The life of criticism, in the larger sense, comes from wide observation and a cultivation of the cosmopolitan spirit.  And it must be said of Brandes that he is a critic in this large sense, that he has taken for his province the modern spirit in all its varied manifestations.  The very title of his chief work—­’Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century’—­shows him to be concerned with the broad movements of thought rather than with matters of narrow technique or the literary activity of any one country—­least of all his own.  It was peculiarly fortunate for Denmark that a critic of this type should have arisen within her borders a quarter-century ago.  The Scandinavian countries lie so far apart from the chief centres of European thought that they are always in danger of lapsing into a narrow self-sufficiency so far as intellectual ideals are concerned.  Danish literature has been made what it is chiefly by the mediation of a few powerful minds who have kept it in touch with modern progress:  by Holberg, who may almost be said to have brought humanism into Denmark; by Oehlenschlaeger, who made the romantic movement as powerful an influence in Denmark as it was in Germany; by Brandes, who, beginning his career just after the war in which Denmark lost her provinces and became as embittered toward Germany as France was to become a few years later, strove to prevent the political breach from extending into the intellectual sphere, and helped his fellow-countrymen to understand that thought and progress are one and have a common aim, although nations may be many and antagonistic.  There is much significance in the fact that the name of ’Emigrant Literature’ is given to the first section of his greatest work.  He thus styles the French literature of a century ago,—­the work of such writers as Chateaubriand, Senancour, Constant, and Madame de Stael,—­because it received a vivifying impulse from the emigration,—­from the contact, forced or voluntary, of the French mind with the ideals of German and English civilization.  It has been the chief function of Brandes, during the whole of his brilliant career, to supply points of contact between the intellectual life of Denmark and that of the rest of Europe, to bring his own country into the federal republic of letters.

A glance at the course of his life, and at the subjects of his books, will serve to outline the nature of the work to which his energies have been devoted.  A Jew by race, Georg Morris Cohen Brandes was born February 4th, 1842.  He went through his academic training with brilliant success, studied law for a brief period, and then drifted into journalism and literature.  A long visit to Paris (1866-7) gave him breadth of view and the materials for his first books, ’AEsthetiske Studier’ (AEsthetic Studies), ‘Den Franske AEsthetik’ (French AEsthetics), and a volume of ‘Kritiker og Portraiter’ (Criticisms and Portraits).