Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/212

194 of Denmark cannot be overestimated. His many and various popular scientific works made a deep impression on the laity on account of their clearness and perspicuity and their vivid and attractive style. They found the widest circulation among all classes, and contributed much to render science, which had hitherto been the exclusive property of the learned, accessible to the common man, and to arouse his interest in it. But Holberg achieved still more by his poetry. It is true he had no appreciation of the ideal and it was long before he was able to relish Homer, old heroic poems, or the sagas, for he saw all things in the convex mirror of the comical muse. But he was so great and his eye for the distorted and ridiculous was so keen that the prejudices and follies that had accumulated in the lapse of centuries were completely extirpated by Holberg, and the path was cleared for a more solid and positive development. Holberg's works were greatly benefited by the circumstance that their author was in possession of a general culture and was able to avail himself of all that had been done in his time in all the rest of Europe. Many of his characters are based on foreign models. Thus Peder Paars bears a certain resemblance to Boileau's "Lutrin," Niels Klim to Swift's Gulliver, and in Holberg's plays there are many reminiscences of Molière. But what he appropriated from foreigners, he digested so thoroughly that through him it appeared in a wholly new and original form. All of Holberg's creations carry in their face the unmistakable stamp of his own individuality. In his works, moreover, the Danish element is constantly brought to the front and kept pure and unalloyed. It has rightly been said of him that all the foreign materials which were touched by his hand were so completely Danicised that his works may claim far more originality than those of the most of his predecessors who usually blindly followed some foreign model.

All that which Holberg had acquired by his hard and indefatigable studies was destined to be a blessing to his countrymen. The old barriers were broken down, the mem-