Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/299

Rh were received with boundless favor. His most popular works are: "Fra Piazza del Populo," "Fra den gamle Fabrik," and "Bruden fra Rörvig." His poems, which in form are without blemish, are inferior to his tales in intrinsic value.

The authors who have hitherto been mentioned in this chapter, many of whom are still living and at the zenith of their productive power, form, notwithstanding their dissimilarity as regards details, essentially one group, owing their origin to the romantic tendency in literature, and representing an ideal view of life and art. The realistic element is surely not altogether lacking in the Danish æsthetic literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, though it is not conspicuous in the beginning of that literary epoch, and several poets, Paludan-Müller, Blicher and others, draw very decidedly on real life, which they possessed the gift of painting both vividly and faithfully. But behind these pictures of reality there is almost always concealed a marked ideal conception of life, and the former are used, directly or indirectly, only for the purpose of satire, to pave the way, so to speak, for the ideal. The climax of the ideal tendency in Danish literature was reached during the first four decades of this century; during the following decades it gradually decreased, and during the last decade scarcely a single representative of the ideal tendency has been added. With the exception of the few writers who had already conquered for themselves a position in literature and continued their activity, and excepting the young poet,, who in a series of dramatic works had shown eminent dramatic talents, all the rest that was produced in this latter period was extremely weak and sapless, in fact, an epigoni-literature, of which the bulk was ladies' novels. In recent times the aesthetic literature has again been awakened to a new life, but