Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/284

266 and ethical element preponderates, while there is also a strong tendency to be satirical, and the plot is taken from real life. In the second the theme is borrowed from an ancient myth; but both present the author's peculiar view of life, and in both the author makes long digressions to discuss realistic details. In both these works the author shows his strength as a lyric poet, a fact which is particularly prominent in his "Amor og Psyche," while in "Danserinden" the most sublime pathos alternates with the most scathing satire. All his later works represent now the one and now the other of these two main tendencies; but the interest widens and deepens, and there is an increasing beauty of form.

The satirical tendency of his muse, directed against his own time, reached its climax in "Adam Homo." It is the fully developed blossom of that bud which is to be found in "Danserinden." The half derisive, half plaintive satire of his early performances is, in "Adam Homo," developed into biting irony. The poet has seen the world in the meantime, and has learned to know humanity — what humanity is, as a rule. What he has seen has filled his soul with disgust and resentment, and in this mood he created his great poem, which is one of the most remarkable that any literature can boast. The poet looks out upon the sea of humanity around him and from the multitude he selects an individual, a very ordinary mortal, and then he shows how his hero, whose intellectual powers are of no mean order, and who might have become something good and useful, from mere human weakness permits the intellectual capital with which Heaven has endowed him to be squandered, and the hero ends as a miserable snob, which does not, however, by any means prevent him from attaining a high social position in the world. As a contrast to this individual, whose career the poet sketches from the cradle to the grave, the author has also introduced a female character of the highest purity and intellectual beauty, refined and charming, and still no less human and real than the hero himself. From an æsthetical standpoint some important