“First and foremost, I endeavor everywhere to bring literature back to life.  You will already have observed that while the older controversies in our literature—­for example, that between Heiberg and Hauch, and even the famous controversy between Baggesen and Oehlenschlaeger—­have been maintained in an exclusively literary domain and have become disputes about literary principles alone, the controversy aroused by my lectures, not merely by reason of the misapprehension of the opposition, but quite as much by reason of the very nature of my writing, has come to touch upon a swarm of religious, social, and moral problems....  It follows from my conception of the relation of literature to life that the history of literature I teach is not a history of literature for the drawing-room.  I seize hold of actual life with all the strength I may, and show how the feelings that find their expression in literature spring up in the human heart.  Now the human heart is no stagnant pool or idyllic woodland lake.  It is an ocean with submarine vegetation and frightful inhabitants.  The literary history and the poetry of the drawing-room see in the life of man a salon, a decorated ball-room, the men and the furnishings polished alike, in which no dark corners escape illumination.  Let him who will, look at matters from this point of view; but it is no affair of mine.”

The boldness and even the ruthlessness which characterize much of the author’s work were plainly foreshadowed in this outspoken introduction; and he has grown more rather than less uncompromising during the quarter-century that has elapsed since they were spoken.  Matthew Arnold would have applauded the envisagement of literature as “criticism of life,” but would have deplored the sacrifice of sweetness to gain increased intensity of light.  Brandes came back from contact with the European world full of enthusiasm for the new men and the new ideas,—­for Comte and Taine, for Renan and Mill and Spencer,—­and wanted his recalcitrant fellow-countrymen to accept them all at once.  They were naturally taken aback by so imperious a demand, and their opposition created the atmosphere of controversy in which Brandes has ever since for the most part lived—­with slight effort to soften its asperities, but, it must be added, with the ever-increasing respect of those not of his own way of thinking.  On the whole, his work has been healthful and stimulating; it has stirred the sluggish to a renewed mental activity, and has made its author himself one of the most conspicuous figures of what he calls “det Moderne Gjennembrud”—­the Modern Awakening.

[Illustration:  Signature]

BJOeRNSON

From ‘Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century’:  Translated by Professor Rasmus B. Anderson.

It is only necessary to bestow a single glance upon Bjoernson to be convinced how admirably he is equipped by nature for the hot strife a literary career brings with it in most lands, and especially in the combat-loving North.  Shoulders as broad as his are not often seen, nor do we often behold so vigorous a form, one that seems as though created to be chiseled in granite.