part of the press, and by many officials of the State, very unusual conditions will be needed to call forth characters and talents of the sort upon which progress in any society depends.  Should such a community develop a kind of poetry, we need not wonder overmuch if its essential tendency be to scorn the age and put it to shame.  Such poetry will again and again describe the men of the time as wretches; and it may well happen that the books which are the most famous and the most sought after (Ibsen’s ‘Brand,’ for example) will be those in which the reader is made to feel—­at first with a sort of horror, and afterwards with a sort of satisfaction—­what a worm he is, how miserable and how cowardly.  It may happen, too, that for such a people the word Will becomes a sort of catchword, that it may cry aloud with dramas of the Will and philosophies of the Will.  Men demand that which they do not possess; they call for that of which they most bitterly feel the lack; they call for that which there is the keenest inquiry for.  Yet one would be mistaken were he pessimistically to assume that in such a people there is less courage, resolution, enthusiasm, and will than in the average of others.  There is quite as much courage and freedom of thought, but still more is needed.  For when the reaction in a literature forces the new ideas into the background, and when a community has daily heard itself blamed, derided, and even cursed for its hypocrisy and its conventionality, yet has remained convinced of its openness of mind, daily swinging censers before its own nostrils in praise thereof,—­it requires unusual ability and unusual force of will to bring new blood into its literature.  A soldier needs no uncommon courage to fire upon the enemy from the shelter of an earthwork; but if he has been led so ill that he finds no shelter at hand, we need not wonder if his courage forsakes him.

Various causes have contributed to the result that our literature has accomplished less than the greater ones in the service of progress.  The very circumstances that have favored the development of our poetry have stood in our way.  I may in the first place mention a certain childishness in the character of our people.  We owe to this quality the almost unique naivete of our poetry.  Naivete is an eminently poetical quality, and we find it in nearly all of our poets, from Oehlenschlaeger through Ingemann and Andersen to Hostrup.  But naivete does not imply the revolutionary propensity.  I may further mention the abstract idealism so strongly marked in our literature.  It deals with our dreams, not with our life....