus Nielsen. In his Grundidéernes Logik (1864–1866), Nielsen had attempted to reconcile the

23 24

Fenger, Georg Brandes’ læreår; Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Dahl, Georg Brandes-tidstavle, 9.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

152

Jelsbak

deepening gulf between religion and science by arguing that faith and knowledge constitute two essentially distinct domains of human cognition, each of which should respect the limits of the other. In his pamphlet, Brandes objected to Nielsen’s “philosophy of reconciliation,”25 arguing stridently that the dogmas and myths of Christianity must be subjected to the challenges and corrections of modern positivism and natural science. In the present context Brandes’ intervention in this debate is interesting in several ways: not only because he left his own field of competence (aesthetics), intervening in a generalist philosophical debate about knowledge and epistemology, but also because he used the public sphere to challenge both the authority of a distinguished university professor and the autonomy of philosophy as an academic discipline. Dualism in Our Recent Philosophy thus clearly points towards Brandes’ later career as an intellectual. In 1866, however, the brilliant young scholar was still exclusively striving for an academic career. Originally, his plan was to write a thesis on the subject of “The Theory of the Comic.” His acquaintance with Hippolyte Taine’s historical aesthetics, however, was decisive for yet another change of direction in his intellectual development. Of special importance was his reading of Taine’s chief work, the grand Histoire de la littérature anglaise (3 vols, 1863–1864/1866), which contained a program for a new, positivist-inspired form of literary history using concepts and principles adopted from the modern natural sciences of geology and biology. In the winter of 1866–1867 Brandes made his first extended study trip to Paris, where he attended Taine’s lectures on aesthetics at the École des Beaux-Arts. This experience inspired Brandes so much that Taine became the theme of his doctoral dissertation from 1870, Den franske Æsthetik i vore Dage (French Aesthetics in Our Age). In contrast to the speculative aesthetics in which Brandes had been trained, Taine represented a more sociological approach that attempted to explain literary works using the life of the author, the composition of the public, and the historical context. For Taine it was not sufficient to discern that a tragedy was a tragedy and lived up to the eternal laws that govern the genre. He was more interested in getting to know the man who stood behind the work, and the culture or the civilization that shaped it. The central idea was to view literary works as psychological testimonies of human thoughts and feelings. Taine thus emphasized human existence in literary history, yet at the same time argued that the creative abilities of human beings were determined by a series of external cultural, climatic, social, and historical factors. In the famous 25

Brandes, Dualismen, 8.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

153

programmatic declaration from the introduction to Histoire de la littérature anglaise, he summarizes these factors as the three foundational forces (forces primordiales) of history: “la race, le milieu, le moment,”26 which can be translated as “the people, the environment, and the age.” In his doctoral dissertation, Brandes loyally subscribes to the pillars of Taine’s historical methodology, yet along the way he also registers a series of objections against the deterministic and reductive character of its explanatory models. In this critique of Taine’s determinism, Brandes found significant support in the more privately psychological and personally historical literary criticism of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), whose profiles of the French Romantics in Critiques et portraits littéraires (1832–1839) would become a direct model for Brandes’ literary criticism. There is a measure of agreement among Brandes scholars that Brandes’ acquaintance with Taine was the decisive turning point or landmark event in his education as a critic. Bertil Nolin has thus designated the encounter with Taine as a paradigm shift in Brandes’ work.27 Similarly, Pascale Casanova stresses Brandes’ appropriation of Taine and his adoption of the model of French Naturalism as the decisive element in the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, in opposition to the German tradition of idealist aesthetics.28 However, describing the Tainian turn in Brandes’ aesthetics as a transition from (German) idealism and metaphysics toward (French) positivism and psychology is far too simplistic. In his conception of history Brandes remained a child of Hegel’s dialectical conception of history, as developed in the German philosopher’s lectures on the subject (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 1819–1832, published 1833–1836). It is the Hegelian view of the progression of world history that forms the ground for the literary-historical drama of Main Currents, which is staged as a struggle between the principles of revolution and reaction. In January 1870 Brandes’ academic training was crowned by a doctorate in aesthetics, and shortly afterwards he departed for a grand European tour to France, England, and Italy, which came to last 15 months and can be identified as the second decisive event in his education. The first destination was Paris, where Brandes was received like a son by the Taine family. Through Taine he was able to make contact with Ernest Renan, who, much to Brandes’ surprise, revealed himself to be a man with strongly elitist and anti-democratic views.

26 27 28

Taine, Histoire, xxiii. Nolin, “The critic,” 21–36. Casanova, La République mondiale, 148.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

154

Jelsbak

Brandes was also surprised by the modest petit-bourgeois lifestyle of the Taine family. Of greater importance for Brandes’ intellectual development was without a doubt the encounter with the English philosopher, economist, and liberal politician John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), whom Brandes also met in Paris and later visited in London in July 1870. In 1869 Brandes had produced a Danish translation of Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which argued for the emancipation of women and the equality of the sexes, but the personal meeting between the two men led to an intense philosophical exchange that became decisive for Brandes’ development. In a letter to his family from 1870, he proclaims that his conversations with Mill amounted to “a kind of turning point in my inner intellectual history.”29 According to Bertil Nolin, Mill’s positivist and utilitarian philosophy was critical to Brandes in that it established a modern ethics founded not in religious but in secular principles.30 Furthermore, Brandes was also drawn to the practical dimension of Mill’s thinking, which brought together liberal ideas of freedom and the social and political reform movements of the age. When, in 1871, the emancipation of women became a key issue in Emigrant Literature, this was primarily due to the influence from the English philosopher – but also on a more general level, it may be said that it was through Mill that Brandes became inclined towards political thinking. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, Brandes continued his travels southward over the Alps to Geneva and then on to Italy. His diary and letters from this part of the journey are full of ecstatic descriptions of places and landscapes in Rousseau’s country of birth around Lake Geneva, and of Italian art and architecture, which would later be used in Emigrant Literature. Brandes’ enthusiasm for Italy was especially awakened by his encounter with the Renaissance and Antique architectural and artistic treasures of Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii. Yet his fascination was also possessed of a more concrete and political dimension, tied to the modern Italian movement for freedom, democracy, and independence, and to the recent annulment of the Papal State in central Italy – an event that stirred up Brandes’ revolutionary instincts.31 Brandes’ thoughts on these themes during his stay in Italy were especially stimulated by his acquaintance with the Italian law professor and later politician Giuseppe Saredo (1832–1902), from Rome. Saredo was an impassioned patriot, a supporter of the young independent Italy, and additionally a 29 30 31

Brandes, Breve til forældrene, vol. 1, 275. Nolin, Georg Brandes. See Stefan Nygård’s contribution to this volume.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

155

dedicated advocate of J.S. Mill’s philosophical and political thought. When in November 1870 Brandes contracted typhus, which confined him to four months of bedrest, it was Saredo who was his daily conversation partner through the winter, helping to keep his nose to the grindstone with hours-long exegeses on liberal progress in the modern world. If Mill’s philosophy had inspired Brandes to liberal political thinking, this inclination was furthermore developed and radicalized during his conversations with Saredo, who also offered insights into the art of political agitation. For Saredo the future of Italy and Europe would be determined by politics, and to the degree that he was interested in aesthetic questions, he was in favor of a firm utilitarian point of view which both provoked and incited Brandes the aesthete. In a letter to his parents Brandes writes: He endorses and adores all tendentiousness. He says: for you a book is a work, or rather a work of art; for me it is an act. The idea of literary immortality no longer has any meaning, a book only sticks around until a better one comes along, no measure of artistic perfection will save it from being swallowed up by what comes after. Let it be an act, a weapon. In all worthy books there is a hidden polemic, and it is the polemic that makes them worthy.32 In 1873, in his afterword to The Romantic School in Germany, Brandes was to adopt Saredo’s credo about the book as an act,33 and it is tempting to see the Italian liberal as the last stop in the journey of radicalization that Brandes underwent during his European Bildungsreise. Summarizing the various impulses Brandes absorbed during his journey, it is striking that they had more to do with his Weltanschauung or “education of the heart” than with academic learning. “I cannot take pride in a direct scientific output,” Brandes writes in a letter on 23 May 1871 to his academic mentor, the philosophy professor Hans Brøchner.34 But his encounters with J.S. Mill and Saredo had made Brandes a political radical, whereas his touristic and amateur anthropological observations of the passionate character of the Italian people had fostered a rebellious and hostile attitude in the young doctor against the ascetic Lutheran culture of his homeland. Brandes’ Grand Tour came to an end in July 1871. After his return, he had very little time to plan the series of lectures that was supposed to position him for 32 33 34

Brandes, Breve til forældrene, vol. 2, 182–183. Brandes, Den romantiske Skole, 379. Georg Brandes and Edvard Brandes, Brevveksling, vol. 1, 148.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

156

Jelsbak

the soon-to-be-vacant professorship in aesthetics at Copenhagen University. His initial plan was to lecture on modern French drama – a topic he already knew in detail. But at this point a surprising and fateful incident took place in Brandes’ intellectual biography; his mentor, the philosophy professor (and atheist) Brøchner, recommended that he embark on the grand project of six related series of lectures on the three major European literatures of the first half of the nineteenth century.35 It was also on Brøchner’s recommendation that the title of the project became “Main Currents.” 6

A Cultural Political Manifesto

Brandes’ first series of lectures on Emigrant Literature did not demonstrate any deep knowledge of its subject. In fact, his knowledge about the French émigré authors was limited to a small handful of books by Chateaubriand, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Benjamin Constant, and Madame de Staël, and time did not allow him to conduct deeper or even independent reading of many of the relevant works, which is why his characterizations rely heavily on observations from secondary sources.36 But what Brandes lacked in knowledge about his subject, he compensated for in his grandiose oratorical presentation of the project. The introductory lecture itself is a rhetorical showpiece, framed as a hybrid of a political manifesto and a theatrical stage setting. Without a quiver in his voice, Brandes casts his plan for the coming six lecture series as a “grand drama” in six acts about the realization of human freethinking and its ultimate triumph in history37 – with the Greek war of Independence and the French July revolution of 1830 as historical turning points. “As I begin this series of lectures, I feel I must ask for your indulgence,” Brandes begins, very politely, only to assert in the next sentence: But for my fundamental views, my major principles and ideas, I ask for no indulgence. What offends you in these areas will not be changed. I consider it a duty and an honor to uphold these principles, which are my credo: the belief in the right to free inquiry and in the eventual victory of free thought.38

35 36 37 38

Fenger, Den unge Brandes, 211–212. Fenger, Georg Brandes’ læreår, 390–398. Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 700 [Danish original: Emigrantlitteraturen, 12–13]. Ibid., 698 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 7].

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

157

With this rather unusual and somewhat theatrical opening for an academic lecture, Brandes positioned himself as an advocate of free thought and modernity, evoking Hegel’s philosophy of history as the grand theory and master plot of his narrative of nineteenth-century European literature. Later in the lecture, he quotes Hegel’s poetic description, from Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, of the French 1789 revolution as the mythical moment of revelation in world history: As long as the sun stood in the heavens and as long as the planets orbited the sun, it has not been seen that man has relied on pure thought or, one could say, that he has stood on his head and tried to refashion and build up the whole of reality according to his head.39 With such rhetorical maneuvers, Brandes began his project contentiously, turning the university auditorium into a scene of agitation and revolt. As an academic contribution to the field of aesthetics, Brandes’ program was inventive in that it introduced the perspective of comparative literature to narrate the story of the revolutionary movement and its repercussions in nineteenth-century European politics and literature. “The comparative study of literature,” Brandes says, “has the double advantage of bringing the foreign closer to us, so that we can understand it, and of distancing us from our own, so that we can see it in context.”40 In what follows, he also introduces the metaphor of the telescope to describe the dual perspective of his method. His main point was that the comparative reading of different national literatures allowed a cosmopolitan perspective that could serve as a corrective to ingrained national prejudices. This was, in fact, a complete redefinition of Brandes’ own scientific discipline of literary studies, until then dominated by the norms of speculative aesthetics, in contrast to the genre of literary history, which in the first half of the nineteenth century in a Danish context had been devoted to the construction of national identity.41 Today, Main Currents is recognized as a pioneering contribution to the development of comparative literature as a discipline,42 and Brandes also has status as one of the first theorists of world literature.43 But the critical purpose of his invention was not primarily academic; it was also and principally aimed at the cultural and literary situation of Denmark. 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 699 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 11]. Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 698 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 8]. Conrad, Smagen. Madsen, “World Literature,” 54–75. Larsen, “Georg Brandes,” 21–31.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

158

Jelsbak

Brandes’ provocative claim was that Danish literature was “as usual, 40 years behind Europe.”44 Danish literature had only taken part in the Romantic reaction against the eighteenth century, and had not yet become a part of the liberal and progressive movements of the nineteenth century represented by figures such as Lord Byron, the French Romantic writers engaged in the revolution of 1830 or the German writers related to the March Revolution of 1848. In Denmark, literary development had come to a halt in the “swamp of reaction.”45 According to Brandes, this explained why literary production in Denmark had all but stopped. A lack of contact and exchange with other European literatures had left the country in a state of lethargy, characterized by “an almost complete lack of understanding of other cultures” and a “spiritual deafness” that had made Danish literature dumb.46 Particularly provocative were Brandes’ explanations for this situation. The second part of the opening lecture unfolds as a literary avant-garde manifesto denouncing the backward and unworldly character of Danish nineteenthcentury Romanticist literature, the era of Oehlenschläger, Grundtvig, Ingemann, H.C. Andersen, and Kierkegaard, which is portrayed as morbidly inward and insular. Brandes accentuates the “naïvité” and “the trait of childishness in our national character,” as well as the “abstract idealism”47 of Danish thinking, as the main reasons why Danish literature had not taken part in the revolutionary and progressive main current of European literature. It was to in order to provoke a change in this state of affairs that Brandes launched his call for a new literature that should work in the service of progress and freedom by addressing topical moral and social issues such as religion, marriage, property, and the relationship between the sexes. This agenda was expressed in the famous aphorism that “The only literature that is alive today is the one that provokes debate.”48 As already mentioned, there was no socialism in Brandes’ reform program, although Pierre-Joseph Proudon was mentioned as one of his examples. Yet, on another level, there was something about the tone and narrative arrangement of Main Currents that may explain why Brandes’ intervention was soon to be associated with socialism by certain readers, like the aforementioned Carl Ploug, and consequently denounced as an attack on the pillars of society.

44 45 46 47 48

Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 700 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 14]. Ibid. Ibid. Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 701 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 17]. Ibid., 700 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 15].

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

159

When emphasizing the manifesto-like character of Brandes’ lecture, there is an obvious imperative to compare the text with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ iconic 1848 Communist Manifesto. Curiously enough, such a comparison has never been made, despite the many striking parallels between the two texts, not only in terms of their Hegelian view of history, but also in their cosmopolitan outlook and rhetorical devices of storytelling. When Brandes introduced the comparative method as a means to dismantle national dogma and self-sufficiencies, this was an echo of the passages in the opening chapter of The Communist Manifesto in which Marx and Engels evoke the historical development in modern industrial bourgeois society towards cosmopolitanism, globalization, and “universal dependency of nations,” which will ultimately do away with “national seclusion and self-sufficiency.”49 “All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed […] And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property,”50 Marx and Engels claim, just as Brandes insists on looking at the European literatures as an interwoven complex. To illustrate this cultural dimension of globalization, Marx and Engels adopted Goethe’s concept of “World Literature” (Weltliteratur), again with a formulation that comes very close to the rationale of Brandes’ comparative method: “National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.”51 Marx and Engels describe this development as an inevitable and irreversible process in history that “batters down all Chinese walls,” forcing “the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.”52 As we shall see, Brandes’ gesture of revolt aimed at something similar for the cultural situation in Denmark in 1871. “It is not so much actual laws that need to be changed, even though they may also need to be, as it is the whole view of society, which the younger generation must take apart and rebuild from the ground up,” Brandes concludes.53 Unlike Marx and Engels, Brandes was not a materialist and did not see economics and industrialization as the driving forces of the revolutionary development, and yet Main Currents proposed a story of a victorious bourgeois cosmopolitanism similar to that told by Marx and Engels in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto. 49 50 51 52 53

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 54. Ibid. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 54. Ibid., 56. Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 705 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 27–28].

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

160

Jelsbak

In this context, it is also interesting to note that Brandes uses tropes and metaphors from the fields of industry and natural science to describe his endeavor. One astonishing example is when he compares revolutionary spirits of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature – such as Goethe’s Werther and Faust and Schiller’s Marquis of Posa – with their more moderate Danish counterparts (such as Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin). Here, Brandes, as an intellectual experiment, proposes an alternative ending for Goethe’s tragedy Faust, one which would be more in accordance with the principles of modernity and the belief in the eventual victory of free thought. In Brandes’ scenario, Faust does not sink to his knees before the Earth Spirit, but “took control of his earth and conquered it with steam, electricity, and methodological research.”54 At this point, Brandes’ comparative approach to the writing of literary history becomes counterfactual. Elsewhere in the lecture, he almost seems to predict his own fate as persona non grata. “All stagnant reaction is tyrannical,” he declares, and describes a situation where “the public utterance of every openly liberal opinion or view leads to exclusion from society, from the respectable part of the press, and from positions in the state bureaucracy.”55 Clearly, this was not Brandes’ own situation when mounting the platform in the auditorium at the University of Copenhagen in November and December 1871, but it was a prophetic description of the eventual outcome of the scandal of Emigrant Literature. In such statements, Brandes was in fact anticipating and performing the role not of a future professor but of an independent intellectual in opposition to society. In his 2006 book Poetry of the Revolution. Marx, Manifestos, and the AvantGardes, Martin Puchner has offered a detailed account of the ways in which the revolutionary discourse of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto was adopted by avant-garde writers and artists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his analysis, Puchner focuses on the creative praxis and poetic potentialities of the manifesto as a genre dedicated to the ultimate aim of changing the world. Although Puchner does not use the term prophet, the genre poetics he proposes is essentially aimed at what we might also call the prophetic discourse of the manifesto. According to Puchner, the discourse of the avantgarde manifesto was characterized by two features in particular: performativity and theatricality. The first concerns the activist dimension of manifestos as texts singularly invested in doing things with words – in provoking a change

54 55

Ibid., 702 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 20]. Ibid., 701 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 15–16].

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

161

in the world. This is what makes manifestos ideal instances of performative speech, in the sense of J.L. Austin.56 The second feature, theatricality, refers to the polemical and provocative language of rupture characterizing many avant-garde manifestos – their use of over-the-top statements and shrill pronouncements. This reflects the position from and the kind of authority with which the manifesto speaks. The revolutionary manifesto does not speak on behalf of power and authority; it is opposed to power and authority. Yet, as Puchner emphasizes, the manifesto often over-compensates for the powerlessness of its position with theatrical exaggerations and demonstrative over-confidence. As we have seen already, Puchner’s terminological pairing of performativity and theatricality is of obvious relevance to an analysis of the at once oppositional and prophetic voice of Brandes’ introductory lecture. If we return to Brandes’ situation in November 1871, this may also serve as an explanation for why he chose to frame his opening lecture as he did. Considering Brandes’ weak scholarly knowledge on the French emigré authors, it is clear that he did not – could not – speak from a professorial position of knowledge and authoritative learning. Instead, he chose to situate his discourse in a political set-up, applying mainly to the world outside of academia. He compensated for his lack of knowledge with a powerful oppositional voice, positioning himself as an advocate for an irreversible force in history, while at the same time punctuating his discourse with insults and accusations against the stagnant character of contemporary Danish literature and culture. The most prominent example of the prophetic discourse of Brandes’ lecture is of course the very metaphor he used to describe the revolutionary movement in world history, Main Currents. This hydrological metaphor might have been inspired by Taine, who uses a similar image in his introduction to Histoire de la littérature anglaise to illustrate his basic idea that the literary works of a given culture or civilization may be “explained” by reference to three great conditioning facts: la race, le milieu, and le moment – or the environmental and climatic causes of the emergence of human cultures or civilizations: As a rivulet falling from a height spreads its streams, according to the depth of the descent, stage after stage, until it reaches the lowest level of the soil, so the disposition of intellect or soul impressed on a people by race, circumstance, or epoch, spreads in different proportions and

56

Puchner, Poetry, 5.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

162

Jelsbak

by regular descents, down the diverse orders of facts which make up its civilization.57 Whereas Taine uses the metaphor of the current to evoke a general logic in the emergence of human cultures, Brandes uses it to refer to a specific moment in history: the French Revolution of 1789. It has been a long time since the revolutionary current in the literatures of France, England, and Germany absorbed the minor streams and burst the dikes thrown up in its way to find its way into thousands of channels. We are still working to stop it and keep it in the swamp of reaction […] The major part of the work will entail opening up a multiplicity of channels through which can flow the streams and currents that have their origin in the revolution and the age of progress, thereby putting a stop to reaction in all those areas in which its task has historically come to an end.58 Brandes mimics the scientific authority of Taine’s argument, while appropriating the metaphor for his own agenda. Taine’s emphasis on the general laws and originating forces of cultures is replaced by Brandes’ political inclination towards the dramatic shifts and ruptures of history. Civilization in Taine becomes revolution in Brandes. Brandes’ use of the metaphor of the current is also a good indicator of the lecture’s affinity with the rhetorical style of the nineteenth-century revolutionary manifesto. Throughout the lecture, he staged himself as a lonely rider fighting against the orthodoxy of Lutheran Christianity and its tyranny over Danish literature and spiritual life. In his role as an independent scholar and prospective professor, in his capacity as a Danish Jew, and as a cosmopolitan freethinker and heretic of the dominant national ideology, Brandes spoke from a dominated position. His relatively weak foundation in the subject of his lectures further contributed to this fragile position. Yet, by evoking Hegel’s philosophy of history and by introducing the powerful metaphor of the current, he compensated for his lack of authority by positioning himself as a prophet for an irreversible process of modernization that would, sooner or later, submerge or absorb his sleepy little nation.

57 58

Taine, History, 14–15. Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 700 and 705 [Emigrantlitteraturen, 24 and 28].

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

7

163

Conclusion

With this said, the opening lecture of Emigrant Literature may be regarded as a pivotal event and performative gesture in the making of Brandes as intellectual. A full analysis of Brandes’ trajectory as an intellectual would also have to take into consideration other important moments in this story, such as Brandes’ interventions in favor of human rights and oppressed peoples in the early 1900s,59 and his later agitation against European nationalism, imperialism, and militarism leading to the misère of the First World War,60 perhaps Brandes’ finest hour as a public intellectual. Emigrant Literature represents the formative phase in this development: the prophetic moment in Brandes’ public career when he still believed in and felt himself aligned with the progress of world history. Bibliography Allen, Julie K.: “Brandes as a German Journalist: Shaping Cultural Identity through the Mass Media,” in: Grands courants d’échanges intellectuels: Georg Brandes et La France, L’Allemagne, L’Angleterre. Actes de la deuxième conference internationale Georg Brandes, Nancy, 13–15 Novembre 2008, edited by Anne Bourguignon, Konrad Harrer and Jørgen Stender Clausen. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, 227–242. Anon (Carl Ploug): “I nyt dansk Maanedsskrift,” Fædrelandet, 17 February 1872. Bohnen, Klaus: Georg Brandes in seiner deutschen Korrespondenz. Copenhagen/ Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005. Bourdieu, Pierre: Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Bourdieu, Pierre: “Une interpretation de la théorie de la religion selon Max Weber,” Archives européennes de sociologie 12/1 (1971): 3–21. Bourdieu; Pierre: “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” Revue française de sociologie, 12/3 (1971): 295–334. Bourguignon, Anne, Konrad Harrer and Jørgen Stender Clausen, eds: Grands courants d’échanges intellectuels: Georg Brandes et La France, L’Allemagne, L’Angleterre. Actes de la deuxième conference internationale Georg Brandes, Nancy, 13–15 Novembre 2008. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010.

59 60

Brandes, Human Rights. Brandes, Verdenskrigen; Tragediens anden Del. See also Martin Zerlang’s contribution to this volume.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

164

Jelsbak

Brandes, Georg: Den franske Æsthetik i vore Dage. En Afhandling om H. Taine. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1870. Brandes, Georg: Emigrantlitteraturen. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1872. Brandes, Georg: Den romantiske Skole i Tydskland. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1873. Brandes, Georg: “Aristokratisk Radikalisme. En Afhandling om Friedrich Nietzsche,” Tilskueren (1889): 565–613. Brandes, Georg: Verdenskrigen, 4th ed. Copenhagen and Oslo: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1917. Brandes, Georg: Tragediens anden Del: Fredslutningen. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1919. Brandes, Georg: Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1: La France et l’Italie. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1952. Brandes, Georg: Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 2: L’Angleterre et la Russie. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1956. Brandes, Georg: Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 3: L’Allemagne. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1966. Brandes, Georg: Breve til forældrene 1859–71, 3 vols. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1978. Brandes, Georg: “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature),” translated by Lynn R. Wilkinson, pmla 132/3 (2017): 696–705. Brandes, Georg: Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples. Collected Essays and Speeches, edited by William Banks. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. Brandes, Georg and Edvard Brandes: Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, 8 vols. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1939–1942. Casanova, Pascale: La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Charle, Christophe: Naissance des “intellectuels”: 1880–1900. Paris: Minuit, 1990. Charle, Christophe: Les intellectuels en Europe au xixe siècle. Essai d’histoire comparée. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Charle, Christophe and Laurent Jeanpierre, eds: La vie intellectuelle en France, vol. 1. Paris: Seuil, 2016. Conrad, Flemming: Smagen og det nationale. Studier i dansk litteraturhistorieskrivning 1800–1861. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1996. Dahl, Per: Georg Brandes-tidstavle 1842–1927 [Arbejdspapirer 18. Institut for Litteraturhistorie]. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitet, 1998. Duclerc, Vincent: L’Affaire Dreyfus. Quand la justice éclaire la République. Toulouse: Privat, 2010. Duclerc, Vincent: “L’affaire Dreyfus et le débat intellectual,” in: La vie intellectuelle en France, edited by Christophe Charle and Laurent Jeanpierre. Paris: Seuil, 2016, 413–418.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Pétroleuse and the Prophet

165

Durkheim, Émile: De la division du travail social. Paris: puf, 1991. Fabiani, Jean-Louis: Les philosophes de la république. Paris: Minuit, 1988. Fenger, Henning: Georg Brandes’ læreår. Læsning, ideer, smag, kritik 1857–1872. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel – Nordisk Forlag, 1955. Fenger, Henning: Den unge Brandes. Miljø, venner, rejser, kriser. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel – Nordisk Forlag, 1957. Hertel, Hans and Sven Møller Kristensen, eds: Den politiske Georg Brandes. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, 1973. Hertel, Hans and Sven Møller Kristensen, eds: The Activist Critic. a Symposium on the Political Ideas, Literary Methods and International Reception of Georg Brandes [Orbis Litterarum. Supplement 5]. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980. Juncker, Beth: “Debatten omkring Emigrantlitteraturen,” in: Den politiske Georg Brandes, edited by Hertel and Kristensen. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, 1993, 27–66. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens vej 1842–77. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985. Larsen, Pelle Oliver: Professoratet. Kampen om Det Filosofiske Fakultet 1870–1920. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2016. Larsen, Svend Erik: “Georg Brandes. the Telescope of Comparative Literature,” in: The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo d’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. New York: Routledge, 2011, 21–31. Madsen, Peter: “World Literature and World Thoughts,” in: Debating World Literature, edited by Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 2004, 54–75. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto. London: Pluto Press, 2017. Nolin, Bertil: Den gode europén. Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893 med speciell hänsyn till hans förhållande till tysk, engelsk, slavisk och fransk litteratur. Uppsala: Svenska Bokförlaget/Nordtedts, 1965. Nolin, Bertil: Georg Brandes. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. Nolin, Bertil: “The Critic and his Paradigm. an Analysis of Brandes’ Role as a Critic 1870–1900 with Special Reference to the Comparatistic Aspect,” in: The Activist Critic. a Symposium on the Political Ideas, Literary Methods and International Reception of Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980, 21–36. Puchner, Martin: Poetry of the Revolution. Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Richard, Nathalie: “Taine et Renan,” in: La vie intellectuelle en France, edited by Christophe Charle and Laurent Jeanpierre. Paris: Seuil, 2016, 399–402. Rubow, Paul V.: De Franske. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1976. Sapiro, Gisèle: La responsibilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (xixe– xxie siècle). Paris: Seuil, 2011. Sapiro, Gisèle: Les écrivains et la politique en France. De l’affaire Dreyfus à la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Seuil, 2018.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

166

Jelsbak

Sørensen, Bengt Algot: “Georg Brandes als ‘deutscher’ Schriftsteller. Skandinavische moderne und deutscher Naturalismus,” in: The Activist Critic. a Symposium on the Political Ideas, Literary Methods and International Reception of Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980, 127–145. Taine, Hippolyte: Histoire de la littérature anglaise, vol. 1, 2nd ed. Paris: Libr. Hachette, 1866. Taine, Hippolyte: History of English Literature, vol. 1. New York: Holt & Williams, 1871.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 8

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough Georg Brandes and Italy Stefan Nygård Throughout his life, Georg Brandes circled around the core of Europe, its cultures structuring his Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature: French, German, and English literature and intellectual life. He was only partially successful in penetrating this fortress, and his relationship with his beloved France, to which he turned after Prussia’s conquest of a substantial part of Denmark in 1864, was particularly ambivalent. He struggled to accept the Parisian publishers’ reluctance to translate him, despite his extensive writing on French literature and his mediation of French writers in Germany, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.1 Notwithstanding the more enthusiastic response he received in Germany, rejecting the parochial tendencies of hegemonic countries became an enduring endeavor for Brandes. Ignorant of developments elsewhere, the literatures of dominant European languages seemed – albeit unevenly – more interested in cultivating their own traditions than entering into dialogue with others. If this was the case, how should writers and intellectuals from nondominant regions like Scandinavia navigate in international cultural space? Brandes, the comparatist as well as the European intellectual, proposed that they should focus on contrasting, comparing, and connecting. Drawing inspiration from eighteenth-century predecessors, especially Voltaire, he linked his relational approach to Mme de Staël: “By means of her writings, more particularly her great works on Italy and Germany, she enabled the French, English, and German peoples to take a comparative view of their own social and literary ideas and theories.” Her Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) occupies a prominent place in the opening volume of Main Currents, and Brandes followed her example of mobilizing travel and exile as opportunities to expose national prejudice by comparing “the spirit and the ideals of one people with those of another.”2 1 On Brandes’ struggles with Parisian publishers, see Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Magt og afmagt, 164–171. 2 Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 104, 136. On Brandes’ comparativism and the Enlightenment, see Bjerring-Hansen, “Fremmede blikke.” On Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, and de Staël, see Jelsbak, “Emigrant Literature.”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_010 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

168

Nygård

As this chapter aims to show, Brandes’ encounter with Italy, especially during his travels between France, England, and Italy in 1870–1871, drew his attention to the meaning of space, place, and geo-cultural location for intellectual production. It was after all during this journey that he began outlining his multi-volume study of progress and reaction in European literature, amid great political upheaval: this was the time of Italy’s annexation of Rome, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune. From Italy, he returned to Copenhagen to deliver his famous lecture series and publish the first volume of Main Currents. The intention in what follows here is to highlight three interrelated strands in Brandes’ life and work, to which Italy gave a vital impulse. The first of them concerns his understanding of the relationship between scholarship, literature, and politics, captured by his well-known dictum that literature comes alive by critically engaging with social questions. The second theme, following from the first, relates to his position as a public intellectual navigating between literary production and public intervention. Brandes was clearly inspired by the prominent role of academic intellectuals in politics in the newly unified Italian kingdom. The connection between academia and politics at the time was more straightforward than it was a few decades later, when the French neologism intellectuel was introduced – which incidentally Brandes adopted into Danish in 1899, in the context of the Dreyfus Affair, which gave birth to the term3 – based on the notion of relatively detached intellectuals temporarily intervening in politics by virtue of the universal nature of their scholarly and cultural pursuits. The ways in which intellectuals collectively sought legitimation for their claims of defending universal justice against the particular interests of everyday politics brings us to the third theme of this chapter: the relationship between the contested understandings of universal ideas and the location of individual actors in European cultural space. 1

An Intellectual on the European Semi-periphery

The purpose of exploring Brandes’ movements along Europe’s North–South axis here is not only to tease out the Southern European dimension of the Northern breakthrough, although this aspect surely merits attention in view of the established narrative of Northern Europe’s pioneering role in cultural avantgardism.4 Relying on Brandes’ correspondence from this period, this chapter 3 The term, however, was not widely adopted in Danish to denote a social category until some decades later. Knudsen, Magt og afmagt, 335. 4 See, for instance, the authoritative account by McFarlane and Bradbury, Modernism: 1890–1930.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

169

also sheds light on his dual role as a European and a Scandinavian intellectual. In the context of the imperialist universalism of the period, Brandes the Scandinavian was insistently critical of parochialism in the cultural centers, against which he defended his own comparative approach. Brandes personifies the venerable debates among European intellectuals about whether “the universal” should be derived from the singular or the plural. Etymologically, the question can be approached from either side. Considering how the Latin universus derives from unus (“one”) and versus, from the past participle of vertere (“to turn,” but also “to convert” or “ to translate”), we can think of universalization as a process either of turning a plurality into one or of converting the singular into the whole. Approaching the world from the perspective of a semi-peripheral linguistic and political region, Brandes, like his late nineteenth-century Italian interlocutors, tended towards universalization in the former sense. Proceeding from the assumption that reconciling different linguistic, cultural, and intellectual traditions was more fruitful than universalizing some particular, they aimed to synthesize competing universalisms in the age of imperialism, when literature was becoming more and not – as Marx and Engels had envisioned in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto – less national.5 Brandes understood European literature in a relational framework. Entanglements, transfers, and comparisons were drivers of progress, but literary cross-fertilization was also inhibited by structural constraints. His encounter with Italy – a non-dominant region like Denmark that was not in a position to universalize local debates – increased Brandes’ awareness of asymmetries of power, both real and symbolic, and cultural as well as political. He eventually established himself as a “semi-peripheral” mediator at a time when cultural production, as well as the mediation and marketing of Scandinavian literature abroad, became the battleground for a redefined cultural regionalism against the backdrop of Denmark’s military defeat in 1864 and the demise of political Scandinavianism.6 This cultural movement, which paved the way for some brief international fame for Scandinavian literature and drama (though in the cases of Ibsen and Strindberg it was more lasting), was inseparably cultural and political.

5 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. On Denmark as a literary semi-periphery, see Moretti, Atlas of the European novel. The present chapter is also inspired by Wallerstein’s reflections on the possibility of a less imperialistic and more “universal universalism,” in European Universalism. 6 For a recent analysis, see Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama. See also Hemstad et al., Skandinavismen. Vision og virkning.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

170

Nygård

Self-identifying as an amateur in political matters, Brandes describes his own strategic thinking in a letter from Rome to his parents in March 1871, 10 days before the Paris Commune. Autonomy in a world of expanding empires was the ultimate aim for Denmark, but in the letter Brandes did not foresee a great future for his country. Its problems were in part dictated by the logic of the market: “A tradesman whose whole capital consists of ten rigsdaler is no tradesman. The large capitals swallow up the small.”7 It was only a question of time before Denmark was absorbed into the German sphere. It could try to stall this development by joining forces with neighbours, but Denmark’s great tragedy was that its potential allies were limited to Sweden-Norway (“a little, unimportant state”). As for France, the principle of nationality it had introduced in European affairs was beginning to work against the country. Brandes estimated that while France could hope to maintain its culturally and scientifically central role for the foreseeable future, geopolitically it was destined to decline. Germany would instead take the lead over the mid-term, only to be blocked by Russia in the next phase. Globally, however, the world would soon belong to a Transatlantic, English-speaking alliance and the Anglo-Saxon race (“In 200 years the world will be Anglo-Saxon”). The moral for Denmark, Brandes concludes, was not to forget old lovers – France and its continuing cultural power – but to merge with the rest of Scandinavia, and embrace the Anglo-Saxon ascendance and its philosophical stars, such as J.S. Mill, whom he greatly admired.8 These geopolitical anxieties, at a time of great power expansionism and German unification, provided a background for the literary survival strategies that Brandes devised for Denmark. Culturally, as he noted in a letter to his journalist-politician brother Edvard, Denmark suffered among other things from a lack of critical mass. The problem was not so much a scarcity of individual talent, but the weak prospects for talents to grow in cross-fertilizing interaction.9 If the logic of small numbers constituted a major impediment for writers at Europe’s Northern margins, broadening their space for maneuver by

7 Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene, letter to parents, 8 March 1871. The letters included in this edition are subsequently referred to as “Letters to parents.” Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 8 Letter to parents, 8 March 1871; Brandes, Recollections, 370–371. 9 There was only one university, which was “orthodox,” and while the University of Uppsala in Sweden was “rationalist,” national boundaries stood in the way of any meaningful rivalry and fruitful dialogue between entities that were regrettably isolated from each other. Letter to parents, 20 March 1871.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

171

approaching markets abroad was a crucial condition for a more differentiated literature to develop in the region. Attention to space and place played an equally central role in Brandes’ literary methodology. His writings were as much the products of the conversations he had and the places he visited as of the books he read. Italian intellectual life held a prominent place at the outset of his project through a combination of his discovery of cultural affinities between Northern and Southern Europe and contingent factors; due to wars and personal illness (typhus) he ended up staying almost a year in Italy between 1870 and 1871.10 As the outcome of his many conversations with intellectuals in Florence and Rome, often centring on shared experiences and structural parallels between Scandinavian and Italian culture vis à vis the core of Europe, Italy provided a Southern specter for Brandes’ mission to modernize Northern literature. These conversations, to which we shall now turn, are documented in the letters Brandes sent home to his parents. Upon his return to Denmark, he relied on them for drafting Main Currents, and he turned to them again in his autobiography. The letters, which were often written late at night, are of course selective and subjective historical sources – all the more so given the author has the imagination of Georg Brandes. With all their inaccuracies, however, they clearly convey the meaning of Italy for Brandes and for the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature.11 2

Copenhagen–Paris–Rome

Brandes arrived in Florence in September 1870. His impressions of intellectual life on the peninsula were initially refracted through a “French prism,” shaped by discussions with mentors in Paris before crossing the Alps. In Italy, however, the Francophile Brandes soon found himself on the defensive in exchanges with local interlocutors, whose politically fueled turn from France to Germany in the same period mirrored Brandes’ own post-1864 turn from Germany to France.12 10 11 12

He planned to return after New Year 1871 (Letter to parents, 19 September 1870), but ended up staying until July of that year. Letter to parents, 24 July 1870. See also the introduction by Morten Borup in Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene, vol. 1, 9–10. Italy had shortly before been humiliated by France and Napoleon iii in the so-called Third War of Independence against Austria in 1866, and the Dano-Prussian war of 1864 dealt a major blow to the political Scandinavianism supported by Brandes. On pro-German sentiments in Italy, see Letter to parents, 23 September 1870.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

172

Nygård

In Paris, the 28-year-old Brandes had been warmly welcomed by the prominent critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, with whom he had studied a few years earlier and who became the subject of his dissertation.13 Other renowned acquaintances included Ernest Renan and J.S. Mill, whose The Subjection of Women Brandes translated into Danish.14 In the house of Philarète Chasles, Brandes recalls “sitting like a mushroom” and absorbing “with 24 ears” the first-hand accounts of Romantic authors provided by the great elderly man of letters and professor of German and English at the Collège de France.15 For a while, he contemplated a longer stay in the metropole and making French his second language, but his impressions of Parisian intellectual life were not unreservedly positive. As noted in his 1905 autobiography, he was surprised to learn that Renan was turning towards a kind of “aristocratic radicalism,” which clashed with Brandes’ own ideals of social art at the time,16 and that French intellectuals were closing in on themselves. Taine was ignorant of literature and philosophy east of the Rhine (“he rejects much that he is not familiar with”), and in Renan’s equally narrow-minded dismissal of English literature Brandes saw a disappointing obstacle to intellectual progress.17 In Italy, reservations about a dominant culture provided a common platform in Brandes’ encounters with members of the country’s academic and political elite. In Florence and Rome, he discovered a milieu that was intellectually more open than Paris, less dogmatic, and more attentive to developments elsewhere. Like his fellow European liberals, Brandes followed Italian unification closely and envisaged a great future for the country. In a letter from Rome, he declared to his parents that he had always loved France because of its liberal ideas, rather than the other way around. Should France ever betray its task, however, these ideas could easily assimilate with liberal Italy instead.18 His Italian interlocutors – and they were many, in contrast to other Scandinavian travellers in the country, who according to Brandes mostly kept to themselves19 – were 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

Letter to parents, 14 April 1870. Letter to parents, 6 July 1870. Letter to parents, 15 June 1870. Brandes, Levned, vol. 1, 277. On Brandes and Renan, see also Fenger, Georg Brandes et la France, 148–149. Taine was “terribly unknowledgeable about German literature” (Brandes made an effort to inform him), philosophy, and art, and on the whole allergic to German abstraction. Brandes claims he even taught Taine to “read books he himself has,” referring to Mill’s published correspondence with Comte. Letters to parents, 25 April 1870 and 4 May 1870; Brandes, Levned, vol. 1, 277. Letter to parents, 20 March 1871. Brandes to Hans Brøchner, 11 November 1870, Georg og Edv. Brandes brevveksling.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

173

preoccupied with the task of putting the pieces together on the peninsula, that is, combining the seven pre-unification states into one polity. The process had begun a decade before and was completed with the annexation of the Papal State on 20 September 1870, only a few weeks before Brandes arrived there. Testifying to a strong sense of being a first-hand witness to a major historical moment, Brandes’ Roman correspondence reveals how the cultural energies propelled by unification rubbed off on him. Italy formed a kind of southern prism for his call to arms for an aesthetic revolution in Northern Europe. However, the North–South relation was mediated by various centers. These encompassed places, people, and languages; the city of Paris – still considered the cultural center of the world – the person of J.S. Mill, the English language from which Brandes translated Mill into Danish, and the French lingua franca. Brandes had first met Mill in London, after which Mill sought out Brandes in Paris in the summer of 1870 (they spoke French) and provided him with a letter of recommendation to the historian and politician Pasquale Villari, a member of the liberal elite in Italy. During the weeks he spent in Florence, Villari introduced Brandes to the intellectual scene in the provisional capital of unified Italy and put him into contact with scholars and politicians in Rome.20 The binding element in Brandes’ liberal networks in France and Italy was J.S. Mill. “After food, Denmark, and Italy, I guess I am mostly thinking about Mill,” he writes home from Rome.21 Scholars and translators of Mill, such as Taine and Villari, were among Brandes’ closest acquaintances. During a short visit to Mill in Blackheath Park in July 1870, however, Brandes discovered that his mentor had not escaped the kind of parochial ignorance that he encountered in Paris. How, Brandes asks, could someone of Mill’s standing reject Hegelian philosophy as nonsense, without having read Hegel either in the original or in translation?22 Connecting this observation to the poor knowledge of his own 20

21 22

In his autobiography, Brandes writes: “John Stuart Mill had given me an introduction to Pasquale Villari, who, even at that time, was commendatore professore, and held a high position on the Board of Education, but was still far from having attained the zenith of his fame and influence. When the reserve of the first few days had worn off, he was simply splendid to me.” Brandes, Recollections, 315. Letter to parents, 25 February 1871. Mill, Brandes continues, who himself relied solely on a book by an English Hegelian (James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel, 1865), asked if Brandes had in fact read and understood Hegel, and wondered if there “really was anything to understand.” Letter to parents, 16 July 1870. We can compare this with a letter from Mill to Alexander Bain three years earlier in which Mill suggests he did have prior “actual experience” of Hegel, although he did not enjoy reading him. Letter to Bain, 4 November 1867, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 16, 1324. On the role of German thought in nineteenth-century English intellectual life, see Ashton, The German Idea.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

174

Nygård

peers among the German-oriented Danish intellectuals of French or English philosophy, Brandes saw an opening for someone like him, who could benefit from familiarity with both parties in a relationship of mutual ignorance. If mediators, as the sociologist Georg Simmel suggests, gain specific advantages from their role as the “third element,” by virtue of their privileged insights into two mutually ill-informed or hostile positions, they may be incentivised to stress or even amplify the distance between opposites. Brandes’ insistence on Mill’s ignorance of Hegelian philosophy can be seen in this light. While a closer inspection of this question lies beyond the scope of the present chapter, we should keep in mind that from this period onwards Brandes made extensive use of the space that opened up for the third-party broker, both as neutral mediator and as tertius gaudens – the “rejoicing third” who benefits “from the fact that he has an equal, equally independent, and for this very reason decisive, relation to two others” – in Simmel’s vocabulary.23 After his relocation to Berlin in 1877, Brandes’ role as an agent of Franco-German cultural transfers was further accentuated.24 More broadly, the way he actively fashioned Scandinavia as a bridge-building culture in a world of great power rivalry points towards the role played by the Scandinavian countries internationally in the following century. Brandes’ first bridge, however, connected the protestant North and the Catholic South of Europe. In Florence and Rome, he was caught up in the political atmosphere of unification and the narrative of reviving (risorgimento) a dormant culture on the peninsula. With admiration and envy, he noted the great impact Italian scholars exerted on the public life of the country. Pasquale Villari is a case in point. This leading figure of the so-called Historical Right, a liberal-conservative parliamentary group that governed Italy until 1876, was an internationally recognized Italian historian, the author of renowned works on the encounter between Latin and Germanic culture in Europe, on Machiavelli and Savonarola, and on the predicament of the Italian South. Villari was very much the kind of historian that Brandes became as a literary historian, writing scholarly works with a view less to telling a complete story than to looking to history for moral guidance. They both considered the form of positivism that stemmed from Paris to be excessively rigid and deterministic, defending instead a more flexible version. In the Italian context, Villari’s name is associated with a strand of “critical positivism,” as an empirical method opposed to the Comtean philosophical system and inspired by Mill, whom Villari

23 24

The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Part 2, Chapter 4, 159. Allen, “Georg Brandes in Berlin,” 469.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

175

translated and whose work on the emancipation of women he mediated. Like Brandes, Villari was the pupil of a devoted Hegelian, Francesco De Sanctis.25 In 1866, Villari had published a famous essay, which Brandes studied in Florence, on the so-called positive philosophy as a historical method for the study of culture and society (“La filosofia positiva e il metodo storico”).26 Like Brandes, he based his critical positivism on the comparative historical method, from which he derived a comprehensive vision of European cultural progress. The somewhat older Villari, who had already established his position in academia and government, welcomed the young Danish visitor into his house and library, even offering to translate his texts (from French), should he ever wish to write about Denmark for an Italian audience.27 Villari introduced Brandes in the literary salons of Florence, which were hosted by intellectuals such as Francesco Dall’Ongaro, the revolutionary journalist and patriotic poet who following the unification returned from his foreign exile after participating in Mazzini’s Roman republic in 1849. When Brandes left Florence for Rome, Villari wrote letters of recommendation to members of the liberal elite in Rome.28 In Florence, at Dall’Ongaro’s salon, Brandes met Giuseppe Saredo, a Piedmontese professor of civil law at the University of Siena who eventually became his main source of information on political developments in Italy. Like Villari, Saredo was a devoted supporter of Mill, and he too was on his way up in the ranks of Italian politics. Appointed senator in 1891, his name later became associated with an inquiry into the municipal finances and activities of the Camorra in Naples (the Saredo inquiry took place at the turn of the century). Brandes acknowledged his debt to Saredo with a dedication in Die romantische Schule in Deutschland (1873).29 Perhaps because Saredo – unlike others who inspired Brandes – was not primarily a writer, critic, or philosopher, this Northern Italian academic and liberal 25 26

27 28 29

Moretti, Pasquale Villari; Stender Clausen, Georg Brandes. Fra mito e realtà, vol. 2, 44–45. Brandes’ mentor was the Danish Hegelian Hans Brøchner. Like Brandes, Villari dissociated himself from Comtean positivism and followed Mill, who allowed for the human will and mind to invoke principles for the scholar to test against evidence from the past and present. Stender Clausen, Georg Brandes. Fra mito e realtà, vol. 2, 47–48. Letter to parents, 7 October 1870. Brandes, Levned, vol. 1, 373. “Giuseppe Saredo, Professor der Rechtswissenschaft an der Universität zu Rom, in herzlicher Freundschaft gewidmet vom Verfasser.” The dedication is not replicated in subsequent editions, or in the English translation. The Danish original contains an afterword to Brandes’ mentor Hans Brøchner: “En Bog er for mig en Handling. De vil bedømme den som saadan.” On Saredo’s role, see Letter to parents, 3 October 1870; Brandes to Brøchner 19 February 1871, Georg og Edv. Brandes brevveksling.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

176

Nygård

statesman rarely figures prominently in the existing scholarship on Brandes, with the notable exception of contributions by Jørgen Stender Clausen.30 Life, literature, and politics merged in the conversations that Brandes and Saredo carried out in French, mixed with Italian, Latin, English, or German,31 during which Saredo inspired Brandes to formulate what eventually became the key slogans in the latter’s program for a modern breakthrough in Scandinavian literature. Brandes himself attributes ideas that he made famous in the North to Saredo: that politics keeps art, philosophy and society together; that books are not merely works of art, but powerful weapons in social debates; and that literature is alive only when it provokes debate.32 “For you a book is a work of art, for me, it is an act,” he quotes Saredo as saying in a letter to his parents. “Every book of value contains a hidden polemic, and its polemical side determines its value.”33 At the time, Brandes perceived these ideas through a French prism, to which his impressions of social art in Parisian theaters, journals, and books before traveling to Italy greatly contributed. Henning Fenger notes that Saredo’s statements on activist art correspond to a line in the foreword to the 1858 play The Illegitimate Son (Le Fils naturel) by Alexandre Dumas fils: “The Old Society is crumbling on all fronts; all the original laws, all the fundamental institutions, earthly and divine, are called into question.”34 These activist ideals flowed from a variety of sources into Brandes’ call to arms in the lectures and publications that he delivered from Copenhagen upon his return to Denmark. Their transfer from subalpine Europe entailed a translation from a specific Italian context, where such ideas gained additional energy from the inertia to which (according to liberals) cultural life had been constrained for centuries by Catholicism and political censorship.35 For the likes of Saredo, the then present moment in Italian intellectual life represented a long-awaited break with a tradition of refraining from writing anything of substance and paying attention only to form. The Roman detour taken by the phrase mettre en débat on its way from Paris to Copenhagen and Scandinavia thus exemplifies the complex geographies of 30 31 32 33 34 35

See the introduction by Morten Borup in Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene, vol. 3, 25–26. For a detailed examination of Brandes’ Italian reception, see the extensive introduction in Stender Clausen, Georg Brandes. Fra mito e realtà, vol. 2. Letter to parents, 8 March 1871. See Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, afterword and p. 15. Letter to parents, 31 March 1871. Fenger, Georg Brandes’ Lærår, 361. Bertil Nolin identifies a third possible source for this phrase in Victor Hugo’s views on literary works as interventions in social debates in the foreword to Lucrèce Borgia (1833). Nolin, Den gode europén, 294. Letter to parents, 14 February 1871.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

177

cultural transfers36 in Europe. It also illustrates how books, plays, conversations, and people all became material for Brandes’ lectures and publications. Saredo must have appealed to Brandes because of his unusual biography. Having advanced from humble origins through work in the printing industry, journalism, teaching, and writing melodramas for boulevard theaters in Turin – anonymously so as not to damage his future career – to professorships in various universities, without formal qualifications, and later to the highest levels of Italian political life, Saredo personified the ideal of socially active scholarship,37 as well as echoing Brandes’ own theoretical move from German abstraction and speculation to the empiricism of Taine and Mill.38 In his work on the young Brandes, Fenger notes the “energizing and politicizing” effect of the Northern Italian scholar and politician on his Scandinavian acquaintance.39 Commenting on the modernizing mission in which they both participated, Saredo warned, in 1871, that Brandes faced an uphill battle: “It is now that your battles begin, a veritable struggle for life in the most elevated sense of the term, because it is up to you to introduce new elements to the moral and scientific life of your country, which will not be accepted without energetic and passionate resistance […].”40 The position of Saredo the public intellectual in Italy was not unlike Brandes’ future one in Denmark. At the university in Rome, Saredo was known as a militant liberal supported by a student movement, although in contrast to Brandes, he had firmly secured his place in the community of Italian law scholars. Closely following his breakthrough as a public speaker, Brandes believed that Saredo’s eloquence, energy, and ambition contributed to making him into an “esprit dominateur.” He read the introduction to Saredo’s four-volume Principii di diritto costituzionale (1862), and his discussion of the applications of empirical methodology to law studies, with great interest.41 36 37

38 39 40 41

Espagne, Les transferts culturels. Brandes to Hans Brøchner, 19 February 1871, Georg og Edv. Brandes brevveksling. Struggle, Brandes argued, was the key to success in intellectual life. “Vous êtes peut-être une nature trop fine pour les combats grossiers de la vie littéraire,” he wrote in 1883 to his more detached friend and critic Georges Noufflard. Brandes to Noufflard, 19 June 1883, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1. Saredo’s wife Luisa Emanuel was a renowned author of historical novels and detective stories. Brandes describes her success at the time of his visit in Letter to parents, 2 March 1871. Fenger, Den unge Brandes, 186–187. Saredo to Brandes, 7 September 1871, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1. Letters to parents, 9 February and 24 March 1871; Brandes to Hans Brøchner, 19 February 1870, Georg og Edv. Brandes brevveksling. During their conversations, Saredo encouraged Brandes to write a book about “Italy in 1871,” which never materialized.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

178

Nygård

Saredo and Villari, Brandes’ Italian interlocutors, occupied somewhat different positions among the liberal intelligentsia on the peninsula. The younger and more radically liberal – and northern Italian – Saredo lacked patience for the conventionalism of the great southern intellectual Villari. The primary North– South division for Brandes prior to his travels in Italy had been that between Northern Europe and Scandinavia on the one hand and the Mediterranean South on the other; little did he expect to find such a strong internal North– South division within unified Italy.42 Villari was centrally involved in framing the Southern question as a key obstacle to fulfilling the unification process. His writings on the socio-economic divide between the rural, Catholic, and conservative South with its Neapolitan center, and the relatively more affluent and modernizing North(-West) – the industrial triangle between Turin, Milan, and Genoa – were published in a much-discussed volume of Southern Letters (Lettere meridionali, 1878). In their reflections on Italy’s Europeanization, past and present, both Villari and Saredo emphasized the importance of mixing Latin and Germanic “races.” Saredo, however, was manifestly anti-Latin in his outlook. In a moment of frustration over the power of the Latin and Catholic elements in France, Brandes quotes him praising the more German parts of Northern Italy (Veneto, Lombardy, and Piedmont) for having “liberated” Italy from Greeks and Arabs and declaring that the road to progress for Italy lay in further Germanization.43 Saredo at one point sought to convince his Danish friend to leave Scandinavia behind and settle in Rome: Stay in Italy, settle down here, and you will reach a far higher position than you can possibly attain in your own country. The intellectual education you possess is exceedingly rare in Italy […]. Within two years you would be a power in Italy; at home, you will never be more than a professor at a university. Stay here! Villari and I will help you over your first difficulties. Write in French, or Italian, whichever you like, and as you are master of the entire range of Germanic culture, which scarcely any man in Italy is, you will acquire an influence of which you have not the least conception. A prophet is never honored in his own country. […] It is with

42

43

Letter to parents, 4 March 1871. Half a decade later Brandes encountered another leading voice on Italy’s “Southern question,” when he hosted Italy’s former prime minister, the then anti-fascist Francesco Saverio Nitti, during a visit to Copenhagen from his exile in France in 1924. See Stender Clausen, Georg Brandes. Fra mito e realtà, vol. 2, 131–132. Letter to parents, 4 March 1871.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

179

individuals as with nations; it is only when they change their soil that they attain their full development and realize their own strength.44 Brandes’ reply to Saredo’s proposal foretold his later relocation to Berlin, in 1877: “Only in the event of my settlement in Denmark meeting with opposition, and being rendered impossible, shall I strap on my knapsack, gird up my loins, and hie me to France or Italy.” While his attachment to Scandinavia and the Danish language kept him from accepting the offer, Saredo’s and Villari’s backing reassured Brandes that “the world is not so closed to me as I had formerly believed.”45 While Brandes at this time favored France over Germany, the anti-clerical Saredo detested France for having supported the Pope until the Franco-Prussian War. In fact, Saredo’s politically induced animosity towards a primary cultural reference, France, mirrored Brandes’ own attitude towards Prussia.46 They both saw themselves as modernizers aligning their respective regions with European progress: Brandes by positioning Scandinavia at the forefront of cultural progress and Naturalist aesthetics, and Saredo by “Europeanizing” Italian law and politics.47 Most of their conversations took place at a specific address, Via della Purificazione 89, on a small street off Piazza Barberini where Brandes, suffering from lingering complications from typhus, carried out a four-month long “Voyage autour de ma chambre,” alluding to the title by Xavier de Maistre.48 During these months, Saredo provided him with access to the outside world by bringing him journals (most of them French, such as Revue des Deux Mondes, Le Progrès, and L’Italie) and books (many of them also by French liberals, such as Edmond About or Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol),49 introducing Brandes to prominent Italians, and discussing the relationship between literature and politics, and between Italy, Scandinavia, and “the core of Europe.”

44 45 46 47 48 49

Brandes Recollections, 296. The passage is only slightly modified from Brandes’ letter to his to parents, 11 March 1871. Brandes, Recollections, 296. Against the backdrop of France’s hold on Rome and Prussia’s conquest of Schleswig, Brandes’ turn towards France in the latter half of the 1860s mirrored Saredo’s turn from France towards Germany. Letter to parents, 20 March 1871. On Brandes and Germany, see Allen, “Georg Brandes in Berlin.” Letter to parents, 9 February 1871. These examples, along with many others, are given in Letter to parents, 5 March 1871. Brandes was particularly impressed by About’s Le Progrès (1864), which he strongly recommended to his parents, especially the parts about science and art and the introduction on “La grande idée,” the militant naturalism of which is in line with Brandes’ introduction to Main Currents.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

180

Nygård

While Brandes and Saredo clearly identified with a modern republic of letters, they were not unaware of the constraints of this elevated sphere and its tensions with the national. “You are no more a Dane than I am an Italian,” Saredo once said, claiming that they were “compatriots in the great fatherland of the mind, that of Shakespeare and Goethe, John Stuart Mill, Andræ, and Cavour.” Critical of abstract cosmopolitanism, Brandes pointed out that their meeting place was also “the terrain of abstractions, that is, in the skies.” The abstractions that confronted each other in this space were translations, and because every translation necessarily betrayed the original – as the Italian locution traduttore-traditore suggested – there were limits to the depth of conversation in the republic of letters.50 3

The Southern Filter of the Northern Breakthrough

Brandes returned to Italy in 1893 and 1913, but it was during his first stay there in 1870–1871 that he outlined his program for an aesthetic revolution in Scandinavia. Judging by his correspondence and the hundred pages devoted to this period in his autobiography Levned (1905–1908), his overall assessment of the country was mixed. He lamented the general ignorance and low educational level of the population,51 but he also situated Italy after unification at the forefront of European progress. The energy mobilized by students and professors in public life impressed him, as did the degree of religious tolerance in Italy compared to Denmark.52 In the salons of Florence and Rome, he discovered a kind of synthesis of his theoretical and practical struggles to overcome national Romanticism and Hegelianism with the help of French Naturalism and English liberalism, and an environment where politics seemed more accessible to liberal intellectuals like himself than in his own region. And, commenting on Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1807) in Emigrant Literature (1872), he depicts Rome as “that house of call for all Europe,” where the “characteristics and limitations of the different nations were first clearly revealed to her.”53

50

51 52 53

“Andræ” is the Danish politician, mathematician, and pioneer of electoral reform C.G. Andræ. The quotation, from Brandes’ Recollections, was slightly modified from how it originally appeared in the letters, dropping a reference to Cavour. Brandes, Recollections, 372; Letter to parents, 28 March 1871. Letters to parents, 22 and 23 October 1870. Letters to parents, 27 February 1871 (on academic intellectuals and public activity) and 22 February 1871 (on religious tolerance). Brandes, Recollections, 125.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

181

Against this background, it may seem surprising that Brandes did not devote more attention to Italy in Main Currents, and eventually failed to have any of it translated into Italian. The Italian reference was more important for how he wrote about European cultural life than for his choice of subjects, and, as Jørgen Stender Clausen has noted, for broadening Brandes’ project onto a European scale, rather than limiting his comparisons to Scandinavia and France.54 In the end, he did not extend his survey of nineteenth-century literature beyond the “core” literatures of France, Germany, and England. Christopher L. Hill has demonstrated, with respect to Japanese literature from the Meiji era, how the core is often reinforced at the periphery by local actors picking up ideas from the center and treating them as if they were universal.55 Brandes confirms this rule insofar as he did not carry his comparative project beyond the “main currents.” In challenging the hegemonic pretentions of the powerful, by calling for more reflexivity, comparison, and synthesis between competing dominant traditions, he did not go beyond European spatial and temporal universalism. But his appeal to global intellectual and literary historians today, in addition to his impact on an unusually large number of countries and linguistic regions, lies not least in his oscillation between reinforcing and questioning the universalism of the core from a “semi-peripheral” standpoint. As this chapter has sought to underline, Brandes’ encounter with Italy inspired his quest for an alternative to the provincialism of the core (blind universalism) and the margin (peripheral parochialism). The inevitable tensions attached to his position became evident during Brandes’ later exile in Berlin (1877–1883), where he struggled to reconcile his cultural program for asserting Danish and Scandinavian greatness with local pressures to absorb Scandinavian literature into a pan-German project.56 If the literary field of his beloved France, and to some extent Germany as well, proved difficult for Brandes to access, Italy was quite the opposite. His correspondence shows that Saredo and Villari were generously carving out a space for Brandes among the liberal elites of the country. When he nevertheless stuck to his plans to try his luck in the North, Saredo wished him well but cautioned him of the less-than-ideal aspects of academic life, noting that universities were populated by the most unpleasant, jealous, and narrow-minded 54 55 56

Stender Clausen, Georg Brandes. Fra mito e realtà, vol. 2, 15, 87. Hill, “Conceptual universalization in the transnational nineteenth century”; Nygård and Strang, “Conceptual Universalization.” Allen, “Georg Brandes in Berlin,” 472–473. For an overview of the tensions between comparison and universalism in today’s globalized study of world literature, see Damrosch, Comparing the Literatures, Chapter 8.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

182

Nygård

people one could imagine.57 In the course of the 1870s, Saredo was pleased to see Brandes gradually abandoning his anti-German stance, congratulating his Danish friend for marrying a German woman – the ex-wife of Brandes’ German translator, whom he married in 1876 – and for relocating to Berlin in the following year as the doors to academic Copenhagen remained shut. Saredo’s prediction that someone of Brandes’ prominence would easily find his place in Berlin proved correct,58 but only as regards the mediator Brandes; for Brandes the public intellectual things were more complicated. While mediators facilitate the travel of literary and artistic products across national borders, positions conquered within a specific intellectual field are not so easily transferable from one context to another.59 Despite Brandes’ widespread recognition in Germany as the “Danish critic,” he failed to translate his position as a public intellectual from Copenhagen to Berlin. Looking back, in the final pages of his autobiography he expresses his disappointment over how narrowly his international recognition, mediated by his German reputation, was tied to his role as the one who introduced Ibsen and Nietzsche to the world.60 Just as Immanuel Wallerstein attributed a stabilizing role to the semiperiphery in his world systems theory, cultural brokerage by semi-peripheral actors in the system of world literature performs a similar function.61 Anything but straightforward, this activity involves geo-cultural detours and the accumulation of refracted understandings of European culture by the likes of Brandes, who negotiate the literary relations between unevenly positioned spaces and places.62 For the European intellectual Brandes, putting a multitude of perspectives into dialogue was more fruitful than getting stuck in endless struggles over hegemony, which seemed to hamper the thinking of many of those that he himself greatly admired. But in his own region Brandes the Scandinavian intellectual was guilty of the same “parochial universalism” of which he accused intellectuals writing in dominant European languages. In the mid-1870s, the Norwegian Ibsen accused him of particularistic cultural chauvinism and of trying to incorporate Norwegian (and Swedish and Finland-Swedish) literature 57 58 59 60 61 62

Saredo to Brandes, 7 September 1871, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1. Saredo to Brandes, 2 May 1876, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1. On Brandes in Berlin, see Allen, “Georg Brandes in Berlin.” Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. For a comparative history of European intellectual fields, see Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe. Brandes, Levned, vol. 3, 387. Pascale Casanova explores the systemic impact of mediators in La République mondiale des lettres. Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise.” For an analysis of intellectual asymmetries in Europe, see Jalava et al., Decentering European Intellectual Space.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

183

into the Danish sphere, arguing that when Brandes claimed to speak for all of Scandinavia, his views were in fact those of a narrow Copenhagen elite. As in every asymmetric cultural relation, the regionally dominant Copenhagen elite could afford to ignore developments elsewhere in the region, while Norwegian and Swedish intellectuals were well informed about developments in Copenhagen.63 Brandes the European intellectual described his Scandinavian identification as imposed from the outside. Beyond Denmark, he argued, it was more practical to go along with the prevailing view of the region instead of making futile attempts at insisting on national differences between the three Scandinavian countries.64 To be famous it was, in the words of Donald Sassoon, “necessary to give foreigners what they wanted, to deal with themes which had wider resonance: in other words it was necessary not to be too national-specific.”65 The Piedmontese Giuseppe Saredo occupied a similar semi-peripheral position in Italy as Brandes did in Scandinavia. Saredo’s intellectual environment may have been peripheral vis à vis the “core” of North-Western European modernity, but it was central with respect to the regional periphery – the Italian South, which in this period accused northern Italians of hegemonic control over the unification process.66 As semi-peripheral intellectuals, Brandes and Saredo were thus both victims and executors of universalism as power. Brandes’ studies of antiquity during his stay in Italy offer another example of cultural transfers and detours. Continuing southwards from Rome to Naples, and momentarily putting aside his project for a combative literature – a project that the Neapolitan Benedetto Croce several decades later rejected as a primary example of “sociological” as opposed to “artistic” literary history67 – Brandes reconnected with the tradition of northern travel writing on the South (in the context of the Grand Tour), by undertaking a more traditional artistic

63

64 65 66 67

The context was an invitation from Brandes to Ibsen to participate in a “Scandinavian” cultural journal (Det nittende Aarhundrede) Brandes was planning with his brother Edvard. The first issue appeared in October 1874. But in a letter to Brandes in April, Ibsen suspected that the publication would be more Danish than Scandinavian; that it would be concerned mainly with what was at stake among a limited circle of Copenhagen intellectuals; and that it would neglect the whole field of Scandinavian literature in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the United States. Ibsen to Brandes, 20 April 1874, available at www .ibsen.uio.no. See also Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen. Letter to parents, 20 June 1870. Sassoon, The culture of the Europeans, 642. Nygård, “Debating the South in Unified Italy.” Croce’s 1919 article is reproduced in Stender Clausen, Georg Brandes. Fra mito e realtà, vol. 2, 12–15.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

184

Nygård

journey in the summer of 1871. The search for the Classical legacy in Italy was very much part of the Circolo Scandinavo, which was established in 1860 as a meeting point for Scandinavian artists and writers in Rome.68 But in contrast to many of his fellow Scandinavian travellers, Brandes called for a more contemporary assessment of Italy in the North.69 More than a traditional art journey, his expedition to Naples provided him with yet another opportunity to revise the powerful German cultural paradigm in Denmark. This time, the French prism was mediated by a young art critic and aristocrat, Georges Noufflard, who guided him on tours around Rome and Naples. Just as Taine had given Brandes an impulse for a critical correction of Danish Hegelianism in the 1860s, French scholarship again provided him with a weapon, which this time Brandes pointed at the serene neo-classical view of antiquity that dominated in Scandinavia.70 By transposing the French–German struggles over Hellenism to the North, this redescription took place against the backdrop of longstanding debates over philhellenism, an inseparably cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical movement involving a considerable degree of instrumentalization of Greek culture in European politics and identity politics.71 As in Germany, philhellenism in Scandinavia occupied a central place in the elaboration of neo-humanism as a cornerstone of national culture. In this debate, Brandes contrasted what he depicted as lifeless German neo-Hellenism – ‘inspired by the ideal of peaceful, subdued harmony’, and represented in the North by Thorvaldsen72 – with a more vivid French conception of the antique, which in turn became part of his definition of the self-consciously ‘modern’ condition, defined as a bold assertion of originality.73 The “Greece of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Thorvaldsen is almost as un-Greek,” Brandes continues, “as that of Racine and that of Barthélemy in Le jeune Anacharsis,” and the “only question that remains is whether one is more Greek when one is German or when one is

68 69

70 71 72 73

Bull, Nordisk Kunstnerliv i Rom. Carbone, Nordic Italies, 178, 193. Brandes also reproduces stereotypical representations of the South among those who undertook a Grand Tour, for instance when in The Emigrant Literature he explains how poetry in the South had not produced a Shakespeare, “because here Nature has taken upon herself the task which falls to the lot of the poet in the North.” Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 125. Fenger, Georg Brandes et la France, 177–178; Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, chapter 23, “New conception of the antique.” Espagne, “Le philhellénisme entre philologie et politique.” Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 159. Letter to parents, 4 June 1871. Neo-Hellenism, in turn, was “disinclination to be one’s self, i.e. modern, and an attempt to be the impossible, i.e. antique.” Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 163.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

185

French.” When Brandes sided with the French conception against the prevailing Scandinavian opinion, he justified this move by the closer proximity – in relation to the Germans – of “the spirit of the French people” to the Greeks. To be sure, he concludes, Mme de Staël was right in claiming that the Germans had understood the Greeks better than the French, but ‘one never resembles an original nature less than when one imitates it’. 74 This episode concludes the reflections in this chapter on the role of “external” references in “internal” Scandinavian debates on socio-cultural modernization, as evidenced by Brandes’ encounter with Italy. No one played this game better than Brandes. His contact with Italy at a delicate stage of his trajectory from being a Scandinavian intellectual to becoming a European one reinforced his belief that Europe was better reflected at its margins than in the more dominant countries. Early on, Brandes had gained better insights into the particularistic universalism of the centers than most Scandinavians. He knew perfectly well that only the hegemonic countries could afford to universalize their local debates. After his failed attempt to achieve recognition as a German writer in Germany, Brandes complained in 1888 to his old mentor Hippolyte Taine in Paris: “You great writers of great literatures have your setbacks to be sure, but you are not familiar with the greatest misfortune of the writer, not to be judged by Europe in his original language.”75 Italian writers, although linguistically closer to France, were equally familiar with the problem of a constrained readership, but for somewhat different reasons. Italy was of course a much bigger country than Denmark, with a comparatively large group of academically educated citizens in the nineteenth century. But it also struggled with some of the highest levels of illiteracy in Europe. As a result, limited domestic cultural markets forced writers to rely on foreign centers, notably Paris.76 In an 1881 review of the foundational work of Italian verismo, Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia, Luigi Capuana posits that if the novel had been written in French, not only would Verga – with whom Brandes corresponded; he also introduced his work to Denmark with a foreword to the Danish translation of Vita dei campi (1880) – have emerged as a European celebrity, but within Italy he would have been much more widely recognized, and local critics of

74 75

76

Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 161, 163. Brandes had been writing in what he judged to be poor German, with the help of editors, and then had these publications translated into other languages, with each translation worse than the German texts. Brandes to Taine, 29 April 1888, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1. See also Brandes’ letter to Noufflard, 2 September 1880: “Car quand on écrit en Danois, l’Europe ne sait riend de nous.” Charle, Les intellectuels en Europe, 346–351.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

186

Nygård

Naturalism would not have to go through Émile Zola to make their point.77 In his 1899 comment on Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, Brandes, who grappled with this topic throughout his life, notes with bitterness how much easier it was for a third-rate writer from a dominant region to achieve international recognition than it was for a first-rate writer from a dominated region.78 Bibliography Allen, Julie K.: “Georg Brandes in Berlin. Marketing the Modern Breakthrough in Wilhelmine Germany,” Scandinavian Studies 61/4 (Winter 2019): 459–481. Ashton, Rosemary: The German Idea. Four English Writers and the reception of German thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Bjerring-Hansen, Jens: “Fremmede blikke: Ekkoer fra 1700-tallet hos Georg Brandes,” Danske Studier (2018): 69–88. Bourdieu, Pierre: Les règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Brandes, Georg: The Emigrant Literature, London: Heinemann, 1906 [1901]. Brandes, Georg: Levned, vol. 1. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905. Brandes, Georg: Levned, vol. 2. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1907. Brandes, Georg: Levned, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1908. Brandes, Georg: Recollections of My Childhood and Youth. London: Heinemann, 1906. Brandes, Georg and Edvard Brandes: Georg og Edv. Brandes brevveksling med nordiske forfattere of videnskabsmænd, edited by Morten Borup. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1939. Brandes, Georg: Georg Brandes’ breve til forældrene 1859–71, 3 vols, edited by Morten Borup. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog-og Litteraturselskab, 1978. Bull, Francis: Nordisk Kunstnerliv i Rom. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1960. Carbone, Elettra: Nordic Italies. Representations of Italy in Nordic Literature from the 1830s to the 1910s. Roma: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2016. Casanova, Pascale: La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Charle, Christophe: Les intellectuels en Europe au xixe siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1996. Clausen, Jørgen Stender: Georg Brandes. Fra mito e realtà: L’Italia del 1870–71 nelle lettere di un giovane critico danese, 2 vols, translated by Salvatore Brogaard. Pisa: Edizioni ets, 2002. Damrosch, David. Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020. 77 78

Ragusa, “The Study of Literary Relations.” A translated version of the article is reprinted in Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping world literature.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Southern Prism of the Northern Breakthrough

187

Espagne, Michel: Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Paris: puf, 1999. Espagne, Michel: “Le philhellénisme entre philologie et politique. Un transfert francoallemand,” Revue germanique internationale 1–2 (2005). Fenger, Henning: Georg Brandes’ Læreår. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1955. Fenger, Henning: Den unge Brandes. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1957. Fenger, Henning: Georg Brandes et la France. Paris: puf, 1963. Fulsås, Narve and Tore Rem. Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hemstad, Ruth, Jes Fabricius Møller and Dag Thorkildsen (eds): Skandinavismen: Vision og virkning. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2018. Hill, Christopher L.: “Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century,” in: Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Jalava, Marja, Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang (eds): Decentering European Intellectual Space. Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2018. Jelsbak, Torben: “Emigrant Literature,” Georg Brandes. Digital Currents. georgbrandes. dk. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes: Magt og afmagt 1864–1914. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998. Krüger, Paul (ed.): Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 1. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1952. McFarlane, James and Malcolm Bradbury: Modernism: 1890–1930. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Mill, John Stuart: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 16, edited by J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–1991. Moretti, Franco: Atlas of the European Novel. London: Verso, 1999. Moretti, Mauro: Pasquale Villari storico e politico. Napoli: Liguori, 2005. Nolin, Bertil: Den gode europén: studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893 med speciell hänsyn till hans förhållande till tysk, engelsk, slavisk och fransk litteratur. Stockholm: Svenska bokförlaget/Norstedts 1965. Nygård, Stefan: “Debating the South in Unified Italy,” in: The Politics of Debt and Europe’s Relations with the “South,” edited by S. Nygård. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Nygård, Stefan and Johan Strang: “Conceptual Universalization and the Role of the Peripheries,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 12/1 (2017): 55–75. Ragusa, Olga: “The Study of Literary Relations: France and Italy in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Symposium: a Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 47/2 (1993), 147–155. Rosendahl Thomsen, Mads: Mapping world Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London; New York: Continuum, 2008. Sassoon, Donald: The Culture of the Europeans: from 1800 to the Present. London: Harper Press, 2006.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

188

Nygård

Wallerstein, Immanuel: “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System. Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16/ 4 (1974): 387–415. Wallerstein, Immanuel: The Modern World-System. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Wallerstein, Immanuel: European Universalism: the Rhetoric of Power. New York: The New Press, 2006. Wolff, Kurt H. (transl. and ed.): The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 9

Brandes – Ibsen

Rethinking the Modern Breakthrough Narve Fulsås Georg Brandes and Henrik Ibsen are the two names most strongly associated with the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature. Although they are closely connected, by putting one or the other at the center we may construct different and even contradictory breakthrough narratives. A Brandescentered narrative, casting him as the initiator of a wave of highly controversial Naturalist writings, has come to dominate the understanding of this literary renewal. I will argue that the origins of the renewal of the bourgeois drama, which became Ibsen’s lasting contribution to world literature, had its origins further back than Brandes’ lectures of 1871; that it was part of a larger Scandinavian literary-political upheaval; and that it might even be seen as an adaptation to market demands.1 1

Two Tales of the Modern Breakthrough

In the Brandes-centered version, as presented in Jørgen Knudsen’s voluminous and magisterial biography of the Danish critic, it all started on 3 November 1871 at Copenhagen University when Brandes delivered the first of a series of lectures that became Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. On this day, writes Knudsen, Brandes introduced “modernity in Denmark and initiated a cultural struggle that has continued since then.”2 Brandes set the stage for an antagonistic conflict between modernity and tradition, liberalism and orthodoxy, reason and religion, truth and hypocrisy, light and darkness. He met with violent reactions from defenders of the established order. The lectures spoiled his chances of being appointed to the professorship in literature for which he was supremely qualified, and the conservative and national-liberal

1 I wish to thank Tore Rem for his help with and comments on this chapter. 2 Knudsen, GB, 11.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_011 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

190

Fulsås

press denied him a voice in their columns. In 1877, Brandes left Denmark and tried to make it as a man of letters in Berlin. At that time, however, a small but dedicated group of young followers had joined him, and he inspired the turn towards contemporary, “Naturalist” literature among authors such as Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Alexander L. Kielland, J.P. Jacobsen, and August Strindberg. By the early 1880s, Brandes seemed to be in command of Scandinavian literature and an alliance between the political left and the “literary left” offered him a newspaper outlet to the public. In February 1883, he returned to Copenhagen in triumph. This positive state of affairs almost immediately began to break down. By the end of 1883, the literary-political alliance between urban intellectuals and rural peasant voters had come to an end. Followers and friends defected, and the poet Holger Drachmann made a high-profile transition from the “Europeans” to the “nationals.” The liberal Left party won the election in 1884, but the royal government was able to hang on to power. Disillusioned, voters abandoned the Left in the next election in 1887; Brandes turned his back on politics and lost faith in progress and democracy. He continued to be an “engaged intellectual,” however, picking up a series of new causes. Through translations of Main Currents and later his huge work on Shakespeare, he won a name as a leading man of letters across Europe, America, and eventually even China and Japan. In Denmark, the Students’ Society (Studentersamfundet) offered him a permanent platform, until the professorship was finally awarded him after the royal government was defeated in 1902. His domestic book sales were always modest, starting at around 300–400 copies and later just occasionally surpassing 700.3 This is a narrative about heroic defeat and the carving out of an autonomous position as an oppositional intellectual. Brandes was a European ahead of his time; according to this narrative, Denmark was not ready for a cultural revolution in the early 1880s.4 A Norway-centered version, in contrast, may start in the 1850s, when Ibsen and Bjørnson were working with the newly founded “Norwegian” theaters in Bergen and Kristiania.5 These theaters were set to overcome the hegemony of Danish actors, the Danish language, and Danish plays on the Norwegian stage, but they also faced the French hegemony over European theater in general. At this time, Bjørnson was already trying to renew bourgeois theater, and he saw the engagement with the heroic, the tragic, and the “demonic” found in 3 Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Magt og afmagt, vol. 1, 232. 4 Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, vol. 1, 123. 5 For this narrative, see Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

191

the native literary heritage as a necessary transitional stage.6 He wrote primarily historical dramas during the 1850s and 1860s, while his breakthrough came with a series of peasant tales. They were successful even in Denmark and paved the way for his transition to a Danish publisher, facilitated by the fact that Danish continued to be the major written language in Norway throughout the nineteenth century, long after the centuries-old union had been dissolved in 1814. Bjørnson’s The Newly Married (De nygifte), from 1865, is considered his first bourgeois play, but it was only in the 1870s that he wholeheartedly returned to his old ambition. In 1875, Bjørnson published the two plays A Bankruptcy (En fallit) and The Editor (Redaktøren), which were hailed by Georg Brandes as finally allowing “those two great powers, the now and reality” into Nordic literature.7 Until then, Brandes had been rather hostile to Bjørnson, but these two plays, together with Bjørnson’s break with Christianity in 1877, opened the way to a conciliation between them. In Norway, Bjørnson very much personified the alliance between literature and the parliamentary opposition. Ibsen, on the other hand, was largely seen as belonging in the conservative camp by the 1870s; he was considered an enemy of Bjørnson, drifting away from Brandes. However, as the political center of gravity in Norway moved towards the liberal parliamentary majority, Ibsen too had to adapt. In 1877, he issued Pillars of the Community (Samfundets støtter), signaling a careful reorientation. The play was a success both as book and in theaters: it was printed in a record first edition of 6,000 copies, followed by an additional 4,000 over the next 12 months. On submitting his next manuscript in 1879, A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem), Ibsen told his Danish publisher that the play dealt with very topical (tidsmæssige) problems and that he expected a high turnover.8 This time the publisher, Hegel, ordered a first edition of 8,000 copies, but again expectations were exceeded and after a year he had printed 13,500, all of them well-produced, expensive books. In Scandinavian theaters, too, the play was the sensation of the season. Ibsen’s modern drama, then, emerged together with an expanding readership. Ibsen reached a wider audience with these plays than ever before, and he was able to attract new groups of middle-class and provincial readers in Denmark and Norway.9 With his next play, Ghosts (Gengangere), however, he 6 Bjørnson, Letter to D. Meidell [Summer 1861], see ibid., 19. 7 Brandes, “Literatur: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: ʻEn Fallit’ og ʻRedaktøren’,” Det nittende Aarhundrede (1875), 241, quoted and translated in Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 75. 8 Ibsen, Letter to F. Hegel. 9 Fulsås, “Det moderne gjennombrotet.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

192

Fulsås

caused controversy. The play was rejected by theaters, while conservative criticism placed him in Brandes’ radical camp. Ibsen had no interest in such party affiliation, which would alienate part of his audience and lead to lost theater income. With An Enemy of the People (En folkefiende, 1882) and The Wild Duck (Vildanden, 1884), he set out to renegotiate an independent position for himself, thus contributing to the dissolution of the literary left while securing himself a position at the top of the literary as well as the economic hierarchy. At the end of the 1880s, he experienced a breakthrough in both German and English; in the 1890s his new plays were published simultaneously in Copenhagen, Berlin, London, and Paris. This is a narrative of artistic and commercial success without precedent in Scandinavian history. 2

Uneasy Alliance

It is clear that Ibsen’s authorship underwent a major reorientation as part of the Modern Breakthrough; it is not equally clear, however, what part Brandes played in this. In Norway, some critics and authors were questioning Brandes’ importance at the time. The Brandes biographer Jørgen Knudsen has no patience which such “Norwegian pride” (Norsk ærekærhed) and is blatantly explicit in his own assessment: My God! Had there been any justice in the world [Brandes] could without lying or boasting have reminded them that the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia was eminently inspired by him alone, and that this breakthrough was unique in Europe at that time. In the great Germany, the literature of the 80s was close to misery and in both France and England, the foremost writing talents lacked precisely the kind of support that had helped his class get through.10 In the case of Ibsen, Erik Christensen has argued forcefully against this view of Brandes as a pivotal “support.” He even claims that Brandes actively tried to “sabotage” Ibsen in Germany.11 I will present some of the same evidence as Christensen, but I do not think it warrants such a conclusion. My aim is rather to argue that the Brandesian narrative needs to be supplemented by structural

10 11

Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, vol. 1, 85. Kristensen, “Why should Brandes sabotage Ibsen in Germany?.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

193

factors, such as the synchronization of political and literary oppositions in Denmark and Norway around 1880, as well as social differentiation and the emergence of a “mass” reading public. On the level of individual agency and personal interactions, we should also add several nuances that question the Brandes-centered chronology. We have already noticed that Bjørnson’s ambitions predate Brandes’ call to arms. In early 1872, parallel with Brandes’ lectures in Copenhagen, Bjørnson expressed his literary intentions in exactly the same way as the Danish critic: “My soul has lately been drawn towards writing a series of bourgeois plays which were to present my thoughts on the problems which we are now facing. I have always known that someday I would get there.”12 When Bjørnson issued A Bankruptcy, Brandes stated that it was inspired by Augier and the modern French drama, which had never been presented on the Danish stage, he claimed – only in his own lectures in 1872.13 However, the Augier plays held up by Brandes as models of social criticism in his first lectures had been performed in Kristiania since the middle of the 1860s. Bjørnson had himself pointed to the new tendencies represented by Musset, Augier, and Dumas fils as better models than Scribe, and called for “Naturalism,” “individualization” and “truth.”14 Ibsen had reviewed an Augier play in 1862.15 Brandes did not introduce these playwrights to Scandinavia. Brandes himself oscillated between taking Bjørnson’s 1875 plays as the beginning of modern drama in the Nordic countries and pointing to Ibsen’s The League of Youth (De unges Forbund) of 1869 as the turning point.16 When The League of Youth was about to be published, Ibsen asked Brandes, whom he had still not met, to read it, though, he claimed, he was uncertain what Brandes’ reaction would be to its “strong realist coloring”:17 “Thinking it over, I see that what really interests you in literature are the tragedies and comedies that take place in the inner life of the individual, and that you care little or nothing about actually existing outward conditions – political or any other.”18 If this play initiated Nordic realism, Brandes clearly did not inspire it.

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Bjørnson, Letter to M. Rode, 2 February 1872, Brevveksling, 197. In his first, anonymous response from Stockholm; see Knudsen 1985, Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens vej, 359. Marker and Marker, The Scandinavian Theatre, 155–156. Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 19, 24, 76–77. Brandes, Det Moderne Gjennembruds Mænd, 59, 137–138. Ibsen, Letter to G. Brandes, 26 June 1869, Letters and Speeches, 84. Ibsen, Letter to G. Brandes, 15 July 1869, ibid., 85.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

194

Fulsås

Their personal relation was closest and most harmonious at its outset, from 1866 until around 1873, and cooled down towards the breakthrough years. Ibsen and Brandes met for the first time in Dresden in 1871: “Out to Ibsen, he squeezed me to his chest, so I almost lost my breath. We talked for 2, 3 hours, partly about his work, partly about the conditions at home, and a lot about me.”19 They met again in 1872: “This time we get along perfectly, and I have almost got a new impression of his character.”20 When Brandes was preparing his lectures in 1871, Ibsen’s wholehearted support was a great encouragement to him. A few years later, however, they started to drift apart. Brandes did not like Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer) (1873), which Ibsen at the time considered his magnum opus.21 Their continued meetings seem only to have enhanced this distance. Their starkly divergent habitus began to have consequences. Brandes was a brilliant academic, while Ibsen had failed his university entrance exam. Their family lives could not have been more dissimilar. Brandes had a strong bond with his mother, to whom he sent regular reports of his activities, while being an inveterate womanizer who lived in a horrible marriage. Ibsen had broken with his family but lived a very conventional life with his wife and son. Brandes was a polemical, provocative, engaged intellectual; Ibsen was a single-minded dramatist, more and more cultivating elevated distance and silence. Brandes published a three-volume autobiography. Ibsen sometimes intended something similar but never achieved more than a tenpage manuscript. Living abroad, Ibsen mainly enjoyed Scandinavian company while Brandes mostly shied away from fellow citizens in order to immerse himself in local intellectual communities. Arriving in a new European city, Brandes would immediately seek out the leading literary authorities and make their acquaintance. On his first visit to Paris in 1870, he befriended Hippolyte Taine, Ernst Renan, and Philarète Chasles, the latter a professor of “Northern” languages and literature at Collège de France.22 It was also in Paris that Brandes experienced one of his early triumphs, when one day John Stuart Mill knocked on his door. On his return to England from southern France, Mill had looked up Brandes’ humble lodging in order to meet the young Dane who had translated his On the Subjection of Women (Kvindernes underkuelse) the year before.23 Mill invited Brandes to come to London and visit him there, which Brandes later did. 19 20 21 22 23

Brandes, Letter to parents, 14 July 1871, Breve til Forældrene 1859–71, vol. 2, 446. Brandes, Letter to parents, 19 September 1872, Breve til Forældrene 1872–1904, vol. 1, 15. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens vej, 357. Brandes, Levned. Et Tiaar, 276–286. Knudsen, GB, 65.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

195

In Dresden in 1872, Brandes headed out to the house of Hermann Hettner, whose book Das moderne Drama was well known to Ibsen but whom the playwright seems never to have met during his seven-year stay in the city. On arriving at Hettner’s house, Brandes anxiously handed over his card and a German translation of the first volume of Main Currents and was immediately allowed upstairs: “You here? Oh, how nice! And I, who wanted to go to Copenhagen to see you!”24 After their next meeting: “Mutual amazement that we were in complete agreement on all points without ever having conferred.”25 Ibsen took Brandes to the Literarische Verein in Dresden and Brandes immediately engaged in the discussion, which was about a book by Thieck on Hamlet that only he and the speaker knew, he claims.26 While Ibsen frequented the literary society during his last years in Dresden, he seems never to have spoken a word there, and he left Dresden quite unnoticed.27 When Brandes visited Munich for the first time in 1873, he proceeded as he had in Paris and Dresden; this time he went to Paul Heyse, who was the central figure in the literary life of the Bavarian capital. Heyse’s young daughter said that her father was not available, but after reading the card: “für Sie freilich.”28 As with Hettner, Brandes reported home that they agreed in everything and he thought that Heyse stood at “the pinnacle of our culture.”29 When Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875, he asked Brandes to introduce him to Heyse. Brandes warned Heyse about Ibsen’s suspicious nature and his hostility to Bjørnson: “You will find him to be a rather enclosed, a bit shy and taciturn, very peculiar and bizarre Norwegian […]. You should not tell him that B[jørnson] and I are reconciled, he will find that out soon enough.”30 Heyse came to like Ibsen; by 1878 and continuing into 1879, they met almost daily. They always met in cafes. Ibsen never went to Heyse’s daily afternoon parties at which he entertained the cultural and social elite of Munich, as well as visiting celebrities. Usually, Heyse served only tea at these gatherings, and the visitors were expected to tip the servants more than the cost of the tea. Ibsen was highly curious about such details, but thought participating in society interfered with the concentration he needed.31 Brandes was of a different disposition.

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Brandes, Letter to parents, 27 September 1872, Breve til Forældrene 1872–1904, vol. 1, 25. Brandes, Letter to parents, 30 September 1872, ibid., 29. Brandes, Letter to parents, 19 September 1872, ibid., 19. Fulsås and Dingstad, Innledning. Brandes, Letter to his mother, [28 July 1873], Breve til Forældrene 1872–1904, vol. 1, 59. Brandes, Letter to his mother, [29 July 1873], ibid., 61. Brandes, Letter to P. Heyse, 6 May 1875, Correspondance, 105. Paulsen, Mine erindringer, 154, 187; Paulsen, Samliv med Ibsen, 27–28.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

196

Fulsås

After moving to Berlin in 1877, he lived in a quarter inhabited by the nouveau riche and the cost of reciprocating invitations was a considerable drain on his finances.32 Later on, in Paris, his eloquence, flair, and command of French made him perfectly fit for the life of the salons.33 Enjoying the company of cultured and like-minded European intellectuals, Brandes soon tired of Ibsen. Having once again met Ibsen and then Heyse in 1874, Brandes wrote from Munich: However warm-hearted Ibsen was and always is to me, I am too superior to him in education to benefit from long conversations with him. In H[eyse], on the other hand, I have finally found an absolute peer, in talent moreover superior, and even such a like-minded spirit that we never need fully to complete a sentence in order to understand each other. Neither is he like Ibsen spiritually unrefined and therefore paradoxical, but fully grown, and he understands almost everything.34 In 1874, Brandes founded the journal The Nineteenth Century together with his brother Edvard. Having initially promised Brandes regular contributions, Ibsen ended up sending him just two, while forcefully criticizing what he perceived as Brandes’ bigoted Copenhagen-centeredness.35 In 1877, when Brandes gave up The Nineteenth Century as well as his academic ambitions in Denmark, Ibsen’s name was notable for its absence from the public address issued in support of Brandes. During Brandes’ years in Berlin, 1877–1882, they did not meet at all, even though Ibsen lived in Germany until 1880 before going to Italy. As late as October 1879, two months before the publication of A Doll’s House, Brandes wrote to Heyse that Ibsen “in recent years has been courting the archconservatives.”36 Brandes had by now put his faith primarily in “the young,” Alexander Kielland and Strindberg. A Doll’s House and Ghosts were as much of a surprise to him as they were to everyone else, and arguably went well beyond what Brandes had imagined in the early 1870s when he had called for a literature that “provokes debate.”

32 33 34 35 36

Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Magt og afmagt, 100. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Uovervindelig taber, vol. 2, 510. Brandes, Letter to his mother, 18 June 1874, Breve til Forældrene 1872–1904, vol. 1, 82. Ibsen, Letters to G. Brandes, 20 April 1874 and 30 January 1875, Letters and Speeches, 147– 149, 154–156. G. Brandes, Letter to P. Heyse, 29 October 1879, quoted and translated in Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 81.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

197

Ibsen’s turn had a major significance. When he joined the moderns he gave the new literature a formidable weight and widened the scope of what was acceptable. Brandes recognized as much in his public intervention in support of Ghosts: By writing the modern tragedy entitled Ghosts Ibsen has hazarded his whole carefully and slowly reclaimed authority, his favor among audiences, almost his entire bourgeois reputation. This book is, in spite of its eminent significance, not the most perfect drama he has written, but it is the noblest deed in his literary life.37 In Sweden, the young authors of the 1880s lacked any corresponding support from an established literary figure and publishers were afraid of publishing anything controversial. The personal and literary relations between Ibsen and Brandes, then, are far from clear-cut. After Ibsen’s early embrace of the young critic and Brandes’ appreciation of the support he received from the older dramatist, their friendship cooled throughout the 1870s. And when Ibsen set out to write plays that seemed to suit Brandes’ program perfectly, the critic did not see it that way, and he did not become their primary European mediator. 3

From the Modern to an International Breakthrough

As regards the European dissemination of the Modern Breakthrough, Brandes was ambiguous in theory and rather peripheral in practice. He coined the term “the Modern Breakthrough” in his 1883 book The Men of the Modern Breakthrough (Det Moderne Gjennembruds Mænd), which contained essays on Bjørnson, Ibsen, J.P. Jacobsen, Holger Drachmann, his brother Edvard Brandes, Sophus Schandorph, and Erik Skram. While these authors belonged to what Brandes considered to be his literary “party” at the time, he also operated with a much more encompassing and liberal concept of “modern.” Just the year before, in 1882, he had published Moderne Geister in German, which omitted Ibsen while including a range of authors as diverse as, for example, the Swedish Romantic poet Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846), the Danish fairytale master H.C. Andersen, John Stuart Mill, Bjørnson, Paul Heyse, and Gustave Flaubert. In the preface, he stated very vaguely: 37

Brandes, “Georg Brandes om ‘Gjengangere’”.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

198

Fulsås

I will not therefore claim that all of them have in full consciousness and wholeheartedly embraced the “modern” in art and ideas, only that, although to different degrees – which can only increase the charm for the observer – they have represented the modern kind of spirit.38 In Brandes’ writings on the Nordic modern, too, he is ambiguous. In his essay on Bjørnson, included in both Moderne Geister and The Men of the Modern Breakthrough, he on the one hand credits his own lectures in 1871– 1872 for having formulated new sources of creativity for Bjørnson, inspiring his A Bankruptcy and The Editor.39 On the other hand, as already related, he credits Ibsen with being the first Scandinavian to make the transition from “Romanticism” to “Realism,” in The League of Youth, from 1869; Brandes suggests that this play was the main inspirational source for Bjørnson’s bourgeois drama.40 Most strikingly, however, there is no defining moment for the breakthrough in Brandes’ history writing, for instance locating the significant transition in Nordic literature somewhere in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Such a perspective would have emphasized the major literary and political rupture in Ibsen’s development from The League of Youth (1869) to A Doll’s House (1879) – or even from Pillars of the Community (1877) to A Doll’s House. Brandes did not highlight the shift from social criticism in a basically comic mode to the radicalism accompanying “modern tragedy.” In The League of Youth and Pillars of the Community, the social order is reaffirmed and restored in the end, while in A Doll’s House and Ghosts Ibsen fundamentally questions one of the basic institutions of bourgeois society: the patriarchal family. This is, surprisingly, not a major concern for Brandes. He seems to be content with the label of “realism” and the addressing of “contemporary problems,” focusing primarily on the technical development present in Ibsen’s works: His technical mastery has in later years advanced from work to work. In “A Doll’s House” he surpassed the technique of the famous French dramatists and in “Ghosts” he demonstrated […] a security, simplicity, and delicacy in the dramatic that recalled the antique tragedy under Sofokles (King Oedipus).41 38 39 40 41

Brandes, Moderne Geister, vii. Slightly different versions exist in Brandes, Moderne Geister, 426–428 and Brandes, Det Moderne Gjennembruds Mænd, 45–47. Brandes, Det Moderne Gjennembruds Mænd, 59, 137–138. Ibid., 135.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

199

Brandes seems to have downplayed Ibsen’s new radicalism not just for tactical reasons, but also because he simply did not endorse it. He found the ending of A Doll’s House unconvincing since there was no lover involved: “The lover is missing. No woman travels to the countryside in order to attend to her own inner improvement.”42 After Ghosts, he wrote that his positive review had been dictated by “sound literary politics,” not by aesthetic opinion.43 He had no interest in “this eternal nonsense about wives leaving their husbands,” but it was wise to support Ibsen: “our entire literature has become one gang: Bjørnson, Ibsen, Kjelland, Elster, the Brandes brothers, and the other Danes.”44 To Bjørnson, he complained that “we need works which will persuade and conquer, not that provoke and frighten.”45 It was impossible to write a proper review of Ghosts, he explained to his mother: “I did not dare […] to talk about its content, evaded everything. It’s just impossible to talk about it. That is also where the effect of the play falls through. It cannot become the subject of conversation.”46 As it turned out, it was these seemingly most Brandesian plays, A Doll’s House and Ghosts, which paved the way for Ibsen’s international breakthrough. It began in Germany in 1887. There Ghosts came to play a major role, as Ibsen’s bestselling drama up until the First World War. By 1914, the cheap Reclam edition of Gespenster (Gengangere) had reached a total print run of 384,000 copies, just ahead of Nora (Et dukkehjem).47 In the UK, the major turning points were the ambitious publishing program initiated by William Archer in 1888 and the Janet Achurch and Charles Charrington production of A Doll’s House at the Novelty Theatre in London in 1889. Given Brandes’ sense of defeat at home and his complaints about Danish “backwardness” – in the foreword to Main Currents he famously claimed that “we are this time, as usual, forty years behind Europe”48 – a possible response might have been to turn his attention outwards and try to promote the Scandinavian modern abroad. However, it seems he never entertained such an idea; he came to play a surprisingly marginal role in the rise of Scandinavian literature, headed by Ibsen, to “world” prominence by the 1890s. After the dissolution of the literary Left, the biographer Knudsen depicts Brandes as a man 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Brandes, Letter to Edvard Brandes, [December 1879], quoted and translated in Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 93. Brandes, Letter to A. Kielland, 26 February 1882, quoted and translated in ibid., 97. Brandes, Letter to Ernst Brandes, 14 January 1882, quoted and translated in ibid., 97. Brandes, Letter to B. Bjørnson, 22 January 1882, G. and E. Brandes, Georg og Edv. Brandes breveksling, 148. Brandes, Letter to his mother, [2 January 1882], Breve til Forældrene 1872–1904, vol. 2, 90. Keel, “Reclam und der Norden,” 140. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen (1872), quoted and translated in Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 7.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

200

Fulsås

with an “identity problem,” searching for new causes and diversifying his interests.49 During the 1880s, he became involved in a series of mainly Scandinavian affairs. One of the most consuming was the huge Scandinavian debate about sexual morality, initiated by Bjørnson and turning the two writers’ friendship into antagonism by 1887. Brandes’ own domestic wars and new love affairs contributed to determining his whereabouts, and were among the reasons he headed for Poland and Russia for public lecture tours in 1885, 1886, and 1887. His “Slavic intermezzo” in 1885–1888 resulted in two volumes of Impressions (Indtryk) from Poland and Russia. Then came his dedication to his own literary work: the completion of Main Currents. While the first four volumes were released by 1875, the fifth came in 1882, and the sixth and last one, The Young Germany (Det unge Tyskland), only in 1890. At no point in the course of all this work did Brandes try to make a corresponding synthesis of contemporary currents in Scandinavian literature. Brandes did make new literary discoveries during this period, however, the two most notable being Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. As for Ibsen, however, he did not engage critically with him in the 1880s after his review of Ghosts in 1882.50 His only effort to promote Ibsen in German was an article for Nord und Süd in 1883. His letters suggest that his ambivalence towards Ibsen continued, and that he was not an enthusiastic follower of the rising dramatist. Brandes had to publicly distance himself from An Enemy of the People (1882), which he took to be an attack on democracy,51 though he became more sympathetic to the play after his political disillusionment and turn to Nietzsche at the end of the decade.52 On The Wild Duck (1884), he wrote that it had “made a sad impression on me, seemed to me a bit empty. Why engage so exclusively with such completely insignificant people! [Ibsen’s] misanthropy seems only to grow.”53 In Rosmersholm (1886), he thought he saw traces of Bjørnson’s campaign for male sexual restraint, which had been anathema to Brandes his whole life.54 Brandes returned to reviewing Ibsen regularly only with Hedda Gabler in 1890, and the review of this play was very critical, particularly in its first versions.55

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, vol. 1, 254–255. See Dahl, “Georg Brandes’ fire indtryk,” 52. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, vol. 1, 43. Ibid., vol. 1, 150; ibid., vol. 2, 332. Brandes, Letter to A. Kielland, 13 November 1884, G. and E. Brandes, Georg og Edv. Brandes breveksling, 361. Brandes, Letter to P. Heyse, 30 December 1887, Correspondance, 293. Dahl, “Den umulige treenighed,” 151.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

201

Neither did their personal relation regain its initial warmth. In 1887, Ibsen traveled through Copenhagen and, according to Brandes, they enjoyed a couple of good chats.56 Then Ibsen turned down an invitation to the Brandesian Students’ Society (Studentersamfundet), only to accept an invitation to the conservative Students’ Association (Studenterforeningen) just as Brandes had left for Germany. Brandes was furious when he heard about it: “Henrik Ibsen’s behavior towards me has upset me. He is as much a scoundrel as everyone else.”57 In Kristiania in 1891, Brandes co-organized a party in honor of Ibsen after the playwright’s return to Norway, but it did not go well. Ibsen allegedly shook his head during Brandes’ speech and said that the Dane did not understand Norwegian literature.58 Besides this faltering relationship, there were other major limitations on Brandes’ capacity to act as a European mediator of Ibsen by the late 1880s. While Brandes had contributed to a transformation of aesthetical norms and hierarchies at home, he had almost no connections among “young” agents and groups with corresponding agendas in the “major” literary and theatrical fields of Europe. In the UK, Brandes’ main contact was Edmund Gosse. In the 1870s, Gosse wrote extensively to promote Ibsen “the poet” to the English audience, and Brandes assisted him with information about Ibsen and other Scandinavian authors. Gosse’s interest in Ibsen faded, however, as soon as his knowledge of exotic Scandinavian authors had secured him a position as a literary expert and he could move on to what really mattered to him: English literature. Gosse abandoned Ibsen just as Ibsen embarked on his cycle of contemporary prose plays. In the 1880s, socialist and feminist circles became Ibsenian strongholds, and William Archer became his foremost translator and mediator.59 These were outside of Brandes’ horizon. When Brandes visited England in 1895, the “Ibsen battles” were long over. He stayed with the Ibsen publisher W. Heinemann and met Archer, who became the translator of Brandes’ book on Shakespeare.60 But Brandes preferred the company of Peter Kropotkin and Russian anarchists to, for example, the Fabian Society, which included Bernard Shaw and other Ibsenites.61 In his autobiography Brandes lists almost a hundred names of politicians, academics, and authors whom he met during his time in Berlin.62 They were 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Brandes, Levned. Snevringer og Horizonter, 222. Brandes, Letter to parents, 5 October 1887, Breve til Forældrene 1872–1904, vol. 2, 158. de Figueiredo, Henrik Ibsen, 414–415. Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 142–148, 159–174. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, vol. 2, 630. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Magt og afmagt, vol. 2, 345. Ibid., vol. 2, 450.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

202

Fulsås

mostly older, established figures. Among them was the Dane Julius Hoffory, who brought him “in touch with the then youngest generation of literature lovers and critics, the men of the immediate future.”63 When these men, including Otto Brahm and Paul Schlenther, together with Hoffory and the publisher Samuel Fischer, began their efforts on behalf of Ibsen in 1886–1887, it was largely independent of Brandes.64 One of Ibsen’s foremost German mediators, Julius Elias, does not figure at all in Knudsen’s biography of Brandes. Brandes wrote in German about French realists rather than Scandinavian ones, for instance Zola in 1888. However, his main outlet was Deutsche Rundschau, which associated him with the established Bildungsbürgerthum and alienated him from the young and rebellious.65 In 1889, Brahm and Schlenther wanted Brandes to contribute to their new journal Freie Bühne, only for the Swede Ola Hansson to intervene with a polemical attack on Brandes as passé, alienating Brandes from the journal.66 Brandes responded by ridiculing Ibsen’s German epigones, making it clear that he had no wish to be, in Knudsen’s words, “grandfather to the new literary current in Germany.”67 In terms of networking, Ibsen was not at all ahead of Brandes. Ibsen had repeatedly tried to promote his literature abroad, particularly in German, since the late 1860s. He had sought publishers, translators, and critics, but while these self-initiated efforts, as well as some unauthorized ones on the part of other people, had resulted in many translations, they had brought him little recognition and even less income. It was only when Ibsen was appropriated by local agents with their own agendas – agents who wanted to use translated literature in order to effect transformations of their local literary and theatrical fields – that he began to receive more recognition.68 In Munich, Ibsen was taken up by the Naturalists and their periodical Die Gesellschaft, edited by Michael Georg Conrad – another absence in the Brandes biography. The Naturalists made Brandes’ old friend Heyse, with his idealism and classicism, the foremost representative of everything they wanted to transcend.69 Ibsen was loath to become directly involved in any local literary struggles and polemics, and thus tried to put a distance from his most ardent admirers. However, he and Heyse had drifted apart since Ghosts. In 1888, Heyse

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Brandes, Levned. Et Tiaar, 312. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, vol. 2, 422. Ibid., 432–435. Ibid., 371–373. Ibid., 437. Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 140–174. Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism, 26–33.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

203

wrote to Brandes: “[Ibsen] I see most rarely and only in the street, where we with resigned respect greet each other like two people who have nothing to say [to each other].”70 Brandes responded that he could barely understand Ibsen’s German breakthrough: “When I lived in Germany, he was little known. I find it hard to imagine such a huge change.”71 Brandes had lost track of Ibsen in Germany. As for France, Brandes’ admiration for its literature and criticism was not reciprocated. Increasing literary xenophobia in the late 1890s gave Brandes an opportunity to air his frustration. Ibsen and the Scandinavians were now criticized for being “foggy,” for having stolen all their ideas from France, and for having nothing to offer French literature. In Ibsen en France (1897), Brandes went on a fierce counterattack, claiming that Ibsen owed nothing to supposedly French models and that French critics were ignorant of foreign literature,72 provoking even Zola to join the nationals.73 This French episode represents a late but isolated reconnection of Ibsen and Brandes on the European scene, and Ibsen politely thanked Brandes for “taking the trouble of disabusing the French of their illusions!”74 4

Conclusion

How important was Brandes, then, to the emergence of modern literature in Scandinavia? Clearly, Knudsen’s identification of Brandes as its supreme cause is not supported by the evidence. As for the contemporary drama of Bjørnson and Ibsen, it had a multilinear genealogy, with some lineages stretching back far beyond the appearance of Brandes. Furthermore, there are questions to be asked about Knudsen’s political, social, and economic contextualization of the Modern Breakthrough, as well as that of others writing in the Brandesian “cultural radical” tradition.75 While Knudsen, for example, emphasizes the victory of the government and the conservatives in Denmark as an obstacle to Brandes’ cause, it could be argued that the overlapping of literary and political

70 71 72 73 74 75

Heyse, Letter to G. Brandes, 2 January 1888, quoted and translated in Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 175–176. Brandes, Letter to P. Heyse, 20 April 1888, quoted and translated in Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 157. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Magt og afmagt, vol. 1, 166–167. Shepherd-Barr, “Ibsen in France,” 61. Ibsen, Letter to G. Brandes, 11 October 1896, Letters and Speeches, 323. Foremost the classic account in Ahlström, Det moderna genombrottet.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

204

Fulsås

antagonisms in Denmark and Norway by the late 1870s in fact facilitated the radicalization of literature. Knudsen’s broad strokes assimilate the defeat of the liberal parliamentary majority in Denmark with Bismarck’s defeat of the liberals in Germany and despotic tendencies in tsarist Russia. Oddly, he then makes Italy an exception to the general reactionary trend while failing to mention that in 1884 Norway made a decisive transition towards representative government.76 Neither is the Brandes-centered narrative of hostility, isolation, and heroic defeat compatible with the information provided by the Norwegian writers’ publishing statistics and theater fortunes. The modern literature and drama developed together with an expanding audience, not ahead of it. To the extent that there was a mismatch between supply and demand, it was more a question of underestimating the sales potential of the new literature, until print runs stabilized throughout the 1880s. Neither Denmark nor Norway put restrictions on the unfolding of this literature, but they were arguably better suited to it than any other cultural environment in Europe. Ibsen might have followed Brandes, but he also followed the literary and theatrical market. It is true that Ibsen shocked many of his old readers with works like Ghosts – and earned his reputation as an uncompromising author in return. However, he soon regained his position as the most successful of the modern authors, both artistically and commercially, with unparalleled print runs and income.77 On the occasion of his 60th birthday in 1888, one of the two leading conservative newspapers in Norway, Aftenposten, released a canonizing special issue. The Modern Breakthrough may best be understood as the emergence of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “literary field,” that is of literature as a relatively autonomous sub-system of cultural production governed by its own norms and hierarchies.78 Urbanization, industrialized communications, the growth of educated, middle-class groups, and a new literary “mass” market that enabled the professionalization of authorship all contributed to this autonomy. To Brandes, literary autonomy was primarily about liberating literature from religious orthodoxy. But it was also about liberating literature from academic classicism, and Brandes, although involuntarily, contributed to this liberation by jeopardizing his professorship and being excluded from the university. Brandes’ main contribution to the emergence of an autonomous literature, however, was his symbolic construction of it as an epochal struggle between old and new, free art and bourgeois accommodation: a haunted 76 77 78

Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, vol. 1, 48–49. Fulsås and Rem, Ibsen, 106–113, 201–205. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 215–223.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes – Ibsen

205

minority facing a hostile society. This is a version of what Bourdieu calls the opposition between “the sub-field of restricted production” and “the sub-field of mass production,” and Brandes made it the genetic code of the Modern Breakthrough. We should recognize the dynamic power of this construction in bringing about the transition towards a modern literature. But we should not reproduce it uncritically as a description of actual circulation, or ignore the political, economic, and social conditions that allowed a seemingly selfcontained world of literature to emerge in the first place. Bibliography Ahlström, G.: Det moderna genombrottet i Nordens litteratur. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1973 [1946]. Bjørnson, B.: Brevveksling med danske 1854–1874, edited by Ø. Anker, F. Bull and T. Nielsen, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1974. Bourdieu, P.: The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, translated by S. Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Brandes, G: “Georg Brandes om ʻGjengangere’,” Dagbladet 2, 3 January 1882. Brandes, G.: Moderne Geister. Literarische Bildnisse aus dem Neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1882. Brandes, G.: Det Moderne Gjennembruds Mænd. En række portrætter. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1883. Brandes, G.: Levned. Et Tiaar. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1907. Brandes, G.: Levned. Snevringer og Horizonter. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1908. Brandes, G.: Correspondance de Georg Brandes, edited by P. Krüger, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1966. Brandes, G.: Breve til Forældrene 1859–71, edited by M. Borup, vol. 2. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1978. Brandes, G.: Breve til Forældrene 1872–1904, edited by M. Borup and T. Nielsen, 2 vols. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1994. Brandes, G. and E.: Georg og Edv. Brandes breveksling med nordiske forfattere og videnskabsmænd, edited by M. Borup, vol. 4. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1939. Christensen, E.M.: “Why should Brandes sabotage Ibsen in Germany?,” Ibsenårbok 1983/84 (1984): 81–98. Dahl, P.: “Den umulige treenighed. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Georg Brandes og Henrik Ibsen,” in: Georg Brandes og Europa, edited by O. Harsløf, Danish Humanist Texts and Studies, vol. 29. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2004, 137–153. Dahl, P.: “Georg Brandes’ fire indtryk,” in: Ibsen og Brandes. Studier i et forhold, edited by J. Dines Johansen et al. Oslo: Gyldendal, 2006, 39–62.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

206

Fulsås

de Figueiredo, Ivo: Henrik Ibsen. Masken. Oslo: Aschehoug, 2007. Fulsås, N.: “ʻDet moderne gjennombrotet’ i lærarskulen. Ibsen-lesing hjå Tromsøseminaristar,” Historisk tidsskrift 100/2 (2021): 131–148. Fulsås, N. and S. Dingstad: Innledning til brev: Bosteder: Dresden 1868–75. https://www .ibsen.uio.no/BRINNL_brevInnledning_3.xhtml. Accessed 20 September 2021. Fulsås, N. and T. Rem: Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Ibsen, H.: Letter to F. Hegel, 2 September 1879. https://www.ibsen.uio.no/BREV_1871-187 9ht%7CB18790902FH.xhtml. Accessed 20 September 2021. Ibsen, H.: Letters and Speeches, edited by E. Sprinchorn. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965. Jelavich, P.: Munich and Theatrical Modernism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Keel, A.: “Reclam und der Norden. Autoren, Titel, Auflagen 1869–1943,” in: Reclam. 125 Jahre Universalbibliothek 1867–1992, edited by D. Bode. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992, 132–147. Knudsen, J.: Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens vej, 1842–1877. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985. Knudsen, J.: Georg Brandes. I modsigelsernes tegn, Berlin 1877–83. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1988. Knudsen, J.: Georg Brandes. Symbolet og manden, 1883–1895, 2 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994. Knudsen, J.: Georg Brandes. Magt og afmagt, 1896–1914, 2 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998. Knudsen, J.: Georg Brandes. Uovervindelig taber, 1914–27. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004. Knudsen, J.: GB. En Georg Brandes-biografi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008. Marker, F.J. and L.-L. Marker: The Scandinavian Theatre. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975. Paulsen, J.: Mine erindringer. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900. Paulsen, J.: Samliv med Ibsen. Nye erindringer og skisser. Kristiania: Gyldendal, 1906. Shepherd-Barr, K.: “Ibsen in France from Breakthrough to Renewal,” Ibsen Studies, 12/1 (2012): 56–80.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 10

Between Deification and Rejection

Georg Brandes as an Ambivalent Public Figure in the GermanSpeaking World Monica Wenusch In modern terms, Georg Brandes can be labeled a pivotal transnational influencer of his time – someone with the power to affect the opinion and judgment of others because of his knowledge, authority, and, not least, his widespread relationship with the intelligentsia. But Brandes’ life and work are also characterized by inconsistencies, ambivalent attitudes, and a complex personality. Being somewhat thin-skinned himself, for example, he was not always squeamish when it came to passing a judgment. In addition, he treated people very differently according to his sympathies and antipathies rather than as a result of any objective considerations.1 The ambivalence in Brandes’ personality is outlined by W. Glyn Jones. Based on Brandes’ correspondence, he detects Brandes’ “devotion to his close friends” on the one hand, and a “tendency to polemics and harsh judgments, followed by his need for self-justification” on the other.2 In fact, self-justification, self-consciousness, and self-staging are keys to understanding Brandes’ character. When we read accounts by contemporaries who met Brandes personally or attended his lectures, it becomes quite clear that he must have been an extraordinarily charismatic and enigmatic figure, for better or for worse. Of course, to reduce Brandes to his personality traits in order to explain his authority as an intellectual would not do him justice. Naturally, his ideas, viewpoints, and themes – in short, his cultural and political agenda – drew everyone’s attention, as did his style in arguing his case. Klaus Bohnen succinctly explained why Brandes wielded such a power of attraction over so many of his contemporaries, and in particular over representatives of the German-speaking cultural life: it was possible to turn Brandes into a figure of identification, because he represented everything the intellectuals were longing for: an openness

1 Cf. Rossel, “Den store manipulator og det knapt så moderne gennembrud,” 198–206. 2 Jones, Georg Brandes, 8.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_012 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

208

Wenusch

towards the world, the linking together of the Scandinavian, French, and German cultures, the acceptance of the challenge of natural science of the time (Darwin), the radical criticism of traditions (theology, society, literature), the thematization of problems of societal relevance; and, not least, an innovative comparative view on literature.3 Brandes was an outstanding networker, with an immense circle of friends and acquaintances with whom he corresponded. These letters, together with articles and accounts about him, provide insight into his role as an ambivalent intellectual public figure and his mixed reception, which ranged from deification to rejection. The aim of this article is to examine Brandes’ multi-faceted position within the German-speaking world, where he quickly became a topic of discussion in the intellectual milieus. This article functions as a kaleidoscope, through which the ambivalent perceptions of Brandes as a literary historian, a mediator, a critic, a networker – a jack-of-all-trades really – can be seen. It examines how the German-speaking intellectual milieus, especially in Austria, viewed the Danish thinker. 1

A Scholar or an Intellectual?

To begin with, it is important to understand Brandes’ social role. In general, Brandes as an intellectual can be characterized as someone who engaged in scholarly research, critical thinking, and reflection about literature, culture, and society, and who gained considerable authority as a public figure both in Denmark and abroad. Coming from the world of academia and culture, he functioned as a mediator for various audiences. He participated actively in the public debate, where he was considered an authority due to his international and transnational perspectives, but also due to his productivity. A key trait of his thinking and temperament was that of opposition. This is evident in his literary historiography, but also in his cultural critique of conservative and traditional views. Indeed, Brandes enjoyed being in opposition. He relished his role as an outsider,4 as someone who did not really fit into existing categories, and as a persona non grata who was denied professorships both in his native country and in Austria. Edward W. Said not only underlines “the public role of

3 Bohnen, “Georg Brandes og de intellektuelle miljøer i Tyskland og Østrig,” 155–156. 4 Cf. Jones, Georg Brandes, 8–9.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

209

the intellectual as outsider” in his Reith lectures from 1993.5 He also highlights “the notion that all intellectuals represent something to their audiences, and in so doing represent themselves to themselves.”6 This applies to Brandes, who was extremely self-conscious and also rather vain, as we can glean from many of his letters. As Said states – in line with Hippolyte Taine’s claim that writers depend on race, milieu et moment – “All of us live in a society and are members of a nationality with its own language, tradition, historical situation. To what extent are intellectuals servants of these actualities, to what extent enemies? The same is true of intellectuals’ relationship with institutions […] and with worldly powers.”7 And here, Said references the connection between the intellectual and the outsider or even the expatriate – both roles being applicable to Brandes. Furthermore, Said’s statement that “the intellectual’s role in society contains a veiled autobiographical message” similarly pertains to Brandes. The private and the public worlds of an intellectual are intrinsically tied together, since the intellectual’s “values, writings and positions” derive from his/her own history and experiences. Furthermore, there is “no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world.” On the other hand, an intellectual is not fully public either, since “the personal inflection and the private sensibility” are always present. At the same time, the intellectual must almost be “embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.”8 In short, the intellectual must by definition position him-/herself between admiration and rejection. All this holds true for Brandes. Said’s reflections on the intellectual are fruitful for understanding Brandes’ success, especially in the German-speaking world. Of course, his importance as a mediator and his “engagement with the development of a modern Scandinavian cultural consciousness”9 is undeniable. But at the same time, as an analyst and literary historian Brandes was not as innovative or groundbreaking as one might think. Prior to Brandes the German literary historians Hermann Hettner (1821–1882) and Rudolf Haym (1821–1901) had published works following a Hegelian tradition comparable to Brandes’ Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. Hettner had written his literary history of the eighteenth century, Literaturgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, which appeared in three parts devoted to English, French, and German literature 5 6 7 8 9

Said, Representations of the Intellectual, x. Ibid., xv. Ibid., xv–xvi. Ibid., 12. Gossens, “Moderne Geister,” 299.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

210

Wenusch

respectively, between 1856 and 1870.10 Haym, for his part, had – amongst other major works – written a book on Romanticism, Die romantische Schule (1870). The similarities to Brandes’ works both in title and subject matter are apparent. The major difference was Brandes’ way of presenting his topics, which was generally considered more enigmatic and inspiring than that of his German predecessors. Consequently, the assessment of Brandes’ achievements is often directed toward his role as an intellectual rather than as a literary scholar. P.M. Mitchell holds that: Brandes is not important as an original or systematic thinker, for much of what he wrote and said was drawn from or based on the works of French and German critics. […] he was an apostle, a prophet, and a mediator who succeeded in making new ideas live in Denmark and in inspiring his contemporaries to a new and enthusiastic literature.11 In Erwin Laaths’ Geschichte der Weltliteratur (1953), Brandes is mentioned not as a literary historian or a critic, but as “a European cosmopolite,” “a great literary power,” and “Scandinavianism’s intellectual agitator,” who enacts “a nimble literary pointillism” in his literary portraits, which stand out due to their intellectual and social correlations.12 Both Mitchell’s and Laaths’ characterizations point in the direction of Brandes’ eminent role as an intellectual and as a mediator. Hence, his success is not necessarily based on his scholarly capability or methodology, but on his intellectualism, his political agenda, and, as his contemporaries also noted, his stylistic artistry (see below). As the Danish writer and critic Poul Borum puts it: “Brandes is a great critic, not because of his methods or his evaluations – both are dated – but because of his mind.”13 Similar observations were made by Brandes’ contemporaries. The distinguished Austrian translator, literary critic, and literary mediator Marie Herzfeld (1855–1940), for instance, discusses Brandes’ methods – or rather lack of scholarly methods – in her book Die skandinavische Litteratur und ihre Tendenzen 10

11 12 13

In fact, Hettner is used as a frequent figure of comparison by contemporary German critics when discussing Brandes. In the foreword of the first volume of the German translation of Main Currents, Brandes’ translator Adolf Strodtmann (1829–1879) emphasizes Hettner’s eminent role as a literary historian and writes that Brandes’ Main Currents must be seen as “a resumption and an addition” to Hettner’s Literaturgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (cf. Brandes, Hauptströmungen, xxvii). Mitchell, A History of Danish Literature, 173–174. Laaths, Geschichte der Weltliteratur, 649. Borum, Danish Literature, 49.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

211

(Scandinavian Literature and its Tendencies, 1898). Herzfeld identifies a literary group gathered around Brandes, “although his mind embraced more than his tenuous program.”14 She also notes that Brandes’ works have to be seen in the wake of Hermann Hettner, Saint-Beuve, and Hippolyte Taine, and therefore he is not the great innovator in the field of literary studies. Generally, Herzfeld continues, there had been others before Brandes who had talked and written about modern literature, who in most cases had possessed “a greater amount of scholarliness, a more consistent character, and a more thorough consciousness.”15 Nevertheless, she must admit that “Brandes was richer, more flexible, with a broader approach than all of them, more entertaining than most of the artists […]. And he had the enchanting, acting personality, which made him appear as a prophet and a luminary.”16 Herzfeld’s allusions to the religious sphere correspond well with Said’s image of the intellectual as a representative of a cause worth fighting for: “Real intellectuals constitute a clerisy, […] since what they uphold are eternal standards of truth and justice and are precisely not of this world.”17 Brandes, however, should not be seen as the noble spearhead in the intellectual fight for truth and justice. But he did possess a strong belief in the concept of freedom, and as an intellectual he had the power to draw attention to subjects that mattered to him. As Herzfeld argues, it was Brandes who could inspire new generations of writers by relativizing conventions of all kinds – indeed Herzfeld lauds this as one of Brandes’ major achievements – and by living and (re-)acting both in an individual and in a universal manner.18 In other words, Brandes’ ideas were not necessarily considered groundbreaking, but he reached a broad audience. As Austrian writer Felix Salten (1869–1945) notes in his obituary of Brandes in 1927: Brandes […] became, beyond Copenhagen’s Alma mater, the teacher for all of Scandinavia, for Germany, France, England, Spain, Italy; he became Europe’s professor of literature, a foreman at the construction site of freedom, one of the great forerunners, bridge-builders, and pioneers wherever talent was at work.19

14 15 16 17 18 19

Herzfeld, Die skandinavische Litteratur und ihre Tendenzen, 6. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 10. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 5. Cf. Herzfeld, Die skandinavische Litteratur und ihre Tendenzen, 11–13. Salten, “Georg Brandes,” Neue Freie Presse (Morgenblatt), 20 February 1927.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

212

Wenusch

It is therefore no surprise that Brandes’ image as a public intellectual was shaped by a wide range of portraits and caricatures, both in contemporary newspapers and magazines and in various personal correspondences and other private records. 2

Brandes’ Ambivalent Reception in German-Speaking Europe

Crucial to the understanding of the ambivalent reception of Georg Brandes in the German-speaking world on a scale between admiration and rejection are the different stages of this reception, as well as the distinction between the three main professional roles he represented as a cultural authority in the public eye: that of a literary historian, a transnational mediator of literature, and – last not least – a critic. Hence, in the following the perception of Brandes’ success or otherwise in each of these roles will be outlined.20 In the 1870s and 1880s Brandes was generally held in particularly high esteem. His popularity related to his image as the man of the Modern Breakthrough, whose style was original and fresh. 1890 marks a turning point in this attitude. By that time the movement of Naturalism, which was intrinsically tied to the name of Georg Brandes, had established itself in German literature. Although he remained an important critical voice within literature, from this point on he was less a figure of identification than had been the case in the two previous decades. The Swedish writer and critic Ola Hansson (1860–1925) carried this altered public interest in Brandes to extremes by attacking him in an article titled “Brandes and the Scandinavian Movement” in the literary magazine Freie Bühne für modernes Leben on 26 March 1890, acknowledging Brandes’ previous merits, but denying his enduring relevance. Brandes immediately struck back with an open letter in the next issue of the periodical, which he sarcastically called “An Obituary of One Who Is Alive,” dated 28 March 1890, which was followed by yet another short response from Hansson.21 Even though Hansson’s polemic and somewhat unjustifiably harsh attack was exaggerated, it is undeniable that Brandes looked different to the public

20

21

For a more extensive outline of the interrelations between Brandes and the German literary world, cf. Bohnen, “Georg Brandes und seine Bedeutung für die deutsche Literatur,” 53–61, and Hansen, “Georg Brandes in der literarischen Öffentlichkeit Berlins 1877–1883,” 126–156, on which my overview is based. Cf. Hansson, “Georg Brandes und die skandinavische Bewegung,” 233–236 (reprint in Hansson’s book Das junge Skandinavien, 1891); Brandes, “Der Nekrolog eines Lebendigen,” 266–269; Hansson, “Zu Georg Brandes’ Nekrolog,” 303.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

213

eye from around 1890. As a literary historian in the 1870s, he was seen as a brilliant new talent who was able to present complex relations within culture and literature in an original way. Soon, distinguished scholars such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) attested that Brandes’ Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature had obtained its lasting position in the history of literature due to its new approaches to literature, for instance literary psychology.22 Later, in the 1880s, Brandes’ works were increasingly characterized as contributions not only to literary history, but also to cultural history, and even to the history of ideas, due to their interest in ethical, social, and political implications in culture. On the other hand, Brandes’ lack of interest in literary aesthetics gradually became more obvious and became a significant limitation of his literary history. Skeptical views of Brandes among scholars increased, also due to Brandes’ casual style of writing. Nevertheless, the broad, non-scholarly public still admired him. Writers, not least, appreciated Brandes’ stylistic brilliance and his commitment to literature. Among the writers that read Brandes’ works with great enthusiasm, especially his Main Currents, were renowned representatives of German-speaking literature, such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Jakob Wassermann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig. Alongside and based on his activities as a literary historian, Brandes was also seen as a trustworthy transnational mediator. In this function he enjoyed even more authority, not least with regards to Scandinavian literature. Among the Scandinavian writers he introduced to a wider readership were, for example, Henrik Ibsen, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Alexander Kielland, but writers and thinkers like Hippolyte Taine, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and of course Friedrich Nietzsche also benefitted from Brandes’ mediation. Nevertheless, Brandes naturally did not have the sole right to operate as a literary mediator, and 1890 again marks a turning point in his reputation. The aforementioned attack on Brandes by Ola Hansson can be seen as a symptom of this fact. In literary circles Brandes was still omnipresent – and much mentioned and cited – but Hansson was one of the new ambitious mediators of Scandinavian literature in Germany, and thus one of Brandes’ competitors in the field. Brandes was not totally replaced, but his relevance was no longer as exclusive as before. His failure to judge literature aesthetically only added to his diminishing relevance as a mediator. Finally, it was Brandes the critic who indubitably had the longest-lasting impact in German-speaking Europe. In this field he gained international recognition, and thus wielded considerable power. He possessed an outstanding 22

Cf. Bohnen, “Georg Brandes und seine Bedeutung für die deutsche Literatur,” 54.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

214

Wenusch

intuition for literary currents, as well as the vigor to convey his observations with stylistic and rhetorical brilliance, but occasionally he was also rather biased in his judgments. As Bohnen has described, writers – who were aware of his pivotal power as a critic – often sent Brandes their works to review, hoping to be positively discussed by him.23 It is known that Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Johannes Schlaf all did this. Brandes’ acknowledgment of a writer often made their success on the literary market more likely. Ultimately, Brandes did not leave much of a mark in the field of literary history in the German-speaking world, but with his unique intuition for the expectations of both the reading public and other spheres of the literary world, as well as his unique sense of literary and stylistic quality, he nevertheless reached an immense public, including a vast number of writers. It was primarily in his capacity as a public figure – as a mediator and first and foremost as a critic – that Brandes became one of the most influential figures within the European literary and intellectual circles of his time, though his image was always ambivalent. 3

Brandes’ Relationship with German-Speaking Europe

From 1872 onward, Brandes regularly visited Berlin, Dresden, and Munich. Following the mixed reception of the early lectures of Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, he realized that he did not have a future in Copenhagen and in 1877 left the Danish capital for Berlin. In Berlin, where he stayed for six years, Brandes was close to the German literary epicenter, which resulted in an intensification of acquaintances with publishers, translators, and mediators of all kinds, such as fellow critics. Brandes quickly established relationships with these valuable contacts. He wrote for newspapers and periodicals and gave numerous lectures in both Germany and Austria, as well as in neighboring Central and Eastern European countries. Here he intensified his networking and also his self-fashioning activities. It was impossible to overlook Brandes in the public sphere, a fact that the Austrian writer and critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936) satirizes in his periodical Die Fackel (see below). Altogether, Brandes’ “enormous energy and curiosity made him an important intermediary among several literatures.”24

23 24

Cf. ibid., 57–58. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, 368.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

215

Amongst a wide range of other works by Brandes, the six volumes of Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, published first in Danish between 1872 and 1890, were quickly translated into German and published in four volumes as Hauptströmungen der Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts between 1872 and 1876. As in Denmark, the work was met with enormous public interest in the German-speaking world. Here too, Brandes’ approach was widely considered unconventional and unscholarly, but also refreshing in its composition and brilliant style, addressing an unusually broad audience. The fact that Main Currents was released in German almost immediately is, of course, a significant indication of the international interest in Brandes. This interest, however, was not primarily a result of his books or his international fame, but due to his public presence, given the numerous articles he had published in German-speaking newspapers and magazines. Another indication of Brandes’ impact may be seen in citations of him by critics, influential readers, and representatives of the German-speaking intellectual elite, such as in Thomas Mann’s famous statement that Main Currents had been the “bible of young European intellectuals.”25 Moreover, the German book market was one of the largest at the time. Among Brandes’ acquaintances were artists, literary figures, and scholars such as the literary historian Hermann Hettner, mentioned above, and the author and Nobel laureate Paul Heyse.26 Other contacts and acquaintances included a wide range of intellectuals – Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Herzl, and Stefan Zweig among many others. His truly vast network is particularly evident in his comprehensive correspondence, for example with leading writers such as Richard Beer-Hofmann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jakob Wassermann, Hermann Bahr, and Felix Salten.27 Without a doubt one of the most important early contacts Brandes acquired was Julius Rodenberg (1831–1914), editor of the highly influential periodical Deutsche Rundschau (established in 1874). The periodical focused on both literary and political topics and defined itself as a national-liberal voice within the intellectual sphere. Among its contributors were several of Brandes’ acquaintances, for example Gottfried Keller and his close friend Paul Heyse. Since the journal’s target audience was the educated bourgeoisie, the liberal Brandes was not really within his ideological comfort zone, but he knew how crucial affiliation with a periodical of this sort was for his career. His pragmatism and 25 26 27

Cf. Mann, Gesammelte Schriften, 826. Cf. the correspondence between Brandes and Heyse in Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 3. Many of these correspondences were thoroughly edited and published by Klaus Bohnen.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

216

Wenusch

flexibility when it came to gaining influence is well known, and his acquaintance and later collaboration with Rodenberg in particular played an important role for Brandes at a very early stage, since he could reach a diversified German-speaking audience via his contributions to the periodical.28 Brandes also contributed to a wide range of other German-language periodicals and newspapers that had different political and ideological orientations.29 All in all, his presence in the literary press at an early stage of his career outside of Scandinavia, together with the publication of Main Currents in a German translation, rapidly resulted in him attaining a high profile in the German-speaking countries. Brandes’ death in 1927 resulted in a flood of obituaries, including in the German-speaking media – a fact that illustrates his position and achievements as seen by his contemporaries. The Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, for example, featured an obituary on its front page written by the Austrian intellectual, writer, and critic Felix Salten, mentioned above. In his homage to the Danish critic, Salten recollects the very first time he personally heard Brandes, at a lecture he had given in Vienna “many, many years ago”: all I know is, that we all, who never had seen him before, gazed at him like pious Catholics would gaze at the Pope, in veneration and admiration. For he was likewise a kind of pope in the great church of the human mind, of freedom and progress. We, the young clergymen, sat there, devout, and thought by ourselves filled with happiness: well, so this is Georg Brandes!30 Salten’s recollection of this moment reflects Brandes’ ability to make an impression on his audience through his charisma and rhetorical brilliance. Moreover, the analogy of Brandes as a religious leader with a flock of devotional followers recalls Said’s observations that “intellectuals are individuals with a vocation for the art of representing,” and an intellectual is “someone who visibly represents a standpoint of some kind, and someone who makes articulate representations to his or her public.”31 But as Salten also states, it was not necessarily 28 29 30 31

For a study of Brandes’ writings in Deutsche Rundschau, see Bengt Algot Sørensen “Georg Brandes als ‘deutscher’ Schriftsteller: Skandinavische Moderne und deutscher Naturalismus.” E.g. Die Tribüne, Nord und Süd, Das Magazin für die Literatur des In- und Auslandes, Frankfurter Zeitung, Wiener Abendpost, Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Wiener Montags Revue, and Neue Freie Presse. Salten, “Georg Brandes,” Neue Freie Presse (Morgenblatt), 20 February 1927. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 12–13.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

217

the coherence of Brandes’ presentation that fascinated his audience. On the contrary, it was first and foremost because of how he presented his sparkling lectures, and the way in which he was able to convey his opinions and standpoints, even when he might not have been factually right: Whether he was right or not did not matter. […] But it was superb how he was able to express his anger. On such occasions, the passion of his great temperament, the vigor of his strong fighting spirit sparkled. Furthermore, those angry sentences sounded specifically appealing in his Danish accent. […] In this way Brandes’ condemning verdicts twitched in a glorious way like a shiny, politely sharpened dagger. Invisible opponents collapsed, pierced, uncapable of fighting back. It was marvelous. Salten, a brilliant stylist himself, highlights several characteristics that also attracted the attention of other contemporaries: Brandes’ Danish accent and a certain aggressiveness that he seemed to enjoy. Salten cannot refrain from adding another detail concerning Brandes’ personality, namely his selfconsciousness, which at times transformed a conversation into a one-man show: “he hardly ever conducted a conversation in the usual manner; for the most part, he held monologues, but they sparkled with stimulation and appeared captivating.” Accounts like Salten’s give us a clear insight into Brandes’ habits and behavior, right down to his accent. The correspondence between the Austrian writers Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) and Richard Beer-Hofmann (1866–1945) corroborates many of Salten’s claims. The two friends exchanged their views not only of the cultural life of the time, but also of mutual acquaintances such as Brandes. Beer-Hofmann had met Brandes during his stay in Denmark in July 1896. Later, Schnitzler also stayed in Denmark, and he visited Brandes together with Beer-Hofmann on 18 August 1896. Schnitzler recalls this meeting in his diary: Brandes (the conversation was in French) told a hundred amusing things in a light, poignant, ironizing, subtle tone, while he seldom let his eyes calmly dwell upon one of us; mostly, he looked past us; he sits on the edge of a chair, his body bent forward and restless, the fingers intertwined into each other, at times with the right hand running through his hair. – Gossiper of the world, that’s what I think [Otto] Brahm had called him once. But since the anecdotal material, which he declaims, mostly refers to great people, and since his peculiar nature shines through everything,

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

218

Wenusch

one never has the impression of pettiness; indeed, it rather seems as if he brought the people he is talking about back to life.32 Once again, Brandes is depicted as the enigmatic raconteur, but also as the restless gossiper, energizing his audience through a kaleidoscope of impressions. Schnitzler and Beer-Hofmann visited Brandes again several days later, on 21 August 1896, together with the Austrian publicist Paul Goldmann (1865–1935). Goldmann recalls this meeting with yet another characterization of Brandes: Georg Brandes, in conversation not less significant than in his works and so delightfully amusing when he, not without a good deal of malice, told private things about the great men in Scandinavia and the whole of Europe, which he knew or had known.33 The combination of humor and malice is a central trait of Brandes’ character – one that is highlighted quite often in accounts of him. It is also found in the memoirs of the Austrian classical philologist Theodor Gomperz (1832–1912). Gomperz and his wife were personally acquainted with Brandes. They must have met in Vienna in 1885, where Brandes had given a lecture. Gomperz’s son, the Austrian philosopher Heinrich Gomperz (1873–1942), describes the impression Brandes made on his father, who was “downright enchanted by the little lively man, who appeared to be both brilliant and hideous.”34 Subsequently Gomperz invited Brandes to visit his home, where the Dane was especially taken with Gomperz’s wife, Elise. The acquaintance resulted in several visits throughout the years and an on-off correspondence between Theodor Gomperz and Brandes. Brandes’ visits made an impact on the Gomperz family due to the ambivalence in his character and behavior: Brandes was a fascinating conversationalist whose lightly exhilarated accounts all but seemed to present themselves without gravity, to rise like glittering, sparkling bubbles of champagne, to glisten and float away into nothingness. Totally suffused with humor, but also mixed with a gentle joy about people’s weaknesses, in most cases on the basis of personal memories, they exposed the all-too-human sides of contemporary celebrities: small, slight deviations from the German pronunciation, choice of words, and syntax provided the small malices that Brandes’ sharp tongue 32 33 34

Schnitzler, Tagebuch 1893–1902, 209. Goldmann, “Erinnerungen an Arthur Schnitzler,” Neue Freie Presse, 8 November 1931. Gomperz, Ein Gelehrtenleben im Bürgertum der Franz-Josefs-Zeit, 163.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

219

delivered, additionally providing a quirky appeal, consisting of a strange mix of the exotic and peculiar.35 Gomperz also reports various anecdotes that Brandes open-heartedly told about well-known public figures, stressing Brandes’ Janus-faced habit of praising and complimenting people publicly and then drastically reducing his enthusiasm in more private conversations. Nevertheless, he is depicted as the witty, charming intellectual conversationalist. This is an assessment which is also shared by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). Rilke met Brandes several times during his stay in Copenhagen in October 1904. In a letter to his wife Clara, he describes a walk he had undertaken with Brandes, where the latter “told reminiscences […] in his own enjoyable manner, stopping upon every punchline,” a habit that considerably prolonged their walk.36 In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937), Rilke comes to the conclusion that Brandes was “nice and sound, but old” and after all was “more of an amusement venue than a human being.”37 4

Critical Voices

In another obituary in the Austrian newspaper Neues Wiener Journal, the Austrian historian, cultural philosopher, journalist, and critic Egon Friedell (1878–1938) acknowledges Brandes’ merits as an intellectual, but he is also quite critical. On the one hand, Friedell calls him an “aesthetic oracle, a kind of literary kingmaker.”38 On the other, he identifies some blemishes that detract from Brandes’ accomplishments – “very obvious shadows,” which, indeed, overshadow his achievements. One of these “shadows” is Brandes’ lack of objectivity and the degree of arbitrariness that governs his works and achievements. Accordingly, Friedell states: “One could say that he speaks in a profound manner about superficial matters. […] Everything floats along in the very same amiable-vicious, appreciative-criticizing medium of the subtle literary essay.” By noting some of the inherent paradoxes typical of Brandes, Friedell indirectly points out the general ambiguities that can also be found in 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 163. Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1902–1906, 219. Ibid., 222. Friedell, “Georg Brandes,” Neues Wiener Journal, 20 February 1927. This is a characterization Friedell readopts in his major work in three volumes, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (A Cultural History of the Modern Age, 1927–1931).

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

220

Wenusch

Brandes’ works and thoughts as such. Brandes often recycled his material and included rather arbitrary and subjective approaches, which resulted in several inconsistencies. There is quite a range of critical voices that have been raised against Brandes. With regards to Brandes’ method of criticism, Egon Friedell is not the only one. The influential German literary critic Otto Brahm (1856–1912), for example, called Brandes a “scandalmonger and a malicious tongue,” and the razor-sharp Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus (1874–1936) called him a “superficial gossiper.” Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the “father” of modern political Zionism, disagreed with Brandes’ viewpoints concerning Jewishness; Brandes rejected Herzl’s views, as expressed in his work Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896). And Max Nordau (1849–1923), who was not only Herzl’s physician but also an author and the co-founder of the Zionist movement, even called Brandes “one of the most obnoxious writing phenomena of the century.” Antisemitic undertones, however, are to be found in the aforementioned Swedish writer Ola Hansson’s characterization of Brandes as an intellectual in his book Das junge Skandinavien (The Young Scandinavia, 1891). Hansson was one of the many Scandinavians living in voluntary exile in Germany at the time, and his relationship with Brandes was, in fact, determined by personal animosity. In his book he presents four essays on Scandinavian literature, one of them dedicated to Georg Brandes. Here Hansson explains Brandes’ personality against his Danish and Jewish background. He describes, for instance, a certain “feminine suppleness,” a “willow-like flexible comprehension,” and a sort of artistic eclecticism, which he identifies as typically Danish, while Brandes’ intellectual vistas are noted as a typically Jewish quality. To this Hansson adds an “investigative skepticism” and a “stubbornness like an elastic spring.” Brandes flashes all these qualities like “a sharp blade,” but at the same time with “a gentle inflection,” even when displaying “hatred filled with bitterness.”39 In other words, Brandes is depicted as being conditioned by race, milieu et moment, as Taine would put it – a condition that Said also claims for the intellectual (see above). Karl Kraus, however, goes even further. He shares Friedell’s view of Brandes as someone who merely “floats on the surface.” And when Friedell draws attention to the literary essay as Brandes’ main medium, then, of course, he refers to Brandes as a regular contributor to a wide range of newspapers and literary magazines. This was of course necessary for Brandes to make a living, but it explains the common accusation that he had a mania for writing. 39

Hansson, Das junge Skandinavien, 14.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

221

Brandes’ visibility and massive public exposure are evidently a thorn in Kraus’ side, not least due to Brandes’ common habit of re-using his own material. Kraus was himself a highly controversial figure within the public sphere, known for his satirical and cynical comments on cultural life first and foremost in his periodical Die Fackel, established in 1899. Brandes seems to be an enemy close to Kraus’ heart, so to speak, for in Die Fackel he never tires of ridiculing him. In 1900, for example, he refers to a lecture Brandes had given titled “On Reading.” Kraus scoffs at the fact that Brandes is constantly recycling his own material. Kraus first read a Brandes article titled “On Reading” in Polish papers and since then in a German periodical; then he hears of a lecture called “On Reading” by Brandes in Vienna, followed by a text also called “On Reading” in the Viennese newspapers; next a similar procedure occurs in Hungary, and so forth. Kraus closes with the punchline that Brandes had managed to have his text “On Reading” published twice in one and the same newspaper within a year.40 Elsewhere Kraus disrespectfully states that Brandes had reached the level of a literary reporter,41 alluding to Brandes’ mastery of written German, or lack thereof. Still more derisive is Kraus’ summary of Brandes’ method of mediation, which in his opinion is highly arbitrary, uncritical, and dictated by quantity rather than quality. Indeed, Kraus denies Brandes the ability to make proper judgments: He once had become an agile and great man because he visited all kinds of people. Some of them were successful, and Mr. Brandes was considered their “discoverer,” because he had decided simply to take the essays he had written on them, and collect them into a book; those, however, whom he with the same amount of love had dedicated to the all-too-many, he cautiously excluded. Mr. Brandes has been lucky with Nietzsche. But he cannot defend himself when reverent connoisseurs of his complete works, and not just his selected works, also praise him as the discoverer of Julius Damati and Adolph Donath.42 In other words, Brandes succeeded on the basis of good fortune and a certain steadiness, which included physical prowess rather than mental power, for in Kraus’ opinion Brandes is a “tireless wayfaring aesthete” who never gives up, zigzagging his way through European literature: “It cannot be denied that Mr. 40 41 42

Kraus, Die Fackel 51, 24. Kraus, Die Fackel 52, 16. Ibid., 17.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

222

Wenusch

Brandes is the man who amongst all the living people who have dabbled in literature had the fastest legs. He ran, making loud noises, between the cornerstones of Europe, back and forth, and forced the passersby to do the same.” In short: in Kraus’ opinion, Brandes was a figure characterized by ambiguities and shortcomings, which also found expression in the professional roles he adopted in his public appearances. Of course, we have to keep in mind that Kraus was a harsh satirist, and that his judgments were often highly exaggerated in order to make his punchlines as effective as possible. Let Marie Herzfeld have the final word in this matter, with another quotation from her book on Scandinavian literature (see above). She concludes that, in 1898, Brandes is no longer the key figure of the modern movement. Nevertheless, Georg Brandes remains one of the most brilliant appearances of modern times. One just has to see him as the man he is; not to take him too seriously. His faults were his fortune, they doubled his talent. He was the eternally effervescent, unfailing, and restless well that refreshes and stimulates: why then ask where his waters came from?43 This assessment sums up the general perception of Brandes at the time, as a polarizing intellectual. In spite of a number of critical voices, the overall assessment of Brandes’ achievements is positive. Again, supporting evidence for this can be found in Brandes’ correspondence with the most prominent and influential representatives of the intellectual life of the time. The aforementioned correspondences with, for instance, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Jakob Wassermann, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who all represent greatness of mind and critical thinking, are just a few examples. In this arena a clear-cut common denominator emerges: Brandes’ extraordinary ability to stimulate and promote cultural life, not only in one particular national context, but across borders. Thus, the critical and on occasion downright negative views of Brandes presented in this article must not conceal the overall immensely positive attitude toward him. A large number of articles on Brandes written by fellow critics substantiates this fact. A feature article about Brandes by the distinguished, but today forgotten Austrian literary historian and critic Moritz Necker (1857– 1915) in the leading Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse in January 1894 is a reliable example of a critical assessment that takes into account Brandes’ 43

Herzfeld, Die skandinavische Litteratur und ihre Tendenzen, 15.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

223

multi-faceted sphere of influence – as a representative of literary history, criticism, and intellectualism. Brandes is depicted as “momentarily the only literary critic who enjoys a certain authority and popularity amongst the wider intellectual audience in Germany.”44 In contrast to the many equally commendable scholars and critics, Brandes is widely and “happily acknowledged” by writers and artists. But Necker also addresses the more negative reception of Brandes, which he subsequently debunks: Naturally, there have been plenty of attempts to compromise Brandes in his reputation – that’s the way it is; it is impossible to please everybody. There have been attempts at denying his academic originality, even viciously challenging his academic integrity. It would have been possible to go even further […] but still it would not be possible to harm him. His writings exert such an appeal, such an inspiring and clarifying and certainly beneficial impact, that one immediately has to make a rush at every single new essay Brandes publishes; and certainly, no new book he writes will remain unread. Necker specifies Brandes’ advantage compared to German scholars and critics: “It is not the form, but the content, the tendency, the subject matter, and the direction of his critical production.” Brandes’ critical opposition together with his “aesthetic nature” are seen as especially important assets, and so is his ambition to highlight the interrelation between literature and the world and thus to highlight the benefit and relevance of literature. 5

Conclusion

It is difficult to draw a clear-cut outline of Georg Brandes’ different roles, as there is significant overlap between them. Nevertheless, there is Brandes the literary historian, a scholar with academic ambitions – in which role and function he generated a great deal of controversies not only in Denmark but also abroad. Furthermore, there is Brandes the industrious, but also arbitrary and provocative literary critic, and the transnational literary networker and mediator with a wide range of contacts who instigated intellectually stimulating dialogues. These contacts give us valuable insights not only into the mechanisms of Brandes’ networking and of the literary and intellectual milieus of 44

Necker, “Georg Brandes,” Neue Freie Presse, 20 January 1894.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

224

Wenusch

the time, but also into his complex character and the reasons why he is often considered one of the most important intellectuals of the time – both rejected and admired, hated and loved. Said’s definition of the intellectual is wholly applicable to Brandes, as substantiated by the many eyewitness accounts discussed in this article. The private and public spheres of the intellectual Brandes are constantly intermingled. Wherever he went, he made both friends and enemies. Opposition defined Brandes’ professional as well as personal life – he was happy, so it seems, as an outsider and exile, as a victim, and even, if necessary, as an opportunist. Overlooking or ignoring Brandes in his heyday seems to have been impossible; that is why he became such a controversial and polarizing public figure. One must not underestimate Brandes’ deliberate self-fashioning. It is safe to claim that he was highly self-aware and equipped with a good deal of vanity. W. Glyn Jones is accurate in his assessment of “two of the most striking aspects of his [Brandes’] personality: on the one hand there is his devotion to his close friends, his reluctance to do anything that will hurt them, his warmth; on the other there is his tendency to polemics and harsh judgments, followed by his need for self-justification.”45 In Brandes’ eagerness to influence his reading audience, he also reveals that he was consciously calculating his effects. His German foreword to the first edition of Moderne Geister (Modern Minds, 1881) is a clear example. Here, Brandes is speaking in the third person on his own behalf, creating an idealized picture of his intentions regarding his German audience. His remark that he is not a chameleon – that he does not change his attitudes and criteria depending on his surroundings in order to fulfill his readers’ expectations – seems somewhat disingenuous. Brandes’ selfpresentation reads as follows: The author of this book, who is definitely not a chameleon and by no means has relinquished his mother tongue, but stands in the midst of the literary movement which reached the Nordic countries some time ago, knows very well that one can only exert a considerable influence in the place where one is born […]. Furthermore, it has not been his ambition to be a genuine German writer. In this book, as in other works, his intention has simply been to write for Europe in German, i.e. to discuss his subject matters in a different manner from that he would have employed for an exclusively Scandinavian audience. He owes much to Germany’s poetry, philosophy, and systematic aesthetics. But since he does not 45

Jones, Georg Brandes, 8.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

225

consider himself a disciple of German literary history, particularly as a critic, he hopes to be able to pay back even just a small part of his debts to Germany.46 What is to be believed? In the first volume of the German edition of Main Currents, Adolf Strodtmann had stated that Brandes was committed to the tradition of German literary history as represented, for instance, by Hettner. He owes much to German culture, as we read. At the same time, he also makes a commitment to his dependency on the theory of race, milieu et moment. Today Georg Brandes may have vanished from the general consciousness outside Denmark, but he was a sparkling, outstanding, internationally known figure of the intellectual life of his time, a radical thinker not limited to the field of literature or even to academia, highly influential, highly self-promoting, polemic at times, a superb and brilliant stylist, and a great transnational networker and bridge builder. Perhaps he can even be seen as a figure of integration, taking on different roles in order to enact his intellectual agendas, making them visible for an international public, and establishing himself as an intellectual authority and as an agitator. Bibliography Bohnen, Klaus: “Georg Brandes og de intellektuelle miljøer i Tyskland og Østrig,” in: Georg Brandes og Europa. Forelæsninger fra 1. internationale Georg Brandes Konference, Firenze, 7–9 november 2002, edited by Olav Harsløf. Copenhagen: Det kongelige Bibliotek/Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2004, 155–161. Bohnen, Klaus: “Georg Brandes und seine Bedeutung für die deutsche Literatur,” in: Akten des vi. Internationale Germanisten-Kongresses Basel 1980, edited by Heinz Rupp and Hans-Gert Roloff. Basel: Peter Lang, 1980, 53–61. Borum, Poul: Danish Literature: a Short Critical Survey. Copenhagen: Det danske Selskab, 1979. Brandes, Georg: Die Hauptströmungen der Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Die Emigrantenliteratur, edited, translated, and introduced by Adolf Strodtmann. Berlin: Franz Duncker, 1872. Brandes, Georg: “Der Nekrolog eines Lebendigen,” Freie Bühne für modernes Leben 1/9 (1890): 266–269.

46

Brandes, Moderne Geister, iii–iv.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

226

Wenusch

Brandes, Georg: Moderne Geister: Literarische Bildnisse aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Dritte, durchgesehene und bedeutend vermehrte Auflage. Frankfurt/ Main: Rütten & Loening, 1897. Friedell, Egon: “Georg Brandes. Zum Tode des großen dänischen Schriftstellers,” Neues Wiener Journal, 20 February 1927. Goldmann, Paul: “Erinnerungen an Arthur Schnitzler,” Neue Freie Presse, 8 November 1931. Gomperz, Theodor: Ein Gelehrtenleben im Bürgertum der Franz-Josefs-Zeit: Auswahl seiner Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, 1869–1912, erläutert und zu einer Darstellung seines Lebens verknüpft von Heinrich Gomperz, edited by Robert A. Kann. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1974. Gossens, Peter: “Moderne Geister: Literarischer Kanon und jüdische Identität bei Georg Brandes,” in: Jüdische Intellektuelle und die Philologien in Deutschland 1871– 1933, edited by Wilfried Barner and Christoph König. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001, 299–308. Hansen, Flemming: “Georg Brandes in der literarischen Öffentlichkeit Berlins 1877– 1883,” in: Literarisches Leben in Berlin, edited by Peter Wruck. Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1987, 126–156. Hansson, Ola: Das junge Skandinavien: Vier Essays. Dresden & Leipzig: G. Pierson’s Verlag, 1891. Hansson, Ola: “Georg Brandes und die skandinavische Bewegung,” Freie Bühne für modernes Leben 1/8 (1890): 233–236. Hansson, Ola: “Zu Georg Brandes’ Nekrolog,” Freie Bühne für modernes Leben 1/10 (1890): 303. Herzfeld, Marie: Die skandinavische Litteratur und ihre Tendenzen nebst anderen Essays. Berlin & Leipzig: Schuster & Loeffler, 1898. Jones, W. Glyn: Georg Brandes: Selected Letters. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1990. Kraus, Karl: Die Fackel 51 (August 1900). Kraus, Karl: Die Fackel 52 (September 1900). Laaths, Erwin: Geschichte der Weltliteratur. Bindlach: Gondrom, 1988. Mann, Thomas: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 13. Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1974. Mitchell, P.M.: A History of Danish Literature. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1958. Necker, Moritz: “Georg Brandes,” Neue Freie Presse, 20 January 1894. Rilke, Rainer Maria: Briefe aus den Jahren 1902–1906, edited by Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1929. Rossel, Sven Hakon: “Den store manipulator og det knapt så moderne gennembrud,” in: 20 begivenheder der skabte Danmark, edited by Kasper Elbjørn and David Gress, 198–209. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Between Deification and Rejection

227

Said, Edward W.: Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Salten, Felix: “Georg Brandes: Anläßlich seines Todes,” Neue Freie Presse (Morgenblatt), 20 February 1927. Schnitzler, Arthur: Tagebuch 1893–1902. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1989. Schnitzler, Arthur and Richard Beer-Hofmann: Briefwechsel 1891–1931, edited by Konstanze Fliedl. Vienna/Zurich: Europaverlag, 1992. Wellek, René: A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, vol. 4. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 11

The Domesticated European? Georg Brandes’ Impressions of Russia and his Russian Reception Birgitte Beck Pristed Slavic or Russian literary “schools” are notably absent from Georg Brandes’ Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. In the first volume, The Emigrant Literature, “Russia” functions as a point of comparison only by negation, a shadow land against which Brandes could highlight the cultural richness of Madame de Staël’s Italy: “where a square yard of such a place, for instance, as the Forum, has a grander history than the whole Russian empire.”1 However, in the revised introduction to a later edition of The Emigrant Literature, Brandes included one of his favorite writers, the liberal humanist Ivan Turgenev, who spent most of his adult life in Paris, in his list of modern, international writers who debated societal issues.2 Small as this revision may seem, it suggests that following Brandes’ discovery of the realist Russian novelists he considered them an integrated part of the major European literatures; several of his later writings and public lectures contributed to the popularization of Russian literature in Scandinavia and more widely across Europe. Brandes was a well-known name among his Russian contemporaries. Before the 1917 revolution, his collected works appeared twice in Russian translation, with two different publishers.3 After the revolution, Russian interest in Brandes faded, but in the late Soviet period, Dmitrii Sharypkin (1937–1978), a renowned Scandinavianist and Brandes scholar, acknowledged his significance as a “propagandist” of Russian literature.4 Indeed, Brandes swelled the “Slavic wave” in Europe by promoting the works not only of Turgenev but also of writers with religious and moral preoccupations that he did not share, most prominently Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy.5 Furthermore, Brandes contributed to the Western European recognition of fin de siècle Russian writers such as Anton Chekhov and the symbolist Dmitrii Merezhkovsky. 1 2 3 4 5

Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 124. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 18. Brandes, Sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols; Brandes, Sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols. Sharypkin, “Georg Brandes i russkaia literatura,” 347. Nolin, Den Gode Europén, 205.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_013 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

229

In parallel, Brandes introduced Scandinavian authors and dramatists of the Modern Breakthrough to a Russian audience that proved highly receptive to the writings of Henrik Ibsen especially, but also Herman Bang, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and August Strindberg, who all had their collected works published in Russia before the revolution.6 Brandes’ liberal viewpoints and professional efforts to overcome narrow national approaches to the study of literature earned him a name as “such a good European and cultural missionary” from Friedrich Nietzsche, an epithet Bertil Nolin later used as the title of his doctoral disputation on Brandes, Den gode europén.7 Brandes strove to expand his intellectual horizon and promote his border-crossing agenda through extensive international correspondence, frequent travels, and guest lectures, which also took him to the European parts of the Russian Empire. Following longer stays in Warsaw, Poland, under Russian rule in 1885, 1886, and 1887, Brandes first traveled to Russia between March and May 1887. He gave a series of lectures that were well attended both by the educated intelligentsia and by a wider readership in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and covered by liberal, “Westernizer” and conservative, “Slavophile” Russian journals. On his return to Copenhagen, Brandes was occupied with other obligations and writings, but in March 1888, he lectured on Russia at a number of local societies, and in November 1888, his travelogue Impressions of Russia was released, shortly after the more sympathetic Impressions of Poland.8 In his memoirs, Brandes recalled his Russian journey as a highlight, leading to new acquaintances and personal, spiritual renewal.9 But what were the implications of Brandes being a “good European” in a Russian context? In this chapter, I will discuss how his European outlook impacted his impressions of Russia, and vice versa – how the notion of Brandes as a “European critic” framed his Russian reception. First, the background for Brandes’ visit to Russia in 1887 will be presented, along with the Russian journalists’, censors’, and lecture audience’s immediate and contradictory reactions to his public appearances. Then I will analyze Brandes’ representation of Russia in the Impressions. I argue that Brandes described the “backward,” “ahistorical” Russia and his fight with censorship and the reactionary press through a set of “Euro-Orientalist” lenses, but simultaneously highlighted the literary merits (less than the political potential) of many Russian writers, and expressed his 6 Sergeev, “Georg Brandes – literaturnyi kritik,” 10. 7 Letter from Nietzsche to Brandes, 2 December 1887, as quoted by Nolin, Den Gode Europén, 156. 8 Knudsen, Georg Brandes, 300–302. For a recent study of Brandes in Poland, see Petelska, “Georg Brandes and Poland.” 9 Brandes, Levned, vol. 3, 191.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

230

Pristed

fascination with leading men and women of the Russian intelligentsia, many of whom he continued to correspond with throughout his lifetime. Finally, the chapter adopts the opposite perspective to examine how Brandes and his writings were received by Russian critics, translators, and intellectuals. This part of the chapter points to publishers’ and commentators’ simultaneous and inconsistent domestication and alienation strategies, and demonstrates how Russian ideas about Brandes changed over time. At first, Brandes was framed either positively as a “leading European critic” or negatively, as a “suspicious Jew”; later, the European image disappeared and was replaced by a new image of someone from the “West.” There are many Russian sources on Brandes. The printed sources encompass Russian translations of Brandes’ works in both book editions and journal publications, written and visual portraits of Brandes, and extensive literary commentaries and reviews of his works. The Russian press coverage of Brandes peaked during his 1887 visit. A lengthy but incomplete 2002 bibliography, compiled by Aleksandra Polivanova and Boris Erkhov, lists 92 entries about Brandes in the Russian daily press and literary journals for the year 1887 alone.10 This bibliography is part of a recent annotated Russian edition of Brandes’ Impressions of Russia, which also includes his portraits of individual Russian authors, reprints of Sharypkin’s articles on Brandes from the 1970s, and an introduction by the Scandinavianist Aleksandr Sergeev. The edition was issued by ogi, a leading Russian academic publisher within the humanities. The present chapter is indebted to this work, as well as to earlier studies on the Russian Brandes sources by the Slavicists Lene Tybjærg Schacke and Peter Ulf Møller.11 In addition to Brandes’ French correspondence with the exiled anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin in London, which was published by Paul Krüger in 1956,12 handwritten letter correspondence, mostly in French, with acquaintances from Russia – such as the professor of literature Aleksei Veselovskii, the critic, translator, and founder of a leading Russian-Parisian salon Аnna Anichkova, the hostess of an artistic and intellectual circle, Nadezhda Auer, his non-authorized publisher Boris Fuks, the Danish-Russian translators Anna and Peter Hansen and Vera Spasskaia, and the exiled nihilist and terrorist Sergei Stepniak and his wife Fanny – is kept in the holdings of the Russian State Archive of Literature 10 11 12

Brandes, Russkie vpechatleniia, 429–559. Schacke, “Georg Brandes i Rusland”; Azadovskij and Schacke, “Georg Brandes und Friedrich Fiedler”; Møller, “Tolstoj som kritiker.” Krüger, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 2, 115–229; see also a recent Danish translation in Lyhne and Norup, Anarkismens tid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

231

in Moscow, the Archive of the Institute of Russian Literature at the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg, and the Brandes Archives at the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen and Aarhus University.13 The present chapter does not attempt to present an exhaustive, systematic analysis of these vast materials, which would require a separate research project of larger dimensions, but instead aims to sketch out the main sources of inspiration for Brandes’ description of Russia together with central positions in his Russian reception, based on a small but representative selection of texts. The focus is less on Brandes’ literary studies of Russian novelists than on how he perceived Russian society, and in return, how he was framed as a “European critic” by his Russian audience. 1

Brandes’ Arrival as a European Critic in 1880s Russia

Well before Brandes’ 1887 journey to Russia, Russian audiences were familiar with his works, primarily from the German and French translations. In October 1877, the most radical revolutionary-democratic literary and political Russian monthly of the time, Delo (Labor), mentioned Brandes for the first time; in December 1878, Brandes remarked to his Danish editor Emil Petersen that he received many letters from Russian admirers, and enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading European literary critics in Russia.14 Main Currents was first translated into Russian by Vаsilii Nevedomskii (1827–1899), from Adolf Strodtman’s German translation, and the first four volumes appeared in Russian between 1881 and 1893. In 1882 the liberal journal Vestnik Evropy (The Messenger of Europe) positioned Brandes against nationalism, and further used his writings to oppose Slavophilism. Thus his Russian reception was framed by a broader nineteenthcentury philosophical debate between the “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles” about Russia’s destiny and national identity. The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia was oriented towards the Western (primarily French) Enlightenment, and perceived Russia as “backward” – a vast but insignificant country that due to unfavorable historical conditions deviated from, or lagged behind, the universal (or Western European) path towards progress. In Impressions of Russia, Brandes refers to Pyotr Chaadaev’s (in)famous “Philosophical Letter” (1829, first published 1836), in which the 13 14

I wish to thank the director of the Brandes Archive in Aarhus, Per Dahl, and Jens BjerringHansen, University of Copenhagen, for their guidance and help in providing materials for the present study. Nolin, Den Gode Europén, 223–224.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

232

Pristed

“Westernizer” argued that Russia was outside history, only lived in the present, and had never contributed to any cultural development in Europe.15 In the mid-nineteenth century, the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky, who was influenced by German thinkers such as Friedrich Schelling, contrasted Chaadaev’s negative conception with an appraisal of the Russian organic, spiritually orthodox, rich “inner life.”16 The editors of Vestnik Evropy found Brandes far too “aesthetic” in his literary criticism; he was not radical enough and lacked political and societal insight.17 Vestnik Evropy had been founded in 1866 during the relatively liberal reign of Tsar Alexander ii, who had emancipated the Russian serfs in 1861 and initiated educational and societal reforms that increased social mobility and urbanization. The journal shared its title and partly its mission with an earlier journal edited by the historian Nikolai Karamzin (1802–1830), that is to acquaint the Russian audience with European culture.18 By 1875, it had begun serializing the novels of Émile Zola, who as a permanent correspondent regularly published his Paris Letters in the journal.19 Censorship reform in 1865 had lifted prepublication censorship of St. Petersburg- and Moscow-based journals, which contributed to the significance and flourishing of the “thick” literary journals, although they often still faced severe post-publication restrictions.20 In 1881, however, Alexander ii was assassinated by radical terrorists, only a few years after Sergei Stepniak had stabbed the head of the tsarist secret police in 1878. In 1895 and again in 1896, Brandes met Stepniak in his London exile. Later he wrote a biographical introduction, celebrating the “iron will” of this cool-blooded, radical hero, to the first Russian edition of Stepniak’s The Career of a Nihilist, printed in Geneva 1898 by his widow Fanny Stepniak.21 When Alexander iii ascended to the throne (1881–1894), he rolled back several of his father’s reforms. The Russian liberal intellectual milieu of the 1880s was thus struggling with stricter censorship, political repression, conservative-orthodox reaction, and anti-Semitism. “Provisional” emergency regulations – which came into force in 1881 and remained in effect until 1905 – enabled tsarist

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 259–260. On the tradition and post-Soviet revival of this binary figure of thought, see Groys, “Russia and the West.” Sergeev, “Georg Brandes – literaturnyi kritik,” 19. Grossmann, “Rise and Decline,” 171. Pogorelskin, “The Messenger of Europe,” 142. Grossmann “Rise and Decline,” 194. Brandes, “Sergei Stepniak,” 267–270.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

233

authorities to close journals and newspapers, prohibit demonstrations and political meetings, and exile or imprison citizens without a court decision.22 During his travels in Poland, Brandes received an invitation from the Literary Society in St. Petersburg, initiated by the translator and literary historian Pyotr Veinberg (1831–1908) and the star lawyer Aleksandr Passover (in French Passauvert, 1841–1910). Brandes first declined the invitation in solidarity with his repressed Polish friends, but then changed his mind and went to St. Petersburg in March 1887, where he stayed in Passauvert’s apartment.23 Passauvert represented Jewish pogrom victims in court and defended opposition leaders in political processes. His most famous client was Lenin’s elder brother, Aleksandr Ul’ianov, who – right at the time of Brandes’ spring arrival in Russia – was arrested after a failed assassination attempt on Alexander iii on 1 March 1887. The judge did not allow Passauvert to defend Ul’ianov, who was eventually hanged on 20 May 1887. We cannot know whether Passauvert and Brandes discussed Ul’ianov’s act of terrorism, but the case illustrates the fact that the “European critic” arrived in Russia at a critical time, characterized by a tense political climate, state violence, revolts, and terror. The politically motivated assassinations of the 1880s color Brandes’ discussion of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) in the literary part of the Impressions, in which Brandes compares Raskolnikov’s anguish and insecurity about his unselfish but vaguely motivated murder of the old pawn-broker and Lizaveta with the steadfast terrorists who fulfilled their perceived obligation to assassinate the tsar without any remorse.24 Brandes arrived in St. Petersburg on 27 March 1887, or 15 March according to the old calendar system. In Impressions of Russia, he humorously stated that he wished Russia was really only 12 days behind Europe, concluding that the repressive political system confirmed a general notion of “Russian backwardness.”25 Brandes faced further delays, as he could not immediately begin his lecture series due to the Orthodox Easter holidays. Instead, he went from St. Petersburg on a shorter excursion to Helsinki and Vyborg in the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. Brandes’ Finland lectures were somewhat unsuccessful because the majority of the Swedish-educated Finnish audience had difficulty understanding his Danish, and – according to Brandes’ memoirs – rather offensively asked him to

22 23 24 25

Hosking, Russia and the Russians, 374. Nolin, Den Gode Europén, 224–225. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 312–325. Ibid., 6.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

234

Pristed

switch to German.26 However, the news correspondents of Russkii kur’er (The Russian Courier), Novosti i birzhevaia gazeta (News and Financial Times), and Peterburgskii listok (The St. Petersburg Gazette), who covered every stop on his trip – but without being able to distinguish the different Scandinavian languages – apparently reinterpreted the incident, reporting how Brandes bravely refused to switch from Danish to Swedish, “primarily for national, or more precisely patriotic reasons.”27 Thus, in line with the tsarist administration’s efforts to separate Finland from Swedish influence, the Russian reporters sought to domesticate the foreign figure of Brandes by turning him into a nationalpatriotic ally and appealing to allegedly joint political and linguistic RussianFinnish and Danish anti-Swedish sentiments. On 25, 27, and 29 April, Brandes gave three public lectures in the Building of the Credit Association: the first on the Russian novel, the second on literary critique – drawing on many examples from Danish literature – and the third on the artistic realism of Zola.28 A planned fourth lecture on Danish literature did not pass the censors, who perhaps feared that Brandes’ talk could result in an offence of lèse-majesté. On behalf of exiled Polish intellectuals, Brandes had addressed letters of appeal to the Danish Empress of the Russian Empire, Dagmar (whose Russian name was Mariia Fedorovna), and compared their situation to that of the repressed Danish minority in North Schleswig under Prussian rule, but obviously never received an answer. In Impressions of Russia, he directly criticized Dagmar for her reactionary rejection of the women’s courses that were taught by Veinberg and other volunteer professors as an alternative to university education, to which Russian women had no access. The women’s courses were prohibited by June 1887.29 It is possible the censors also feared Brandes’ critical remarks about Dagmar’s favorite writer, Hans Christian Andersen, whose talent and worldwide reputation Brandes acknowledged, but not without ironizing over the fairytale writer’s childish, idyllic, and illusionary worldview.30 The audience, who had expected Brandes to present new knowledge about the literature of his home country, was disappointed by the replacement of the censored talk with his previously published lecture on Musset and Georg Sand from the Main Currents volume on the French Romantic school, and some people walked out while he was giving this fourth lecture. Brandes later presented his lecture on Danish literature for a closed 26 27 28 29 30

Brandes, Levned, vol. 3, 194. Sharypkin, “Tvorchestvo Georga Brandesa,” 366. Nolin, Den Gode Europén, 224. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 134. Sergienko,“Hans Christian Andersen,” 93–94.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

235

circle in Anna Tenisheva’s salon, and his manuscript was subsequently printed in Vestnik Evropy, which testifies to the inconsistency of tsarist censorship, which was not entirely prohibitive. Brandes was thus allowed to present and even publish the Danish literature lecture, admittedly not for a broad audience, but with limited access for an exclusive audience of like-minded intellectuals. As an international guest, Brandes also attended official banquets of the established beau monde in St. Petersburg. With subtle irony and by referring to himself as “a present foreigner” instead of using the first person singular, Brandes seeks to distance himself from one of these celebrations when he describes it in detail in Impressions of Russia, namely an anniversary for the chief censor Iakov Polonskii’s (1819–1898) literary debut. After wining and dining, however, Brandes consented to raise a toast to the chief censor’s honor, while his liberal friends from Vestnik Evropy boycotted the event.31 Later, in the literary part of the Impressions, Brandes described the freedom-loving Byronist poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s pitiful transformation into a curtailed valet de chambre (personal secretary) of the repressive Nicholas I after the tsar had crushed the 1825 Decembrist revolt of Pushkin’s liberal friends.32 Brandes exclaimed that Pushkin’s follower, the youthful Mikhail Lermontov, was much closer to his own heart and recalls with great veneration how he read A Hero of Our Time in his own youth.33 During his Russian visit, however, Brandes found himself in a dilemma similar to that of the mature Pushkin: Brandes’ participation in the Polonskii celebration illustrates how even a good European could not make a public appearance in an authoritarian state without being partly instrumentalized for the agenda of its regime. Impressions of Russia originally carried the subtitle “Iagttagelser og Overvejelser” (Observations and Considerations); for better or for worse, as an invited guest the European was not in a position to make observations without also participating. His attendance at the St. Petersburg banquet came at the cost of a certain subjection to the conservative values of the host. Brandes continued his travels to Moscow, having received an invitation from the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature at Moscow University. In the auditorium of the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, Brandes repeated his three French lectures from St. Petersburg, followed by a fourth given in German and based on the sixth volume of the Main Currents, The Young Germany. Although the lectures were sold out, received with applause, and followed by further honorary banquets, in Moscow Brandes received less press attention than he 31 32 33

Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 74; see also Sharypkin, “Tvorchestvo Georga Brandesa,” 367. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 231–232. Ibid., 236.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

236

Pristed

had in St. Petersburg.34 In Moscow, Brandes met two progressive professors of literary history, the Shakespeare scholar Nikolai Storozhenko (1836–1906) and the Italian medievalist Aleksandr Veselovskii (1838–1906), who had both studied and lectured in the capitals of Europe and who were both striving to develop a scientific, positivist, and comparative approach to the study of literature. Storozhenko later edited and wrote the introduction to the Russian translation of Brandes’ book on Shakespeare, as well as contributing to the further Russian reception of this work, which culminated in the émigré philosopher, existentialist, and Kierkegaard scholar Lev Shestov’s (1866–1938) first book, Shakespeare i ego kritik Brandes (Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes), in 1898. After two months of this intensive program of lecturing and networking, Brandes traveled south to Bryansk to rest at the estate of the liberal industrialist and engineer Prince Viacheslav Tenishev and his wife – a well-known patron of the arts – Anna Tenisheva. Finally, with a stopover in Smolensk, Brandes boarded a train back to Copenhagen via Warsaw.35 2

Brandes’ “Euro-Orientalist” Impressions of Russia (1888)

Brandes opens Impressions of Russia with a disclaimer that his visit only encompassed a small part of the country, and that his knowledge of both the country and the language has certain limitations. He aims for an impressionist immediacy of vision and relies on a self-assured belief in his abilities as a critical observer: “But naturally I believe in my capacity for observation and in the soundness of my judgments.”36 The travelogue is divided into two sections: the first is devoted to “observations and considerations” about the country, people, and society, and the second to “literary impressions.” In the first part in particular, Brandes does not rely solely on his personal observations, but includes general statements on Russia and the Russians that draw on a set of pre-existing – rather clichéd – perceptions of Russia. For example, Brandes makes few distinctions when he describes the Russian landscape, steppes, and rivers: Unchanging uniformity is their characteristic […]. This sluggishness as well as this uniformity is Russian; […] so is its uniformity unbroken by either mountains or valleys. The decidedly essential feature which 34 35 36

Sharypkin, “Tvorchestvo Georga Brandesa,” 387. Sergeev, “Georg Brandes – literaturnyi kritik,” 20. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, x.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

237

characterizes Russia is uniformity […] Although the country is enormously large, it is monotonous.37 […] where the snow […] covers everything, […] with its monotonous sheet […] the severity of climate […] seems to be the connecting link between the extraordinary uniformity of nature and the melancholy which is so characteristic of the Russian disposition.38 The dullness of the landscape is only diverted by the Russian fauna, more precisely the estimated 175,000 hungry wolves that Brandes mentions in his introductory chapter.39 One might argue that it is the repetitiveness of the description itself which is monotonous, rather than what is described: a multiethnic empire with a diverse geography spanning four climate zones and featuring the highest point in Europe, Mount Elbrus. The point here, however, is not to dismiss Brandes’ depiction, but to demonstrate a certain pattern in his conception of Russia. In line with nineteenth-century perceptions, the landscape determines the Russian and/or Slavic character: “All springs from the broadly constituted nature (shirókaya natura),”40 which Brandes associates positively with rich soil, literally, in the reoccurring motif of black earth (chernozióm), and figuratively, in the generosity and open-mindedness he finds among both simple people and great personalities. Brandes characterizes Russians as “the most arbitrary oppressors in the world” on the one hand, and on the other as radical freethinkers with an “inclination to have their swing.”41 He is fascinated with the lack of hypocrisy and “open marriages” that he encounters among

37 38 39 40 41

The original reads “Det har en sørgmodig Ensformighed” (it has a melancholic uniformity), which is omitted from the English translation (perhaps due to redundancy?), cf. Brandes, Indtryk fra Rusland, 7. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 2, 4, 14, 28–29. My italics. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 3. Ibid., 33–34; see also 22, 30, 269, 353. Ibid., 22; see also 40. The original reads “Hanget til at løbe Linen ud,” Brandes, Indtryk fra Rusland, 32, 37, 292, 364. I refer to Samuel C. Eastman’s 1889 English translation of Brandes’ recurring and italicized metaphor, which Eastman later renders as “he goes to the end of his rope,” Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 217. The Danish historical dictionary Ordbog over det danske sprog (vol. 12, 1931) suggests “run out one’s line” as an English translation of this strong image, which originated in the age of whaling; it describes how a harpooned whale furiously drags down his attackers until the rope is completely taut and further flight is impossible. Brandes uses it to point to the fearlessness of Russian radicals in pursuing the truth, without compromising, wherever this pursuit might lead them. I thank the anonymous reviewer for suggesting “a tendency toward fearlessness” or “a tendency to go to eleven” as an alternative translation, as well as many other useful comments on the manuscript.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

238

Pristed

the liberal intelligentsia, and he engages in both correspondence and romantic affairs with some of these acquaintances, as detailed by his biographer.42 Yet Brandes’ impressions of local gender norms are limited to a certain artistic and intellectual milieu and partly based on wishful thinking and projections, rather than insight into the dominant orthodox patriarchy and family values of tsarist society. For a slight corrective from one of Brandes’ contemporaries, it should suffice to consult Tolstoy’s classic adultery story The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). The depressing landscape also determines the mood of Russians and society as a whole: “The Russian is melancholy, – yet not splenetic in solitude, like the Englishman. It is a melancholy pervading the community. It is this which easily glides into sectarian mysticism.”43 Sometimes this melancholy is “insane” and “black”;44 sometimes it is a Slavic “weakness and sorrow,”45 but the temperament finds its highest expression among the modern Russian writers, who are all characterized as “melancholic” archetypes. Gogol’s melancholia is “indignant,” Dostoevsky’s is “dissolved in sympathy,” and Tolstoy’s is “fatalistreligious,” while Turgenev’s qualifies as “philosophic.”46 When it comes to the cityscapes, Brandes characterizes St. Petersburg as “an unhealthy city […] a half-educated city […]. Finally, it is a beautiful city, in grand style, with half European and half barbarian splendor.”47 His impression of Moscow is that “In some places, it is like the country in this city […] Here the traveller would think he was on the highway into Asia.”48 “Barbarian” is a recurrent word, and again this type finds it clearest expression in a writer – namely Dostoevsky, who in contrast to the Europeanized Turgenev is described as “the legitimate barbarian without a drop of classic blood in his veins,”49 although Dostoevsky’s Christian philosophy hardly qualifies as particularly heathen. Another recurring stereotype in the Western gaze on Russia, which Brandes repeats but also seeks to revise, is the notion of Russians as copyists of (original and superior) European culture: “They are, it is said, a people of imitation, a people without originality.”50 Brandes demonstrates his awareness of the limitations of such clichés: 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 52–53; Knudsen, Georg Brandes, 397–398. Brandes, Impressions of Russia, 29. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 274. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 301; for further uses of “Barbarians,” see, for example, 11, 13, 106. Ibid., 17, my italics; see also 23, 32, 105, 163.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

239

But the old French proverb, ‘Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar’ contains a truth, though with so many limitations that it will be wrong nine times in ten. […] That appeared when Peter the Great undertook to scratch the Asiatic and found a European under the foreign crust.51 The French aphorism Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tartare has been ascribed to the conservative Roman-Catholic diplomat Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), who served as ambassador of the Kingdom of Sardinia in St. Petersburg during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1817). Although Brandes revised the proverb to express his European sympathies and dislike of the conservative monarchist, his Impressions of Russia depended on such fixed phrases, which were characteristic of the Western European and especially the French nineteenth-century discourse on Russia. One important source for Brandes’ Impressions of Russia was the threevolume history of Russia L’Empire des Tsars et les Russes (1881–1889), written by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, with whom Brandes corresponded while writing his book.52 The Eastern European area studies scholar Ezequiel Adamovsky has argued that especially after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878, which prompted anti-Russian sentiment among the other European empires, a paradigmatic shift in French bourgeois-liberals’ perception of Russian–European relations took place. Russia, which had hitherto been perceived as a “northern” empire, according to the notion of Northern versus Southern Europe, gradually became an Eastern European country in the 1880s – Europe orientale. A new notion of an East–West divide was established within Europe, which was eventually reinforced in the twentieth century after the revolution and especially during the Cold War. In his reading of L’Empire des Tsars et les Russes, Adamovsky demonstrates how Leroy-Beaulieu still uses the epithets “North” and “Orient” for Russia. However, when Leroy-Beaulieu uses the terms Europe orientale or Europe de l’Est, he is specifically denoting Asia, comparing it to Arab nomadism and mentioning backwardness, despotism, peasant collectivism, and disrespect for private property, as well as, of course, contrasting the Russian Empire with Europe occidentale.53 According to Adamovsky, the establishment of Slavic studies as an institutionalized discipline in late nineteenth-century Europe contributed to the “relocation” of Russia from the North towards becoming an Orient within Europe. To describe this change in the discourse, Adamovsky derives the term 51 52 53

Ibid., 13–14. Nolin, Den Gode Europén, 205. Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism,” 606–607.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

240

Pristed

Euro-Orientalism from Edward Said’s influential critique of orientalist studies and colonialist perceptions of the Middle East in his Orientalism (1979). While Larry Wolff has suggested that the concept of Eastern Europe was an invention by French Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire,54 Adamovsky argues that since Said explicitly links Orientalism to nineteenth-century colonialism and imperialism, Euro-Orientalism cannot pre-date Orientalism, and a consistent discourse about Europe orientale only began developing in the 1870s, becoming a hegemonic discourse during the twentieth century.55 Furthermore, Euro-Orientalism was not based on a perception of race difference – as Said’s Orientalism was, and as the quotation above about Russians and Tatars seems to imply – but rather on the notion of class difference. Hence, neither Leroy-Beaulieu’s nor Brandes’ writings are racist. On the contrary, both authors spoke out publicly against Russian anti-Semitism. To establish a Western liberal-bourgeois self-identity, however, the two good Europeans needed a counter-narrative about the barbaric, repressive, backward Russian feudal Other. Brandes did rely to some extent on the French Euro-Orientalist discourse in his description of Russia, and he exoticized the country to pursue his liberalist agenda. On the other hand, he distanced himself from given clichés, familiarized himself and Europe with Russian authors, and remained open to revising his perceptions in his life-long correspondence and dialogue with Russian intellectuals. For the literary part of the Impressions, another important source was the French literary historian and orientalist Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, who had served as a diplomat in Constantinople and Cairo before his service in St. Petersburg in 1877–1882. After returning to Paris with his Russian wife, Alexandra Annenkova, de Vogüé devoted himself to literary studies and translations of Dostoevsky, among others, into French. De Vogüé’s main work Le roman russe (1886; English translation by Herbert Anthony Sawyer The Russian Novel, 1916) introduced the Russian novelists to a French audience and earned him a seat in the Académie Française. In his preface, de Vogüé explicitly refers to Brandes’ works, stating that “France should never remain behind an idea, and […] leave the monopoly of a new study to Germany where Reinholdt, Zabel, and Brandes have been carrying out considerable work on Slavic literature for some years.”56 Alexander von Reinholdt (1856–1902) was an equally important source for Brandes. Reinholdt belonged to the German-speaking 54 55 56

Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism,” 608. Vogüé, Le roman russe, lii. My translation, since this section of de Vogüé’s introduction is omitted from the English translation.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

241

minority in St. Petersburg, and his Geschichte der russischen Literatur von ihrem Anfang bis auf die neueste Zeit was released between 1883 and 1885 by the Friedrich Verlag in Leipzig. He later wrote several entries on German authors for the famous Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, published in Imperial Russia between 1890 and 1907. Brandes and de Vogüé’s inspiration was mutual, however – this is clear from the composition of Brandes’ literary impressions, which is almost identical to de Vogüé’s chapter structure, and his choice of authors: after a brief introduction, he presents Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Brandes also owes his notion of Russian melancholy to de Vogüé, who even characterizes the national poet, Pushkin, as melancholic: “The drop of African blood falling on the snows of Russia may explain his many contradictions – passion and melancholy – welded together in this remarkable nature.”57 Brandes’ biographer Jørgen Knudsen has described Brandes’ travels to Poland and Russia as visits that “opened this distant, foreign, Slavic and yet familiar world to him.” Knudsen’s account partly mirrors his own travel experiences on the Scandinavian youth movement’s Next Stop Soviet tour in 1989 and from the Yeltsin years of the early 1990s, when Russia opened to the West.58 Yet despite Brandes’ essentialist or “Euro-Orientalist” representation of Russians as melancholic, sensual, mystic, backward, repressive, and barbarian, perhaps the exoticized Russia of the late nineteenth century was less distant from Denmark than our later, Cold War-influenced perceptions allow us to imagine? Certainly, Russia was far less distant for Brandes’ contemporaries than it is for us today, now the current regime has once again isolated the country from the West by invading Ukraine. The international situation looked quite different in 1866, when the marriage between Alexander iii and the Danish princess Dagmar consolidated not only a geopolitically strategic alliance, but also growing industrial trade relations between Russia and Denmark. The Danish entrepreneur C.F. Tietgen and the Great Northern Telegraph Company wired the Russian empire between 1869 and 1872. Many Danes worked in Russia, including telegraphists, agricultural specialists, teachers, and translators, and large Scandinavian expatriate communities existed in both St. Petersburg and Moscow by the late nineteenth century. The latter was headed by the consul and teacher Thor Lange, whom Brandes disliked and avoided during his trip. While Brandes’ writings are a good source for understanding the Russian intelligentsia of the

57 58

Vogüé, The Russian Novel, 60. Knudsen, George Brandes, 292; Knudsen, Symbolet og manden, vol. 1, 282, 294.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

242

Pristed

capitals, closer insights into the daily life of the peasant class are provided by the Danish agricultural specialist C.A. Kofoed, who worked as an estate manager in Kaluga during the 1880s and later played a significant role in Pyotr Stolypin’s land reforms.59 Ole Sohn has written about the 2,000 Danes who migrated to Siberia between 1864 and 1917 and received land plots along the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was constructed gradually during the 1890s.60 In a letter to Brandes, Kropotkin enthusiastically mentions the establishment of Danish agricultural cooperatives near Tomsk and Tobolsk, which had begun exporting Siberian butter via Denmark to England.61 There were regular boat connections between Copenhagen and both St. Petersburg and Riga, and rail connections via Warsaw and Helsinki. Hence, Russia was closer to Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century than it was during the Soviet period, and than it is today. The late nineteenth-century cultural exchange, the “Slavic wave” and West European reception of the realist Russian novels, and, inversely, the Russian interest in Scandinavian literature, must be understood in this context of intensified political and economic trade relations. 3

The Domestication of Brandes in the Russian Popular and Illustrated Weeklies

Russia’s double status as foreign and familiar to Europe has recently been critically reexamined from a post-colonialist perspective by the Tartu-based Russian historian Viatcheslav Morozov, who controversially calls Russia a “subaltern empire,” thus criticizing both the nineteenth-century Russian Empire and contemporary Russia in the wake of the first invasion of Crimea in 2014. Morozov further claims that Russian citizens today are speechless.62 From the multiple Russian sources on Brandes, however, it is evident that during the late nineteenth century the Dane’s Russian audience was far from speechless, but rather quite eloquent, whether their responses were aiming to domesticate or alienate his image. The extensive Russian press coverage of Brandes’ visit, especially while he was in St. Petersburg, testifies to his popularity and partly contradicts his remarks about St. Petersburg as a semi-literate city where only 30 per cent of 59 60 61 62

Kofoed, 50 Aar i Rusland. Sohn, De drog mod øst. Krüger, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 2, 172–174. Letter from Kropotkin to Brandes, 23 October 1902. Morozov, Russia’s Postcolonial Identity.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

243

the 900,000 inhabitants were able to read. When Brandes arrived in 1887, a new book market was emerging with a potentially enormous Russian-speaking reading audience. According to the sociologist Abram Reitblat, the numbers of books in circulation in Russia tripled between 1885 and 1900. Although “the educated readers” represented only a narrow population segment, a large number of “average” and “popular” readers emerged after the 1860s educational reforms.63 These new readers turned to popular illustrated weeklies, whose print runs were on a steep rise. One example of how Brandes was presented to this broader audience is found in Zvezda (The Star), launched in 1886 by Vissarion Komarov, a military veteran of the Russo-Turkish war and a loyal tsarist patriot. With a minimum of text and maximum of visual effects, Brandes is presented as a celebrity somewhat ironically placed beside a lithograph of the Dutch king and the German national Romantic poet Ludwig Uhland (see Illustrations 1 and 2), whom Brandes associated negatively in his Main Currents volume on Young Germany with the Swabian school of “Sunday afternoon, gilt-edged poets, men who put into rhyme old, dead ballad themes, or their own petty, sentimental feelings, whilst they were cautiously watching over their interests as government servants aspiring to professorships or consistory counsellorships.”64 The mismatch of Brandes and Uhland does not seem to bother the readers or editors of Zvezda, who introduce Brandes as the “famous Danish critic who arrived in St. Petersburg not long ago. He has a special writing style; his critical texts read like literary works.” The journal situates Brandes between the “aesthetic” and “realistic” schools of literary criticism, and offers a positive summary of his first lecture on Russian literature.65 In a later, May issue of Zvezda, under the headline “Georg Brandes: International Critic and Literary Historian,” the critic Evgenii Garshin presents a longer biographical sketch. While Garshin is positive about Main Currents, he understandably has reservations about Brandes’ labeling of all Russian authors as “melancholic” and finds it regrettable that Brandes reads Turgenev in German and French translations: “It would be desirable if our recent guest would also pay attention to other coryphées of our literature, and even better if the critical Dane would master the not-that-headache-provoking Russian language, which would open to him a whole world of excellent works of Slavic genius.”66 Garshin is offended by Brandes’ lecture on Russian literature, but 63 64 65 66

Reitblat, The Reading Audience, 176. Brandes, Young Germany, 240. N.N., “K riskunkam,” 376–379. Garshin, “Georg Brandes,” 419.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

244

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Pristed

The Domesticated European?

figure 11.1 and 11.2

245

Cover and page opening of Zvezda’s coverage of Brandes’ first lecture in St. Petersburg source: n. n. “k riskunkam,” zvezda 17, (april 25, 1887): 376–379

still invites the international and/or Danish critic into the Slavic world of literature. The Russian domestication of Brandes had a lasting impact, as illustrated by the popular magazine Sem’ia (The Family), which in a retrospective article from 1896 celebrated the 25th anniversary of Brandes’ Copenhagen lectures by recalling “the loud success” (shumnyi uspekh) of the lectures in Russia. Here the portrait of Brandes – the fighter for sexual emancipation par excellence – is reframed in a Russian domestic setting and awkwardly positioned underneath the title “family” in a lavishly decorated illustrated magazine, representing orthodox family values (see Illustrations 3 and 4). 4

Alienation and Character Assassination

The popular illustrated weeklies were not all supportive of Brandes’ lectures. The negative accounts offer a vivid depiction of Brandes’ physical appearance, which estranged him from his Russian audience. Lecture attendees expected a literary authority (in this case the leading authority in Europe) to have a broad full beard, and to wear glasses, ribbons, and medals; instead, the 45-year-old

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

246

Pristed

figure 11.3 and 11.4

Brandes’ portrait under the header “Sem’ia” (Family). The photo caption reads “on the 25th anniversary of his professorship” source: n. n. “k portretu brandesa,” sem’ia 49, (1896): 7

Brandes looked like a young flâneur. Brandes did not even read like an academic professor, but more like a tribune orator on the barricades.67 As Sharypkin has demonstrated, the illustrated weeklies sometimes did not discuss the content of the lectures, instead scrutinizing the strange appearance of the European 67

N.N., “Nedel’nye zametki,” 556.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

247

celebrity, commenting on any mistake in his French and his foreign accent, though appreciating that he spoke slower than a native speaker, since this made him easier to understand.68 While Brandes’ own writings about his Russian travels describe the leading members of the intelligentsia, the press materials, which Sharypkin has examined in detail, offer different insights into his broader, less educated, but newly emerging audience of Russian readers. Brandes also became the subject of outright attempts at character assassination, most notably from the critic Fedor Bulgakov (1852–1908) in one of the larger conservative newspapers, Novoe vremia (New Times), which had a circulation of approximately 60,000 copies,69 and in anonymous articles that appeared in the monthly literary journal Istoricheskii vestnik (The Historical Messenger), which had a more modest print run of around 5,200 copies. Both periodicals were issued by the famous publisher Aleksei Suvorin (1834–1912), who among others “discovered” Anton Chekhov. Under Suvorin, initially progressive journals turned increasingly conservative and antisemitic. The famous satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–1889) described the motto of Novoe vremia as “always going forward, but through the anus.”70 Bulgakov was a conservative book historian,71 but more importantly, from the late 1870s he served as secretary of the Committee of Foreign Censorship in St. Petersburg.72 According to Brandes’ accounts in both the Impressions and his memoirs, Brandes was subject to much undesired attention from Bulgakov at the beginning of his visit to St. Petersburg, when Bulgakov approached him several times.73 Hence, Brandes perceived Bulgakov’s subsequent press attacks as a result of a personal offence caused by Brandes’ disinterest in Bulgakov’s dinner invitations. Brandes did not seem to be aware that Bulgakov’s intrusive but negative interest in his person was more likely a result of Bulgakov’s professional role as a censor of foreign literature – it was his job to keep an attentive eye on the foreigner and obstruct his public lectures whenever necessary. To use an anachronistic term, Brandes was targeted with kompromat (compromising material to create negative publicity) as an advanced means of political strategic communication, rather than simple, personal gossip. Bulgakov found a rich source of compromising material in German press reports from the 1887 copyright lawsuit between Brandes’ two German 68 69 70 71 72 73

Sharypkin, “Tvorchestvo Georga Brandesa,” 370. Bulgakov, “Chtenie Brandesa,” 2. As quoted by Gerasimovich, “M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin o reaktsionnoi,” 73. Bulgakov, Illiustrirovannaia istoriia knigopechataniia. “Bulgakov, Fedor Il’ich,”Russkii biograficheskii slovar', http://www.rulex.ru/01020965.htm. Brandes, Indtryk, 187–189; Brandes, Levned, vol. 3, 200.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

248

Pristed

publishers, which continued to haunt the Dane during his time abroad. According to the charges, the revised second German edition of Main Currents was copied significantly from Adolf Strodtman’s original translation, for which the new publisher had failed to secure the publication rights.74 With reference to this case, anonymous articles in Istoricheskii vestnik denounced Brandes as plagiarist. One writer scolded the naive, kind-hearted Russians for always inviting and applauding European scholars who had already lost their relevance in Europe: “Now this has happened again with our latest guest, the literary fund invited him for 4 lectures, where he talked about something he has no idea about, namely Russian literature, and in the other lecture, he just read his outdated booklet of tired, old gossip about George Sand and Alfred Musset, which has long been well known to the Russian audience.” To maximize the alienation and defamation of Brandes, the article concluded with strongly antisemitic remarks about his “kike hackwork” (zhidovskoe proizvedenie; zhidovskii kritik).75 5

Brandes’ Collected Works in Translation Furnish Russian Home Libraries

Despite the negative press stories, Russian readers had many opportunities to familiarize themselves with Brandes’ writings directly, in Russian translations. Main Currents was translated from German and issued in parallel editions by publishers in both St. Petersburg and Moscow in the 1880s and 1890s. The Moscow edition was translated by the German composer and pianist Emil Zauer and introduced by the literary scholar Evgenii Solov’ev (1866–1905), who published numerous biographies in the well-known series Life of Remarkable People, including Turgenev’s biography, in which he relied on Brandes’ characterization of Turgenev. Solov’ev characterized Denmark through the eyes of Brandes as a narcissistic provincial country, isolated from Europe since 1864. Against this background, Brandes’ international breakthrough seemed even more remarkable. Solov’ev did not mention Brandes’ 1887 trip to Russia at all, and his biographical sketch was full of inaccuracies. For example, in his Russian-language biography, Brandes enjoyed the status of being a professor at the University of Copenhagen, a post he was denied at home.76 74 75 76

For an explanation of the complex case, see Bjerring-Hansen, “Romantik, Modernität und Copyright,” 132. N.N., “Plagiator Brandes,” 709. Solov’ev, “Georg Brandes (kharakteristika),” i–xiii.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

249

The first 12-volume edition of Brandes’ collected works was issued in 1902– 1903 by the Ukrainian-Russian Jewish autodidact publisher Boris Fuks, who had started his publishing business as a 22-year-old in Kyiv. In the same series, a Library of Selected Critics, Fuks also issued the collected works of Vissarion Belinskii and Max Nordau. The censorship stamps on the title page indicate that the edition was accepted for publication by censorship authorities in Kyiv, not in Moscow or St. Petersburg.77 Presumably, it was easier to print the collected works in the periphery of the Russian Empire than in the strictly controlled presses of the capitals, close to the power centers. Just after the publication, however, Fuks moved to Moscow and opened a bookstore there; it seems he sold his library series to a Moscow audience, although the books were produced in Kyiv. The collected works were introduced and translated from Danish into Russian by Maria Luchitskaia, who also translated several other Scandinavian authors into Russian. In letters to his other translator, Vera Spasskaia, Brandes mentioned Fuks’ edition, but later complained that Russian publishers were thieves (“Røverfolk”) who printed his work without permissions, and that he never received a single Kopek for his collected works in Russian translation.78 Indeed, the Fuks edition appeared both unauthorized and disordered. For example, to the first volume on Scandinavian Literature the translator appended Brandes’ portrait of Sofiia Kovalevskaia, the famous Russian mathematics professor in Stockholm, because Luchitskaia herself wrote Kovalevskaia’s biography. On the one hand, the female translator’s intervention increased the number of women figures in Brandes’ Scandinavian Parnassus of outstanding thinkers; on the other, it transgressed the scope of the Main Currents from comparative literature to a wider cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary presentation of Russian–Scandinavian connections. Fuks’ large-sized, decorated volumes targeted the taste preferences of a broader readership who were seeking to expand their home libraries (see lllustration 5). In a letter to the exiled anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin on 20 November 1904, Brandes wrote: “If there is something I don’t believe in, then it is the possibility of a revolution in Russia.”79 Two months later, on 22 January 1905, Bloody Sunday resulted in mass strikes, unrest, and pogroms until Nicholas ii gave in to the protests and issued his October Manifest, which introduced an elected state duma and multi-party system. The constitutional reforms meant that 77 78 79

Brandes, Sobranie sochinenii. Letters from Georg Brandes to Vera Spasskaia, 30 March 1903 and 12 October 1906. Georg Brandes Arkivet, Aarhus. Krüger, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 2, 189.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

250

figure 11.5 The lavishly decorated title page of Fuks’ 1902 edition of Brandes’ collected works

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Pristed

The Domesticated European?

251

by 1905–1906 pre-publication censorship was abrogated, and censorship was completely abolished by the Temporary Government in April 1917, although press freedom only lasted until October 1917. Following the abrogation of censorship, a revised and complete 20-volume edition of Brandes’ collected works was released by the publisher Prosveshenie (Enlightenment) in St. Petersburg. This edition is less elaborate than the Fuks one, with smaller dimensions and less decoration, but it is more ordered and academic in style.80 Brandes wrote Impressions of Russia with an explicitly Danish or Scandinavian home audience in mind, and in his later correspondence with Kropotkin he expressed his awareness of some of the limitations of his characterization of Russia. Brandes regretted wasting time on learning classic languages, Greek and Latin, instead of living languages, apologized for his inability to speak the Russian language, and called the Russia book his weakest work.81 Kropotkin, however, was very appreciative of Brandes’ essay on Turgenev. In a letter of 8 December 1888, shortly after the Danish launch of the twin books on Poland and Russia, Brandes wrote to Vera Spasskaia (1852–1938) to say that he wanted to avoid their translation into other European languages, as their content could harm his relations in Russia and Poland.82 By April 1890, however, he had included both books in a list to her of his hitherto unpublished translation desiderata, and on 7 June 1891 he promised to send the Impressions with a false title page and content list to mislead the censors in customs, who were not able to understand the Danish content.83 The small Scandinavian languages thus functioned as code languages to bypass censorship. Deprived of the chance of a university career, Spasskaia taught French at the German Lutheran Petri Pauli Women’s High School in Moscow while translating from German and English into Russian on the side. Brandes became important for her success as a translator, as his visit to Moscow and their later correspondence prompted her to obtain knowledge of the Scandinavian languages. Her translation of Storozhenko’s aforementioned Russian edition of Brandes’ two volumes on Shakespeare, published in 1899 and 1901, became the first of a series of translations by her hand of Scandinavian works by authors including J.P. Jacobsen, Henrik Ibsen, Tor Hedberg, Selma Lagerlöf, and Henrik

80 81 82 83

Brandes, Sobranie sochinenii. Krüger, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 2, 160–162. Letter from Brandes to Kropotkin, 7 November 1899. Letter from Georg Brandes to Vera Spasskaia, 8 December 1888. Georg Brandes Arkivet, Aarhus. Letters from Georg Brandes to Vera Spasskaia, 14 April 1890 and 7 June 1891. Georg Brandes Arkivet, Aarhus.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

252

Pristed

Pontoppidan, which were released between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. However, Spasskaia’s translation of Brandes’ works on Shakespeare faced competition from a non-authorized parallel translation from German which appeared on the book market before her official translation from Danish could be published. Impressions of Russia remained a prohibited work in Russia until the 1905–1906 reforms, but a Russian translation was published in 1913 in the 19th volume of the complete collected works, entitled Russia, together with Brandes’ essays on Maksim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, and Dmitrii Merezhkovsky.84 6

Outlook: the Russian–Western Dichotomy in 1895 Revisited in 1955

In the summer of 1895, while working on his Shakespeare book, Brandes traveled to Finland to revisit the Auer family, with whom he had stayed in contact since his 1887 trip. At their country house pension in Rahua, Brandes stirred some controversy among their circle of intellectuals and artists by telling unflattering anecdotes about Hans Christian Andersen. Soon, these anecdotes, intended for a semi-private audience, were printed in Novoe vremia and found their way to the Danish press via Andersen’s Danish-Russian translators Peter and Anna Hansen.85 Brandes had not shown any interest in their translation project, while Peter and Anna Hansen defended Andersen as a writer for an adult audience.86 However, Brandes’ three essays on Andersen and part of his correspondence with the fairytale writer all appeared in Russian translation both in the serious literary journals and later in book editions of Andersen’s work. Hence, beyond the scandalous press, the Russian readership also had access to Brandes’ more nuanced views on Andersen. At the Auers’, Brandes met the religious philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev (1853– 1900), who had been a close friend of Dostoevsky and a source of inspiration for the Grand Inquisitor legend in the Brothers Karamazov, later developed in Solov’ev’s tale about anti-Christ. One witness to their meeting was the 17-yearold Sergei Makovskii (1877–1962), according to Brandes a “Wunderkind,” who after the revolution migrated to Paris and later published his poems and memoirs there. In his émigré memoirs from 1955, Makovskii recalls the summer in Rahua and delivers a double portrait of Solov’ev and Brandes. Brandes is no longer identified as the leading “European” critic, but instead as the “great man 84 85 86

Brandes, Sobranie sochinenii. Bredsdorff, H. C. Andersen og Georg Brandes, 86–92. Sohl Jessen, “Russia under Hans Christian Andersen’s,” 54–55.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

253

of the West,” gesticulating and talking constantly and quickly with a foreign accent. Makovskii presents Brandes as egocentric and attention-seeking. In contrast, he elevates the figure of Solov’ev as “our great Russian European,” presenting him as tall, thin, modest, quiet, and with spiritual depth. In Makovskii’s perception, the contrast between the two thinkers culminates when Nadezhda Auer organizes a Shakespeare evening. Brandes reads two chapters from his Shakespeare manuscript, translating directly from the Danish text into German. Solov’ev listens attentively but remains unaffected. After a while Solov’ev remarks that what Brandes says about Othello is true, but then he adds, “by the way, Pushkin wrote something similar.” According to Makovskii, Solov’ev’s comment derails Brandes for the rest of the evening.87 Reworking his lost Russian youth from the difficult, marginalized position of the emigrant, Makovskii tells this counter-anecdote to demonstrate the originality of Russian thought and literature as “core European,” and defame the “Western imitator” from a peripheral country. Despite Makovskii’s attempts at reversing the East–West dichotomy, however, Brandes’ book on Shakespeare has enjoyed a long-lasting reception in Russia due to the work of another émigré philosopher – Lev Shestov’s Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes. Brandes’ Shakespeare book was reissued by Russian publishers as recently as 2012 and 2014. From Finland, Brandes spontaneously decided to return to Copenhagen via St. Petersburg, and Sergei Makovskii joined him as a guide to the Hermitage Museum, which he knew very well since his father was the famous painter Konstantin Makovskii. Brandes did not give the young Makovskii much opportunity to talk, instead telling anecdotes about the artists non-stop himself. Back at the hotel, a police officer appeared and gave Brandes 24 hours to leave Russia, officially with reference to the Jewish settlement law and Brandes’ lack of travel papers. Brandes complained to the Danish Embassy, but he was forced to leave by train via Warsaw and never returned to Russia again.88 7

Conclusion

After the 1917 revolution, the number of Russian publications on Brandes dropped significantly. Brandes’ liberal stance and Nietzsche-inspired ideas about great individuals did not conform to Communist ideology, although Soviet critics did acknowledge his critique of bourgeois society, and a Soviet

87 88

Makovskii, “Vladimir Solov’ev i Georg Brandes,” 119–142. Ibid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

254

Pristed

scholar like Sharypkin was able to specialize in Brandes’ works. Apart from a few obituaries in 1927 and various anniversary articles, however, Brandes disappeared from the broader Russophone public.89 While Brandes was well known to his Russian contemporaries, his works today are not read outside a specialized academic community of Russian Scandinavianists and Shakespeare scholars. As the present chapter has demonstrated, one explanation for this is how the Russian image of Brandes changed over time from “a leading European critic,” to a domesticated public celebrity, and finally to a rejected, foreign Jew and arrogant ignorant man from the “West.” But how do these changing Russian perspectives inform our notion of Brandes as a societal and cultural critic, literary scholar, and “global” public intellectual? As a societal and cultural critic, Brandes inevitably participated in existing conflicts among Westernizers and Slavophiles that framed the presentation of him in Russian journals. Both camps repurposed Brandes’ visits to further their own domestic political agendas in Russia, and both sides were disappointed with him for opposite reasons. It was simply not possible to arrive as a “good European” observer without participating in this conflict. However, Brandes’ navigation between authoritarian and liberal forces within Russian society was not as straightforward as one might expect. As an invited foreign guest in the upper circles of Russian society, he literally raised a toast for the chief censor of his liberal friends. As a celebrity icon, his Russian publishers transformed him into an authoritative literary professor at the University of Copenhagen and accommodated his collected works in decorated volumes for family libraries to demonstrate European education in a conservative setting. In Russia, Brandes became a domesticated European. Although Brandes advocated criticism and expressed a clear fascination with the fearless, uncompromising Russian radicals who were ready to “run out their line” in pursuing the truth, he chose a different, more pragmatic strategy of cultural adaptation during his traveling, lecturing, and publishing adventures in Russia. The foreign observations of Brandes’ strange accent, language mistakes, and misunderstandings with his audiences in the unfamiliar territories of Finland and Russia perhaps add more vulnerable nuances to the existing picture of Brandes’ communicative effectiveness as a provocative orator with a clear, progressive program. Brandes’ achievements as a literary scholar within the Russian-Scandinavian context may equally be explained by his ability to adopt flexible standpoints, depending on his correspondence partner, and to 89

See, for example, a 1942 article by Nusinov, “K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia” (192–193), which, in line with high Stalinist wartime patriotism, celebrates Brandes as “the glorious son of the Danish people.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

255

get around censorship by moving between languages and between public and semi-public levels of communication. The Russian domestication of Brandes also entailed familiarizing a broader audience with Scandinavian dramatists and authors, who became an accepted and integrated part of the Russian reading repertoire. Within academic circles, the Russian literary comparatists, including Storozhenko, Veselovskii, and Veinberg, welcomed Brandes’ transnationalist agenda and attempts to bridge European cultures and literatures, and there is no doubt that Brandes left a lasting impact on the reception of Shakespeare in Russia. However, in order to move between languages in his literary publications, Brandes was dependent on his Russian translators. This chapter has only briefly touched upon the translations by Maria Luchitskaia and Vera Spasskaia. But the role of both authorized and non-authorized translations, together with Brandes’ extensive correspondence with translators and ambiguous support and disdain for them, may prove an avenue of further research, as insights from translation studies are relevant for understanding the global dimensions of Brandes’ comparatist approach to literature. As a global public intellectual, Brandes’ lecture tours in Russia resulted in clashes of expectations between him and his intended and unintended audiences at home and abroad. While Impressions of Russia and Brandes’ lectures on Russian literature were received with interest at home among the Danish audience, his attempts at teaching Russians about their own national literature were ill received abroad. Conversely, while his anecdotes about the Danish national writer Hans Christian Andersen were meant to entertain his closed circle of Russian intellectuals and artists abroad, they led to conflicts in the Danish press at home. Despite Brandes’ aim to overcome narrow nationalist approaches to literary history, his Impressions of Russia to some extent reinforced an essentialist, especially French-inspired, Euro-Orientalist perception of the “subaltern” Russia Empire, which was characteristic of the discourse in the 1880s. However, Brandes articulated his awareness of the linguistic and conceptual limitations of such an approach – and even apologized for it in unofficial letters. His attempts to defend Polish intellectuals against their imperial oppressor, a tsarina of Danish origin, foreshadowed contemporary Inner European decolonization debates about languages and literatures, and today appear strikingly current. Bibliography Adamovsky, Ezequiel: “Euro-Orientalism and the Making of the Concept of Eastern Europe in France, 1810–1880,” The Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 591–628.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

256

Pristed

Azadovskij, Konstantin M. and Lene Tybjærg Schacke: “Georg Brandes und Friedrich Fiedler –Tagebuchnotizen und ein Briefwechsel. Quellen zum Thema ‘Brandes und Rußland’,” Scando-slavica 30/1 (1984): 5–29. Bjerring-Hansen, Jens: “Romantik, Modernität und Copyright: Georg Brandes auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt,” Die skandinavische Moderne, edited by Jens BjerringHansen, Torben Jelsbak and Monica Wenusch. Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2016, 121–142. Brandes, Georg: Hovedstrømninger i det nittende Århundredes Litteratur, vol. 1. Emigrantlitteraturen, reprint of the 5th revised ed., 1923 with notes by Iver Jespersen. Copenhagen: Jespersen og Pios Forlag, 1966. Brandes, Georg: Impressions of Russia, translated by Samuel C. Eastman. London: Walter Scott, 1889. Brandes, Georg: Indtryk fra Rusland. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske boghandels forlag, 1888. Brandes, Georg: “Sergei Stepniak,” originally 1897, reprinted in Russkie vpechatleniia, edited by Aleksandra Polivanova, with an introduction and notes by Aleksandr Sergeev. Moscow: ogi, 2002, 267–270. Brandes, Georg: Sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols, translated by Maria Luchitskaia. Kyiv: Fuks, 1902–1903. Brandes, Georg: Sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols, translated by Maria Luchitskaia. St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1904–1914. Brandes, Georg: “Rusland,” in: Levned, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske boghandel, nordisk forlag, 1908, 189–209. Brandes, Georg: Russkie vpechatleniia, edited by Aleksandra Polivanova, with an introduction and notes by Aleksandr Sergeev. Moscow: ogi, 2002. Brandes, Georg: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. 1, The Emigrant Literature, edited by Diana White and Mary Morison. London and New York: The Macmillan Company and William Heinemann, 1901, reprinted 1906. Brandes, George: Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. 6, Young Germany, edited by Diana White and Mary Morison. London and New York: The Macmillan Company and William Heinemann, 1905, reprinted 1906. Bredsdorff, Elias: H. C. Andersen og Georg Brandes. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1994. Bulgakov, Fedor: “Chtenie Brandesa. O russkom romane,” Novoe vremia 3994 (14 April 1887): 2. Bulgakov, Fedor: Illiustrirovannaia istoriia knigopechataniia i tipografskogo iskusstva. St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1889. http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/113-bulgakov-f-i-illyust rirovannaya-istoriya-knigopechataniya-i-tipografskogo-iskusstva-t-1-s-istorii-izobr eteniya-knigopechataniya-po-xviii-vek-vklyuchitelno-spb-tsenz-1889#mode/grid /page/408/zoom/1. Accessed 14 September 2021.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

257

Fjodorova, Nadezhda: “Notes on reception of a text of a different nation (Georg Brandes about Anton Chekhov),” Comparative Studies (1691–5038) 3/2 (2010): 151–156. https: //du.lv/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Comparative_studies_Vol_III.pdf#page=151. Accessed 25 August 2023. Garshin, Evgenii: “Georg Brandes: Mezhdunarodnyi kritik i istorik literary,” Zvezda 19 (9 May 1887): 419. Georg Brandes, Arkivet, Aarhus Universitet: Georg Brandes’ correspondence with Vera Spasskaia (1887–1926). Unpublished. Gerasimovich, Mikhail: “M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin o reaktsionnoi i liberal’noburzhuaznoi pechati,” Vestnik bgu 2 (1992): 73–76. Grossman, Joan Delaney: “Rise and Decline of the ‘Literary’ Journal: 1880–1917,” in: Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, edited by Deborah A. Martinsen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 171–196. Groys, Boris: “Russia and the West: the Quest for Russian National Identity,” Studies in Soviet Thought 43 (1992): 185–198. Hosking, Geoffrey: Russia and the Russians: a History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2011. Knudsen, Jørgen: gb – En Georg Brandes-biografi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes: Symbolet og Manden 1883–1895, vol. 1. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994. Kofoed, C.A.: 50 Aar i Rusland. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1945. Kogan, Petr: “Brandes,” Russkaia mysl’ 7 (1903): 90–106. Krüger, Paul: Correspondance de Georg Brandes: Lettres choisies et annotées par Paul Krüger, vol. 2, L’Angleterre et la Russie. Publ. par la Société pour l’Étude de la Langue et de la Littérature danoise. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1956. Loks, Konstantin: “Georg Brandes – pisatel’, kritik, publitsist,” International’naia literatura 13/1–2 (1942): 193–194. Luchitskaia, Mariia: “Georg Brandes,” introduction to Sobranie sochienii Georga Brandesa v 12 tomakh, translated and introduced by Mariia Luchitskaia, vol. 1. (Biblioteka izbrannykh kritikov). Kyiv: B. K. Fuks, 1902–1903, 1–17. Luchitskaia, Mariia: “Georg Brandes,” introduction to Sobranie sochienii Georga Brandesa v 20 tomakh: 2nd revised and completed version, translated and introduced by Mariia Luchitskaia, vol. 1. St. Petersburg: Prosveshenie, 1906–1914, v–xiv. Lyhne, Vagn and Lis Norup: Anarkismens tid: en brevveksling mellem Peter Kropotkin og Georg Brandes. Copenhagen: Det Poetiske Bureau, 2017. Makovskii, Sergei: “Vladimir Solov’ev i Georg Brandes,” in: Portrety sovremennikov. Moscow: xxi, 2000 [1955], 119–142. Morozov, Viatcheslav: Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: a Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World. London: Palgrave, 2015.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

258

Pristed

Møller, Peter Ulf: “Tolstoj som kritiker: En russisk artikel af Georg Brandes om Lev Tolstoj,” Nordisk Østforum 3 (2010): 293–308. N.N.: “K riskunkam,” Zvezda 17 (25 April 1887): 376–379. N.N.: “Nedel’nye zametki,” Nedelia 17 (27 April 1887): 556. N.N.: “Plagiator Brandes,” Istoricheskii vestnik 6 (1887): 709. N.N.: “K portretu Brandesa,” Sem’ia 49 (1896): 7. Nolin, Bertil: Den Gode Europén: Studier i Georg Brandes’ idéutveckling 1871–1893. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri, 1965. Nusinov, Isaak: “K stoletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Georga Brandesa: Pamiati slavnogo syna datskogo naroda,” International’naia literatura 13/1–2 (1942): 192–193. Petelska, Michalina: “Georg Brandes and Poland,” in: Georg Brandes – Digitale Hovedstrømninger, Dansk Litteratur Arkiv. Last modified 27 January 2020. https: //georgbrandes.dk/research/1papers/petelska_GBandPoland_res_1papers.html. Pogorelski, Alexis: “The Messenger of Europe,” in: Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, edited by Deborah A. Martinsen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 129–149. Reitblat, Abram: “The Reading Audience of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Reading Russia a History of Reading in Modern Russia, vol. 2, edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena. Milan: di/segni, 2020, 171–210. https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/disegni/article/view/14460/13410. Accessed 14 September 2021. Schacke, Lene Tybjærg: “Georg Brandes i Rusland,” Humaniora 5 (1981/1982): 36–42. Sergeev, Aleksandr: “Georg Brandes – literaturnyi kritik, teoretik iskusstva, publitsist,” in: Georg Brandes, Russkie vpechatleniia, edited by Aleksandra Polivanova. Moscow: ogi, 2002, 9–33. Sergienko, Inna: “Hans Christian Andersen as a Children’s Writer, as Reflected in Russian Criticism from the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century to 1917,” in: Hans Christian Andersen in Russia, edited by Mads Sohl Jessen, Marina Balina et al. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2020, 77–114. Sharypkin, Dmitrii: Skandinavskaia literatura v Rossii. Leningrad: Nauka, 1980. Sharypkin, Dmitrii: “Georg Brandes i russkaia literature,” in: Georg Brandes, Russkie vpechatleniia, edited by Aleksandra Polivanova, with an introduction and notes by Aleksandr Sergeev. Moscow: ogi, 2002a, 347–359. Sharypkin, Dmitrii: “Tvorchestvo Georga Brandesa po russkim istochnikam i materialam,” in: Georg Brandes, Russkie vpechatleniia, edited by Aleksandra Polivanova, with an introduction and notes by Aleksandr Sergeev. Moscow: ogi, 2002b, 360–405. Sohl Jessen, Mads: “Russia under Hans Christian Andersen’s Western Eyes, Part 2,” in: Hans Christian Andersen in Russia, edited by Mads Sohl Jessen, Marina Balina et al. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2020, 43–60.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Domesticated European?

259

Sohn, Ole: De drog mod øst: danskeres udvandring til Rusland og Sibirien 1864 til 1919. Copenhagen: Høst, 2003. Solov’ev, Evgenii: “Georg Brandes (kharakteristika),” in: Literatura xix v. v ee glavneishikh techeniiakh, translated from German by Emil Zauer, vol. 1. St. Petersburg: Pavlenkov, 1895, i–xiii. Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de: Le roman russe, 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1888 [1886]. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k58100481/f1.item.zoom. Accessed 14 September 2021. Vogüé, Eugène-Melchior de: The Russian Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1916. https: //archive.org/details/russiannovel00sawygoog/page/n9/mode/2up?view=theater. Accessed 14 September 2021. Wolff, Larry: Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 12

“The Universal Struggle for World Renown” Georg Brandes’ Global Literary Strategies Jens Bjerring-Hansen 1

Introduction

“Whoever writes in Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Greek or the like is obviously poorly placed in the universal struggle for world renown,” Georg Brandes noted in his essay on “World Literature” (in German 1899, revised and translated into Danish the year after), an effort to bring Goethe’s concept up to date for the dynamic reality of the dawning twentieth century.1 This is the statement of a comparative and sociologically minded literary scholar, but also a writer whose publications make an interesting empirical case for the study of transnational literary dynamics. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Brandes had gained a reputation as a leading figure in the intellectual life of Continental Europe, both as a promoter and a representative of a Scandinavian “wave” of literature. He had built this reputation through travels, networking, and translations and writings in French and, especially, German. This chapter will address Brandes’ reorientation towards the English and American literary world, which played an important, yet overlooked, role in his literary strategies around and after 1900 – in other words, in the time of what Thomas Piketty and other economists, as well as historians, have called the “first globalization” (1870–1914).2 Within the realm of literature, increasing globalization, with the English language as a primary driver, meant that the term “world” in concepts like “world literature” or “world renown” was no longer a mere synecdoche for Europe. Relating to Gisèle Sapiro’s call for a “sociology of translation,” and to what the bibliographer D.F. Mckenzie has called the “sociology of texts,”3 the present chapter aims to stress the instability of translation and border-crossing textual transmission by highlighting the critical influence of the people, politics, 1 Brandes, “Weltliteratur,” 3. 2 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, 28. See also Maier, Once Within, 213. 3 Gisèle Sapiro, “The Sociology of Translation”; McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_014 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

261

and circumstances involved. The focus is on Brandes’ and others’ attempts to arrange English translations and American editions of his works, not least Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. These attempts, which were often futile, are accompanied by Brandes’ own reflections, in essays, interviews, letters, and diary entries, concerning the possibility of a world literature in a modern globalizing context. Together, the fate of the texts in the US, and the frequently defeatist considerations on the part of their author, expose both the challenging “messiness” of translation (Emily Apter) and the structural “asymmetries” (Stefan Nygård and Johan Strang), which, rather than hopeful notions of “reciprocity” or “hybridity,” characterized the transnational cultural space forming around 1900.4 These challenges, however, make Brandes’ case even more interesting and, perhaps, paradigmatic. 2

Shifting Horizons

From the extensive Danish scholarship on Brandes, two influential narratives of development can be distilled. First is an ideological and methodological one put forward by literary scholars, pointing to a gradual shift of interest from the social to the individual – from “main currents” as quasi-natural, social forces to “great personalities” as the source of culture.5 The second is biographical, framed by Jørgen Knudsen in his seminal biography, where the master-plot underlying the meticulously researched volumes is a tale of heroic loss, accounting for the freethinking protagonist’s personal and ideological battles, with his succès de scandal of the Main Currents lectures in the early 1870s and his bold, but ostracizing call for neutrality in the First World War as structuring events.6 Alternatively, a cruder, geographical trajectory could be suggested to describe Brandes’ development. One could argue that, gradually, Brandes’ Danish identity was complemented by a Scandinavian, a European, and, finally, but debatably, a global one. As shown in other chapters in this book, Brandes had established a name for himself as a major European critic and intellectual around 1900; he was the

4 Apter, Against World Literature; Nygård and Strang, “Facing asymmetry,” 75–97. 5 Drawing on Paul V. Rubow’s and Henning Fenger’s studies of trajectories in Brandes’ methodology, Sven Møller Kristensen has summarized the development as follows: “from cultural and intellectual history to a more biographical and psychological approach, from Taine to Sainte-Beuve, from currents to portraits,” Kristensen, Georg Brandes, 11. 6 Accordingly, the last of the five volumes of the biography (1985–2004) are titled “Invincible Loser,” cf. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Uovervindelig taber.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

262

Bjerring-Hansen

“good European,” according to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy Brandes had “discovered” and popularized.7 In the latter part of Brandes’ life and work, however, the world became more and more important, as both frame and subject. The development of the global signature “Brandes” is indicated by his choice of topics and titles. Instead of dealing with groups of authors, as he did in Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century (1886, German original: Moderne Geister, 1882), The Men of the Modern Breakthrough (Danish original, 1883), and, of course, Main Currents, his later books were both scaled up in terms of size and narrowed down in terms of focus, presenting an array of universal geniuses, among others William Shakespeare (Danish and English editions, 1896), Goethe (1914, English edition, 1924), Françoise de Voltaire (1916–1917, English edition, 1930), Cajus Julius Cæsar (1918), and Michelangelo (1921, English edition, 1963). Other works from this period dealt with transnational phenomena and events, as for instance his essay on world literature and his book on the First World War, The World at War (1916, English edition 1917). Accordingly, Brandes’ network, correspondence, and travels expanded beyond Europe. If we look at the actual impact of his writings from a broad perspective, Brandes himself noted self-consciously – or, perhaps, braggingly: “I have my readers in Europe, Asia, and America. I am of a different nature than those who address themselves to the Danish bourgeoisie.”8 This understanding of global importance was not without reason, however, as suggested by the statement of a contemporary Chinese critic, Zhen Zhenduo, that Brandes belonged “not to Denmark, but to the world.”9 His high esteem of Brandes was primarily based on Main Currents, which played an important role in the introduction of Continental European literature and thought to China. No less interesting is the fact that the global trend of Brandes’ authorship can be traced through displacements in the mental geography of his texts. One striking example of this is his adaptation of a device borrowed from Enlightenment discourse, that of the neutral foreign visitor – more precisely an inhabitant of the star Sirius, most likely inspired by the protagonist of Voltaire’s science fiction novel Micromegas.10 In the 1871 introductory lecture of Main Currents, this device was deployed to illuminate the backwardness and parochialism of Danish thought and literature: 7 8 9 10

Letter from Nietzsche to Brandes, 2 December 1887, Correspondance de Georg Brandes, 441. Brandes, “Georg Brandes og Socialdemokratiet.” Zhen Zhenduo, “Brandes, the Modern Danish Critic,” quoted from Shoutong, “Uden for Europa,” 185. On the relationship between Brandes and Voltaire, see Bjerring-Hansen, “Fremmede blikke.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

263

Put a couple of foreign dramas – for example, Dumas’s Le fils naturel (The Natural Son), Émile Augier’s Le fils de Giboyer (The Son of Giboyer) and Les effrontés (The Brazen) – into the hands of an inhabitant of Syrius who has read only the classics of our modern literature, and he will acquaint himself with innumerable social conditions and social problems that he did not know about, because although they exist in our society, they do not exist in our literature, for moral outrage has as its counterpart moral prudery.11 The important thing to note here is not the actual point being made, but, rather, the communication strategy: even though a radical and provocative comparative European perspective is being presented, the speaker – to begin with, in fact an actual public speaker – is Danish, addressing a Danish audience (which, after the publication of this lecture in Emigrant Literature in 1872 and the consequent fierce debate, would grow into a Scandinavian one). As a demonstration of both the intellectual potential in Brandes’ original introduction and the international trend of his authorship, the preface to a Japanese edition of Main Currents is highly interesting. Here, almost 50 years later, the alien from the remote star is put to new use: The Japanese reader looks upon most of the social and literary views which are portrayed here as the inhabitants of a different globe would look upon the codes of honor of the Earthlings and the struggles between the Peoples of the Earth which can be deduced from them. In fact, the Japanese is identical to the inhabitant of Syrius, to whom the author appeals in the introduction to the work. He inhabits another continent and a country which, like a different globe, for thousands of years have had no contact with Europe. His civilization has its roots in China, ours in Greece and Rome and Palestine. He has his share of prejudices, but not a single of the prejudices with which a European is born.12 The shift is clear. Now, this is not a Dane talking, but a European with an intercontinental outlook. Brandes clearly sought to situate and promote his work in a modern worldwide reality as a tool for intercultural understanding. Main Currents had been repurposed by the author’s emphasis on the comparative methodology of the work, rather than the ideological critique, so that the 11 12

Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction,” 704. Brandes, “Forord til en japansk udgave af Hovedstrømninger.” The edition was published in Tokyo in a translation by Junsuku Suita.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

264

Bjerring-Hansen

potential audience was no longer Danish, nor European, but global. From an authorial perspective, this authorized edition seems to exemplify the perfect model of international textual transmission, where the author controls the text to some degree, and also the “paratexts,” such as the foreword and introduction, which frame and present the text.13 We do not know much about the Japanese edition in terms of its success and appropriation, except for the fact that the Chinese translator of Main Currents, Shih Heng, used it, but only for comparison purposes. The main basis for his immensely widespread translation was the English version.14 This points directly to the decisive, yet, for Brandes, also uncomfortable and uncontrollable role that English had come to play in the globalizing circulation of literature. 3

Outside the Territory

In the early twentieth century, Georg Brandes added, in essays as well as private letters, two important complications to Goethe’s famous, hopeful notions of Weltliteratur from the early nineteenth century.15 Both are relevant for the understanding of his own authorial practices and mentality. The first critical update of the concept had to do with the cultural asymmetries between periphery and center. In his essay on world literature from 1899, Brandes sided with the Finns, Hungarians, Swedes, and so on who were bemoaning the unfeasible situation of minor languages and literatures in the “universal struggle for world renown.” In this, Brandes was conforming to a principle of his, discussed in Stefan Nygård’s chapter in this book – namely that of rejecting any parochial tendencies of hegemonic countries, in alignment with his tireless engagement in the concerns of oppressed peoples in various European conflict zones, attested to in his writings, speeches, and activism from the 1890s onward.16 Around 1900, Brandes’ perspective in discussions like these was essentially that of Continental Europe. In the essay, he allied himself with the dominated periphery, but his thoughts were published in Vienna, in the heart of

13 14 15 16

Genette, Paratexts. On the complicated issue of the Chinese editions of Main Currents, see Jensen, “Georg Brandes på kinesisk.” Goethe’s scattered remarks on world literature are collected and commented on in Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur. On this topic, see William Banks’ recent documentation and introduction in Brandes, Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

265

the continent, and expressed in impeccable German, one of the dominating languages. However, in 1913, in a short speech in London delivered at the English authors’ “Celebratory Dinner for Dr. George Brandes,” previously unnoted in the discussions of Brandes’ work on world literature, the guest of honor would give another critical update on the concept by addressing the new and dominant role of the English language as a vehicle of literary communication and thus scaling the issue up to a more genuinely global one. In the speech, Brandes repeated many of the key arguments and expressions from his 1899 essay, albeit, for the sake of courtesy, leaving out the recurring war and fight club metaphors. Given that “to a writer the language means almost everything,” Brandes asks for compassion for the fate of a Danish writer, which he continues to compare with the conditions of his English-speaking colleagues: Every line written by an Englishman can be read by several hundred million people. When a Dane travels only two hours south of Copenhagen, he is outside the territory where his language is understood.17 To reach this high number of English-reading people Brandes had to look beyond Europe to former British colonies, whether in the United States, India, or Oceania. Essentially, he sketched the axis from the North American East Coast via London and Europe in general and on to South Asia in which, according to the historian Charles S. Maier, “communication space had started to condense at hitherto impossible rates.”18 He addressed a global republic of letters with English as its backbone, compared to which not only marginal, but also major European literatures had a disadvantage in terms of numbers and dynamics, including the German, in which he was more or less naturalized, and the French, in which he had fought for recognition. In this polite complaint about English being the new lingua franca, Brandes touched upon a theme which has also drawn critical attention in the current wave of globalization; for instance, Pascale Casanova cautions against the dominating and segregating cultural effects of anglicization, and Anna Wierzbicka warns against diminishing nuance in intellectual exchange in the global adoption of English.19 These exact arguments can be inferred from Brandes by linking his warnings in the essay on world literature with his later awareness of the decisive shift towards English.

17 18 19

Brandes, “Tale ved Engelske Forfatteres Fest,” 294. Maier, Once Within Borders, 213. See Pascale Casanova, La Langue mondiale; Anna Wierzbicka, Imprisoned in English.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

266

Bjerring-Hansen

Brandes could joke about the language issue, as seen in a letter to Danish writer Henrik Pontoppidan: “It is a disaster that English has become a world language. Now, a critic gets even more rubbish in his house,” he writes, after having given examples of curious letters from all over the world received on a given day.20 Of course, he benefitted immensely from the new situation, which opened doors to opportunities in new parts of the world in terms of translations, travels, and networks, as well as headlines and bylines in the press. He felt uneasy, however, with the globalization of English, not only because of the cultural and linguistic “domain loss” facing old Europe and the “good European,” but also, importantly, due to a lack of authorial control, which posed both practical and mental challenges for him. A fundamental and obvious challenge was his shortcomings with the English language. Brandes was a product of an educational system and a traditional model of Bildung that deprioritized English in favor of German and French (as well as Latin and Greek). In the last half of the nineteenth century, an increased awareness of English became more important.21 Brandes, with 50 years of hindsight, this in a summary of the situation at the time of his education: Of foreign literature mostly German was read in Denmark, despite the ill will against Germany after the two [Schleswig] wars, and nonGerman literature mostly in German translations. Even Kierkegaard cited Shakespeare in German. English was not taught in high schools.22 Brandes could read English, and he wrote books on English literature: Naturalism in England (1874, first English edition 1902), the book on Disraeli’s writings, Lord Beaconsfield (first Danish and English editions 1878), and William Shakespeare. A Critical Study (1896, first edition in English, out of a total of 19, 1898). He was, however, extremely uncomfortable when it came to written, let alone spoken, English. During his first meeting with John Stuart Mill in London 1870 the young Danish critic and the English philosopher spoke French together.23 In 1895, in a speech at the London Author’s Club, Brandes excused his ‘poor’ 20 21

22 23

Letter from Brandes to Henrik Pontoppidan, 21 November 1911, https://www.henrikpont oppidan.dk/text/seclit/secbreve/brandes_georg/1911_11_21.html. In 1851, the University of Copenhagen established a professorship in English, and in 1864 – the year of the fatal defeat of Denmark to Germany in the Second Schleswig War – English became an elective in the school system; see Rasmussen, Modernitet eller åndsdannelse; Rix, Naturalism in England. Brandes, “Forord,” iv. See Brandes, Levned, vol. 1, 317. The first volume of the autobiography was published under the title Recollections of My Childhood and Youth.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

267

English, but assured the audience that he could “read it with ease.”24 And, as a final example, in a private letter from 1913, during his third and final English lecture tour and shortly after the speech addressing English as a lingua franca, Brandes would express his bewilderment over the fact that he was widely celebrated, even though his English skills were, as he says, “almost non-existent.”25 Brandes’ linguistic deficiency, or strong sense of it, was by no means uncommon. Importantly, though, it supported two more literary aspects of his unease when confronting global English and acting on the world stage: the translation and transmission of his texts. 4

“How Translation Is Done”

In Brandes’ essay on “World Literature” translation is considered a process of loss: “The choice of words and their tone, the architecture of sentences and their music, the peculiarity of linguistic expressions, everything disappears. Translations are not even casts,” Brandes notes in the slightly expanded Danish version of the essay.26 Admittedly, this point is something of a truism, and an unoriginal one at that, but what really matters is the strength of his opinion and his personal engagement in the issue of translation, both of which are evident in a letter from 1901 to the French literary historian Fernand Baldensperger, the later co-founder of the Revue de littérature comparée, for which he would write Brandes’ obituary (1927). The letter is in French, but in a short paragraph concerning the essay on “World Literature,” which Baldensperger had been skeptical about, Brandes explains himself in Danish (here in English translation): Regarding the little piece on world literature, in which something has upset you, the only – and true – purpose was merely to protest against the assumption that what really is written in one of the minor languages can be transmitted without an immense loss for the author concerned. He loses immeasurably and therefore he is outshined on the international marketplace by far inferior writers, writing in their own language. The whole article was written in a hurry on a morning at a French beach 24 25 26

Brandes, “Tale i The Authors Club i London,” 428. Letter from Georg Brandes to Henrik Nathansen, 8 December 1913, https://www.henrik pontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secbreve/brandes_georg/1913_12_08.html. Brandes, “Verdenslitteratur,” 34. The Danish version of the essay was originally published in Tilskueren in 1900. The quoted passage does not appear in the German version from the year before.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

268

Bjerring-Hansen

resort and I have forgotten about it again. What you are saying on the issue is much more thought-through and important. (I was a little sad to see that you read me in German.)27 From the context, it does not seem like the French professor got the practical joke of “untranslating” that Brandes played on him. The point of it, and of the essay as a whole, seems pretty clear, though: it was not an academic or exhaustive piece about world literature, merely a “protest,” biased and full of self-identification. Later in his career, it is interesting how Brandes again related the caveats of the internationalization of literature, as he saw them, to the constraints of anglicization. As late as 1924, three years before his death, he expressed his frustrations even more clearly. In a letter to his friend the Danish writer Henrik Nathansen, he complained about his book sales in Denmark, adding: But this would be of no importance, if only I was writing in a language which could be read untranslated and undemolished in England and America, but, in reality, Danish is a jargon, not a language.28 At numerous public occasions he had celebrated his mother tongue, but now he is berating Danish for its niche character and failing impact. In pessimistic moments like this, Brandes is back in the identity of the periphery as the poor Dane, subjugated to the economic powers of the world and highly skeptical of the possibilities of a genuine global breakthrough. Regardless of whether translation is considered a necessary evil, albeit an enterprise of loss (according to Brandes around 1900), or a completely futile and senseless exercise (Brandes as of 1924), the optimistic notions of world literature – Goethe’s from some hundred years before, and David Damrosch’s, from some hundred years after – are contested. Damrosch defined world literature as “literature that gains in translation,”29 but in shifting the perspective from that of the receivers in the centers of the global literary system to that of the peripheral authors, this definition does not always hold true. Matters may turn out to be less fashionable when considering the “sociology of translation” (Sapiro) with attention to the

27 28 29

Baldensperger, “Four Unpublished Letters,” 319 (emphasis original). Letter from Georg Brandes to Henrik Nathansen, 8 November 1924 (emphasis original). https://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk/text/seclit/secbreve/brandes_georg/1924_11_08 .html. Damrosch, What is World Literature?, 288–297.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

269

crucial, but often forgotten middlemen – the translators – and to the actual practices of translatory work. An anecdote from 1889 serves to illustrate this. Under the headline “How translating is done,” it was (re)told in an Irish newspaper five years later, indicating that it was probably in international circulation. The story deals with Brandes’ travel memoirs and essays from his journey to Russia, published in book form under the Danish title Indtryk fra Rusland (1888). In the English translation by S.C. Eastman, the book was given the title Impressions of Russia, though the more correct translation would have been “from Russia,” blurring the genre and character of the work. The anecdote, which does not mention the title of the book or the name of the translator, gives the context for this awkward error. By coincidence, the American translator stopped in Copenhagen on a journey through Europe and had to stay there for a few months, because his wife had broken her leg. He passed the time by translating a completely random Danish book. “With the help of a dictionary, I translated it, but I didn’t know a word of your language when I began,” the translator wrote in a letter to Brandes after his return home. For the author, however, the fun stopped there. The anecdote ends by mentioning that the book was published in several editions in America.30 As documented by Einar Haugen, Brandes was furious to learn about the error-filled translation. In his later memoirs, however, there is no trace of his earlier anger. Eastman’s translation is mentioned as “on the whole accurate and satisfactory.”31 Haugen sees this contradiction as an “oddity,” but it in fact points directly to the precarious and dilemmatic social aspects of translation.32 Remembering Ernest Renan’s words that “a work that has not been translated is only half published,” a translation is, per se, valuable from the author’s point of view.33 Considering Brandes’ particular situation in the early twentieth century and his aspirations to be (and be considered) an author with global reach and success, these social explanations for the euphemisms of the memoirs, as well as the anonymity of the anecdote, make even more sense. Similar stories are associated with other English translations of Brandes’ works. The first was his book on Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, published in 1879, the year after the Danish original and the same year as the German edition, which was the basis for the translation by a “Mrs. Sturge.” It was full of errors, for instance the word indisch (Indian) was rendered as “Jewish,” 30 31 32 33

“How translating is done.” Brandes, Levned, vol. 3, 238. Haugen, “Georg Brandes,” 484. Quoted in Birus, “Debating World Literature,” 258.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

270

Bjerring-Hansen

presumably because of the translator’s inability to deal with the intricacies of the blackletter typeface in the German book she was using. Brandes learnt about the quality of the translation in a letter from the Norwegian-American Rasmus B. Anderson, who, at the same time, took the opportunity to recommend himself as Brandes’ translator and promoter in America. Haugen is critical of the quality of Anderson’s translations, and it can be added that his assessment was shared by the book’s English-speaking critics. In 1886, Anderson had translated Brandes’ Moderne Geister (German first edition 1882) for the American market under the title Eminent Authors. When the British edition was published in 1925, an unimpressed reviewer from The Guardian concluded his assessment by observing: “The translation, by a Danish-American, is very imperfect.”34 What happened to some of Brandes’ works in English, due to the barriers of distance and language as well as outright dilettantism, was out of the author’s control; nonetheless, it was by no means trivial for him and for his ambitions of an American breakthrough. The translations were acts of “manipulation,” to draw on André Lefevere’s realistic theory of translation – they were of the kind that threatened rather than deepened the texts and literary fame of the author.35 Further, an unregulated literary marketplace, in terms of protection against British reprints of American editions and vice versa, allowed for the erroneous texts to be perpetuated. This is evident in the case of Eminent Authors (with more than 40 years between the US and the UK editions), as well as in the enormous multiplication of the dubious texts of Lord Beaconsfield. Within a year, the London edition (from Bentley Publishers, 1880) was reissued in piratical editions by two publishers in New York (Scribner’s Sons and Harper’s Library). In his memoirs, Brandes claims that a hundred thousand copies of the Harper’s book were sold at 15 cents, without ever him receiving any money or even being asked for permission in the first place.36 Of course, he does not mention the quality of the translation. 5

The Transmission of Main Currents in the US

Brandes’ Shakespeare book, which was translated into English in 1898, had established his recognition in England and the US, and his lecture tours in these countries were outright triumphs, as noted by Bertil Nolin.37 Brandes 34 35 36 37

Brandes, “Eminent Authors.” Lefevere, Translation. Georg Brandes, Levned, vol. 2, 323. Nolin, Georg Brandes, 84.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

271

worked with William Heinemann in London, a serious publisher with ambitions in terms of promoting and selling Scandinavian literature, which had controlled Henrik Ibsen’s publications in English since 1890. Heinemann was also well-connected in the blossoming book market in the US through a cooperation with Macmillan Publishers in New York, who commissioned the American edition of Main Currents, published alongside the English edition in 1901–1905. Thus, on the face of it, seen from the perspective of the author, the English-American history of Brandes’ main work is a happy one, framed by orderly legal conditions, supported by capable people, including translators, and, all in all, marked by a high degree of authorial control. Digging deeper into the story, however, there are important nuances to be made, which testify not only to the intricacies of translation, but also to the instability and dynamics of transnational textual transmission. By the early 1880s Brandes and Rasmus B. Anderson had already agreed on an American edition of Main Currents. The Norwegian-American was a translator as well as a friend of the famous Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and an avid supporter of modern Scandinavian literature; he had given up his professorship in Scandinavian Languages at the University of Wisconsin for a part-time job selling life insurance in order to finance an early retirement devoted to Scandinavian Studies. A few years later, however, he was appointed as the United States’ ambassador to Denmark, where he lived from 1885 to 1889. On his return to the States, he lost interest in Brandes and the Modern Breakthrough of Scandinavian literature. “The fact was that I had already begun drifting away from the Ibsen, Bjørnson, Brandes, Garborg school in Scandinavian literature. I was struggling to find my way back to my old, more conservative mooring,” he explains in his 1915 memoirs.38 The long but rather fruitless relationship between Brandes and Anderson is, as Einar Haugen rightly notes, an interesting chapter in the history “of the slow infiltration of European literary currents into the English-speaking countries.”39 As early as 1881, in a letter to Bjørnson, Anderson had hinted at the social and moral prejudices behind this slowness or lateness on the part of America: I am undertaking an American edition of Brandes’ writings. I have read Gengangere (Henrik Ibsen), Else (Kristian Elster), Farlige Folk (Alexander Kielland), Arbeidsfolk (Kielland), Moderne Geister (Brandes). Splendid,

38 39

Quoted in Haugen, “American Translators,” 485. Haugen, “American Translators,” 487.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

272

Bjerring-Hansen

splendid, all of it!!! But this kind of literature wouldn’t do in America. Strangely enough, the people are not ripe for it.40 Anderson’s doubts and hesitation resulted in ten years of futile preparations for the American edition of Main Currents. Adding further complications to the apparent imbalances and asynchronicities between Scandinavian and American literary life, in 1889, the year when Anderson left Copenhagen, Brandes would more or less denounce the legacy of his own radical agenda as presented in the original introduction to Main Currents in favor of Nietzsche and other “great personalities.” Literary and intellectual life was, according to Brandes, “messing with the same ideas” – Darwinism, freethinking, the emancipation of women, and so on – which urged him to reinvent himself.41 In other words, not only the Americans, in Anderson’s understanding of them, but also the Danish author himself were strangers to the original motivations of the work. However, from the very beginning of the dialogue with Anderson, Brandes was acutely aware of the problems of translating Main Currents. His bitter experiences from the two competing German editions, of which one was a direct translation from the Danish and the other a revision for which Brandes was his own translator, had made him attentive to the problems regarding the polemical and local Danish aspects of the work’s first editions. He thus suggested that the translation Emigrant Literature should be based on the German revision, rather than the Danish original: I have revised the first volume of the German Edition for foreigners. […] It differs from the Danish second edition by some minor improvements, but primarily because everything in the Introduction that solely had to with Denmark is deleted.42 There are different hypotheses about the reasons for Brandes’ revision of his main work, which he effectuated in first German, then Danish second editions.43 Was it due to an ideological and methodological shift? Or to the lack of international copyright protection? Brandes’ own additional argument for universalizing the text is interesting. The revisions took place for the sake of 40 41 42 43

Haugen, “American Translators,” 470–471. Brandes, “Aristokratisk Radikalisme,” 612. Letter from Brandes to R.B. Anderson, 17 August 1881, translated in Haugen, “American Translators,” 467. See Bjerring-Hansen, “Romantik, Modernität und Copyright,” 121–142.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

273

the international audience. It was, in other words, a question of pragmatics or cross-cultural “code-switching,” as linguists would say. In this regard, the accommodation of the paratext to given cultural norms was, of course, particularly important. Thus, the eventual British edition and the identical US edition, anonymously translated by the two British women Diana White and Mary Morison, were reshaped. The text was based on the revised Danish edition and the new introduction was heavily reduced and redacted, with no mentions of or allusions to Danish conditions. It appears in perfect alignment with the author’s intention that the book was to be promoted with an emphasis on methodology, rather than ideology. A review in the New York Daily Tribune accordingly highlighted Brandes’ comparative perspective as a selling point: “The comparative view of various literatures,” Brandes thinks, “possesses the double advantage of bringing foreign literature so near to us that we can assimilate it, and of removing our own until we are able to see it.”44 This passage was left over from the 1871 introduction, but perfectly fitted Brandes’ more genuinely international agenda, which was also clear in the preface to the Japanese edition, and, further, coincided perfectly with a growing American interest in comparative literature. Around this time, the first US departments and programs devoted to the field came about.45 In other words, the Brandes who appeared in New York (and London) around 1900 was the esteemed and fashionable Shakespeare scholar and critic, not the “troublemaker,” to borrow a phrase from Bertil Nolin.46 There is another strand of the story, though, in which the troublemaker appears. In 1914, during Brandes’ US tour, the following could be read in the political and literary magazine The Dial, a statement which for Scandinavians is so commonplace that it is almost odd to read it in translation: “‘A living literature’, Brandes says, ‘brings problems up for debate’ and ‘for a literature to bring nothing up for debate is the same thing as to lose all its significance’.”47 In a Scandinavian context this statement, originally addressing contemporary, local authors, was, and still is, the most famous part of the original introductory lecture. At least in Denmark and Norway, it is a phrase which, in the standard narrative, encapsulates the aspirations of social and cultural reform of 44 45 46 47

New York Daily Tribune, 29 June 1901. See Engberg-Pedersen, “Reaction in France.” Nolin, Georg Brandes, 31. “The Great Dane,” The Dial, 1 June 1914.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

274

Bjerring-Hansen

the literary movement, which Brandes himself would give name the “Modern Breakthrough.” By 1914, Brandes had long since distanced himself from this sort of group thinking and manifesto rhetoric, and, of course, it was left out of the English translations of Main Currents. But why was the statement and, thus, the old, radical version of its author circulating in the American press 50 years later, operating in the present tense (“he says”)? One possible explanation may be found in a forgotten piece of translation and promotion by the journalist and critic Morton Payne. In 1895 Payne had introduced Brandes in the vast Library of the World’s Best Literature – Ancient and Modern, a handbook for speedy European Bildung, which was published in several new editions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was well informed on modern Scandinavian literature, which he read and translated from the original languages. Further, his inclusion of the likes of Henrik Ibsen and Arne Garborg in the library clearly suggests an interest in the more radical strands of the new – or, rather, newish – Scandinavian literature, which is noteworthy, and also reflected in the section on Brandes. Payne put emphasis on the Danish critic’s progressive period in Copenhagen before the years of exile in Berlin from 1877, and as a sample of his work he chose the opening polemical pages of the original, unrevised Introduction to Main Currents.48 The case of the first, yet belated translation of the Introduction bears witness to the notion of Pierre Bourdieu that “texts circulate without their contexts” when crossing borders.49 A text which in its original field of production had already become a document of literary history was given new life in a different cultural context. From the point of view of the author, these fascinating dynamics posed challenges. Having come to the US primarily on his merits as a (Shakespeare) scholar and (famous) critic, Brandes was confronted with his old, activist aesthetic ideas, which he had tried hard to keep out of international circulation.

48

49

A Library of the World’s Best Literature, including: a biographical sketch by William Morton Payne, 2299–2303; an excerpt from a chapter on Bjørnson from Eminent Authors, 2303–2306; and finally, an excerpt from the Introduction to Main Currents translated by Payne himself, 2306–2311. For a recent English translation of the full introduction by Lynn Wilkinson, see Brandes, “The 1872 Introduction.” Bourdieu, “The Social Conditions,” 4.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

6

275

Brandes in America, 1914

To sum up, this chapter has attempted to bring nuance to the story of how and with what consequences Brandes was globalized, by pointing to the importance of the instability of translation and transmission as well as the related issues of asymmetry and asynchronicity. Importantly, these consequences were not only practical and economical, but also psychological – as evidenced by both private letters and public speeches and essays, including the essay on “World Literature,” which can be read as a personal protest against parochialism in the international circulation of texts. As a concluding perspective, the psychological aspects of the story can be developed a little further by addressing the climax of Brandes’ aspirations for global success: his visit to America in 1914. Taking place just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War – perhaps the single most important event in the history of globalization – the visit was in come ways a paradigmatic example of the cultural aspects of the process. In the 1899 essay, Brandes situated world literature in “the extraordinary upswing in the means of transportation between peoples and the immense spread of the daily press,”50 providing an avant la lettre definition of the global condition as well as framing his travels in America and the infrastructure that facilitated them: the Hamburg– America steamship line, the railroad links between the stations of the tour (New York, Boston, Chicago), and the intense, day-by-day coverage of every lecture, gala, and banquet in both American and Danish newspapers (facilitated by the Atlantic Cable).51 According to the Chicago Tribune, “the United States have never before had a visit from a guest whose presence has been as stimulating and valuable for the entire society.”52 This rather shallow claim of Brandes’ universal appeal is true to the extent that, as Julie K. Allen has pointed out, Brandes attracted various American ethnic communities (Danes, Norwegians, Germans, Poles, Jews, and so on) with vested interests in him. Accordingly, Brandes delivered his lectures alternately in English, Danish, and German, “reflecting these multinational affiliations.”53 He was thus provided with multiple identities:

50 51 52 53

Brandes, “Weltliteratur,” 3. See Knudsen, Uovervindelig taber, vol. 2, 555–562; Allen, 110–115. The Danish-American journalist C.H.W. Hasselriis has documented important feature articles and interviews from Brandes’ visit; see Brandes, Besøg i Amerika. Hasselriis, “Georg Brandes.” Allen, Icons, 112. Prior to the trip, Brandes had taken English lessons; see Knudsen, Uovervindelig taber, vol. 2, 558.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

276

Bjerring-Hansen

the great Dane

The Dial, 1 June 1914

the most distinguished Scandinavian man of letters Chicago Herald, 23 May 1914

a distinguished representative of European letters The Outlook, 6 June 1914

the great cosmopolitan

Minneapolis Journal, 27 May 1914

These designations reflect the multitude of modes that make up world literature, according to Alexander Beecroft, and between which we have seen transfer as well as contestation and conflict in the case of Brandes: the national (Denmark), the regional (both Scandinavia and, more broadly, Europe), and the global (the US, Japan, and China).54 It is worth noting that these words were just that – hyperbolic journalistic hype full of platitudes, as well as sloppy research and misunderstandings. Brandes played along, although with double tongue, as Jørgen Knudsen has documented, by praising America in interviews (“Materialism? Rubbish! Aren’t we all materialists now and then?” he said in the New York Times under the headline “Europe is finished”), while lamenting American barbarism and shallowness in his diary.55 Back in Denmark, his reflections on the global experience would be marked by a similar ambiguity or doubt. In a private letter to Pontoppidan, two days before the killing in Sarajevo and just a month before the outbreak of the war, which would force him out into the world again (see Martin Zerlang’s chapter below), he wrote: After having seen hundreds of people a day for six weeks in a row, my mood is like that of a person marooned on a desert island. I hardly know or see anybody in Copenhagen and cannot overcome myself to seek out others. Copenhagen is to me the peaceful exile.56

54 55 56

See Beecroft, “World Literature,” 87–100. Knudsen, Uovervindelig taber 2, 565. Letter from Brandes to Pontoppidan, 26 June 1914, https://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk /text/seclit/secbreve/brandes_georg/1914_06_26.html.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

277

While there may have been some irony in Brandes’ comments about his situation and feelings on his return, there is a bigger irony at play here in the idea of home as exile. In his scandalous success, Emigrant Literature, which forced him out of academia and eventually drove him to Berlin, he had hailed the French emigrés with their cosmopolitanism and opposition to Napoleonic order.57 Here, rather than aesthetic and cultural potential, it is the basic conditions of his exile that Brandes idealizes – solitude and stillness – while expressing both the principal dilemma of in-betweenness and his own fascination and unease with the global. References A Library of the World’s Best Literature – Ancient and Modern, vol. 5, Bismarck–Brandt, edited by Charles Dudley Warner. New York: Peale & Hill, Publishers, 1895. Allen, Julie K.: Icons of Danish Modernity. Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Apter, Emily: Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Baldensperger, Fernand: “Four Unpublished Letters of Georg Brandes,” Scandinavian Studies 18/8 (November 1945): 317–320. Beecroft, Alexander: “World Literature Without a Hyphen,” New Left Review 54 (November–December 2008): 87–100. Birus, Hendrik: “Debating World Literature. a Retrospect,” Journal of World Literature 3/3 (August 2018): 239–266. Bjerring-Hansen, Jens: “Fremmede blikke: Ekkoer fra 1700-tallet hos Georg Brandes,” Danske Studier (2018): 69–88. Bourdieu, Pierre: “The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 145/5 (2002): 3–8. Brandes, Georg: “Aristokratisk Radikalisme,” Tilskueren 6 (August 1889): 565–613. Brandes, Georg: “Weltliteratur,” Das Literarische Echo 17 (June 1899): 1–5. Brandes, Georg: “Verdenslitteratur,” in: Verdenslitterær kritik og teori, edited by Mads Rosendahl Thomsen. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2008 [1900], 31–36. Brandes, Georg: “Tale i The Authors Club i London,” in: Samlede Skrifter, vol. 15. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905 [1895], 428–429. Brandes, Georg: Levned, 3 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905, 1907, and 1908.

57

See Torben Jelsbak’s chapter in this book.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

278

Bjerring-Hansen

Brandes, Georg: Besøg i Amerika Maj–Juni 1914, edited by C.H.W. Hasselriis. Chicago: The Danish-American Association, 1914. Brandes, Georg: “Forord til en japansk udgave af Hovedstrømninger,” Politiken, 23 July 1915. Brandes, Georg: “Tale ved Engelske Forfatteres Fest. London, 27. November 1913,” in: Napoleon og Garibaldi. Medaljer og Rids. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1917, 292–295. Brandes, Georg: “Forord,” in: Hovedstrøminger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur, 6th ed. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1923. Brandes, Georg: “Georg Brandes og Socialdemokratiet,” Social-Demokraten, 22 November 1924. Brandes, Georg: “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature),” introduced and translated by Lynn Wilkinson, pmla 132/3 (May 2017): 696–705. Brandes, Georg: Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples. Collected Essays and Speeches, edited by William Banks. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. Casanova, Pascale: La Langue mondiale: Traduction et domination. Paris: Seuil, 2015. Correspondance de Georg Brandes, vol. 3, edited by Paul Krüger. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1966. Damrosch, David: What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Engberg-Pedersen, Anders: “Reaction in France (1874). An introduction,” chapter 4, “Reception and afterlife.” Georg Brandes. Digital Currents, 2018. https: //georgbrandes.dk/research/2introductions/engberg_hs3_1874_res_2introductions _en.html#reception. Accessed 17 September 2021. Genette, Gérard: Paratexts. Thresholds of interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hasselriis, C.H.W.: “Georg Brandes blandt sine Landsmænd,” Politiken, 28 May 1914. Haugen, Einar: “Georg Brandes and His American Translators,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 37/4 (October 1938): 462–487. “How translating is done,” The Evening Telegraph (Dublin), 8 March 1894. Jensen, Claus Hermann: “Georg Brandes på kinesisk,” Fund og Forskning 14 (1967): 91–102. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes, 5 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985–2004. Kristensen, Sven Møller: Georg Brandes. Kritikeren – liberalisten – humanisten. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1980. Lefevere, André: Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge, 2017. Maier, Charles S.: Once Within Borders – Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging since 1500. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. McKenzie, D.F.: Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. The Panizzi Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Nolin, Bertil: Georg Brandes. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Universal Struggle for World Renown

279

Nygård, Stefan and Johan Nygård: “Facing asymmetry: Nordic intellectuals and centerperiphery dynamics in European cultural space,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77/ 1 (January 2016): 75–97. Piketty, Thomas: Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, Mass./London: Belknap Press, 2013. Rahbek Rasmussen, Jens: Modernitet eller åndsdannelse? Engelsk i skole og samfund 1800–1935. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003. Rix, Robert William: “Naturalism in England (1875). An Introduction,” Georg Brandes. Digital Currents, 2018. https://georgbrandes.dk/research/2introductions/rix_hs4 _1875_res_2introductions_en.html. Accessed 17 September 2021. Sapiro, Gisèle: “The Sociology of Translation: a New Research Domain,” in: A Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014, 82–94. Shoutong, Zhu: “Uden for Europa: Georg Brandes og Kina,” in: Georg Brandes og Europa, edited by Olav Harsløf. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004, 285–303. Strich, Fritx: Goethe und die Weltliteratur. Bern: Francke, 1946. “The Great Dane,” The Dial, 1 June 1914. Wierzbicka, Anna: Imprisoned in English: the Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 13

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism in his Later Writings Søren Blak Hjortshøj The fin de siècle has been called the first period of intensified globalization in modern European history.1 Similar to our present-day global age, this was a period of accelerated change and increasing transnational connections: in most Western European national states, liberal democracy and capitalism took their last definitive steps to replace the former Old World structures at this time. Industrialization, massive urbanization, alienation and rootlessness, and the domination of modern political ideologies and rationalistic science over Old-World feudal and Christian-related values and norms were also key elements in this transition to the modern world. The vast changes of the fin de siècle period were nevertheless highly contested. According to the classic studies by Reinhardt Rürup and Shulamit Volkov,2 modern antisemitism developed as an ideology and cultural code in this period. Cosmopolitanism and rootlessness were identified as predominantly Jewish characteristics, and connected with the changes that came with intensified globalization.3 All over Western Europe (and not merely in Germany), Jews and Jewishness were thus identified as a medium of and central actors in these changes. Georg Brandes’ greatest achievements and failures as a public intellectual also took place in the fin de siècle period. From his earliest writings, Brandes had labeled himself a (Spinozist) liberal cosmopolitan and thematized the cosmopolitan tradition as Jewish.4 In the context of modern antisemitism as a trans-European phenomenon, this chapter will demonstrate that Brandes’ alignment of cosmopolitanism and Jewishness had severe career consequences

1 Maier, Once Within Borders – Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging since 1500. 2 Volkov, Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert; Rürup, “Die ʻJudenfrage der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und die Entstehung des modernes Antisemitismus.” See also more recent research, such as Stanislawski, Zionism and Fin de Siécle; Geller, The Other Jewish Question – Identifying The Jew And Making Sense Of Modernity. 3 Ibid. 4 Hjortshøj, Son of Spinoza. Georg Brandes and the Modern Jewish Cosmopolitanism.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_015 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

281

for Brandes as a public intellectual. It will also shed light on how the reactions to this approach led Brandes to censor and erase his own previously written texts in his collected writings. Brandes made statements about cosmopolitanism and Jewishness in a time when cosmopolitanism, in the form of globalization, acquired an apocalyptic meaning – similar to how more and more people oppose and fear the intensified globalization processes of today. It was not in Hitler’s Nazi Germany of the 1930s that cosmopolitanism and Jewishness were originally interconnected and became a dominant cultural code through which developments were discussed and anticipated. Historical research that suggests racially based modern antisemitism became a dominant cultural code from the time when Hitler gained power in Germany is in fact focusing on the culmination of a much longer historical course of interconnected events and words. The present chapter will first show that it was primarily due to reactions to Brandes’ linking of Jewishness and cosmopolitanism that his seemingly predestined academic career ended before it had even begun. Of particular importance in this context is Brandes’ figure of the modern Jew and his key cosmopolitan ideal of the transnational vision. We will then see how, in Julius Lange (1898), Samlede Skrifter (1899–1910), and the three volumes of Levned (1905–1908), Brandes avoids Jewish-related and cosmopolitanism-related content and vocabulary. I will argue that these publishing strategies should be understood in the context of Brandes’ goal of becoming a professor, and being visibly included in and accepted by the Danish bourgeoisie. 1

Brandes’ Seemingly Predestined Academic Path

During the 1860s, Georg Brandes followed a designated path toward an impressive academic career.5 At the time, if a young scholar wanted an academic career, it was necessary for them to win the attention of one or more so-called patriarchal protectors.6 The previous Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen (then the only university in Denmark), Carsten Hauch, had uttered on his deathbed that the only candidate gifted enough to replace him was Georg Brandes. Besides this weighty approval, another professor at the University of Copenhagen, Hans Brøchner, recognized Brandes’ academic talent early on and thus Brandes became a promising intellectual 5 Jørgen Knudsen, Frigørelsens Vej 1842–77, 261–262. 6 See Larsen, “Professoratet – Videnskabelige Magtkampe i Det Filosofiske Fakultet 1870– 1920,” 62–77.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

282

Hjortshøj

protégé of Brøchner.7 Brøchner’s greatest and most substantial influence on Brandes concerned Spinoza and Spinozism, as has been shown in previous Brandes research.8 For many years, Brøchner himself had been categorized as a Spinozist liberal “freethinker” although, at this time – in the 1870s – so-called “freethinkers” were often professors and civil servants at universities. Brøchner was appointed a professor in 1870.9 With Brøchner’s protection and advice, Brandes gradually achieved the goals which would normally mark the beginning of a life-long academic career: he won the gold medal of the University in Copenhagen in 1863 and successfully submitted his doctoral thesis on Hippolyte Taine in 1869. When Brandes returned from a fully funded Bildungsreise in 1870–1871, he brought with him great plans for a lecture series that aimed to change the aesthetic ideals of Danish artists and writers, as well as the younger generations of the Copenhagen bourgeoisie. Instead of continuing to produce national Romantic art, Brandes advocated for Danish literature to follow the new genres of psychological realism and Naturalism which writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, and Victor Hugo were already doing in France. Hans Brøchner liked Brandes’ idea and even advised him to make it more wide-ranging, suggesting that it would win him greater public recognition as an insightful and innovative younger, talented scholar.10 The self-confident Brandes followed Brøchner’s advice and changed the topic of his lectures. Instead of focusing only on the French literary reactions to the French Revolution, Brandes now proposed a six-volume lecture series that would explain the main patterns of European literary history in the nineteenth century. The first lecture series, entitled Emigrantlitteraturen (1872), emphasized that the most important innovations resulting from this reaction to the French Revolution had been a result of the cosmopolitan “stranger” outlooks of emigré French writers looking back on French culture. Brandes’ subtext was an analogy to the Danish context; his opinion was that cultural and political changes had to occur in Denmark for it to develop into a genuinely modern liberal society. Specifically, Brandes observed that Denmark had isolated itself as a nation economically, politically, and culturally after losing the war against Prussia in 1864, since earlier in the nineteenth century it had been more closely connected to the southern German-speaking states than the other European nations of this period. Brandes was thus implicitly arguing that for Denmark to 7 8 9 10

Ibid. See Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens Vej 1842–1877, 68–71. Ibid. See Larsen, Professoratet, 64–65.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

283

have a chance of progressing into a genuine modern society, it should be on the basis of critical thinking and practice, which could dissolve the centuries-old feudal and Christian-related dogma that still dominated most of society and the relation between the citizens and the state. Thus, in the spirit of Spinoza, Brandes aimed at dissolving the remaining clerical and dogmatic ideas and structures by urging writers, painters, and the younger generations to provoke “debate.”11 Brandes’ key argument in Emigrantlitteraturen was that certain groups of people were better placed to demonstrate how the nation was still caught in the dogma and prejudices of the Old World: first, “natives” who had lived abroad for shorter or longer periods and thus acquired comparable perspectives on Danish norms, customs, and traditions; and second, individuals who had already developed a constructively alienated, cosmopolitan outlook due to their religious or cultural in-between position in society (such as individuals of Jewish descent). Such views were considered highly provocative in Denmark in the 1870s. In the leading Danish newspapers, it was noticed that this outspoken critique came from an individual of Jewish descent and thus from someone who, according to most commentators, should not be considered Danish.12 Following the publication of Emigrantlitteraturen, Brandes endured attacks from leading Danish figures, who characterized his work as a threat to the order of society and an attempt to subvert the national tradition.13 This connection of Brandes’ Jewish background with his intellectual ideas is in fact a rather well-known modern antisemitic stereotype of the fin de siècle period. The stereotype of the “rootless intellectual Jew” was widely used as a more salonfähig, bourgeois but still highly antisemitic argument for why university and other civil servant positions of the state could not be administered by individuals of Jewish descent.14 In the following years, mainly because of the stir that Emigrantlitteraturen had caused and the identification of Brandes as a subversive “Jewish” intellectual, threatening the national order, it became difficult for him even to earn a living in Denmark. As a result, he moved to Berlin in 1877, where he lived in “exile” until 1883, making a living by writing journalistic articles for German, Austrian, and French newspapers and magazines, along with the few Danish ones that would still publish his work. Brandes later returned to Copenhagen 11 12 13 14

See Georg Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen (1872),11–22. See Knudsen, Frigørelsens Vej, 1842–77, 237–280. Ibid. See, for example, Morris-Reich, The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

284

Hjortshøj

in 1883, when a group of men in the Copenhagen bourgeoisie (the majority of whom were other Danish Jews) offered him a monthly salary if he were to come back and work as a scientist and intellectual.15 Brandes accepted this offer and moved back to Copenhagen. In his acceptance letter, he stressed that his primary motivation for moving back was that it was now possible for him to live in Copenhagen and work there as a “Danish scientist.”16 2

Brandes’ Conception of the Modern Jew in his Early Writings

The primary ideal of the Modern Breakthrough – a cosmopolitan, alienated outlook – was not first presented in Emigrantlitteraturen. In texts from 1867 and 1869, Brandes had initially put together the first building blocks of this Jewishrelated ideal, which I, in my book Son of Spinoza. Georg Brandes and Modern Jewish Cosmopolitanism (2021), call “the transnational vision.” It was the particular Jewish racial heritage that allowed the figure of the modern Jew to take precedence in developing this cosmopolitan outlook, according to Brandes. Throughout the period of the Modern Breakthrough period, Brandes continuously reflected and built on this figure, for which the biographies Benjamin Disraeli (1878) and Ferdinand Lassalle (1881) are of particular importance. Brandes’ primary source for his understanding of the concept of race and this idea of a specific modern Jewish heritage was the French historian and aesthetics theorist Hippolyte Taine, on whom Brandes wrote his doctoral thesis in the late 1860s. According to Taine, race is a fundamental part of the Volksgeist into which every individual is born. J.G. Herder’s conception of Volksgeist was the most common term in the nineteenth century for representing cultural heritage, and in Taine´s interpretation the environment, the race, and the moment (the time in history) form the constituents of the people’s spirit.17 Thus, Taine believed every Volksgeist comprised various layers, among which environmental influence represented the random and most recent layers. According to Taine and also to Brandes in his early writings, race is the deepest layer of the Volksgeist. Here, we must remember that Brandes’ use of the concept of race occurred before modern antisemitism developed as an ideology, and thus before it was monopolized by antisemites. However, up until the early 1880s, race played a large role in Brandes’ analyses of cultural matters. After the 1879–1881 Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, a public debate which usually is seen 15 16 17

See Georg Brandes, Levned, vol. 3, 31–32. Ibid., 28–37. Brandes, Den Franske Æsthetik i Vore Dage – En Afhandling om H. Taine, 154–194.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

285

as having made modern antisemitism into a dominant cultural code, Brandes stopped referring to race in this way. I will return to this later. It is thus mainly in texts from the late 1860s and the 1870s that Brandes thematized modern Jewishness as an ideal, for example in the essay “Shakespeare: ‘Kjøbmanden i Venedig’” (“Shakespeare: ‘The Merchant of Venice’”) (1867), in which reflections on Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice develop into contemplations on what Henning Fenger also calls Brandes’ own ideas on “modern Jewishness.”18 The most comprehensive description of the figure of the modern Jew is to be found in the essay “M. Goldschmidt,” published a few years later. In the 1872 efforts of the leading Danish newspapers to label Brandes as a subversive threat to the national order, this essay was a key text. A few more years later, in Emigrantlitteraturen, Brandes turned to a related figure, that of the emigrant, which shared the cultural inside-outside characteristics of the modern Jew. The innovative outlook of the modern Jew is described in this way in “M. Goldschmidt”: But the Jewish spirit is already free at birth, the Roman and anti-Roman culture […] Catholicism and Protestantism […] are all equally close and equally distant to him. He is the son of Spinoza. Thus from birth onwards he is against any European narrow-mindedness, he is oppositional, freeborn and emancipated, both as scientific observer and as poetic recreator. 19 The cosmopolitan characteristics of the modern Jew and later the emigrant figure are in fact rather similar to the much-discussed ideal of the cosmopolitan outlook Ulrich Beck described in his already classic work The Cosmopolitan Outlook (2004); Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1997) should also be mentioned in this context.20 Yet, in the fin de siècle period, this constructively alienated Jewish in-between “stranger” figure was already widespread in the social imaginary. Thus, it seems that Georg Brandes was only one among several European Jewish writers and intellectuals publishing articles, essays, and books in which Jewish-related stranger figures were described.21 Georg 18 19 20 21

Fenger, Georg Brandes’ Læreår, 215. Brandes, “M. Goldschmidt,” in Kritiker og Portraiter, 401. See, for example, Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, 1–14. See Hjortshøj, Son of Spinoza. A recent special edition of Jewish Quarterly Review (2021) is dedicated to essays on Simmel’s “The Stranger,” including studies of how Simmel’s stranger figure relates to issues in the so-called Jewish Question of the period such as

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

286

Hjortshøj

Simmel’s essay on “The Stranger” (1907) is probably one of the best-known examples. Brandes’ modern Jew and Simmel’s stranger figure can be read as counter narratives to the increasingly dominant modern antisemitic representation of “rootless Jewish intellectuals” as “parasitical” elements within the different European national traditions. As a cosmopolitan and cultural pluralistic ideal, Brandes’ transnational vision represents the idea of a socio-cultural identity in which the individual acts within a national culture but does not feel dogmatically bound to its tradition. This individual may innovate more easily. In his early writings, Brandes holds this outlook higher than that of monocultural individuals whose horizon is obstructed by the dogmatic traditions and prejudices of the cultural tradition into which they are born. In responses to the publication of Emigrantlitteraturen in the bourgeois Danish newspapers, most commentators were of the opinion that the emigrant figure in this book strongly correlated with the modern Jew figure of “M. Goldschmidt,” and thus Brandes was ridiculed for idealizing Jewishness (in a disguised way through the non-Jewish emigrant figure). In this passage from Emigrantlitteraturen, it is evident that the ideal of the transnational vision is once again thematized by the figure of the emigrant: One single grand notion poses the greatest threat of all to the despotism of every society’s established beliefs and rules. Not the notion of the logical […], nay! What arouses and astonishes the masses more than anything else, provided one is able to put it into perspective for them, is the fact that an ideal which they assume to be universally recognized is regarded as an ideal only by so many concurring minds, while other peoples […] have an entirely different concept of what is fitting and beautiful […]. Thus, were I to characterize what Mme de Stäel gained from French society, culture and literature, […] I would put it like this: In her two major works ‘Corinne’ and ‘De l’Allemagne’ in particular, she put the human and literary beliefs and opinions in France, England, Germany, and Italy into perspective for the inhabitants of the various countries.22 In fact, Brandes’ Emigrantlitteraturen not only constructs the figure of the emigrant on the basis of these key characteristics; it also defines the comparative literary method that he uses throughout his oeuvre on the basis of

22

modern antisemitism, minority vs. majority relations, and Zionism, as well as comparisons with strangeness in our current global age. Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 99.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

287

this Jewish-related cosmopolitan outlook.23 Still, one might ask why Brandes’ alignment of Jewishness and cosmopolitanism – originally set out in essays from the late 1860s on Jewish-related topics – caused such a stir in 1871/1872 in the Danish civil sphere. Why was it that the leading Danish newspapers, and the key people involved in appointing a new professor in aesthetics and literature at the University of Copenhagen, reacted in such a way? In order to grasp this, however, we must first understand the rise of modern antisemitism as a dominant cultural code and how it developed out of earlier, nineteenthcentury discussions of the so-called Jewish Question. 3

The Jewish Question

The so-called Jewish Question was not in fact one but several questions, which arose in the context of the acculturation process undergone by the European Jews in the various Western European states towards the end of the Enlightenment. It is unclear when the term “the Jewish Question” was first used. However, it seems to date to the middle of the eighteenth century, to the earliest discussions about whether the Jews in the different European states should be emancipated.24 Thus, the so-called Jewish Question concerned how the European Jews should be treated and what their social and juridical status should be.25 Discussions about whether the European Jews should be emancipated and granted the same civil rights as Christian-born men therefore became part of the more general raison d’état discussions about how Jews and other out-groups (such as peasants and the rural proletariat) could contribute more to the economy of a state. One of the direct consequences of the emancipation of the Western European Jews was that a wider range of career opportunities became available to them in the nineteenth century. However, as David Sorkin documents in The Transformation of German Jewry (1987), the German-Jewish nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was not really embraced by the majority society bourgeoisie. It is clear in the prose writing of two other influential Danish-Jewish writers, M.A. Goldschmidt (for instance En Jøde, 1851) and Henri Nathansen (Indenfor Murene, 1912), that most Danish-Jewish 23

24 25

Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen, 11 (“The comparative examination of literature has a dual nature; it brings us closer to that which is foreign so that we may adapt it, and it distances us from that which is our own so that we may gain a clear view of it […]. We must use it to correct the illusions created by our natural vision.” My translation.). Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 74–78. Ibid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

288

Hjortshøj

bourgeois families also existed in parallel to the Danish majority society bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. There was undoubtedly interaction, which grew throughout the nineteenth century and the fin de siècle period. However, if an individual of Jewish descent wanted to be recognized for his or her talents and abilities, the best way to ensure this was to convert to Christianity. This can be seen in the cases of the writer Henrik Hertz and the leading Danish actress from the 1830s to the 1860s, Johanne Luise Heiberg. We can also find evidence that Brandes was born into this out-group: in the building he lived in during his childhood, owned by his Danish-Jewish merchant grandfather, two thirds of the tenants were fellow Danish-Jews.26 For context: at that time, only 2% of the inhabitants of Copenhagen were of Jewish descent. 4

Modern Antisemitism

In the second part of the nineteenth century, the content of the discussions of the so-called Jewish Question shifted. Due to the Romantic focus on the Herderian Volksgeist, there was less focus on how European Jews could contribute to the economy of the monarchs and the European states and more on whether they were able to contribute in a cultural sense. Could the different Western European Jewish minorities be considered worthy parts of the European national cultural traditions they had been born into? This transformation of the so-called Jewish Question is also visible in a Danish context, for example in the discussion between the Danish national father figure F.S. Grundtvig and the Danish-Jewish writer M.A. Goldschmidt in 1849. In a public debate, Grundtvig characterized Goldschmidt as a Jewish “stranger” who would never be able to understand the deepest and most meaningful layers of the Danish Volksgeist.27 Around the same time, Richard Wagner wrote the essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (1850). This essay has been determined to be one of the most important texts in the development of modern antisemitism.28 In his essay, Wagner called for a new direction and warned against the new acculturated “assimilated Jew,” who could no longer be recognized by his accent or appearance (unlike the Orthodox Jews). Instead, Wagner pointed to elements such as blood or language as identifying the new type of subversive Jewishness, personified by the “assimilated Jews.” 26 27 28

See Knudsen, Frigørelsens Vej 1842–1877, 12–13. See Thing, Den historiske Jøde, 16. See Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred; Smart Jews. The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

289

With the aforementioned Berliner Antisemitismusstreit and Brandes’ role in this debate, a new stage of the Jewish Question was initiated, as figures such as Heinrich von Treitschke, Adolf Stoecker, and Wilhelm Marr connected antisemitism with national conservative political ideology. In this way, modern antisemitism became a populist ideology arguing that modern liberal characteristics such as democracy (and the idea that, for instance, women and Jews should have the same privileges and rights as men), capitalism, and rationalistic science were hollow categories insufficient to replace the Christian and feudal Old World.29 Jews and Jewishness became the main symbols of the altered power structures in the transition to the modern liberal democratic-capitalist society. From the perspective of the modern antisemites, the modern spirit favored and intensified particularistic Jewish characteristics.30 The ideology of modern antisemitism focused mainly on the so-called “assimilated Jews,” as is clear in the text which first started the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, Heinrich von Treitschke’s “Unsere Aussichten” (1879). Treitschke raised a concern about how a specific segment of German Jews dominated some of society’s most powerful industries, as prominent scientists, journalists, politicians, capitalistic entrepreneurs, and intellectuals.31 He further claimed that this GermanJewish “mixed culture” of the “assimilated Jews” was destroying the German national culture from within.32 In the case of Georg Brandes, there is a noteworthy transnational dialectic as regards the discussions of the so-called Jewish Question and the development of modern antisemitism, which in some cases is surprising. A good example of this is the significant role Brandes played in the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, and thus in the very creation of the ideology of modern antisemitism. In 1877, the influential Norwegian bishop J.C. Heuch published an anti-Jewish pamphlet against Georg Brandes, which garnered a lot of attention in the Danish and Nordic civil sphere as part of the stigmatization of Brandes in the years after the publication of Emigrantlitteraturen. In 1880, another of the founding fathers of modern antisemitism, Adolf Stoecker, then used and quoted from Heuch’s work when, in the German Reichstag, he warned against growing Jewish influence. Stoecker put forward Georg Brandes as a primary example of this subversive rootless Jewishness,33 this “church-despising modern Jewry.”34 29 30 31 32 33 34

See Rürup, “Die Judenfrage der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,” 74–94. Ibid. Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 8–12. Ibid. See Knudsen, I modsigelsernes tegn, 85–86. See Heinrichs, “Juden als ideelle Hoffnungs- und Heilsträger im Protestantismus des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts,” 223.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

290

Hjortshøj

Thus, going back to the similar use of Heuch’s pamphlet in the Danish civil sphere, it was mostly the “Jew,” Georg Brandes (and his brother Edvard Brandes), who was made responsible for an interpretation of modernity as a time when “everything that was solid melted into air,” paraphrasing Marshall Berman’s classic for a Danish historical context. Furthermore, for many decades Brandes’ early depictions of the modern Jew, particularly his most daring one in “M. Goldschmidt,” were remembered and used against him to demonstrate his subversive “Jewish” ideas.35 5

Brandes’ Distancing Strategy

Early on, Brandes understood the dangerous potential of modern antisemitism. This can be seen in his journalistic coverage of the Dreyfus Affair of 1896–1906. Across 22 articles, Brandes reported on this absurd trial. In “Sagens Genoptagelse” (“The Reopening of the Case”), published in Politiken in 1903, he gives an overview of the implications of the trial. Brandes characterizes the antisemitic accusations against Albert Dreyfus as a vital sign of a polarized battle between different ideas about what the European civilization ought to signify and which direction it should take. He calls the Dreyfus Affair “the fight for and against […] the modern culture” (kampen for og imod […] den hele moderne kultur).36 He also remarks that, ideologically, modern antisemitism had become a central component in this “clash of civilizations.”37 However, Brandes does not draw the same conclusion from the Dreyfus Affair as, for example, Theodor Herzl did; it is said Herzl lost his last hope that the European Jews would ever be accepted as equal citizens in Europe.38 In contrast, Brandes continued to believe that every individual is first and foremost rooted in the Volksgeist into which he is born. In this way, Brandes considered every European Jew part of a European Volksgeist. Accordingly, when Herzl wrote to Brandes in 1896 and asked whether he would support his first draft of a Zionist ideology, Brandes wrote back that he did not believe in Herzl’s solution to the so-called Jewish Question.39 Later, in 1917–1918, when the pogroms in Russia and Poland had become more brutal than ever before, it seems that Brandes changed his view on the Zionist movement, writing an 35 36 37 38 39

See Knudsen, Symbolet og Manden, vol. 2, 387–389. See Brandes, “Sagens Genoptagelse,” Samlede Skrifter, vol. 16, 188. Ibid., 190. See Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, 1–19. See Gibbons, “The Reluctant Jew,” 77–78.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

291

article in which he envisioned that one day Israel/Palestine would be a rich and prospering state; he believes that the inhabitants of this state would primarily be Eastern European Jews who, understandably, wanted to live in a country in which their rights were respected.40 Western European Jews would, on the other hand, continue to be part of the countries they and their families had lived in for generations and in which they had been granted emancipation, according to Brandes. The fact that Brandes foresaw the dangerous potential of modern antisemitism quite early on is the most strategic explanation for why he abandoned his ideas on modern Jewishness (including the idea of a specific Jewish racial heritage). He most likely feared that, if he continued representing the modern Jew, and projecting racially based ideas onto Jewishness, he would be caught in the claims which Heinrich von Treitschke, for example, had stated in “Unsere Aussichten.” Treitschke claimed that the “assimilated Jews” had a pompous attitude: And what hollow, insulting self-conceit! Under constant sneering invectives they prove that Kant’s nation was educated to humanity only by the Jews, that the language of Lessing and Goethe became receptive to beauty, spirit and wit only through Börne and Heine!”41 Back in the 1860s and 1870s, before the race concept was semantically monopolized by modern antisemitism, Brandes had in fact found the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis of this period inspirational, particularly in the writings of Ernest Renan.42 Renan and Gobineau had written books in the 1850s and 1860s that described the struggle for power in the period as a clash between different human races, including the Semitic Jews and the Aryan Europeans. By 1879– 1881, however, this idea had taken on a new, disturbing turn with the development of modern antisemitism as a political ideology and cultural code. The popularity of this cultural code and ideology grew in the following decades as it became a component in many of the newly founded nationalistic movements that arose in Europe at this time. Shulamit Volkov has written that the most typical reaction of the “assimilated Jews” to the phenomenon of modern antisemitism was to distance themselves from Jewishness. Not only is this pattern obvious in Brandes’ later writings; he even recommends the strategy to other European Jews, in his first 40 41 42

See Brandes, “Das neue Judentum,” 266. See Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” 9. Fenger, Georg Brandes’ Læreår, 207–218.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

292

Hjortshøj

reaction to Treitschke’s “Unsere Aussichten” and the related personal attack made by Adolf Stoecker in the German Reichstag. In the article “Bevægelsen mod Jøderne i Tyskland” (1881), Brandes writes that the most efficient way of bringing modern antisemitism to an end would be for Western European Jews to continue the process of acculturation they had begun in the late Enlightenment period.43 Moreover, he urges Western European Jews not to act “provocatively Jewish” in the civil sphere.44 These two related attitudes appear to become Brandes’ primary strategies in his later writings, as he stops idealizing and writing about modern Jewishness and idealized racial Jewish characteristics in the 1880s, after he wrote this article. Later, around the turn of the century, he then adopts the even more drastic editing strategies of deJudaizing and de-cosmopolitanizing his collected writings. 6

Brandes’ Erasure of Cosmopolitanism and Jewishness

The two most significant characteristics of Brandes’ self-editing of his Samlede Skrifter are that he erased all passages, sentences, and words which referred to his former thoughts regarding the Jewish racial traits idealized in his early writings,45 and that he altered or rephrased all foreign words and foreign phrases, sayings, and so on, replacing them with Danish ones.46 In the process of editing out these foreign words, Brandes often found it necessary to invent new words because no equivalent existed in the Danish language.47 One of the more illustrative examples Jørgen Knudsen lists is the replacement of the word optimisme with gladsyn,48 although optimisme is considered a common Danish word today and no one uses gladsyn. Brandes’ de-cosmopolitanization strategy can be more substantially observed in comparing the changed vocabulary from two pages in the original version of the essay “M. Goldschmidt” with the 1899 version in Samlede Skrifter. In this excerpt, I have, unlike the rest of my quotations from Brandes, not used English translations; however, non-Danishspeaking readers will most likely be able to recognize the difference between

43 44 45 46 47 48

See Brandes, “Bevægelsen mod Jøderne i Tyskland,” 372–380. Ibid. In the research on Brandes, Paul Rubow was the first to comment on this phenomenon in Litterære Studier. Jørgen Knudsen also documents these editing strategies. See Knudsen, Magt og Afmagt, vol. 1, 113–117. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

293

the original, so-called foreign words (of which most are common Danish words today) and the altered – supposedly more authentic – Danish counterparts: Reflecteret, p. 404 Naive, p. 404 Charakter, p. 404 Coquetteri, p. 404 Mystisk, p. 404 Forceret, p. 405 Psychologisk, p. 405 Charakter, p. 405

Bevidst, p. 455 Troskyldige, p. 455 Præg, p. 455 Koketteri, p. 456 Hemmelighedsfuld, p. 456 Anstrengt, p. 456 Sjæleligt, p. 456 Personlighed, p. 45649

Brandes’ editing strategies in his collected writings reflect historically relevant perspectives on the consequences of the increasing use of the cultural code of modern antisemitism in the fin de siècle period. All of his earlier writings were subject to this kind of vocabulary editing in the versions which appeared in Samlede Skrifter. For example, the essay “M. Goldschmidt” is included, but in a rather diminished version in which all the passages that idealized modern Jewishness are left out. Previously, this had been the most read and discussed part of the essay.50 Another example is the deletion of pages 308–313 from Benjamin Disraeli (1878) for the version which appears in volume nine of Samlede Skrifter (1901). These pages were arguably the second-most coherent thematization of modern Jewishness in Brandes’ early writings. In the original 1878 work, they discussed whether Disraeli could be seen as a prime example of a modern Jew. For the version in Samlede Skrifter (titled “Lord Beaconsfield”), after having erased these central pages, Brandes chose to sum up the political life and writings of Disraeli as truly incarnating British Imperial history and culture. Jørgen Knudsen is one of the few commentators to elaborate on Brandes’ significant editing strategies for Samlede Skrifter; he uses the term “purism” to describe the process.51 It is not clear, however, how Brandes – ideologically 49

50 51

Brandes, “M. Goldschmidt,” 404–405; Brandes, “M. Goldschmidt,” in Samlede Skrifter, vol. 2, 455–456. Aside from the first edition of Kritiker og Portraiter in 1870 and the additional version of “M. Goldschmidt” in Samlede Skrifter, in 1885 Brandes also published a second edition of Kritiker og Portraiter. However, in this second edition, the essay “M. Goldschmidt” was omitted. See, for example, Gibbons, “The reluctant Jew,” 61. Knudsen, Magt og Afmagt, vol. 1, 113–117.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

294

Hjortshøj

speaking – “purifies” the vocabulary and content of his former texts for Samlede Skrifter. Rather, his editing process reveals a determined effort to decosmopolitanize and de-Judaize his previous work in a period when modern antisemitism was on the rise. It is also notable that Brandes’ Samlede Skrifter was a commercial success in Denmark, unlike most of his other writings.52 7

Other Publications of the Period

It was not merely in the editing process for his collected writings that Brandes tried to erase elements of Jewishness and cosmopolitanism from his previous work. Another example of how Brandes self-fashioned himself as an assimilated and almost monocultural Dane may be found in the biography of his best friend in his late teenage years, Julius Lange, published in 1898. In this book Brandes presents himself as deeply influenced, even defined, by the Danish Romantic period, which he had mocked previously.53 In Brandes’ autobiography Levned (1905–1908), his strategy of de-Judaizing appears again. In one of the most quoted anecdotes from the work Brandes recalls how, as a boy, he suddenly discovered that he was of Jewish descent when he started school.54 It is peculiar that Jewishness and the Jewish tradition are not represented as having been an element of his life until this point (let us remember: two thirds of the people living in the building Brandes grew up in, which was owned by his Danish-Jewish grandfather, were also of Jewish descent). Nevertheless, the story goes that when Georg Brandes began to attend a Christian Danish school, on his way home after school some of the other boys would shout some sort of abusive word at him and his brother and throw rocks at them. Puzzled by this, one day he asks his mother what the swearword means. “Jews!” his mother says, “Jews is a group of people.” “Bad people?” asks little Georg – “Yes,” his mother answers smilingly, “sometimes rather bad people, but not always.” “May I see one of these Jews?” asks little Georg. “You may,” his mother replies, and then lifts Georg up in front of a mirror; he screams in horror.55 Clearly, this anecdote is told with a tone of irony, characteristic of Brandes’ voice. Nevertheless, it functions as part of a narrative framework in Levned through which Brandes constructs his upbringing and his individual identity 52 53 54 55

Ibid., 101–102. Brandes, Julius Lange. I have myself translated this anecdote from Brandes, Levned, vol. 1, 20. Ibid.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

295

as being uninfluenced by his Jewish heritage. As has been noted by other scholars, Levned is in general selective in its choice of content.56 It leaves out many relevant details.57 As a result, it cannot be read as an objective historical account of how or when Brandes found out he was of Jewish descent. Jørgen Knudsen, Kristian Hvidt, Tine Bach, and Henry J. Gibbons thus all counter the de-Judaizing strategy of Levned by showing that Brandes was exposed to much more Jewish influence in his childhood than he claims was the case in his autobiography.58 This is also well documented by friends and acquaintances of the Brandes family such as Edmund Gosse and Peter Nansen, who visited their family home and described it as “strongly tinged” by the Jewish tradition.59 Each of the three Brandes brothers moreover had a Bar Mitzvah, and even as adults, although they did not follow the traditional Sabbath customs, they would gather together in their childhood home on the day their mother served slow-cooked Cholent (Georg Brandes’ favorite dish).60 8

Brandes’ Goal to Become a Professor

As demonstrated, Brandes refers explicitly to his strategy of distancing himself from Jewishness in an article from 1881, in the aftermath of the eruption of modern antisemitism. In this section, I will examine whether Brandes also had a personal, career-oriented motive for his distancing strategies. It is noticeable that the works in which Brandes distances himself the most from Jewishness were written in the same period in which he finally reached his ultimate career goal of becoming a professor at the University of Copenhagen. Achieving acceptance among the Christian, majority society bourgeoisie was a lifelong and failed struggle for many talented individuals of Jewish descent around Western Europe at this time; Georg Simmel’s failure to gain a tenured position at the University of Berlin is a significant case.61 Brandes was finally given a professorship at the University of Copenhagen in 1901/1902. Pelle Oliver Larsen has recently documented Brandes’ six failed attempts to 56 57 58

59 60 61

See, for example, Kondrup, Levned og Tolkninger, 90–215. Ibid. Tine Bach has written about Brandes’ description of how he learned and used to recite a Jewish evening prayer. Bach, Exodus – Om den hjemløse erfaring i jødisk litteratur, 199. Henry J. Gibbons notes that Brandes remained a nominal paying member of the Mosaic Congregation in Copenhagen until 1910. See Gibbons, “The reluctant Jew,” 67. See Gibbons, “The reluctant Jew,” 57–58. See Hvidt, Edvard Brandes, 243–244. Morris-Reich, The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

296

Hjortshøj

become a professor; ideological issues and possible cases of structural racism were the cause. Larsen lists many examples indicating that it was the link between Brandes’ Jewish background and his reputation as a liberal cosmopolitan and “freethinker” that became the decisive factor in discussions about whether he was worthy of a professorship decades before, in 1871 and 1872.62 The leading national liberal and conservative newspapers’ stigmatization of him – particularly Carl Ploug’s attacks – also played an important role. Systemskiftet of 1901 had a profound impact on when and how Brandes’ acceptance by the Danish majority society bourgeoisie would finally occur. (In 1901, the “democratic” vote was accepted for the first time by the nobility and bourgeois national conservative party Høire (Right), who had upheld a dictatorlike regime; the peasant national liberal party Venstre (Left) then formed a government.) But the institution of the University of Copenhagen also had much to say regarding who was worthy of professorships, both before 1901 and after. Moreover, it is interesting to observe how even the most powerful members of “the system” demanded that their voices be heard in the matter of Brandes’ potential appointment. Even the King and the most important theologian and bishop, H.L. Martensen, interfered in the election process.63 As mentioned, it had nevertheless become quite common by this time for Christian-born “freethinkers” to receive tenured positions at universities. Furthermore, unlike so many other key fin de siècle writers and scholars (influenced by communism, socialism, or anarchism), as a liberal cosmopolitan Brandes could not be considered a “revolutionary.” As such, his career goals met with an unusual numbers of obstacles, despite the fact that between 1871 and 1901, Brandes was the most important Danish public intellectual – and even one of Europe’s leading intellectuals. Considering the other candidates that were appointed as professors in aesthetics and literature at the University of Copenhagen in this period, it is furthermore significant that the two approved candidates, Julius Paludan and Vilhelm Andersen, both focused on national conservative and Romantic topics. Paludan had first made his name known for a wider audience when he criticized Brandes’ Modern Breakthrough project, claiming that it lacked academic substance because of Brandes’ admiration of the French Revolution (Paludan strongly opposed writers and scholars who valued the French Revolution).64 Vilhelm Andersen was a follower of the type of modern, secular-orientated national conservatism that became popular, not least in Germany, in the 1880s 62 63 64

See Larsen, Professoratet, 68–77, 127–132, 220–235, 262–270, 275–283, 313–319, 326–329. Ibid. See Knudsen, I modsigelsernes tegn 1877–83, 159–166.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

297

and the 1890s. In what Andersen himself considered to be his opus magnum, Tider og Typer, his aim was to create a narrative of the Danish Romantic period as a Guldalder (Golden Age). He presented this period as particularly rich in its literature and art production. Tider og Typer also has obvious modern antisemitic content, with racial analyses of why European Jewish writers and “intellectuals” could not be considered as contributing to the different European national traditions, particularly in the case of Brandes – thus, in the interaction between Georg Brandes and Vilhelm Andersen, this aforementioned “clash of civilizations” of the period is personified. Andersen appears very conscious of his use of stigmatizing modern antisemitic discourses when writing about Brandes. He even recalls how the greatest Norwegian writer of the 1860s, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, all the way back in 1867, in the first public debate Brandes participated in, wrote that Brandes had no “Danish consciousness” as a Jew.65 Andersen later became the predecessor of the study of Danish and Nordic literature at Danish universities, and also influenced how the subject of Danish is taught in Danish schools. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to the impact of Andersen’s ideological standpoints on the didactical and pedagogical fields for which he developed the foundational framework in Denmark. To sum up, it was no coincidence that in the years around the turn of the century, Brandes made a determined effort to self-fashion himself in the civil sphere as more “Danish” than he did in his early writings. At this time, he stopped writing about modern Jewishness, and he also suddenly found the Danish Romantic period particularly rich. Consequently, Brandes’ editing strategies of de-Judaizing and de-cosmopolitanizing in Samlede Skrifter, Julius Lange, and his autobiography appear related to the strategy detailed in 1881 in “Bevægelsen mod jøderne i Tyskland.” In many ways, he continued to follow this distancing strategy in the following decades; not only did it result in his greatest publication successes,66 but he also achieved his ultimate career goal of becoming a professor at the University of Copenhagen. 9

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have seen how Brandes distanced himself from Jewishness in the period when he was finally appointed as a professor at the University of

65 66

See Hjortshøj, Son of Spinoza, 142–146. See Knudsen, Magt og Afmagt, vol. 1, 101–102.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

298

Hjortshøj

Copenhagen. From the late 1860s, this was Brandes’ primary goal as a public intellectual; there were no fewer than seven episodes between 1871/1872 and 1901/1902 in which key figures at the University of Copenhagen, Danish politicians and ministers of government, and even the leading representative of the Danish church and the King himself discussed and opposed Brandes’ potential appointment.67 The absurdity and the antisemitic subtext of his decades-long struggle for a professorship makes this historical case the Danish equivalent of the French Dreyfus Affair, which over ten years disclosed how antisemitism was widespread in French society at the turn of the century. On two occasions (one of these occurring on his deathbed in 1872), the former professor of aesthetics Carsten Hauch declared that the only candidate gifted enough to succeed him was Georg Brandes. The focus here has been on Brandes’ figure of the modern Jew, first developed in essays of the late 1960s, and on the stigmatization of him as a “rootless cosmopolitan Jew” following the publication of Emigrantlitteraturen. However, it could just as easily be argued that the publication of this book made no difference: being of Jewish descent, Brandes would never have been given a professorship, at least in the 1870s and the 1880s, no matter what books he had published and how good they were. The first non-converted Danish Jew to become a professor in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Copenhagen, J.A. Fridericia, was not appointed until 1899 – almost 30 years after Brandes’ first efforts.68 Like many other European Jews at this time, Brandes experienced the existence of a glass ceiling, although Grundloven (1849) stated otherwise. The most significant consequences of this Danish Dreyfus Affair concerned how far Brandes was prepared to go in order to be included, or even acknowledged, by the establishment in Denmark. In the years following the eruption of the modern antisemitic ideology and the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit, Brandes reacted by distancing himself from his earlier writings on modern Jewishness and cosmopolitanism. This strategy may have helped him achieve his ultimate career goal of becoming a professor at the University of Copenhagen. However, it must also be noted that the title and the chair Brandes finally earned had little significance, since it entailed no academic responsibilities. Thus, as Brandes experienced many times, even this final and visible sign of inclusion on the part of the Danish majority society bourgeoisie was dubious. Still, there is no doubt that for Brandes this appointment was very important. It was a vital sign of his embourgeoisement.69 67 68 69

See Larsen, Professoratet, 62–75, 180–191, 220–235, 262–270, 275–283, 313–319, 326–329. Larsen, Professoratet, 130. See Knudsen, Magt og Afmagt, Volume 1, 224–229.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Georg Brandes’ Erasure of Jewishness and Cosmopolitanism

299

Bibliography Bach, Tine: Exodus – Om den hjemløse erfaring i jødisk litteratur. Copenhagen: Forlaget Spring, 2004. Beck, Ulrich: The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Brandes, Georg: Breve til Forældrene 1859–71, Vol. i: 1859–71. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab og C. A. Reitzels Boghandel, 1978. Brandes, Georg: Den Franske Æsthetik i Vore Dage – En Afhandling om H. Taine. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1870. Brandes, Georg: “M. Goldschmidt,” in: Kritiker og Portraiter. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1870, 387–409. Brandes, Georg: “Shakespeare: ‘Kjøbmanden i Venedig’,” in: Kritiker og Portraiter. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1870, 113–127. Brandes, Georg: Emigrantlitteraturen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1971 [1872]. Brandes, Georg: “Lord Beaconsfield” (2nd ed. of Benjamin Disraeli, 1878), in: Samlede Skrifter, vol. 9. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1901, 273–527. Brandes, Georg: “Sagens Genoptagelse” (1903), in: Samlede Skrifter, vol. 16. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1906, 188–192. Brandes, Georg: Levned, vol. 3. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1908. Dahl, Per: Om at skrive den danske ånds historie. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985. Dohm, C.W. von: Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden. Mit Königl. Preußischem Privilegio. Duisburg: Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung und vom Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, 2009 [1781]. Drachmann, Holger: “Ostende-Brügge,” in: Poetiske Skrifter, vol. 6. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1911–1912. Fenger, Henning: Georg Brandes´ Læreår. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1955. Geller, Jay: The Other Jewish Question – Identifying the Jew and Making Sense Of Modernity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Gibbons, Henry J.: “The Reluctant Jew,” in: The Activist Critic, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980. Gilman, Sander L.: Smart Jews, the Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Gilman, Sander L.: Jewish Self-hatred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Heinrichs, Wolfgang E.: “Juden als ideelle Hoffnungs- und Heilsträger im Protestantismus des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts,” in: Geliebter Feind, Gehasster Freund. Atnisemitismus und Philosemitismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Irene A. Diekmann and Elke-Vera Kotowski,.Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2009, 213–231. Heschel, Susannah: “Judaism, Islam, and Hellenism: the Conflict in Germany over the Origins of Kultur,” in: The Jewish Contributions to Civilization. Reassessing an Idea,

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

300

Hjortshøj

edited by Jeremy Cohen and Richard I. Cohen. Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008, 98–124. Heuch, J.C: Dr. G. Brandes’ Polemik mod Kristendommen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1877. Hjortshøj, Søren Blak: “Georg Brandes’ Representations of Jewishness: between Grand Recreations of the Past and Transformative Visions of the Future.” PhD Dissertation, Roskilde University, 2018. Hvidt, Kristian: “Edvard og Georg Brandes opfattelse af deres jødiske herkomst,” in: Judisk liv i Norden, edited by Gunnar Broberg et al. Uppsala: Svanberg og Tydén, 1988, 209–222. Hvidt, Kristian: Edvard Brandes – Portræt af en Radikal Blæksprutte. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1987. Kondrup, Johnny: Levned og Tolkninger. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1982. Kondrup, Johnny: Livsværker. Studier i dansk litterær biografi. Copenhagen: Amadeus, 1986. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens Vej 1842–1877. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes. I Modsigelsernes Tegn 1877–1883. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1988. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes. Symbolet og Manden, 2 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes. Magt og Afmagt, 2 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998. Larsen, Pelle Oliver: “Professoratet – Videnskabelige Magtkampe i Det Filosofiske Fakultet 1870–1920.” PhD Dissertation, University of Aarhus, 2010. Maier, Charles S.: Once Within Borders – Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging since 1500. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nathansen, Henri: Af Hugo Davids Liv i–iv. Copenhagen: v. Pios Boghandel, 1917. Nathansen, Henri: Georg Brandes – Et Portræt. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1929. Nielsen, Harald: Ursupatoren. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1922. Rürup, Reinhardt: “Die ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen gesellschaft und die Entstehung des modernes Antisemitismus,” in: Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Göttingen: Fischer Verlag, 1975, 74–94. Simonsen, Konrad: Georg Brandes ( Jødisk Aand i Danmark). Copenhagen: Nationale Forfatteres Forlag, 1913. Stanislawski, Michael: Zionism and Fin de Siècle. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Thing, Morten: Den historiske Jøde, Copenhagen: Forum, 2001.Volkov, Shulamit: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, München: C. H. Beck, 1990. Wagner, Thorsten: “Jødernes ligestilling – et europæisk perspektiv,” in: Jøderne som frie borgere, edited by Bent BlüdnikowCopenhagen: Det Jødiske Samfund, 2014.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 14

“The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe”

Georg Brandes and the Young Generation in The World at War Martin Zerlang In the dramatic years leading up to the French Revolution in 1789, an impression took “deep hold of that generation.” They felt that something was “wrong with the great machinery of existence, and that it would soon collapse.” And so it did. They “heard the crash […] when all barriers were broken down and all forms done away with; when the established order was overthrown and distinctions of class suddenly disappeared; when the air was filled with the smoke of gunpowder and the notes of the »Marseillaise«; when the ancient boundaries of kingdoms were changed and re-changed, kings were dethroned and beheaded, and the religion of a thousand years was abolished.”1 With these words, full of echoes from the Communist Manifesto, Georg Brandes presents the young J.W. Goethe as the first hero of his Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature. Die Leiden des Jungen Werther (1774), this “young man of the burgher class,” is “more than the spirit of the era, he is its genius.”2 Werther was the first example of a type, which the reader is about to meet again and again: “the young man of the age in literature.”3 “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” was the battle cry of the revolutionaries. The idea and institution of fraternity was “closely associated with the tradition of youth itself.”4 Among the driving forces behind the French Revolution, one finds the ideas of a new generation, a new spirit of times, and youth as a progressive force. The Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars represent a watershed in modern history. They resulted in a divide between past and present, and they led to a new understanding of history as change over time, and a new use of history as an explanation for these changes.5 The concepts of youth and generation came to the center of historical understanding. 1 2 3 4 5

Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 27. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 28. Cf. Gillis, Youth and History, Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770–Present. Georg Lukács points to mass conscription during the Napoleonic Wars as the background for a rising historical consciousness; see Lúkacs, The Historical Novel. Reinhart Koselleck notes

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_016 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

302

Zerlang

The last volume of Main Currents is entitled The Young Germany. Paradoxically, in this volume Brandes is about to take leave of his youthful celebration of youth. Youth, enthusiasm, and general currents yield to maturity, skepticism, and great personalities. However, even here one hears echoes of the message dominating the rest of the volumes – the idea of youth. It is an idea or even ideology that Brandes shared with his predecessors and coevals. Around 1820, the young generations in Germany and France celebrated themselves, and in the following years, this cult of youth manifested itself all over Europe – in movements such as Giovina Italia, La jeune France, Junges Polen, Junges Deutschland, the Young Hegelians, and the “Young Europe” founded in 1834 by Giuseppe Mazzini. The understanding of the young generation as the lens through which history should be seen also manifested itself in literature. With his novel Confessions of a Child of the Century (1836), Alfred de Musset introduced the idea of a generation, and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, one of Brandes’ spiritual fathers, took up this thread in his Portraits littéraires (1862) when he wrote about “a generation composed of those born at the end of the last century, still children or too young under the Empire,” who “with virtual unanimity under the Restoration” fought against the “ancient régime.”6 In the volume on the French “generation of 1820” Brandes himself spends several pages and many metaphors on the formation of this generation. The aim of this chapter is to take a closer look at Brandes’ use and understanding of the idea of the generation in the face of the war. What happened to his understanding of youth when the young generation turned conservative, or even reactionary? Did he revise his idea of the generation now that it, as he viewed it, was no longer a progressive force? First, however, a few words on the formation of his idea of the progressive youth in connection with his proclamation of a modern breakthrough. 1

The Modern Breakthrough

The Revolution and the Restoration indicated that politics were a major force in the process of modernization that had swept over the Western world since the end of the eighteenth century. Politics and economics of course went hand in hand, and the ideals of political liberalism supported economic liberalism. Steam power and other aspects of industrial innovation made it possible to a new understanding of history as change; see Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Series: Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. 6 Cited in Alan Barrie Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820, 6.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

303

benefit from this liberalism, and innovation spread to all sectors of social life: “Romanticism is liberalism in Literature,” Victor Hugo claimed in Hernani (1830).7 Innovation and youth are two sides of the same coin, and for Brandes youth, generation, and historical change all fused in his concept of the Modern Breakthrough. The writers portrayed in his book on The Men of the Modern Breakthrough (1883) certainly agreed on this. The titles of some of their works demonstrate their cult of youth: De Unges Forbund (The League of Youth, 1869) by Henrik Ibsen, Ungt Blod (Young Blood, 1877) by Holger Drachmann, Unge Dage (Young Days) by Sophus Schandorph, Det unge Danmark (The Young Denmark, 1879) by Karl Gjellerup, the novel Niels Lyhne (1880), planned by J.P. Jacobsen as “En Ungdoms Historie” (The History of a Youth) – and a little later Det unge Blod (The Young Blood, 1899) by Edvard Brandes. All of them would more or less subscribe to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s poem “I Ungdommen” (In Youth) – in which he declares that “the pleasure of the youth, the dreams of the youth, the blood of the youth and the courage of the youth put colors and gold on the world.”8 The Modern Breakthrough was also the personal breakthrough of Georg Brandes; when in 1870, at the age of 28, he sketched out his plan for his grand oeuvre on the Main Currents of European Literature, he did not hesitate to present history as a drama in which the older generation must yield to the young. In the volume on Det romantiske Tyskland (The Romantic Germany), the “Generation of 1820” is the protagonist, while the “Generation of 1830” takes center stage in Det reaktionære Frankrig (The Reactionary France). In all six volumes, he organizes his material by the concept of generation. The younger the generation, the better, at least if “young” is defined culturally, not chronologically: “Seen from the point of view of our own day, the young men of those days (1830) appear to have been younger than youth generally is – younger, fresher, more richly gifted, more ardent and hot-blooded.”9 The concept of generation entails the idea that one should be of one’s own time. Among the proponents of Realism in the nineteenth century there was a demand for contemporaneity. “Il faut être de son temps”10 was the rallying cry of artists. The same idea is pervasive in the introduction to Main Currents, where Brandes exhorted his fellow Danes to catch up with the leading forces of Europe. According to him, Danish spiritual life was lagging 40 years behind 7 8 9 10

Hugo, Hernani. Edited with Introduction, and Critical and Explanatory Notes by John E. Matzke. Bjørnson, Digte og Sange. Brandes, The Romantic School in France, 9. Nochlin, Realism, Style and Civilization, 103f.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

304

Zerlang

the “main currents,” and his work might well be interpreted as a heroic effort to synchronize and thus rejuvenate the spiritual life of Denmark with the leading forces of Europe. That this is the underlying project is nowhere expressed more explicitly than in his sarcastic comments on the Romantic School in Denmark “in those days when there was still youth in Denmark.”11 Around 1900, a new cult of youth developed, and this time it was not only as a movement among relatively narrow intellectual circles. To avant-gardist trends such as Jugend and Art Nouveau must be added sport, the spread of new technologies such as bicycles and cars, and also the organization of youth in movements such as the boy scouts and “Wandervögel.” The organizing of the youth seemed to prove their revitalizing power. The Jungdeutschlandbund was founded in 1911 and three years later, at the outbreak of the war, it had 759,000 members.12 At the arrival of this second wave of a young generation claiming its right to a renewal of culture, Georg Brandes, born in 1842, had become an older man. Indeed, in the years leading up to the First World War, he was in a trough of the wave. But when war broke out, he invested all his energy in fighting against it. This time, however, his fight took place within a totally new ideological constellation. In 1914, the intellectual youth praised the war as the way to a better future. Indeed, they claimed that the intellect – reason – had to abdicate before the much stronger forces of life (and death). At the outbreak of the war in 1914, this was seen as a seminal year or even “one of the symbolic years of world history,”13 and it was celebrated by a youth that to a large extent understood themselves as the “generation of 1914.”14 In a self-portrait by from 1914 Otto Dix chose to give the indication of the year a prominent place in the picture. By understanding themselves as “the generation of 1914” they established a contrast to the generation of 1789. Theirs was a conservative revolution. Their ideals were no longer “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” but “Pflicht, Ordnung und Gerechtigket.” War was an expression of these ideals and a way to establish a new society based on these ideals. 11 12 13 14

Brandes, The Emigrant Literature, 174. Gillis, Youth in History, 143. See, for instance, Plenge, 1789 und 1914, die symbolischen Jahre in der Geschichte des politischen Geistes; Zerlang, 1914, 95f. Or Ceux de 1914, to quote the title of one of the most important novels of the war. Its author, Maurice Genevoix, participated in one of the same battles as Ernst Jünger, whose Steel-Storm was one of the most important documents on the experience of the war – from the very start its focus is on the young generation and its longing for war as an adventure in stark contrast to the boredom of “the age of safety” praised by Stefan Zweig in the first chapter of The World of Yesterday.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

305

To Brandes, the war was everything opposite to a modern breakthrough, and once again he felt compelled to enter the scene of cultural debate. This time, obviously, he was not in line with the young generation, who saw the war as a sublime renewal of culture and personality. Brandes was committed to the ideas of his generation: liberalism, anti-militarism, reason. In this context, it is relevant to examine his understanding and valuation of the idea of the generation. 2

At War, but Above the Battle

“Oh young men that shed your blood with so generous a joy for the starving earth,” are the opening words of Romain Rolland’s anti-war manifesto Audessus la mélée (Above the battle, 1914/1916).15 They are addressed to the youth of France, but they also apply to young soldiers in Germany, England, and Austria, who marched off to war in a frenzy of enthusiasm. He describes and decries how the young soldiers march with “firm and rapid steps” towards the battlefield, but he also notes that their firmness is illusory.16 The marching soldiers are deluded by idols. They are no longer “free minds.” His manifesto is a call for a “tribunal” where free minds, “artists and poets, preachers and thinkers of all nations,”17 can congregate to create a kind of moral High Court. In this call, Rolland specifically encourages the “neutral countries” to contribute. At present, “the neutral countries are too much effaced,”18 that is: too indistinct, too invisible, too erased. The word “efface” also emerged in a discussion on the war in which Georg Brandes was asked to take sides. “Le Danemark s’efface,” wrote the French politician Georges Clemenceau, who wanted Brandes to take his side. They had been close friends since 1903; for ten years they met every summer at a hotel in Karlovy Vary, Karlsbad, to exchange views on politics, culture, and literature. Brandes, however, could not accept Clemenceau’s view: that the Germans were solely responsible for the war. For him, the political alliance between Republican France and Tsarist Russia represented an undermining of the Republican values. Brandes insisted on maintaining his neutral position towards the nations at war, and so Clemenceau, in a rather theatrical way, made his sortie: “adieu Brandes.”19 15 16 17 18 19

Rolland, Above the Battle, 37. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 51, 53. Ibid., 17. See Knudsen, “Brandes and Clemenceau – a friendship with a bitter end.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

306

Zerlang

The motives for Brandes’ neutrality were manifold but interconnected. He insisted on the right to use his “free thought,” resisting all efforts to make him a tool for a cause he considered incoherent; he saw guilt on all sides, and while condemning German militarism, he also condemned the alliance between Republican France and authoritarian Russia. To all this, it must be added that the Danish government, in which his own brother served, based its politics on Denmark’s staying out of the war. In contrast to Rolland, Brandes never once was attracted by the war. In an article from 1914, republished as one of the first chapters in The World at War, he mentions that Rolland “approved of war and awaited it with confidence.”20 It did not take long, though, before Rolland changed his mind and became the leading French spokesman for an impartial and pacifist position. This was also noticed by Brandes, who quoted extensively from Above the Battle in the next chapter of his book.21 His neutrality did not prevent Brandes from being a committed participant in the cultural and political debate on the war. With The World at War, he established his position as a leading intellectual in one of the neutral nations that stood up against the war-mongers. The book strikes a very different tone from the high or even high-flown rhetorical style of Rolland. Even though Brandes writes that Rolland is not the kind of writer who is satisfied merely with “the use of superlatives,”22 it is evident that in comparison with Brandes Rolland excels in a superlative style. With a few understandable exceptions, Brandes attempts a cooler approach. Or, better: his style is mature rather than young. In its form, nevertheless, Brandes’ book recalls Rolland’s. It is a hybrid text: a collection of articles, speeches, appeals, and open letters as answers to open letters. The follow-up bore the title The Second Part of the Tragedy (1919), but while drama served as a structure in his Main Currents, tragedy here gives no structure to the work except in the sense that the war splinters all efforts to reach an overall form, a clear structure, or a unified tone. The five introductory chapters are pre-war articles: one from 1881 on forebodings of a great war, another from 1888 with worries about the future, and a third from 1905 giving expression to his certainty of a coming war. Two articles from 1913, on German patriotism and on French youth, describe how the young generation is prepared for war. Then, after its outbreak, Brandes explores the “fundamental causes” of the war as well as the different perspectives on it in Germany, Britain, France, and Russia. After this comes a more disconnected series of 20 21 22

Brandes, The World at War, 37. Ibid., 75–77. Ibid., 76.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

307

articles: reports on Poland and Persia; answers to Georges Clemenceau and William Archer, who accused Brandes of siding with the Germans; articles on the relationship between big and small nations; and a piece on patriotism among French schoolboys. If the young Brandes cherished the idea of the generation as a historical force that would bring about change, the mature Brandes ends up pointing to another force. At the end of The Second Part of the Tragedy, he states that “the real nature of the war is economic.”23 In a later addition to the book, which has not been translated into English, he once again points to economics as the key to understanding the war: describing the machinations of England, Germany, and France in Persia, he shows how financial oligarchies and economic interests are pulling the strings. The purpose of war is no longer to conquer land or peoples, but markets. It is all a fight for customers: “Each nation wants a wider outlet for its products, greater investment for its capital. The real character of war today is not a fight for ideals but a fight for concessions.”24 3

The Intellectual

The “free mind” mentioned by Rolland was always the leading ideal in Georg Brandes’ work; this Enlightenment concept was often referred to by the socalled intellectuals when they engaged in politics and fighting nationalism, religion, and militarism. On one side there was the Enlightenment, and on the other what Georg Brandes had in 1881 called: “reaction, the enormous hell-dog […] with its three heads: chauvinism, bigotry, and war madness.”25 In the Danish version of The World at War, Brandes writes about “what they in France call the Intellectuals.”26 In the English translation, they are described as “the intellectual élite of France.” The concept of “the intellectual” is indeed French; it arose with Émile Zola’s 15 January 1898 publication of the article “J’accuse,” in which he indicted the general staff, the war ministry, and others who had wrongly accused Captain Dreyfus of high treason. In this case, all the heads of the hell-dog were barking: chauvinism, antisemitism, bigotry, and militarism. Zola’s letter was published in the newspaper L’Aurore, which was edited by the politician Georges Clemenceau. As a politician, Clemenceau understood 23 24 25 26

Ibid., 270. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 44.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

308

Zerlang

the importance of mobilizing the individualistic intellectuals. Just a week after Zola’s intervention, on 23 January 1898, Georges Clemenceau wrote: Is not this a sign, that all these intellectuals, having come from all corners of the horizon, are getting together around an idea and sticking to this idea. Without the menacing warnings that have been spread in all institutions of public teaching, how many would not have come, who now don’t dare to make manifest their troubled conscience. As concerns me, I would like to see the origin of a movement of opinion above all different interests. In this hour when nothing is quite right, I put my hopes for the future in this pacific revolt of the French spirit. 27 One of the intellectuals gathering around the ideas of freedom and fairness was Georg Brandes. He wrote more than 20 articles on this “affair,” and it also appears in The World at War as part of the history that led to the war. Another intellectual involved in the Dreyfus Affair was the sociologist Émile Durkheim, who developed the first theoretical concept of the intellectual in the article “L’individualisme et les intellectuels.”28 The anti-Dreyfusards claimed that individualism would lead to anarchy, and that individualistic thinking would lead to disrespect toward national, religious, and military authorities. Against this, Durkheim argued that true individualism celebrates the humanity we all share, and that individualism is therefore the only possible religion of a modern society.29 In fact, individualism serves to keep a modern state together. The intellectual, by the use of his free mind, in his understanding of society actually serves society. And in his respect for expert opinion, he recognizes the authority of reason. One day after Zola’s “J’accuse,” l’Aurore released a “Manifesto of the Intellectuals.” Individualism is a defining feature of the intellectual, yet during the Dreyfus Affair intellectuals came together in their growing awareness that they were a factor in public debate, in their collective signing of petitions, and so on. These collectives of individualists also made themselves heard at the start of the war. Immediately after the outbreak of the war, a number of appeals and manifestos were published, most of them as rallying points for the intellectuals 27 28 29

Clemenceau, L’iniquité: L’affaire Dreyfus, 217. Cited in Lukes, “Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’.” Along the same lines, Brandes writes about “the great encounter between the principle of authority on the one side and the principles of individuality and solidarity on the other,” Brandes, The Reaction in France, 5.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

309

of the nations involved. A list of the most important of these appeals makes the social dimension of the intellectual evident: 1) On 18 August a scientist and a philosopher from Germany, Ernst Haeckel and Rudolph Eucken, wrote about “England’s blood debt in the war” (Englands Blutschuld am Weltkrieg). 2) One month later, on 18 September 1914, the New York Times published a manifesto signed by prominent British writers such as G.K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells. Here they identified Great Britain’s war aims as a struggle for civilization. 3) Two weeks later, on 4 October, 93 of the most prominent German artists and scientists published a manifesto, An die Kulturwelt, in which, with the anaphorical “Es ist nicht wahr,” they masqueraded as classic intellectuals and guardians of truth – but in fact it was a truth tied to the German cause. Their appeal was a response to the international reaction to the atrocities committed during the German invasion of neutral Belgium. 4) On 11 October, 1,100 Russian intellectuals published a response to this German manifesto: “A notre patrie et au monde civilisé tout entier.” 5) The nationalistic German manifesto also provoked a response from the German doctor Georg Nicolai, who published an appeal directed to “the Europeans.” Nicolai is interesting as an example of the intellectuals with whom Brandes made contact during the war and because of the war. Nicolai escaped to Denmark, contacted Brandes, and ask him to write a prologue to his book on The Biology of the War. But his efforts to become a rallying point for European and pacifist-minded intellectuals did not succeed. In his article on Nicolai’s stay in Copenhagen in 1918 and his contact with Brandes, Jesper Düring Jørgensen ends his account with an interpretation of “the Nicolai affair” as an example of the impossibility of “maintaining a position as a free, independent or neutral spirit.”30 4

Generationalism

Nicolai’s book on the biology of the war calls attention to the biological determinism which is also an aspect of the concept of generation – as well as the concept of degeneration, which served as a foil to the celebration of the rejuvenating power of war among the “Generation of 1914.” In The World at War, the idea of generation is present from the very first pages. In his description of German conditions, Brandes asserts that “the 30

Sørensen, “Blandt agenter og intellektuelle: Georg Friedrich Nicolai i København 1918.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

310

Zerlang

intellectuals of the younger generation are all reactionary.”31 Interpreting history based on a biological concept may lead to logical problems, but Brandes solves this with an elegant paradox: “Politically, the young are old and only the old are young.”32 In this introductory chapter, an article originally published in 1881, he still has hopes for the young generation outside Germany: he predicts that in Italy, in France, in Russia, and in Scandinavia, “there will rise a generation imbued with international ideas and eager to carry them out in life.”33 In 1923, José Ortega y Gasset wrote that the “idea of the generation” is the most important in history; just five years later Karl Mannheim published a sociological theory of generations. The concept of the generation relates to the concept of the intellectual. In both, there is a combination of distance and involvement. Karl Mannheim also wrote about “das freischwebende Intelligenz”; according to him, every new generation is characterized by a certain freedom or distance from society. The “accelerated pace of social change characteristic of our time”34 continually produces new generations, and the members of each new generation share a “common location” in the historical process: our culture is developed by individuals who come into contact with the accumulated heritage. In the nature of our physical makeup, a fresh contact (meeting something anew) always means a changed relationship of distance from the object and a novel approach in assimilating, using, and developing the proffered material.35 In After the Peace-Treaty, Georg Brandes claims that there exists “some kind of union” between intellectuals.36 Like intellectuals, the different generations constitute social groups somewhere between the formal “Gesellschaft” and the close “Gemeinschaft,” or community. According to Mannheim, a generation is a social group positioned between these two categories, originally suggested by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies: the institutional and contractual Gesellschaft and the close, emotional community of “die Gemeinschaft.” The cohesion of the generation as a community ceases to exist as soon as the mental disposition on which its existence is based stops holding it together. Thus, the 31 32 33 34 35 36

Brandes, The World at War, 2. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, 163. Ibid., 171. Brandes, Tragediens anden Del: Fredsslutningen, 7.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

311

generation is closely linked to yet another concept that appeared around the First World War, that of a collective mentality. The growing consciousness of belonging to a generation was closely connected to the growing importance of collective experiences: school education as a shared experience, the process of urbanization as a shared experience, the formation of imagined communities by the media, and mass politics. The new concept of collective mentalities covered shared assumptions, experiences, and expectations just like those implied in the generation.37 Brandes does not use the concept of collective mentalities, but the mass psychology of the turn of the century is present in his most misanthropic statement in The World at War: “Humanity in the mass is trained to obey when commanded, and is led by passion and imagination. It is bestial at bottom, although easily roused to enthusiasm; it is often heroic in its self-abnegation and devotion, but, whether bestial or sublime, quite unamenable to reason.”38 5

The Mission of the Youth

Mass suggestion plays a major role in Gabriel Tarde’s reflections on crowd behavior and mentality, and in the Danish version of The World at War Brandes actually uses the word “suggestion.” The question of suggestibility dominated the discussion on youth in the years around the turn of the century. The most important expression of the cult of the youth in France shortly before the outbreak of the Great War was Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (1913), edited by Henri Massis in collaboration with Alfred Tarde, son of Gabriel Tarde. Ernest Psichari was another important figure behind this “manifesto” on the youth of France. He was the grandchild of one of Brandes’ old heroes, Ernest Renan, but in spite of his background in a progressive, republican, antiauthoritarian environment Psichari became a supporter of the military and the church, cultivating war as a way out of decadence. If suggestibility is to be considered the explanation for this surprising step, it must be added that as a very young man in a period of dramatic social change he was particularly suggestible. In his The Generation of 1914 Richard Wohl portrays Ernest Psichari as a young man tormented by doubt and self-doubt, who chose the army as an escape from his spiritual crisis. Military discipline cured him of his psychological problems, and military experiences in the French colonies provided

37 38

Zerlang, 1914, 116–125. Brandes, The World at War, 34.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

312

Zerlang

him with an experience of primitive forces as an antidote to the decadence of Parisian over-culture.39 In his article on the “French Youth,” Brandes declares that now, in 1913, the nation seems “vibrant with a desire to know what the young generation is thinking about;”40 as his primary example he points to Ernest Psichari. Though it may be difficult to find one’s way through the multitude of articles on this subject, Brandes proposes four recurring features in the discussion. First of all, Brandes notes, once again with a paradox, that “the youth of France is claimed to be young, at last.”41 In its youthfulness, it combines a fit and healthy body with a robust mind. In the Danish original, this robustness manifests itself in an unwillingness to think. Secondly, the youth is idealistic, even to the point of risking its own life. Thirdly, it is nationalistic, admiring France “to the point of worship.” And, fourthly and most significantly, it worships what is collective and common, it believes that the individual should melt into the whole, and it is attracted to Catholicism. According to Brandes, a foreign observer would note a major and surprisingly rapid change in the mental climate of France: “In 1912 […] the finest of the younger men […] had a decided aversion to war and sincere doubts as to its advantages,” but in 1913 “all this was changed”: “They spoke of war, considered it unavoidable and even looked upon it as a purifying force.”42 This change was so baffling that external social and political conditions were not sufficient to explain it. Even a psychological explanation is hard to find. Nonetheless, Brandes sketches out a psychological narrative, in which Ernest Psichari in a kind of youthful rebellion chooses the opposite direction to the one prepared for him by his family. “If ever a young man was not brought up to admire war it was Ernest Psichari,” Brandes writes, adding that it provoked a little laugh among the friends of the family when the mother, the daughter of Ernest Renan, expressed maternal pride of her son, the young Ernest Psichari, who distinguished himself as an officer in Morocco.43 As for Psichari himself, he wrote a novel, L’Appel des Armes (1913), in which eroticism yields to militarism. Two protagonists, a 40-year-old captain and a 20-year-old soldier, both

39 40

41 42 43

Wohl, The Generation of 1914. Brandes, The World at War, 14. In his The Generation of 1914, Wohl begins with a reference to “a flurry of inquiries into the ‘miracle’ of the new youth” appearing in the years before the outbreak of the war. Most important among these was an enquête made by L’Opinion in 1912 and published the following year under the title “Les Jeunes Gens d’aujourd’hui.” Brandes, The World at War, 14. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 22.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

313

find themselves in a relationship with a woman, but both of them choose the war instead of the woman. The book is “a sort of hymn to war.”44 If patriotism was vibrant in France, it was fanatic in Germany, Brandes writes. He notes the many large organizations, including Jung Deutschland (Young Germany), that “keep the patriotic flame burning and train the youth of Germany both physically and mentally so as to increase the fighting power of the German nation.”45 According to Brandes, the many military organizations in Germany fostered a martial spirit among the young, so that 1,800,000 enlisted as volunteers in the first week after the declaration of war.46 Brandes only mentions a few of the German worshippers of war, but he does note their negative equation of peace and old age: pacifists are like “trousered old women.”47 This contempt of old age was a recurrent theme in the writings of the crowd of belligerent professors, poets, politicians, and preachers. Thus, in Jahrbuch für geistige Bewegung (1911), Friedrich Gundolf exclaimed: “The general, intolerable peace is a sleepy ideal for old men. Where youth, change and creativity is possible and necessary, war is necessary.”48 6

The Psychology of Enthusiasm for War

The Romantics also celebrated youth, but it was the Neo-Romanticism and Vitalism of the turn of the century that made youth into an absolute value: the sport clubs, the boy scout movement, artistic currents such as Die Jugend-Stil, and war-positive organizations such as the Jung Deutschland, mentioned by Brandes, all contributed to this. And, of course, youth also became an argument in world politics. Brandes uses the metaphors of this period when describing England as “the older power” and Germany as a “youthful climber” claiming his right to a place in the sun.49 All these references to the old generation and the young generation, to “trousered old women” and heroic young men, and to the tension between the generations, move the discussion of the causes of war from the field of politics to the field of psychology. In Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark asks if there was

44 45 46 47 48 49

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 24. Cited in Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, 7. Brandes, The World at War, 43.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

314

Zerlang

a “Crisis of Masculinity,” and all his examples point to a remarkable tension among decision makers between nervousness and a worship of military values such as discipline, rigidness, toughness, and even insensitivity to brutality.50 He does not mention the Austrian Otto Weininger, but the latter’s huge success with the book Geschlecht und Charakter in 1903 is a clear indication of the importance of gender in understanding the cultural and political positions of these years. In 1912, in his characterization of Italian Futurism, Brandes pointed to its combination of exaltation and anti-feminism. Another example of this may be found in the war book Klokke Roland (1914) by Johannes Jørgensen.51 Here, Jørgensen exhibits an extreme pattern of thought in which France represents true masculinity in contrast to the effeminate Germans: Germania is “a perfect wife in her own home, an angel to her children, a fury to her husband”; she easily cries or gets angry; she is impervious to arguments; and she always acts on the basis of feelings instead of principles. In contrast to this, French culture is based on masculine reason and consequence.52 The message was popular: 21 editions were released within a single year. Even though “Mandighed,” manliness, is an important value in the universe of Brandes, he never loses himself in these kinds of generalizations based on the gendering of national characters. But his discussion of Ernest Psichari’s L’Appel des Armes shows that he was well aware of the link between the worship of war and the worship of masculinity. 7

Neutrality

At the end of The World at War, Brandes reflected on the precarious position of the intellectual who attempts to be impartial and objective in wartime. William Archer, who had translated some of his works into English, wrote an appeal to Brandes in which he accused him of “color-blind neutrality” – of not being able to distinguish between black and white. This notwithstanding, the American critic H.L. Mencken wrote that Brandes “is probably the only genuinely neutral the war has produced. He denounces both the Germans and the

50 51 52

Clark, The Sleepwalkers, How Europe went to war in 1914, 360. See Jørgensen, False Witness. The Authorised Translation of “Klokke Roland” by Johannes Jørgensen. Ibid., 186ff.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

315

English as scoundrels, and believes that American participation in the war was due to press-agenting, both by Wilson and the big financiers.”53 Is there an explanation for Brandes’ ability to preserve his neutrality in spite of political pressure, loss of friends, and loss of prestige? It was no doubt painful for him to lose friends such as Clemenceau, or to be characterized as color-blind by his English translator William Archer. He repeatedly points to his feeling of isolation, of fighting all alone against the stupidity materialized in the war. He no longer has the support of a generation. One reason for Brandes’ isolation is no doubt the principle of individuality that he defines early on in his career, in Main Currents, as the contrast to the principle of authority. Unlike many German intellectuals who until the turn of the century relied on public or private support, Brandes learned to live the life of an independent intellectual when he was young. Another but concomitant reason is his uncompromising personality in contrast to what he calls “the people of less pride,” who for economic or other similarly self-absorbed reasons chose to support Germany. A third reason could be that since the 1870s Danish intellectuals – with Georg Brandes at their head – had developed a progressive and committed political culture, at least in comparison to German intellectuals. Throughout these years, German thought was characterized by backward-looking, inwardlooking, and very separate currents, with a condescending view on politics.54 Brandes held to the ideals of his youth, and his neutrality was not another word for resignation. His early fight against oppression and subjection crystallized in his fight against imperialism. Towards the end of The World at War, Brandes discusses William Archer’s open letter on his so-called “color-blind neutrality.” He observes that the fact of writing from the position of a small nation in a minority language creates a lot of confusion, because people from nations such as England, France, or Germany do not know your language, do not know your work, and do not know what you have written on this or that subject. But now the situation is even worse – in this case, it is a question not just of confusion, but of hypocrisy. Those super-powers who only 50 years earlier, in 1864, remained neutral and refused to support Denmark, now use “neutral” as a word of scorn and contempt:

53 54

Mencken, Letters of H.L. Mencken, 154; cf. Knudsen, Georg Brandes. Uovervindelig taber. 1914–27, 384. Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867–1918, 138f; cf. Thomas Mann, who defined himself as a non-political man.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

316

Zerlang

Extraordinary how “neutrality” changes in the life of nations! When I was twenty-two, I did not dream I should live to see Denmark ridiculed by France and England because she remained neutral!55 To this may be added that neutrality can hardly be said to characterize a generation in the process of defining itself – particularly not a young generation. To be young is to take sides. A frightening number of the young intellectuals who saw the war as a way to cultural renewal never reached old age. One of the first victims of what Brandes called “the slaughter of the youth of Europe”56 was Ernest Psichari. Just three weeks after the outbreak of the war, he was killed, shot in the head, during an unsuccessful effort to halt the German advance. Bibliography Agathon (Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde) : Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui. Le goût de l’action, la foi patriotique, une renaissance catholique, le réalisme politique. Paris: Libraire Plon, 1913. Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne: Digte og Sange. Copenhagen: Den Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1870. Bourgignon, Annie, Konrad Harrer and Jørgen Stender Clausen (eds) : Grand Courants d’échanges intellectuels : Georg Brandes et la Allemagne, l’Allemagne, l’Angleterre. Nancy : 2008. Brandes, Georg: Reactionen i Frankrig. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1874. Brandes, Georg: The World at War, translated by Catherine D. Growth. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1917. Brandes, Georg: Tragediens anden Del: Fredsslutningen. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1919. Brandes, Georg: Main Currents of European Literature. www.georgbrandes.dk. Accessed 17 September 2021. Clark, Christopher: The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Clausen, Jørgen Stender: Det nytter ikke at sende hære mod ideer. Georg Brandes’ kulturkritik i årene omkring 1. verdenskrig. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1984. Clemenceau, Georges: L’iniquité : L’affaire Dreyfus, with an introduction by Michel Drouin. Paris, Mémoire du livre, 2001.

55 56

Brandes, The World at War, 248. Ibid., 53.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

The Slaughter of the Youth of Europe

317

Dosenrode, Søren (ed.): World War 1: the Great War and its Impact. Aalborg Universitetsforlag. Studier i historie, arkiver og kulturarv 10 (2018). Gillis, John: Youth and History. Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770–Present. New York, London: Academic Press, 1981. Jørgensen, Jesper Düring: “Blandt agenter og intellektuelle: Georg Friedrich Nicolai i København 1918,” Fund og Forskning 1 (2008): 30–51. Jørgensen, Johannes: Klokke Roland. Copenhagen: v. Pios Boghandel, 1914. Jørgensen, Johannes: False Witness. the Authorised Translation of “Klokke Roland.” London, New York, Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916. Knudsen, Jørgen: Georg Brandes. Uovervindelig taber. 1914–27. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004. Knudsen, Jørgen: “Brandes and Clemenceau – a friendship with a bitter end,” in: Bourgignon, 2008, 317–326. Koselleck, Reinhart: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Series: Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Lukes, Steve: “Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’,” Political Studies 17/1 (1969), 14–30. Lúkacs, Georg: The Historical Novel. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Mannheim, Karl: Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Taylor & Francis Books, 1998. Mommsen, Wolfgang: Imperial Germany 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Mommsen, Wolfgang: Kultur und Krieg. Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Elisabeth Müller-Luckner. Munich: R.Oldenburg Verlag, 1996. Nochlin, Linda: Realism. Style and Civilization. London: Penguin Books, 1971. Ortega y Gasset, José: “The Idea of Generations,” in: The Modern Theme, translated by James Cleugh. London: The C.W. Daniel Co, 1931, 11–18. Plenge, Johann: 1789 und 1914: die symbolischen Jahre in der Geschichte des politischen Geistes. Berlin: J. Springer, 1916. Rolland, Romain: Above the Battle, translated by C.K. Ogden. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1916. Spitzer, Alan Barrie: The French Generation of 1820. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Wohl, Richard: The Generation of 1914. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Zerlang, Martin: 1914. Copenhagen: Gad, 2014.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

chapter 15

Brandes after Nietzsche

Aristocratic Radicalism vs. Human Rights William Banks That Georg Brandes played the decisive role in transforming Friedrich Nietzsche from an obscurity into a German, a European, and ultimately a planetary figure is well known and widely acknowledged; as such, the story of the critic’s “discovery” of the philosopher needs only a summary recounting here. In August of 1886, a still almost entirely unknown Nietzsche requested that a copy of the newly published Jenseits von Gut und Böse be sent to one “Dr. Georg Brandes, Kopenhagen.”1 Undeterred by the lack of response, Nietzsche continued to reach out to Brandes over the course of the following year, finally piquing the critic’s interest with the October 1887 publication of Zur Genealogie der Moral. The two men then struck up a lively correspondence, and after nearly a year of intensive study, Brandes felt sufficiently informed to schedule a series of five lectures “on the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche” in Copenhagen for the spring of 1888.2 These monumental addresses, word of which rapidly spread to Germany through the Scandinavian colony in Berlin, were followed by the critic’s “Aristocratic Radicalism. An Essay on Friedrich Nietzsche” in the August 1889 edition of the Danish journal Tilskueren, the very first attempt at treating the vast and variegated corpus of the philosopher as a coherent whole.3 When a German edition of the essay appeared in Deutsche Rundschau in April of 1890, the long vogue of Nietzsche was on. If this is well-trodden territory within Nietzsche studies, it has also left its mark on the Brandesian critical tradition, which often divides the long career of the critic into two distinct phases, with the “Nietzsche encounter” serving as

1 For a superb summary of the Nietzsche–Brandes relationship, see Per Dahl’s introduction to Dahl and Posselt, eds, Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche/ Aristokratischer Radicalismus, 17–129. 2 The 1888 lectures have just been issued in the Danish/German bilingual volume Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche/ Aristokratischer Radicalismus. 3 The essay, along with the complete correspondence, first appeared in English translation in 1914 as Georg Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004682191_017 EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

319

a convenient hinge.4 By the late 1880s, the name of Brandes was virtually synonymous with the movement he had helped to inaugurate a decade and half earlier, that of literary radicalism. As a public intellectual and “activist critic,” he had long enjoined the young authors of the culturally backward North to produce a literature that “provokes debate,” that is works that are deeply engaged with the social and political problems of the day, such that life might be breathed into a moribund literary tradition and, just as importantly, reform and progress in the larger society might be stimulated. As a literary historian and scholar, his literary radicalism manifested itself in the basic structure of Main Currents, the singular work on which his European fame had been built. Coming of age in the long afterglow of German Idealism, the young critic employed a Hegelian scheme, according to which it was (the clash of) ideas that functioned as the motor of history, and just as critically, history itself, if in fits and starts, seemed generally to be moving in the direction of progress and enlightenment. The tragedy of Denmark and the North was that its leading literary lights, unlike their counterparts in Europe’s major countries, never found a way out of the early nineteenth-century Reaction; they were plainly unable to execute the Byronic turnabout back toward the ideals of the Enlightenment. Post-Nietzsche, it can certainly be argued that Brandes largely abandoned his youthful literary radicalism in favor of the designation he himself attached to the name of his friend and ally – that of a specifically aristocratic radicalism. Critical to this transition was a complete reworking of his conception of the bearers of the world-historical ideas, that is those store mennesker (great individuals) through which progress manifests itself. Niels Christian Pages has identified this new sensibility in a letter of April 1888: My friend N. [Nietzsche] has the future in front of him. […] I am becoming more radical, less historical, and constantly more aristocratic regarding aesthetic and historical points of view. I no longer believe the nonsense about great men being concentrations of the masses, formed from below, an expression of the herd, etc. Everything comes from the great ones, everything filters down from them.5 The reasons for this dramatic reorientation are complex, and yet it is difficult to avoid attributing much of it to Brandes’ increasing frustration with 4 For a brief and informative survey of Brandes’ development as a critic and scholar, see, for example, Larsen, “Georg Brandes. The Telescope of Comparative Literature.” 5 Cited and translated in Pages, “On Popularization. Reading Brandes Reading Nietzsche,” 172–173.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

320

Banks

the processes of popular politics. That the literary radicals had reinvigorated Nordic literary culture rather goes without saying; indeed, by the late 1880s much of Europe, however improbably it might have seemed in November 1871, was now taking its cues from the North. And yet the second aspect of the literary radical project – that is the stimulation of progressive social and political reform – had hardly ever gotten off the ground. Incensed by both the intransigence of existing elites and the apparent inertia of the masses, Brandes appears to have found in Nietzsche a way out of the deadlock. What was needed was a new elite, an aristocratie légitime, a kind of dictatorship of the poets, the philosophers, the artists, the saints. The decisiveness of this transformation, at least with respect to Brandes’ scholarly praxis, is hard to overstate, for the great pioneer of comparative literature effectively ceased doing comparative literature; for the remainder of his career, the critic would devote himself almost exclusively to literary biography, charting out the life and work of a long series of world-historical great individuals, among them Shakespeare, Heine, Ibsen, Goethe, Voltaire, Napoleon, and Caesar. This particular understanding of Brandes’ development, that of a journey through a youthful literary radicalism toward, via the encounter with Nietzsche, a mature aristocratic radicalism, is certainly persuasive – and yet it is not without its problems, each of which are here treated in detail. In the first place, we must be mindful that Brandes, even before the Nietzsche volumes began to appear in his mailbox, was already well on his way toward something approximating what he eventually named “aristocratic radicalism.” The relationship between the two men is less that of disciple and prophet, as Heiberg famously said of Hegel, than that of a meeting of minds, in which the critic found in the philosopher substantiation and affirmation for that which he already believed. Nor should the novelty of Nietzsche’s valorization of the grosse Mann be overstated; as Brandes himself notes, Nietzsche’s insistence that the purpose of our species is “the production of individual great men” was indeed shared by “numerous aristocratic spirits” of the age.6 In the second place, we must also understand that despite the intensity of the concord between the two men, there was, from the very beginning, significant distance between Nietzsche and Brandes, a circumstance all too often overlooked in the critical tradition. Much of this confusion can be attributed to the fact that in “Aristocratic Radicalism,” Brandes almost entirely withholds judgment and evaluation of the central ideas of his object, many of which

6 Brandes, “Aristokratisk Radicalisme. En Afhandling om Friedrich Nietzsche,” 574. All translations from Tilskueren are by the author.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

321

appeared to be, at the risk of understatement, far outside the parameters of the progressive literary radical reform program. The essay, understandably enough, resulted in a public scandal in Denmark, initiated by the Danish philosophy professor Harald Høffding, whose “Democratic Radicalism. An Objection,” published in the November/December issue of Tilskueren, would set off a furious debate stretching well into the following spring, with each figure weighing in twice more. In the back and forth between the two combatants, Brandes would be compelled – however reluctantly – to concede that there were indeed points at which he departs from the Basel philosopher. While this momentous “Radikalismedebat” remains a part of national memory, it never really managed to escape the boundaries of Denmark and the North; indeed, of its six essays, only “Aristocratic Radicalism” has ever appeared in a language other than Danish. “Aristocratic Radicalism,” which has been translated into numerous languages and has enjoyed a very long afterlife, has thus been severed from its context, resulting in the all too common belief that the views expressed in the essay are virtually the same as those of its author. In the third and final place, any suggestion that Brandes post-Nietzsche somehow withdrew from the political struggles of the age is belied by the fact that, beginning in the mid-1890s and especially after the turn of the century, he escalated his involvement in affairs of state, and rather dramatically. His overhaul of his scholarly praxis was, indeed, accompanied by an equally comprehensive reworking of his role as a public intellectual. As Olav Harsløf has described, the young Brandes had practiced a form of “cultural-political criticism (ideological criticism)”; aesthetics and politics here coexisted in a relatively happy harmony, for the critic effectively mined literary works for submerged political content, be it progressive/emancipatory or reactionary/ authoritarian. The mature Brandes, in sharp contrast, transitioned to a form of what Harsløf calls “political-journalistic criticism (social criticism),” that is away from essentially indirect ideologikritik toward direct engagement in global affairs.7 If in the 1870s and 1880s the two sides of the critic could coexist more or less comfortably, the events of the 1890s necessitated a rupture between Brandes as scholar and Brandes as public intellectual. The reason for this monumental shift involves a substantially revised understanding of Europe’s major powers, which back in 1871 had functioned as models to be emulated by backward Denmark and the North. The late nineteenth-century resurgence of great power imperial expansion, however, had all but stopped the march of progress, placing in mortal danger not only the subjects of overseas colonization but also 7 Harsløf, “Fra kulturpolitik til politisk journalistik,” 136.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

322

Banks

the small states and national minority populations of Eurasia (Denmark very much included), who increasingly found themselves in the paths of predatory great powers. It was the fate of all such undertrykte folkeslag that motivated the critic to refashion himself as a kind of international tribune of oppressed peoples, a relentless defender of, however improbably – given his equally potent radical aristocratism – the weak against the strong.8 How Brandes at one and the same time could be an aristocratic radical and, essentially, a human rights advocate, amounts indeed to the central enigma of the critic’s life and work. 1

An Aristocratic Radical Tradition

That Nietzsche styles himself as a Cassandra, a prophetic voice echoing back to us from the future, is already evident in the title of the only one of his early works to attract any attention in his native Germany – the Unzeitsgemässe Betrachtungen of 1873–1876. While Brandes treats these Untimely Meditations at length in “Aristocratic Radicalism,” it is to his credit as a scholar and critic that he makes considerable effort to place his object within current intellectual trends, identifying the numerous fellow travelers already echoing Nietzsche’s central concerns. This is especially the case with the core contention of the ideology of aristocratic radicalism, namely that a small handful of extraordinary individuals – a genuine spiritual aristocracy – holds the key to the progress of our species, and that the principal problem of modernity is the unwillingness of the masses to submit to the will of their betters. While Brandes focuses on contemporary France (Renan, Flaubert), what could be called the aristocratic radical “tradition” is significantly older, and largely originated in Britain, as a critical component of the Reaction to the events of 1789.9 Although his concern was principally with the aristocracy as a class rather than as a breeding ground for the extraordinary individual, the tradition was formally inaugurated by Edmund Burke. The appearance of Thomas Carlyle’s 1841 On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History, in contrast, placed all the emphasis where it had probably always belonged, that is upon the singular Great Men; history is, after all, largely synonymous with “The Biography of Great Men.”10 That the doctrine of aristocratic radicalism can hardly be said 8 9 10

For English translations of the critic’s political journalism, see Banks, ed. and trans., Georg Brandes, Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples. Collected Essays and Speeches. For a summary of this tradition, see the forthcoming introduction to Banks, ed., The Critic and the Philosopher. Carlyle, On Heroes, 13.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

323

to have been monopolized by the Right is evidenced by its strong presence in the works of no less a consummate liberal than John Stuart Mill, the other major nineteenth-century philosopher with whom Brandes, 20 years earlier, had carried on a productive dialogue. “The honour and the glory of the average man,” Stuart Mill insists, “is that he is capable of following” the example of the great men (and, for him as well as for Brandes, but not for Nietzsche, the great women), “that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open.”11 The doctrine of aristocratic radicalism was thus clearly already in the air of fin de siècle Europe when Brandes gave it its name. No greater testament to its ubiquity may be found than in its appearance across the Atlantic in the young W.E.B. DuBois, who begins his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth” with the assertion that “the Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”12 More importantly, as has been suggested, Brandes is no exception; indeed, it is arguable that the seeds of the doctrine were there almost from the beginning. In his November 1871 address, for instance, Brandes attributes the grand dialectical turnabout of the early nineteenth century to the singular figure of Byron, for it is “this one man” who “brings about the reversal in the great drama.”13 With respect to the intellectual foundations of Main Currents, it would be wrong to deny that the literary positivism of Taine, that is the idea that individual authors and their works are effectively determined by conditions external to themselves – the famous trinity of “la race, la milieu, la moment” – exerted a powerful influence over the critic. And yet, as Torben Jelsbak has demonstrated, Tainean positivism, even for the young Brandes, did “not to a sufficient degree provide space for the individual and for creative genius,” and thus could not abide “the kind of hero worship that over time became a steadily more prominent driving force” in the critic’s praxis.14 Also of significance for Main Currents is the influence of the literary psychology of Taine’s contemporary Sainte-Beuve, whose conception of the relatively sovereign authorial personality provides for Brandes the rudiments of his mature scholarly praxis. One way of conceiving of Main Currents, then, is that it is marked by a gradual progression away from Taine and toward Sainte-Beuve, from the idea that the great individuals concentrate the spirit of the age within 11 12 13 14

Mill, On Liberty, 62. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth,” 31. The author thanks C. Ansel Tucker for alerting him to DuBois’s early aristocratic bias. Lynn Wilkinson, trans., “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur,” 700. Jelsbak, “Brandes Before Main Currents.”

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

324

Banks

themselves toward the contention that the greatness of the great individuals emanates directly from the personality itself. And as Adam Paulsen has detailed, this process was indeed underway before Brandes began his correspondence with Nietzsche; in a July 1887 letter meant to justify the revisions he had made to the second edition of The Romantic School in Germany, the Dane confesses that his “understanding of the relation between ideas and personalities was turned on its head.”15 Whereas in the early 1870s he had treated individual authors as mere “mouthpieces for the ideas,” by the mid-1880s he was seeking to demonstrate “how their production emerged out of their lives.”16 What Brandes gathered from Nietzsche, then, seems to be a kind of confirmation for what he had long suspected – namely not only that greatness is located firmly within the personality of the individual, but even more so that the presence of greatness is more often than not fundamentally at odds with the spirit of the age. This is made explicit in “Aristocratic Radicalism”: Our time has been thoroughly penetrated by the views of Taine, principally the idea that the great man is the offspring of his age, that through and through he is determined by it, that he unconsciously summarizes it and consciously gives it expression. Yet although the great man by all means does not stand outside the march of history and always must build upon his forbears, an idea always crystallizes in an individual or individuals, and these individuals are not random points spread across the common multitude, but highly gifted individuals who draw the multitude to themselves and are not drawn into it.17 What Nietzsche learned from Schopenhauer, then, Brandes appears to have absorbed from Nietzsche. The grosse Mann is most certainly not the favored child of the age, the physical manifestation of the Volksgeist; on the contrary, like the Great King Xerxes lashing the billows of the Hellespont, the great must bend the currents of the age to their singular will. 2

The “Nietzsche Affair” of 1889–1890

If all this strikes the contemporary reader as a bit much, it must be emphasized that it was not popular among Brandes’ Danish contemporaries either. Once 15 16 17

Paulsen, “Young Germany.” Letter from Brandes to his German publisher, cited in Paulsen, “Young Germany.” Brandes, “Aristokratisk Radicalisme,” 573.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

325

more, the principal strength of his Nietzsche portrait is that, unlike the philosopher’s numerous post-Second World War apologists, he made no effort to conceal the dreadful political, social, and ethical implications of Nietzschean aristocratic radicalism. Early in the essay, for example, Brandes casually notes that “for Nietzsche […] everything will come down to the ability to breed and to cultivate a caste of eminent intellects which could seize centralized power.”18 Two of Nietzsche’s core values, that is the indispensability of eugenics and the desire for the overthrow of popular governance, are here presented, if not precisely favorably, at the very least without objection. And of Nietzsche’s novel ethical thought, Brandes gives us this, again largely withholding judgment: He proposes a morality that disregards immediate consequences and through its practice inflicts agony upon the neighbor, in the interest of pursuing a more distant goal, for example the furtherance of insight, even if this awakens sorrow and doubt and wicked passions among the neighbor.19 It has been more than a century since the (anti-)gospel of Nietzsche first erupted into the world of ideas, and if only because of its familiarity, it has lost much of its capacity to shock. In late nineteenth-century Denmark, however, the appearance of “Aristocratic Radicalism” did precisely that, prompting the aforementioned “Democratic Radicalism. An Objection,” from a thoroughly scandalized Høffding. Observing that “it is by no means always easy to determine whether it is Nietzsche or Brandes who is the author of the individual utterances,” Høffding’s rebuttal is essentially a demand for clarity: do you, Dr. Brandes – you whose name for two decades has been associated with the cause of progressive reform – really believe such things that are so clearly at odds with everything for which you have previously stood?20 The critic’s response, “The Great Individual. The Source of Culture” – at the same time both a rather serious escalation and, however reluctantly, a partial concession – immediately followed in the January 1890 number of Tilskueren. Høffding’s “Response to Dr. Georg Brandes” then appeared in the February/ March issue, followed by Brandes’ “Rejoinder” in April, and finally, formally concluding the affair, Høffding’s “Epilogue” in May.21 18 19 20 21

Brandes, “Aristokratisk Radicalisme,” 570. Brandes, “Aristokratisk Radikalisme,” 588. Høffding, “Demokratisk Radikalsime. En Indsigelse,” 850. English translations of all six essays are forthcoming in 2023 in William Banks, ed. and trans., The Great Debate. Nietzsche, Culture and the Scandinavian Welfare Society.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

326

Banks

The conflict between Brandes and Høffding is of significance insofar as it constitutes the very first substantial discussion of Nietzsche in any language, but it must also be counted among the most important public debates of nineteenth-century Denmark and the North, where it is largely remembered today as having turned on the matter of culture – specifically the question of how the worthiness of a given culture is to be evaluated. Brandes, of course, insists that the measure is to be found in the “leading figures,” that is the relative greatness of the great men and women produced by the nation; Denmark may have achieved universal literacy relatively early, but any suggestion that it was somehow more cultivated than France (a late adopter of universal education) was patently laughable, given the exemplary quality of its poets, its philosophers, its artists. Høffding, in absolute contrast, contends that a culture ought to be evaluated by the level of cultivation of its ordinary citizens, although he does not, importantly, dispute the significance of the great individuals. If anything, Høffding maintains that a society is far more likely to produce a genuinely superior elite “by providing favorable life circumstances for as many as possible.”22 In so doing, society is assured that the abilities of no extraordinary individual, no matter how humble their circumstances of birth, is wasted, and furthermore, that relations between the exceptional and the ordinary shall be all the more harmonious. On this latter point – a lifelong concern of Brandes – the two men can find no common ground, for like Nietzsche the critic maintains that relations between mass and elite are always characterized by agonism, by ressentiment. Far greater is the waste, for Brandes, that results from the manner in which the dull and vengeful mob, by virtue of its vastly superior numbers, smothers the flame of greatness wherever and whenever it appears among us. It should by now be apparent that there is far more at stake here than “mere” culture, for Nietzschean aristocratic radicalism is not only a method for its evaluation, it is also – and every bit as much – a prescription for the proper “cultural organization” of society; as such, it can hardly be sealed off from the larger question of the proper social organization of a people. By contending that, in the interest of acquiring a better elite, it is the responsibility of society to ensure “favorable life conditions for as many as possible,” Høffding has effectively backed himself into arguing for the social democratic welfare society. And this is by no means an accident, for just two years previously, in his Ethics, Høffding had introduced a new concept into Nordic discourse, that of the velfærdsprincip, a uniquely Scandinavian variant of the old utilitarian 22

Høffding, “Demokratisk Radikalsime. En Indsigelse,” 850.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

327

maxim of Bentham and Mill.23 The Nietzsche debate is also, therefore, the first moment at which the concept of the welfare society is contested in the North; as Lasse Horne Kjældgaard has aptly put it, “long before there was a welfare state, there was a debate about welfare.”24 It is precisely here that the extremism of Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism reveals itself. Because it is culture – understood here as the sum total of the great individuals produced by a people – that functions as the very telos of our species, then any concern for the welfare of ordinary human beings must necessarily give way to the demands of the great. While this is at least in some sense defensible as a philosophical principle, Nietzsche in fact ventures much further, for if culture is to survive in the modern world, it must necessarily be at the expense of the masses, who must be conditioned to willfully accept their sacrifice. It must be noted that Brandes did not have access to the entirety of Nietzsche’s corpus; of special significance here is one of the numerous manuscripts published only after his death, the 1872 essay “The Greek State,” which had been privately bound and presented to the Wagners as a Christmas gift.25 What is only (strongly) implied in his published works is here made absolutely explicit; unlike us modern softies, the Greeks intuitively understood that the production of culture is contingent upon the suffering of the masses. If we moderns are to match their achievements, then “the misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympian men.”26 Although Brandes was clearly not entirely aware of the extent of the essential cruelty of Nietzsche’s political and social program, it nonetheless comes through clearly enough in his portrait of his friend and ally: Modern hygienic measures that preserve the lives of millions of weak and useless people who rather ought to die is for him no real progress. Securing a median of happiness among the largest possible number of the miserable creatures we call human beings today would not be progress. But for him […] the fostering of a stronger, higher form of humanity

23 24 25 26

See Høffding, Etik. En Fremstill af det Etiske Principer of Deres Anvendelse paa de Vigtigste Livsforhold, 30–47. Kjældgaard, Meningen med Velfærdsstaten. Da Litteraturen tog Ordet – og Politikerne Lyttede, 13. Kjælgaard’s treatment of this aspect of the debate in the initial chapter is superb. See Corey Robin’s seminal “In Nietzsche’s Margins” for a discussion of “The Greek State” and of Nietzsche’s reactionary politics in general. Nietzsche, “The Greek State,” 166.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

328

Banks

than that which surrounds us (“the overman”) would be a great, an actual form of progress, even though such could only be achieved through the sacrifice of masses of human beings as we know them.27 It is a testament to Høffding’s chops as a debater that he manages, in the back and forth of the conflict, to compel Brandes to show his true colors here, and in the end, the critic cannot follow his friend and ally down such a path. Instead Brandes seeks, however unsatisfyingly, to cordon off the political and social dimensions of aristocratic radicalism, re-presenting the doctrine as exclusively a theory of culture. In “Rejoinder,” his final sally in the conflict, he remains insistent that the principal threat to culture is the ressentiment of the masses – the ever-increasing encroachment of the mob upon the aery domain of Parnassus. If culture is to survive, then, it must be insulated from the popular will and placed under the protection of a rather nebulously defined elite class, who must somehow be made to understand “that it will not do to shortchange or to muddy up the sources of culture,” that is, the great individuals who are the sole source of all that is of value.28 Curiously enough, this most “modern” of nineteenthcentury men of letters must look backward for models of such a system of cultural organization, to the so-called “aristocratic republics” of Renaissance Italy or Early Modern Britain. 3

The Strong and the Weak, the Weak and the Strong

At the very least, then, we must be careful not to overestimate the impact of Nietzsche on Brandes, and on two rather mutually contradictory counts. In the first place, the critic’s thinking had long been evolving toward something approximating Nietzsche’s doctrine of aristocratic radicalism before their encounter; the distance between the two men by the late 1880s, by Brandes’ own account, was not so great.29 And in the second place and at the same time, their differences were very real, and present from the start. As Per Dahl and Gert Posselt have revealed, Brandes’ misgivings regarding the reactionary drift of Nietzsche were evident as early as a December 1887 letter to Paul Heyse,

27 28 29

Brandes, “Aristokratisk Radikalisme,” 595. Italics original. Brandes, “Duplik,” 275. Ibid., 258–259.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

329

in which he confides that he finds “Nietzsche’s attitude toward socialism and anarchism too dismissive and lacking in nuance.”30 This is not to argue that the Dane’s “conversion” to aristocratic radicalism was anything less than sincere, or that his encounter with the Basel philosopher did not result in a decisive reorientation of his thought and praxis. Despite the considerable concessions Brandes makes to his opponent in “Rejoinder,” he remains insistent that the principal malady of the present is “the purely democratic principle,” the manner in which the so-called progressive intellects of the age view “the word omnibus (for all!) as the solution” to virtually every problem confronting our species.31 If he cannot condone the full measure of the brutality of Nietzschean aristocratic radicalism, Brandes nonetheless never wavers from his conviction that the great mass of ordinary human beings must be disciplined, that they must be trained up “to understand that they have responsibilities toward the unusual people, that they ought to withhold their judgement when they cannot assess or understand.”32 The pathway toward cultural progress is gruelingly slow, and if giants are once again to bestride the earth and lead us toward the heights of a New Parnassus, then we ordinary souls must be prepared to sacrifice. And yet, as has been suggested, the firmness of Brandes’ aristocratic radical convictions was most certainly undermined by his conduct as a public intellectual in the decades after the encounter with Nietzsche and the conflict with Høffding. The reason for his self-reinvention as a human rights advocate, as noted, was the dramatic resurgence of imperial expansion among the great powers, which, in apparent contrast to his earlier concern with the rising restiveness of the masses, he now appears to identify as the most stubborn obstacle to progress. Here is Brandes in his seminal 1899 address “Thoughts at the Turn of Century”: The decisive political development we have experienced at the end of the nineteenth century is this: the great powers divide the world among themselves […] they act with injurious recklessness, because for the sake of economic advantage they sacrifice not only those peoples who they conquer by fire and by sword and in all manner of horrors, but further all the small nations within their immediate orbit, which are either

30 31 32

Dahl and Posselt, eds, Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche/ Aristokratischer Radicalismus, 44. Brandes, “Duplik,” 278. Ibid., 275.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

330

Banks

abandoned for the sake of national unity or exchanged as bounty or delivered up to brutality.33 If greatness in individuals is the solution to all the world’s problems, the sole source of value in the world, then greatness in nations, it seems, has become rather more problematic. So much so, indeed, that the critic is compelled to enter directly into the domain of grand politics, to speak out initially on behalf of all those small nations and national minorities unfortunately situated astride Europe’s old continental empires, as well as, gradually and increasingly over time, the far more numerous victims of great power colonialism abroad. A brief (and incomplete) survey of the various oppressed peoples for which Brandes served as an advocate provides an idea of the scope of his actIvity as an early human rights activist: the Boxer Rebels of late imperial China, the partitioned Poles and their similarly divided Ruthenian neighbors, the murdered Armenians of eastern Anatolia, the Finnish victims of Russification, the Persian pawns of the Great Game, and the unfortunate Latin American peoples newly suffering under the belated entry of the United States into the colonial project. That Brandes here comes to side with all those on the wrong end of what could be termed a national/civilizational will to power, that is, with the weak and against the strong, must surely appear somewhat at odds with his aristocratic radicalism. The imperial enterprise, after all, can in a certain sense be understood as the scaling up of Nietzschean ethics, from the willful assertiveness of the great individual to the willful assertiveness of the great nation. Nor should it be forgotten that the Europeans who conquered the world “by fire and by sword” understood themselves to be agents of progress, and indeed of specifically cultural progress – the fruits of one’s unquestionably superior civilization are gradually, after a substantial period of “tutelage,” to be imparted to the “less fortunate” peoples of the globe. The British offer a striking example, for as Samuel Moyn has recently noted, under Gladstone they came to believe that “the cause of humanity was served by the geopolitical advancement of a single nation (and empire).”34 If the French, as Brandes suggests in “The Great Man. The Source of Culture,” have proved themselves exemplary in the production of great individuals – and thereby in the production of culture itself – then where is the harm in their refashioning in their own image the peoples of

33 34

Brandes, “Tanker ved Aarhundredskiftet,” 144–145. Samuel Moyn, “Beyond Liberal Internationalism,” 118.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

331

West Africa and Indochina?35 In so doing is not the cultural development of our species thereby increased? The answer to both these rather pithy questions is, of course, a resounding no, for the utility of the doctrine of aristocratic radicalism, for Brandes, clearly does not extend to the domain of the relations between nations. This is made explicit in an important essay of 1905, “The Rights and Duties of the Weaker”: Our age is steadily in more marked attunement with the right of the stronger. The time is long past when one contemptuously referred to it as the right of the fist. A modern understanding views the various peoples as it does the single individual, whose desires are self-assertion with evermore increased power.36 Confronted with cultural, linguistic, indeed even national extinction, oppressed peoples are left with only a single choice: What can we set in opposition to this right of the stronger? First and foremost what I will call the right of the weaker […] the right to be judged and to be treated not according to one’s external weakness, but according to one’s internal strength, one’s value for universal civilization, the example one provides, the cultural heights one has achieved.37 Culture, as is always the case with Brandes, remains primary, and yet here it is, in the end, in the service of some higher value – the struggle of the weak against the strong, the only means by which the oppressed might resist the predation of their tormentors. The great women and men of culture, surely enough, must play the decisive role here; and yet in absolute contrast to the Nietzsche debate, they are now conceived, effectively, as a means – a demonstration of the “internal strength” of an outwardly weak and oppressed people. This internal tension, between the deification of the strongest individuals among us and the simultaneous advocacy for the rights of the weakest peoples, would remain with the critic until the very end; whether the two can ultimately be reconciled is thus a central question for Brandes scholarship. Although a satisfying resolution may well never be forthcoming, it is worth taking a look at another text from the same year as “Thoughts at the Turn of the 35 36 37

Brandes, “Det store Menneske. Kulterens Kilde,” 23. Brandes, Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples. Collected Essays and Speeches, 149. Italics original. Ibid., 150.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

332

Banks

Century,” that is his introduction to Memoirs of a Revolutionist, the autobiography of another friend and ally, the erstwhile geologist Peter Kropotkin, who is of course better remembered as the principal theorist of the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century anarchist movement. Kropotkin presents an intriguing challenge to Brandes, for this singular figure – the life of whom Oscar Wilde had counted as among “the most perfect lives” he had ever come across – amounts to a categorical rejection of the entirety of Nietzschean aristocratic radicalism. That Kropotkin, even as a young man, knew greatness, is indisputable. Here is Brandes on the scientist’s year of discovery: He approaches his thirtieth year – the decisive year in a man’s life […]. He has found out that the maps of Northern Asia are incorrect; that not only the old conceptions of the geography of Asia are wrong, but that the theories of Humboldt are also in contradiction with the facts. For more than two years he has plunged into laborious research. Then, suddenly, on a certain day, the true relations of the facts flash upon him; he understands that the main lines of structure in Asia are not from north to south or from west to east, but from the south-west to the north-east. He submits his discovery to test, he applies it to numerous separated facts, and – it holds its ground. Thus he knew the joy of scientific revelation in its highest and purest form; he has felt how elevating is its action on the mind.38 And yet the ecstasy of the Archimedean moment soon dissipates, the life of the mind proving itself ever less satisfying: Then comes the crisis. The thought that these joys are the lot of so few, fills him now with sorrow. He asks himself whether he has the right to enjoy this knowledge alone – for himself. He feels that there is a higher duty before him – to do his part in bringing to the mass of the people the information already gained, rather than to work at making new discoveries.39 It must be stressed here that Brandes immediately proceeds to express his disapproval, reasserting his conviction that “a man does the utmost for the wellbeing of all when he has given to the world the most intense production of 38 39

Brandes, Introduction to Memoirs of a Revolutionist, xi–xii. Curiously enough, the decisive year for Kropotkin was the same as that for the critic, 1871. Ibid., xii.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Brandes after Nietzsche

333

which he is capable.”40 And yet this reiteration of aristocratic radicalism surely comes off as somewhat lukewarm, or compulsory – it is one brief disclaimer in what is for all practical purposes an encomium to a man who turned his back on his greatness, who sacrificed everything to serve the very weakest among us, thereby emerging as an even greater figure in the eye of the critic. Can one love Nietzsche and Kropotkin at one and the same time? For Brandes, at least, the answer is yes. Bibliography Brandes, Georg: “The 1872 Introduction to Hovedstrømninger I det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature),” introduced and translated by Lynn Wilkinson, pmla 132/3 (May 2017): 696–705. Brandes, Georg: “Aristokratisk Radicalisme. En Afhandling om Friedrich Nietzsche,” Tilskueren (August 1889): 565–613. Brandes, Georg and Harald Høffding: The Great Debate. Nietzsche, Culture and the Scandinavian Welfare Society, edited and translated by William Banks. Madison, WI: Wisconsin, 2023. Brandes, Georg: “Det store Menneske. Kulturens Kilde,” Tilskueren (January 1890): 1–25. Brandes, Georg: “Duplik,” Tilskueren (April 1890): 251–279. Brandes, Georg: Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by A.G. Chater. London: William Heinemann, 1914. Brandes, Georg: Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples. Collected Essays and Speeches, edited and translated by William Banks. Madison, WI: Wisconsin, 2020. Brandes, Georg: Introduction to Peter Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, vii–xiv. Brandes, Georg: “Tanker ved Aarhundredskiftet,” in: Samlede Skrifter, vol. 12. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1902, 142–162. Brandes, Georg: Vorlesungen über Friedrich Nietzsche/ Aristokratischer Radicalismus, edited by Per Dahl and Gert Posselt. Basel/Berlin: Schwabe Verlag, 2021. Carlyle, Thomas: On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska, 1966. DuBois, W.E.B: “The Talented Tenth,” in: The Negro Problem, edited by Booker T. Washington. New York: James Pott, 1903, 31–75.

40

Ibid., xii.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

334

Banks

Harsløf, Olav: “Fra kulturpolitik til politisk journalistik,” in: Den politiske Georg Brandes, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, 1973, 135–138. Høffding, Harald: “Democratisk Radikalisme. En Indsigelse,” Tilskueren (November/ December 1889): 849–872. Høffding, Harald: Etik. En Fremstill af det Etiske Principer of Deres Anvendelse paa de Vigtigste Livsforhold. Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsen, 1887. Høffding, Harald: “Epilog,” Tilskueren (May 1890): 343–353. Høffding, Harald: “Gensvar til Dr. Georg Brandes,” Tilskueren (February/March 1890): 125–153. Jelsbak, Torben: “Brandes Before Main Currents.” Digital Currents Project. https://georg brandes.dk/research/1papers/jelsbak_BrandesBeforeMC_res_en.html. Accessed 17 September 2021. Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne: Meningen med Velfærdsstaten. Da Litteraturen tog Ordet – og Politikerne Lyttede. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2018. Larsen, Svend Erik: “Georg Brandes. the Telescope of Comparative Literature,” in: The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. Milton Park, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012, 21–31. Mill, John Stuart: On Liberty. Kitchener, ON: Batoche, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich: “The Greek State,” in: On the Genealogy of Morals and Other Writings, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, 2006, 164–173. Pages, Niels Christian: “On Popularization. Reading Brandes Reading Nietzsche,” Scandinavian Studies 72/2 (Summer 2000): 163–180. Paulsen, Adam: “Young Germany.” Digital Currents Project. https://georgbran des.dk/research/2introductions/paulsen_hs6_1890_res_2introductions_en.html. Accessed 17 September 2021. Robin, Corey: “In Nietzche’s Margins,” in: The Reactionary Mind. Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford, 2018, 133–164.

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Index America 5, 56–57, 265, 269–276 Andersen, Hans Christian 29, 66–67, 158, 234, 252 Andersen, Vilhelm 296–297 antisemitism 220, 248, 280–298 aristocratic radicalism 26, 115, 131, 318–333 Balzac, Honoré de 88, 92 Benedictsson, Victoria 69, 72–73, 123 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne 57–58, 122, 128–130, 190–193 Bourdieu, Pierre 146, 149, 204–205 Brandes, Georg  Julius Lange 294 Levned (autobiography) 180, 294–295 Naturalism in England 104–105, 266 Samlede Skrifter (collected writings) 292–294 The Emigrant Literature 64–65, 84–85, 141–163, 228, 282–286 The Men of the Modern Breakthrough 197–198, 303 The Reaction in France 38, 41 The Romantic School in France 37–39, 102, 106–107 The Romantic School in Germany 65–66, 98, 103–104 The World at War 306–311 Young Germany 48, 67, 107–108, 243, 302 of Brandes 25, 269, 318–322 Brandes, Edvard 2, 68 Brandes, Ernst 2 Brøchner, Hans 281–282 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 36–37, 323 celebrity 29, 169, 183, 194–195, 218–219, 243– 248, 254, 270 censorship 176, 229–235, 247–255 Chasles, Philarète 172 China 262 Christianity 151–152, 288, 294 Clemenceau, Georges 19, 305, 307–308 colonialism 20–21, 239–240, 255, 330–333 Constant, Benjamin 64

comparative literature/criticism 4–14, 19–31, 33–34, 48–50, 63–65, 81–82, 99, 113–118, 157–163, 167–169, 181–182, 260–264, 273, 320 Copenhagen, University of 3, 281–282, 295–297 cosmopolitanism 12–13, 26–31, 110, 143–144, 157–159, 178–180, 280–298 critical positivism 89–90, 107, 147, 152–154, 174–175, 323 criticism 1, 6–10, 30–31, 37, 62–63, 71–75, 151–156, 243 culture/s  mass 146–147 national 13–14, 20–21, 26–31, 113–135, 167–185, 238–242 theory of 8–10, 46–50, 94–95, 97–111, 126, 212–213, 261–267, 310, 326–331 renewal of 52, 65, 142–144, 156–162, 207– 209, 283–288, 304–305 currents (metaphor) 161–162 Danish  language 10, 99–100, 124, 179, 190–191, 233–234, 251, 268, 292–294 literature 39, 52, 75, 86, 94–95, 117, 142– 143, 158–159, 170, 204, 234–235, 282–283, 297, 319, 321 de Staël, Germaine 38, 63–65, 167, 286 de Vogüé, Eugène–Melchior 240–241 Denmark 20, 58–59, 70, 169–170, 189–191, 241–242, 248, 268, 281–284, 297–298, 304, 315–316, 326 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 238 drama 58, 88, 93, 109–110, 151, 189–205 Dreyfus Affair 148–149, 290, 298, 307–308 Eastman, S.C. 237n41, 269 Engels, Friedrich 145, 159 England 201, 270–271 English  language 120–121, 264–267 literature 39, 46, 104–105, 127–128 emotions 7, 33–50, 85, 108, 150, 310

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

336 European identity 3, 10, 19–27, 118, 142, 167– 169, 185, 228–231, 238–242, 260–264, 274, 280, 287–290, 302, 330 Fibiger, Mathilde 60–62 Finland 233–234, 252–253 First World War 19, 31, 304–316 foreignness 117–118, 125, 135, 234–235, 254, 292–293 France 146–147, 167, 171–172, 301, 311–312 French  language 29, 173, 185, 246–247, 266 literature 27, 38–39, 105, 128–129, 203 philosophy 48, 148–151 Revolution of 1789, 142, 162, 282, 296, 301–302 Garborg, Arne 68–69 gender 52–77, 92–93, 313–314 generations 47, 202, 301–316 German  language 29, 135, 185n76, 207–225, 264– 266, 268 literature 25, 41–44, 103–104, 117, 127, 266 philosophy 2, 87, 125, 131–134, 153, 318–333 Germany 3, 19, 144, 170, 182, 185, 195–196, 202–203, 247–248, 280–281, 297, 309, 313–315 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 85, 160 Gomperz family 218–219 Gosse, Edmund 127–128, 201 Greece 184, 327 Grundtvig, Elisabeth 70–71 Grundtvig, F.S. 288 Hegel 8, 24–26, 47–49, 99–102, 108, 151, 157, 173–175 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig 61, 126–127 Høffding 325–238 human rights 102, 318–333 Ibsen, Henrik 68, 82, 109–110, 182–183, 189–205 intellectualism 10–14, 125–134, 141–163, 167– 185, 208–212, 216, 307–309 Italian  language 120

Index literature 314 Italy 154–155, 167–185 Japan 263–264 Jewishness 219, 288–298 Kierkegaard, Søren 3, 87–88, 266 Knudsen, Jørgen 191, 203–204, 293 Kropotkin, Peter 251, 332–333 languages 20, 22, 29, 46, 250, 265–268 letters 9–10, 113–135, 171 literary history 8–11, 20–26, 48–49, 81–95, 152, 209–210, 213–214 marketing 116–118, 224 Marx, Karl 145, 159 Mérimée, Prosper 106–107 Mill, John Stuart 58–62, 125, 154–155, 173– 174, 194, 323 Modern Breakthrough 3, 116–118, 144, 189– 205, 284–285, 302–305 morality feud 67–71 Moretti, Franco 97–99, 109 Møller, P.L. 88 Napoleon 44 Nietzsche, Friedrich 26, 131–134, 318–333 Nobel Prize for Literature 1 Norway 182–183, 190–193, 204 Noufflard, Georges 128, 184 Oehlenschläger, Adam 86 pacifism 19–21, 31, 304–309, 312–316 pétroleuse 144–146 philology 6, 20, 22 prose 97–111 Psichari, Ernest 311–312, 316 psychology 23, 35–50, 106, 152–153, 293, 313–314 publishers 167, 191, 201–202, 247–249, 270–271 Renan, Ernest 147–148, 153, 172, 269, 311–312 revisions (of Brandes’ works) 8–9, 63–65, 90, 272–274, 324

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

337

Index revolutions  of 1848, 20, 47, 142 See also French Revolutions of 1789 Russia 228–255 Russian  language 231, 243, 251 literature 27–28, 228, 238, 240–243, 255 revolution 228, 249–251, 253 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 37, 323 sales (of Brandes’ books) 190, 294 Sand, George 52, 63, 105 Saredo, Giuseppe 154–155, 175–183 scandal 12, 142–144, 321 Scandinavia 63, 144, 169, 174, 182–185, 199– 205, 220, 242, 273–274 Schlegel, Friedrich 66, 103 science 1, 35–36, 73, 81–83, 151–152, 160, 284, 332 Scott, Walter 105 Second Schleswig War 143, 167, 282, 315–316 sexuality 52–53, 67–71, 75–77 Shakespeare, William 28, 253, 273, 285 socialism 143–145, 158–159

Solov’ev, Vladimir 248, 252–253 Stendhal 42–43, 49–50 Strindberg, August 68, 133–134 Sweden 56–57, 69–70, 73–75, 197, 233–234 Taine, Hippolyte 2, 89, 126–127, 147–148, 152–154, 161–162, 172, 323–324 theater, See drama Translation 29, 59, 126, 180, 185n76, 202, 248–252, 255, 260–261, 267–274 Turgenev, Ivan 27, 228 types (in literature) 83–95 Villari, Pasquale 173–175, 178–179 Williams, Raymond 45–49 women 7–8, 52–77, 92–93, 234 Wordsworth, William 104 world literature/Weltliteratur 29–31, 97, 159, 260–261, 267–268, 275–276 youth 66, 92–93, 144, 202, 301–316 Zionism 290–291 Zola, Émile 129–130, 148–149, 307–308

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

EBSCOhost - printed on 4/2/2024 12:38 PM via . All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use