Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/300

282 its productions have an essentially different character from the idealism of the preceding period, being very intimately connected with that powerful realistic tide which, during the last decades, has almost flooded the general literature of the civilized world. It endeavors, in a much higher degree than ever before, to approach reality and to describe it, either for its own sake or with a view of preparing the way to tendencies and views which are diametrically opposed to the old, idealistic views of life. This movement came to Denmark as a result of the social and religious agitations with which it is everywhere intimately connected. In Denmark, (born 1842) was the first to champion the modern radical ideas, whose claims he advocated with great enthusiasm and talent, though he can hardly be acquitted from the reproach of a blind one-sidedness and a passion which have provoked much bitterness and discord. By his historical and critical works on literature, in which he has chiefly adopted Taine as his model, he has contributed vastly to drawing the attention of the Danish people to the literary movements in Europe and making the Danes feel the need of spiritual intercourse with the outside world and so to emerge from the intellectual stagnation which had fallen on Denmark. This realistic tide would, of course, sooner or later have reached Denmark, even if Brandes had not been, and yet the fact that realism has already acquired so great prominence in Denmark must, in a great measure, be ascribed to him, though the events and movements in the world generally during the last decades may also have had their share in bringing about this result.

One of the most eminent representatives of the new tendency is. Already his earliest poems, in which he appeared as a champion of radicalism in literature, made a great sensation, and the friends of this tendency greeted the new phenomenon with an enthusiasm hardly warranted by the intrinsic value of the poems. They were followed by other works in prose and in verse, published in