It sometimes happens to the Dane on his travels that a foreigner, after some desultory talk about Denmark, asks him this question:  How may one learn what are the aspirations of your country?  Has your contemporary literature developed any type that is palpable and easily grasped?  The Dane is embarrassed in his reply.  They all know of what class were the types that the eighteenth century bequeathed to the nineteenth.  Let us name one or two representative types in the case of a single country, Germany.  There is ‘Nathan the Wise,’ the ideal of the period of enlightenment; that is, the period of tolerance, noble humanity, and thorough-going rationalism.  We can hardly say that we have held fast to this ideal or carried it on to further development, as it was carried on by Schleiermacher and many others in Germany.  Mynster was our Schleiermacher, and we know how far his orthodoxy stands removed from Schleiermacher’s liberalism.  Instead of adopting rationalism and carrying it on, we have stepped farther and farther away from it.  Clausen was once its advocate, but he is so no more.  Heiberg is followed by Martensen, and Martensen’s ‘Speculative Dogmatic’ is succeeded by his ‘Christian Dogmatic.’  In Oehlenschlaeger’s poetry there is still the breath of rationalism, but the generation of Oehlenschlaeger and Oersted is followed by that of Kierkegaard and Paludan-Mueller.

The German literature of the eighteenth century bequeathed to us many other poetic ideals.  There is Werther, the ideal of the “storm and stress” period, of the struggle of nature and passion with the customary order of society; then there is Faust, the very spirit of the new age with its new knowledge, who, still unsatisfied with what the period of enlightenment has won, foresees a higher truth, a higher happiness, and a thousandfold higher power; and there is Wilhelm Meister, the type of humanized culture, who goes through the school of life and from apprentice becomes master, who begins with the pursuit of ideals that soar above life and who ends by discerning the ideal in the real, for whom these two expressions finally melt into one.  There is Goethe’s Prometheus, who, chained to his rock, gives utterance to the philosophy of Spinoza in the sublime rhythms of enthusiasm.  Last of all, there is the Marquis von Posa, the true incarnation of the revolution, the apostle and prophet of liberty, the type of a generation that would, by means of the uprising against all condemned traditions, make progress possible and bring happiness to mankind.

With such types in the past our Danish literature begins.  Does it develop them further?  We may not say that it does.  For what is the test of progress?  It is what happens afterward.  It has not been printed in this shape, but I will tell you about it.  One fine day, when Werther was going about as usual, dreaming despairingly of Lotte, it occurred to him that the bond between her and Albert was of slight consequence, and he won her from Albert.  One fine day the Marquis von Posa wearied of preaching freedom to deaf ears at the court of Philip the Second, and drove a sword through the king’s body—­and Prometheus rose from his rock and overthrew Olympus, and Faust, who had knelt abjectly before the Earth-Spirit, took possession of his earth, and subdued it by means of steam, and electricity, and methodical investigation.