Georg Brandes
483 GEORG BRANDES A FRENCH critic once termed artificial light one ¦*¦ *• of the great formative influences upon the life of Ibsen. The remark is probably too clever, but it does call attention...
...In a certain sense, he also walked along blind to the people round about him...
...He could trace the adventures of the French literary emigrants with so sure a hand because he was a master of the psychology of migration...
...He could write a better book about Shakespeare than any other foreigner (excepting Goethe, the universal genius) because he was, in all truth, really not a foreigner...
...He was, in short, the humanistic renaissance of modern Spain...
...No man who retained identity with any particular western society or tradition could have explored the wide world with half so discerning an eye...
...Brandes has been compared with the mighty Spaniard, Menendez y Pelayo...
...One may marvel at the performance, but it is well to remember that it was achieved by an outsider...
...But each comes back to his own hearth-fire with a gait so regular and spontaneous that one can tell the origins of both at a glance...
...The many migrations that were registered in Brandes's Hebraic blood and mind fitted him singularly well, however, for the study of a Europe which had been completely dissociated, which was merely a chaotic muddle of numberless individualisms...
...And yet it is only a kind of neutral centre from which his interests and energies ran to a hundred contiguous quarters...
...Georg Brandes was a most remarkable human encyclopaedia: the range of his mind was very nearly the range of the modern European mind, and yet he was an almost vehemently personal master of it all, strutting up and down through a dozen literatures without losing his identity...
...But he seems to have viewed them only, as it were, in some mirrored reflection...
...Not so Georg Brandes...
...No doubt he was really earnest in his consideration of Christ and of Christian beliefs...
...The great passion of Pelayo was for the classic, indigenous culture of the Iberian peoples...
...In some ways a pitiful spectacle, it calls to mind the prayer of the Church, offered unceasingly —"rege eos et extolle illos usque in aeternum...
...The spectator in Brandes is evident particularly in his treatment of religion...
...By comparison, the esteemed Danish critic whose death has just occurred, scarcely thought at all...
...Very likely Main Currents in NineteenthCentury Literature, his most imposing work, is as vast in scope as anything the mind of a writer has grappled with...
...And Brandes...
...that he could not understand it is another...
...The Austrian Herman Bahr, the Italian Benedetto Croce, are both illustrations of contemporary cosmopolitanism...
...The remark is probably too clever, but it does call attention to certain gloomy habits of self-consideration fostered by a vile, foggy northern climate and a provincial environment...
...and his achievement was to prove there had been, still remained, and could again be a glorious Spain holding a view of the world with metaphysical earnestness and poetic fire...
...That Brandes could not share this is one thing...
...Whatever one may think of this strange Danish mystic, he does exemplify in a singularly luminous manner the approach of the Scandinavian soul, in so far as that has been made distinct through temperament and experience, to the verities of religion...
...He went through life voicing a protest against religion...
...The likeness is really an illuminating contrast...
...If ever a man thought too much, upon the stage and off it, that man was Ibsen...
...The only time he really came into contact with Danish or Scandinavian life, of the roots of which he remained profoundly ignorant, was during the era of his youthful brush with the doctrines of Kierkegaard...
...He was much like a tired and homeless voyager who, passing the door of a great lighted house, does not understand that this is home...
Vol. 5 • March 1927 • No. 18
