by
The essay provides a brief outline of Georg Brandes' intellectual trajectory and formation as a critic before Main Currents
If one is to tell the story of Georg Brandes’ education as critic up to his breakthrough in 1871-2 with the appearance of his Emigrant Literature, the first act of the six Main Currents, it is tempting to employ the narrative model of the principal genre of 19th century literature, the bourgeois Bildungsroman. The path of the main character toward becoming himself is here normally portrayed as a process in three phases, involving first a departure from “home” in the form of a journey out into the world, a series of formative experiences, and ultimately a return home to find a place in society. According to the Romantic-Idealist conception of Bildung underpinning the genre, becoming oneself is conceived as the same as reconciling with one’s background, ancestry and milieu. The Bildungsroman thus understands the (self-) construction of the individual as a compromise between one’s own internal drives and the external demands of society.
Brandes’ life up to Emigrant Literature contains a series of foundational elements: growing up in the bourgeois milieu of Copenhagen, successful university studies and a well-grounded academic education within the prevailing philosophical and literary value system of the era, crowned by a doctorate in aesthetics in 1871. This was followed by a European grand tour in 1870 and 1871, which took Brandes to Paris, London, Switzerland and a longer stay in Italy. But the journey did not result in a successful reconciliation with society for Brandes – rather it was the opposite. When Brandes left Denmark in April 1870 he was the great young hope of the literary and academic Parnassus, yet when he returned in July of 1871 he had undergone a series of experiences that brought him into opposition with the local national liberal cultural. The lectures on émigré literature, which should have served as a proving ground for his appointment to the soon to be vacant chair as professor in aesthetics, instead ended up as a polemical attack on the national liberal culture and its fundamental pillars: Christianity, love of the fatherland and marriage as a social institution. It resulted in a confrontation that – for better or worse – sealed his fate and defined the rest of his career.
In the attempt to reconstruct the series of factors, events and influences that led Brandes toward Emigrant Literature, it is striking the degree to which the desire to rebel and to oppose, as well as a certain sense of martyrdom, was evidently written into his intellectual character from the very beginning. As the eldest son of a clothing wholesaler, Georg Morris Cohen grew up in a secular, bourgeois Jewish home in Copenhagen. During his school years he was the teacher’s pet who shined with his extraordinary gifts and insatiable appetite for book learning, yet at the same time his upbringing also seemed to have imparted the young Brandes with a degree of wariness regarding his Jewish origins – the result of an experience of foreignness and of not being acknowledged as a full member of the society into which he was born (compare Gibbons 1980: 55-60; Knudsen 1985:12-16).
Recent scholarship has emphasized this paradoxical component of Brandes’ cultural baggage, his intellectual habitat. On the one side, as a modern, secular Jew, he purposely kept his distance from Judaism in its most orthodox variants, but on the other he exhibits a lively interest, throughout a large measure of his authorship, in the role of the Jew in history and in the specifically Jewish contribution to the development of Western culture, in that he saw the Jew as especially well disposed to critical, oppositional and cosmopolitan thinking (Hjortshøj 2017).
Brandes’ upbringing and family history contain all the ingredients of a modern Bildungsroman about the pathways and choices of life in a 19th century bourgeois family, on the social field encompassing the business world, politics and artistic-literary inclinations. Following his father’s wish, Brandes began as a law student at the university, but quickly abandoned the law to pursue his less practical and potentially unprofitable passion for aesthetics and literature. His father’s business went under in 1861, after which Brandes was compelled more often than not to support himself through various forms of teaching, while at the same time his studies and travels were financially supported by his younger brother Ernst (1844-1892).
In accordance with family tradition, Ernst had trained in business and had already acquired a significant fortune as a stockbroker by the time at a young age he left the business world in order to work as a journalist and publicist – according to his older brother Georg, this was because as a Jew he was denied a career within the official institutions of the banking industry (Brandes 1908:378). In 1889 he took over editorial and financial responsibility for the newspaper Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende, a business trade publication, which he attempted to transform into an organ for liberal social debate and critique, despite rising opposition from the paper’s traditional readership. The project ended in tragedy, when burdened by financial problems and a defamation suit against the paper, he chose to take his own life in 1892.
The youngest brother Edvard Brandes (1847-1931) chose a third career path. After a doctorate in Oriental and Semitic linguistics, he first worked as an author and theater critic, but gradually over time embarked on a long and influential career as newspaper publisher and politician. From 1880 to 1897 he served as member of the Folketing for the liberal Venstre party, which served as the driving force for the transition to full parliamentarianism in Denmark. In 1884 he helped found the newspaper Politiken, which became the central organ for the radical, urban and cosmopolitan Copenhagen wing of the Venstre. After this faction broke from the Venstre in 1905, forming the new Radikale Venstre party, Edvard Brandes became one of the chief architects of a modern political program that in numerous essential areas set its mark on the social development of Denmark in the 20th century. At the peak of his political career, he twice served as finance minister in the Radical governments of 1909-10 and 1913-20 (Hvidt 2005).
This brief sketch of the family album reveals how closely Georg Brandes’ life was bound up with modern social development and the radical social and political changes undergone by Danish society at the turn of the 20th century. At the same time the tragic fate of the brother Ernst is a reminder of the widespread anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the Danish society of the time, which was also a factor in the story of Georg Brandes as critic and intellectual.
Brandes’ intellectual and academic years of apprenticeship, which are summarized in detail by Henning Fenger (Fenger 1955, 1957), play out on a field between different disciplines and institutions – between the university and the press, between aesthetics and philosophy, between Danish and European literature. As a student of aesthetics and literature he devoted himself to a comprehensive reading program, encompassing both Goethe, Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians, Homer, and Plato as well as the Romantic poetry of the Danish Golden Age, from Baggesen and Staffeldt through Oehlenschläger to Chr. Winther, Fr. Paludan-Møller, Henrik Hertz and J.L. Heiberg. During the same years he experienced an intellectual and religious crisis under the influence of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Paul V. Rubow has argued that his relation to Kierkegaard, more than anything else, shaped Brandes’ personality (Rubow 1932:101-65). According to Rubow, it was the passionate idealism of Kierkegaard’s religious existential thought, together with its uncompromising demand of individual self-realization and personal renewal in opposition to lethargic social norms and majority opinion that appealed to and stimulated Brandes. But a series of other philosophical sources of influence also made an impact on him as his intellectual journey gradually unfolded.
As a student of literature Brandes quickly established a reputation as one of the most intelligent academics of his generation. In the fall of 1862 he was awarded the university’s gold medal for a treatise on the concept of fate in Greek tragedy, and in the winter of 1864 he was well prepared for his MA defense. The title or the problematic of his exam, which was not chosen by Brandes himself but in accordance with the custom of the time was selected by the faculty, was in full:
Determine the reciprocal relationship between the pathetic and the symbolic in general, in order thereby to illuminate the contrast between Shakespeare’s tragedies and Dante’s Divine Commedia, along with the possible errors that might result from a one-sided over emphasis on one of these two elements.
In order to pass the exam, Brandes also had to produce three lesser written exercises on the following – likewise related – themes: “To what extent can poetry be called idealized history?,” “Demonstrate in which manner the philosophical orientation of Spinoza and of Fichte may lead to a misconstruing of the concept of beauty,” and “Demonstrate the relationship of the comic to its limits and its various contradictions” (Dahl 1998:9).
These themes together provide a potent image of the university and the discipline from which Brandes emerged, whose disciplinary norms and criteria he was to honor in his first academic work. They are comfortably situated within the frame of the idealist and speculative Hegelian aesthetics that functioned at the time as the dominate system for all academic work on literature and in art in Northern Europe. According to this orientation, the physical and sensual world and its phenomena were viewed as materializations of eternally valid abstract ideas and principles. The methodology of speculative aesthetics thus concentrated on relating works of art to abstract concepts such as the beautiful and the noble, the tragic and the comic etc., and thereafter evaluating the concrete works on how well they are in agreement with the concepts. In 1866 Brandes embarked on an effort to complete his education within this tradition in the form of a planned dissertation on the theme of “the theory of the comic,” but for the first time in his career he found himself in conflict with speculative aesthetics and the Hegelian system of thought, which up to then had shaped his academic training.
In the meantime, Brandes had also begun supporting himself as the theater reviewer for the Copenhagen newspaper Dagbladet and the weekly Illustreret Tidende. His contact with these journalistic venues meant that Brandes’ prior more theoretical or academic orientation was challenged by new, more worldly and socially engaged interests and questions. The experience is also evident in a stylistic change in his manner of writing, in which the abstract Hegelian conceptual prose yields to a more emphatic and polemical approach. It was in his role as polemicist and social debater that Brandes made his literary debut in 1866 with the pamphlet Dualism in Our Recent Philosophy
The pamphlet was a contribution to the great debate of the time, that on the relation between faith and knowledge, which emerged in the wake of the historical and philological critique of the Bible and of Christianity forwarded by Left Hegelians such as Ludwig Feuerbach (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841) and David F. Strauss (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 1842-3). New life was breathed into the debate in the 1860s with the appearance of the French philosopher Ernest Renan’s La Vie de Jésus (1863, Da. Jesu Levnet, 1864), which on the basis of study of historical sources denied the Christian dogma of the divine nature of Jesus. At the same time the Christian worldview was challenged on a second front in the form of rising natural science and natural history: in his Principles of Geology (1830-3), the English geologist Charles Lyell had presented a positivistic and naturalistic explanation of the lifeforms of the Earth, which contradicted the Christian ur-myth that all present species had initially appeared in their finished forms through a divine act of creation a few thousand years prior. Lyell’s geology was the most important inspiration for Charles Darwin’s doctrines of the origin of species and of slow historical evolution through natural selection, as presented in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859, Da. Arternes oprindelse, 1872).
The formal occasion for Brandes’ intervention in this discussion involved his earlier teacher at the university, the philosophy professor Rasmus Nielsen. In his Grundidéernes Logik (1864-6), Nielsen had attempted to reconcile the rising gulf between religion and science by arguing that faith and knowledge constitute two essentially distinct domains of human cognition, each of which should respect the limits of the other. In his pamphlet, Brandes objected to the dualism and the indolent spinelessness of this point of view, instead arguing that the dogmas and myths of Christianity must be subjected to the challenges and the corrections of modern geology and biology. In other words, Brandes accepted neither Nielsen’s “philosophy of reconciliation” (Brandes 1866:8) nor his declared truce between the worldly and the spiritual regimes. Instead he argued stridently and confidently for an open confrontation between the two.
In the winter of 1866-7, at the same time of the publication of Dualism in Our Recent Philosophy, Brandes took took his first extended study trip to Paris, which would prove to be of decisive significance for his intellectual development. Especially important was his encounter with the French philosopher, historian and literary critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-93). Before the journey, Brandes had already acquainted himself with Taine’s chief work, the grand Histoire de la littérature anglaise (3 vols., 1863-4/66, Da. 1874-7), which contained a program for a new, positivist-inspired form of literary history that sought to explain literary works and developments from concepts and principles adopted from the modern natural sciences of geology and biology. But the influence of Taine on Brandes increased quite considerably during his stay in Paris, during which he attended the Frenchman’s lectures on aesthetics at the École des Beaux Arts, so much so that Taine ended up as the theme for Brandes’ doctoral dissertation, French Aesthetics in Our Age (1870).
There is a measure of agreement among Brandes scholars that his acquaintance with the positivist methodology of Taine should be viewed as the landmark event of his education as critic. Bertil Nolin has thus designated the encounter with Taine as a paradigm shift in Brandes’ aesthetics and critical approach (Nolin 1980). This shift can be summarized as a movement away from (German) idealism and metaphysics toward (French) positivism, psychology and cultural history. In contrast to the speculative aesthetics in which Brandes had been trained, Taine represented a different historical view of literature that attempted to explain literary phenomena from the life of the author, the composition of the public and the historical context. For Taine it was not sufficient to discern that a tragedy was a tragedy and lived up to the eternal laws of such. He was more interested in getting to know the man who stood behind the work, and the culture or the civilization that shaped it. The central idea was to view literary works as psychological testimonies of human thoughts and feelings.
Taine thus emphasized human existence in literary history, yet at the same time argued that the creative abilities of human beings were determined by a series of external cultural, climactic, social and historical factors. In the famous programmatic declaration from the introduction to Histoire de la littérature anglaise, he summarizes these factors as the three foundational forces [forces primordiales] of history: “la race, le milieu, le moment” (Taine 1866:XXIII), which can be translated as the people, the environment and the age.
Taine’s philosophy of history further rested upon the theory, first developed in his treatise on the ancient Roman politician and historian Titus Livius (Essai sur Tite-Live, 1854/6), that all the domains of a given culture – its religion, art, philosophy, industry and family life etc. – can be traced back to a collective cause in the form of a predominate characteristic (“faculté maîtresse”) among the given people. As natural scientist of the soul, the task of the literary historian consisted of mapping the human faculties, abilities and feelings that form the basis of literary history and reveal how these are determined by the previously mentioned foundational forces. All things, including human feelings and passions, must be treated and explained historically: “there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, just as there is for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat; vice and virtue are products just as much as vitriol and sugar” (Taine 1866: XV). It was this kind of characteristic formulation from the introduction to Taine’s English literary history that Brandes took to heart and employed in his dissertation (Brandes 1870a:182).
Taine’s literary history represented an early attempt at an objective and positivistic view of literature, yet at the same time it was strongly marked by the prevailing doctrines of his age, including the Romantic conception of the people as the driving force of history. This is particularly evident in Taine’s far-reaching observations on the differences between the Germanic and the Romance peoples, each of which is governed by peculiar psychological characteristics. Taine further subscribed to the erroneous but prevailing doctrine of the age that the acquired characteristics of a human being can be inherited, which resulted in an unclear and otherwise superficial distinction between the traits of an author that can be attributed to “the race” and those which can more accurately be attributed to environmental influences. This lack of clarity was also implanted in Brandes.
In his doctoral dissertation, Brandes loyally subscribes to the pillars of Taine’s historical methodology, yet along the way also registers a series of objections against the deterministic and reductive character of the Frenchman’s explanatory model, among others a tendency to reduce poets and poetic works to a predominate capacity and to a summation of the spirit of the age and the race. In this critique of Taine’s determinism, Brandes found significant support in the more privately psychological and personally historical literary criticism of the French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-69). Sainte-Beuve’s profiles of the French Romantics in his book Critiques et portraits littéraires (1832-9) were thus also a direct model for Brandes, when after his dissertation he published a series of his own author portraits, Kritiker og Portraiter (1870).
The essence of Brandes’ critique of Taine more or less comes down his sense that the theoretical architecture of the Frenchman does not to a sufficient degree provide space for the individual and for creative genius, and thereby not at all for the kind of hero worship that over time became a steadily more prominent driving force in Brandes’ own critical methodology. Yet this disagreement also points toward an important difference between the two regarding their conceptions of history itself. Whereas Taine is occupied with the long, nearly unchangeable lines in the formation of national identity – or what the 20th century French Annales school of historical science would come to call the “longue durée” of historical time (Braudel 1997:151-2), Brandes’ more impatient and combative attitude was better oriented toward dramatic rupture and renewal in history. If the key words of Taine were nation and civilization, for Brandes they are rupture and revolution.
That the Tainean turn in Brandes’ theoretical development has previously been described as a transition from (German) idealism and Hegelianism toward (French) positivism is thus only conditionally true. In his conception of history Brandes remained a child of Hegel’s dialectical method and philosophy of history as developed in the German philosopher’s lectures on the subject (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 1819-32, published 1833-6). Hegel here portrays world history as a continuous narrative of the progressive penetration of human reason and freedom into the world through the steady movements of ideas (theses), which encounter their opposites (antitheses) and thereafter are sublated in a higher synthesis. It is this dialectic and this conception of history that forms the ground for the literary historical drama of Main Currents, which is staged as a struggle between the principles of revolution and reaction.
From his theater reviews and literary portraits from the period following his stay in Paris, we can see how Brandes attempts to bring Taine’s concepts into play. Two of the most express examples are the treatments of H.C. Andersen and M.A. Goldschmidt, each a central yet quite distinctive figure from the Late Romantic Danish Golden Age. The two essays can be simultaneously read as a reflection on Brandes’ own ambivalent relation to his double identity as a Danish Jew at a time when fashionable opinion in Denmark moved steadily in a more national direction. In the treatment of the national poet H.C. Andersen, Brandes attempts to explain the secret of his popular tales with reference to the author’s affection and empathy for “childlike imagination and childlike feeling” (Brandes 1870b:323), while identifying the “foundational idyllic tone” in Andersen as particularly Danish (Brandes 1870b:345). Brandes here was on the trail of the poetic “naiveté” and the presence “of childishness in the national character” that later, in the introduction to Emigrant Literature, yet here for the purpose of parody, is identified positively as a peculiarity of Danish culture (Brandes 1872a:17).
The counterpoint to Andersen is the Jewish author M.A. Goldschmidt, the strange bird of Danish Golden Age literature, who in the manner of Taine is categorized as a “stylist” and an “eclectic” – a predominate characteristic that is explained with reference to the author’s Jewish origins. On the strength of his Jewish characteristics, Goldschmidt had been able to assimilate to Danishness and to contribute to creating a modern Danish prose style, but at the same time, Brandes argues, he maintained an unfortunate inclination toward mysticism and to playing the coquette with his Jewish background. This leads Brandes toward a few general observations regarding the question of “the task of the Jew in modern culture” (Brandes 1870b:399). He notes the strong Jewish presence in contemporary European music and literature, citing – as a counterpoint to Goldschmidt – the German Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1854) as an example of an artist who “manifests his Jewish origins in something cosmopolitan, something eclectic, which leads him to reconcile Romance and Germanic peculiarities” (Brandes 1870b:400).
The citations introduce a recurrent theme in his authorship, namely the connection between Jewish identity and modern cosmopolitanism, as well as the conception of the modern European Jew as a historical type particularly disposed to play the role of mediator between national cultures. For Brandes the modern European Jew was possessed of the immense advantage of not being weighed down or burdened by a “home” and thus by a defined national inheritance and tradition. On the one hand this amounted to a tragic experience, but on the other it simultaneously rendered him especially well disposed to intellectual mobility, cultural renewal and secular freethinking. As Brandes formulated it, the modern Jew was a “son of Spinoza . . . polemically inclined from birth against every form of European narrow-mindedness, oppositional, free born and born for scientific observation and poetic re-presentation” (Brandes 1870b:401).
As Henry J. Gibbons has proposed, there is also an element of the self-portrait in Brandes’ characterization of the modern Jew as cultural reformer (Gibbons 1980:60-1). We rediscover the same figure in the introduction to Emigrant Literature, in which Brandes makes a point of emphasizing that the most progressive poets of Young Germany, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne and Berthold Auerbach (Brandes 1872a:14), were all of Jewish descent. The influence of Taine in this way also made Brandes newly aware of his own identity as a Jew – an ethnic identification that up to then had only played a subordinate role in his self-understanding.
In April of 1871 Brandes embarked on a grand tour through France, England, Switzerland and Italy, which came to last 15 months and can be identified as the second decisive event is his education as critic. If Brandes’ intellectual education had up to this point been shaped purely from the books he had read and written about, then his education and the development of his ideas during the journey were more spontaneous and desultory, based as they were on personal encounters and conversations and on observations of art, people, places and landscapes. As Henning Fenger has asserted, Brandes was “an ingenious traveler,” who by virtue of his social skills and talent for conversation quickly established personal contacts and networks in the places he visited (Fenger 1957:169). Through his expansive, almost daily correspondence with home, which functioned as kind of combined intellectual diary and archive of impressions and travel memories for later literary reworking, we can follow his doings and also locate the first sketches of what after his return home would become Emigrant Literature.
The first destination was Paris, where the newly minted doctor of contemporary French aesthetics was received like a son by the Taine family. Through Taine he was able to make contact with Ernest Renan, author of the scandalous biography of the historical Jesus, La Vie de Jésus, who however, and much to Brandes’ surprise, revealed himself to be a man with strongly elitist and anti-democratic views. Brandes was further introduced to the circle around Philarète Chasles (1798-1873), a literary historian, librarian and professor of English at the Collège de France who is less remembered today. By virtue of his surveys of German and English literary history, Chasles is among the early pioneers of comparative literature, but the 72-year-old man of letters was additionally known as a walking encyclopedia of the private lives and scandals of the great French authors of Romanticism, whom he had known personally.
Though Brandes would affectionately refer to Chasles as “the old fuddy duddy” in his correspondence with his family, he did indeed learn a thing or two from him. In a letter written the night of June 15th, 1870, Brandes enthusiastically relates a visit to Chasles the evening before, in which the affable professor had held court with his colorful anecdotes and gossip on 19th century literary life in France. “I sit like a sponge and take it all in. I listen with 24 ears,” Brandes notes: “at last I glimpse behind the scenes of the whole of literary life here” (Brandes 1978, I:238-9).
It is thus also after one of Chasles’ soirées that Brandes, in a June 20th letter home, commits to paper the first sketch of a literary historical presentation of “the great currents in new French literature” (Brandes 1978, I:249), which in broad strokes contains the central idea and plan of the three “French” volumes of Main Currents (the first, third and fifth volumes), as well as the polemical attack on contemporary Danish literature featured in the introductory lecture. The sketch portrays the evolution of 19th century French literary history from Romanticism toward Naturalism as a dialectical interplay between the spirit of Voltaire and the spirit of Rousseau, e.g. between the regimes of reason and nature and passion. Brandes identifies three phases or groups within this process. First is Romanticism – the French Sturm-und-Drang – represented by figures such as Alexandre Dumas père, early Victor Hugo and George Sand, who place nature and passion at the center of literary production, thereby constituting a continuation of the spirit of Rousseau. Brandes places the July Revolution of 1830 as the historical ground point of this period. Thereafter follows the sudden shift toward the so-called “L’école de bon sens,” the stolid and temperate school of French theater represented by Neoclassical dramatists such as Eugène Scribe and Émile Augier, with moralism and idealism as common traits. But around 1850 a new rupture opens up a third period, the positivistic and naturalistic “realism with a physiological basis,” represented by Taine, Renan, Dumas fils, the brothers Goncourt, and Flaubert.
After this literary historical survey of 19th century movements and groups in French literature, Brandes provides a few comparative perspectives on contemporary Danish literature. Oehlenschläger’s position in early Romanticism is likened to that of early Victor Hugo in France, and a “moral” turn is dated to Søren Kierkegaard’s Either-Or (1843). But the analogy can be stretched no further, and thus Brandes reaches the conclusion that would come to function as the polemical fulcrum in the introductory lecture of 1871: “You see that we have still not reached the third period” (Brandes 1978, I:252). Danish literature has thus stalled in moralistic reaction and is therefore outside the main current of European literature.
With respect to the later programmatic declaration in the introductory lecture, it cannot but be observed that Brandes himself was at least a generation or two behind in his literary points of orientation. His knowledge of modern French Naturalism was at this point severely limited, and in looking forward to his program for the literary debate of social problems and the struggle of the individual against “society” that would function as the provocative component of the introductory lecture of 1871, it is likewise clear that the matrix of this program was not contemporary French Naturalism, but rather the French and English Romanticism from the years around 1830, with the poet and freedom fighter Lord Byron as its symbolic hero. In 1871 Brandes called for a literature that submitted modern problems such as marriage, religion and private property to debate. An early formulation of this call to arms is present in a note from the letter of June 1870 – but here, noticeably, as part of a historical characterization of French Romanticism:
Convergence in the Revolution of 1830 (...) attack on society, on property (Proudhon), on marriage (A. Dumas’ Anthony, Forward to Victor Hugo’s Angelo. Fourier, St. Simon. George Sand’s initial burst of creativity. The god of Romanticism is passion).
The inclusion of the socialist and anarchist Joseph-Pierre Proudhon (1809-65) must be an error, since his critique of private property (presented in his Qu’est-ce que la propriéte? [What is Property?, 1840] rather belongs to the intellectual basis of the June Days uprising of 1848. But regardless of this and other temporal disparities along the way, the note bears witness to how Brandes attempted to link literary and political developments together and how he saw Romantism not as a purely literary phenomenon, but as a broader, intellectual historical and political current that also encompassed revolutionary utopian and socialist social thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837).
The conversations with Chasles turned Brandes on to the radical thread in French Romanticism, but also left another mark on Brandes, namely his interest in literary gossip and anecdotes about the love loves of the authors. In the letter mentioned above, Brandes mentions the then current rumor about Lord Byron’s alleged incestuous relationship with his own sister, relating this to an anecdote he had heard from Chasles, about how as a young man the French author Prosper Merimée (1803-1870) had shocked the female attendees at a literary salon by defending incest and free love in opposition to bourgeois conventions. Along with a host of other personal stories, these two anecdotes appear in Emigrant Literature. They figure in the treatment of Chateaubriand’s autobiographical novel René, in which Brandes’ discusses incest as a theme in European romanticism (Brandes 1872a:71-72).
The encounter during the European journey that would undeniably prove to be the most decisive for Brandes’ development was with the British philosopher, economist and liberal politician John Stuart Mill (1806-73). The year before Brandes had produced a Danish translation of Mill’s The Subjection of Women, in which the British philosopher argued for the emancipation of women and the equality of the sexes. In the beginning of July 1870, Mill passed through Paris, taking the opportunity to seek out his Danish translator at his quarters on the Rue Mazarine. This visit, which is lively related in his letters home, marked the beginning of an intense philosophical exchange that clued Brandes in to a new manner of conceiving literature and society. In a letter of July 16th, Brandes proclaims that his conversations with Mill amounted to “a kind of turning point in my inner intellectual history” (Brandes 1978, I:275).
As thinker Mill belonged to Empiricist tradition in English philosophy and social science, which proceeded from the idea that all knowledge and perception must be built on observation. On this foundation Mill developed a social and moral philosophy, the so-called utilitarianism, which began with the proposition that every human act must be evaluated according to its sum efficacy for society – and not according to the degree to which it cohered with any predetermined principles, whether they be determined by religion or a conception of natural rights. Mill’s utilitarianism was critical to Brandes’ thinking in that it provided a foundation for an ethics founded not in religious but in worldly principles. Just as important for Brandes was the practical and pragmatic dimension of Mill’s philosophy, which blended together conceptions of freedom with the social and political reform movements and the technological and economic developments of the age. “His ideas resemble railroads. Simple, without ornament, useful, grand. He bothers not with roads, but with railroads,” notes Brandes in a letter of July 10th, 1870 (Brandes 1978, I:269).
Brandes’ enthusiasm for the philosophy of Mill was also motivated by a fascination with modern English society as the most progressive in relation to democratic reforms and the relations between the sexes. At the same his visit to England also strengthened the comparative observation he had already made in Paris, not just of the difference in manners and customs between the European countries, but also of the immense ignorance of the European nations’ knowledge of each other’s culture and intellectual life. Just as in Paris he had been surprised by Taine’s ignorance of Germany, so he could in England discern Mill’s equally striking lack of knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy. This experience made it clear to Brandes that there was a need for a cosmopolitan mediator between European literatures.
When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, Brandes left Paris, travelling southward by train over the Alps to Geneva and then on through Italy, including Turin, Milan, Florence, and Rome. This part of the journey resulted in the nature descriptions of Rousseau’s land of birth around Lake Geneva and the ecstatic depictions of Italian landscapes, art and architecture that constitute some of the literary highpoints of Emigrant Literature (chaps. I and XVI). Brandes’ enthusiasm for Italy was first and foremost awakened by his encounter with the Renaissance and Antique architectural and artistic treasures of Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii. Yet his fascination was also possessed of a more concrete and political dimension, tied to the modern Italian movement for freedom, democracy and independence and to the recent annulment of the Papal State in central Italy – an event that stirred up Brandes’ revolutionary instincts.
Brandes’ thoughts on these themes during his stay in Italy were stimulated by his acquaintance with two quite distinctive intellects and personalities: the law professor and later politician Giuseppe Saredo (1832-1902) of Rome, ten years his senior, and the 24-year-old French art student Georges Noufflard (1846-97), who like Brandes found himself in Italy as part of long lasting grand tour.
Saredo was a fiery patriot, an advocate of young, independent Italy and thereby an equally engaged liberal – a fighter for democracy, free trade and modern industry as well as a follower of J.S. Mill’s philosophical and political thought, which he saw as the very foundation of a modern liberal society. When in November of 1870 Brandes was afflicted with typhus, which nearly took his life and consequentially subjected him to four months of bedrest, it was Saredo who for a time served as his daily conversation partner. Again, at this point Brandes’ intellectual journey follows the path of a modern bildungsroman: Much the same as the humanist Settembrini, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), entertains the convalescent Hans Castorp with his liberal ideas, it was Saredo who in the winter of 1870-1 held Brandes’ feet to the fire with his hour-long discourses on the connection between humanism and the technical and material progress of the modern world.
Georges Noufflard was Saredo’s diametrical opposite: a refined and distinguished aesthete, the son of wealthy clothing factory owner in Roubaix, who was in Rome for research on a never realized book on the city’s monuments and artworks. Brandes and Noufflard met in the Scandinavian Club in Rome at the beginning of April 1871, just as Brandes had arisen from his convalescence. The two spent an intense few months as companions, visiting the art museums and churches in Rome, Sorrento and Naples, which exerted a decisive influence on Brandes’ conception of art. More specifically, it was with Noufflard as his guide that Brandes became attuned to the sensual and impassioned depiction of the human body in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art – an experience that led him to look with new and critical eyes on the Danish national icon Thorvaldsen and his more subdued Neoclassicism, which he now declared to be unmodern and passé in a letter home. And it was likewise the bel-esprit Noufflard who inspired Brandes to develop the most provocative assumption in Emigrant Literature, the irreverent takedown of the Danish and Northern European concept of “the home” and its implied ideal of woman as a creature of it. This moralistic doctrine, Brandes argued, could be traced back to “one singular, cruelly simple, cruelly base climactic necessity,” namely the frigid Nordic climate and
the necessity of artificial heating . . . without artificial heating, in the full magnificence of sunlight, all the beautiful ideals, duties and virtues reveal themselves to be – not untrue but relative (Brandes 1872a:151).
This formulation is emblematic of the radicalization of Brandes’ thinking that took place during his Italian journey. It is evidenced in that it added to the positivist Tainean aesthetics and cultural analysis present in his dissertation a more polemical and cultural critical dimension. It can also be said, in other words, that the Italian journey resulted in the rebirth of Brandes as the “Activist Critic” (Hertel and Kristensen 1980). It would no longer do for Brandes merely to describe and to analyze how literary works and human moral doctrines came into being as results of cultural, climactic and historical conditions. It was now also necessary to reveal the reformative and revolutionary potential of literature, which could be used to criticize and to change the moral doctrines and rules of conduct viewed by a particular culture as given and unchanging.
The grand tour was brought to an end in July 1871, as Brandes was to return home to find a place in a society that, through his impressions of Italy, seemed all the more barren and hostile to art and to humanity. His encounters with philosophy of J.S. Mill, Saredo and youthful Italy had made Brandes a political radical, while his friendship with Noufflard had stimulated a more existentially and aesthetically motivated opposition to the Protestant art and culture of his fatherland.
These insights together explain why the grand tour in the case of Brandes did not lead “homeward” toward a reconciliation, but instead manifested itself in a fateful confrontation with his native national liberal culture, which would have far reaching consequences for the future course of his life. Emigrant Literature destroyed the possibility of an academic career for him in Denmark, but at the same time opened up new pathways, in that it forced him instead to seek a living as an independent writer in the growing German language literary market of Europe, in which in the following years he would make a name for himself as tone setting European literary critic.
© Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab med støtte fra Carlsbergfondet • Privatlivspolitik
