ADDRESS DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE VISIT TO LONDON OF DR. GEORG BRANDES, HON. F.R.S.L., BY MAURICE A. GEROTHWOHL, LITT. D., [November 22nd, 1913.] DR. GEORG BRANDES,-Yesterday, on the occasion of your first address in this country, you were welcomed by an old friend, the most distinguished critic of modern European literature who adorns our Fellowship list, Mr. Edmund Gosse. To-morrow, at a gathering widely representative of English authorship, you will be greeted by yet another protagonist both of Shakespearean and of comparative criticism, Sir Sidney Lee. As a humbler worker in that particular branch of literature and criticism in which you and they have attained to eminence, I am nevertheless proud, in my official capacity as Professor of Comparative Literature in this Society, of being enabled to add my tribute to theirs. Mr. Gosse remarked that ours had been the last country in Europe to do homage to your critical genius and mission, but I feel confident that your reception here, if it do seem somewhat tardy, will but have gained in warmth and popularity. Indeed, I am not certain that, despite your familiarity with our 23 VOL. XXXII. national temperament and language, you will have gauged the full significance of that popular welcome, and of the intense and wide-spread interest in your brilliant labours and personality which that welcome has implied. Never in recent times has a critic, and especially a foreign critic, so triumphed over our inveterate and stubborn hostility-a truly national hostility to criticism and critics, whether literary or dramatic. Our actors do not like critics, our authors do not like critics, our public does not read them, or heeds them not in its quest for merely pleasurable literature and drama. Yet you, sir, before you set foot on our shores, had already achieved the impossible-an unstinted popularity among us all. What is the secret of that unique achievement? one is tempted to ask. I think it lies in this that your criticism is pre-eminently human and universal. Your criticism is human, for it is one, not of books only, but of life as well; or, perhaps I should say, of books in their relation to and bearing on life. Your criticism is universal, for it is untrammelled by considerations of country, school, or fashion, from which English and French critics are apt to suffer in varying degrees and, as it were, inevitably, when dealing with the literatures of their own and especially of foreign countries. Their criticism is rarely what such criticism should be-and I speak of no other form of art-truly cosmopolitan. Belonging to large, powerful and self-satisfied nations, they seek not to appeal beyond their frontiers. They travel little, whether materially or in mind, and endeavour to appraise the foreign literature by their native standards, while loudly protesting against any similar re-valuation of their own literature by the critics of the other side. I mean that English criticism of French literature and French criticism of English literature is generally prejudiced, while English criticism of English literature and French criticism of French literature is generally incomplete. The English critic cannot escape from the insularity of our ethical standards; the French critic cannot evade the custom dues of intellectual Paris, his quota of bourgeois supersanity and of Normalien arrogance or paradox. Now you, sir, belong to a nation, brilliant historically and intellectually, but numerically small. As a critic, that is the most fortunate thing that could have happened to you, and it is most fortunate for us. who read your books. True, you have but recently complained that English people did not read your books. That may be so in general; I cannot say. One thing I know, however-that your views are widely quoted in our press. So that whatever readers you possess must needs have read your books, not once, but thrice, and learned your views by heart, than which I could suggest no warmer compliment. I said that it was fortunate for you-for us-that you were born in Denmark, that small and homely but ideal land of cultured democracy. For, having found its boundaries too narrow for your intellectual quest, you wandered, bearing on the one hand the message of Scandinavian thought and literature, but on the other shedding what was too provincial, too particularist,—I might almost say "kleinstädtig" -in the Scandinavian garb. And in return you assimilated, without false pride, what the thought and culture of other nations had to give. You were able to compare their aesthetic standards with a breadth and versatility bred of an acute observation sharpened by those intuitive gleams of the artist whose gaze encompasses alike the past and future of the national ideals. A A very Proteus, you became in turn a German, a Frenchman, a Pole; you became an Englishman, one of the Elizabethans, to whose temperament, the Danish temperament, in its curious blend of physical robustness with a keenly nervous sensibility in the artistic and emotional sphere, bears so strong a likeness. And, no doubt, it is your sympathy with Elizabethan thought and literature which endears you in the main to Englishmen, while your sympathy with certain aspects of Mr. Bernard Shaw's philosophy and drama, and your criticism of other aspects, should endear you to Mr. Shaw. It is indeed a great lesson you are teaching us, that Mr. Shaw, although alive and well alive among us, is as deserving as are the mighty dead of admiration; for in England we never genuinely admire our contemporaries, we only wonder at them. But others will dwell, and more eloquently than myself, on all that you have done to popularise English thought and letters in Denmark. Like Tieck and Schlegel in Germany you have, not naturalised,--for he is a citizen of the world-but nationalised Shakespeare in your country. They adapted him to German taste, you have helped the Danes to comprehend him so fully that the elaborate prefatory matter which encumbers our London theatre programmes would be skipped in Copen hagen. But But your studies in English authorship are not limited to Elizabethan literature nor to Mr. Shaw. They have dealt with Wordsworth, Ruskin, and with the transcendental logic and feminism of John Stuart Mill. You should therefore be safe from suffragette aggression. An eclectic in literature, you are likewise an eclectic in politics. All great men of bold thinking or of romantic living, of dynamic energy, appeal to you-whether they be socialists or feudalists; dreamers of a millennium, like Lassalle, or splendidly imaginative snobs, like Beaconsfield. I speak here of the dilettante man of letters, not of the practical statesman. Which two monographs prove that you are not only a learned critic of books, but a penetrating critic of men. To us, however, your fame as a critic, as a worldcritic, in the days to come, will rest, if it rest not already, on that truly monumental work, 'Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature.' all the native qualities, as well as all that early acquired experience of books and men, which make up your critical genius, are to be found in their highest and ripest development. After the late M. Taine, you have delved searchingly into all the circumstances that have produced this literary movement or that literary genius, racial heredity, environment, opportunity. But, unlike M. Taine, whose systematic utterances partake too often of the character of a chemical formula or medical prescription, you are not blinded by the force of those three groups of circumstances. You conceive, nay, you insist, that a genius of the first rank rises superior to them all, to his country, to his environment, to Here |