of which we are about to speak is eminent above all for mastery over verse. The swallow who heralded the summer was a German by birth, Adolph Wilhelm Schack von Staffeldt[1] (1769–1826), who came over to Copenhagen from Pomerania, and prepared the way for the new movement. Since Ewald no one had written Danish lyrical verse so exquisitely as Schack von Staffeldt, and the depth and scientific precision of his thought won him a title which he has preserved, of being the first philosophic poet of Denmark. The writings of this man are the deepest and most serious which Denmark had produced, and at his best he yields to no one in choice and skilful use of expression. This sweet song of Schack von Staffeldt’s, however, was early silenced by the louder choir that one by one broke into music around him. It was Adam Gottlob Öhlenschläger (q.v.; 1779–1850), the greatest poet of Denmark, who was to bring about the new romantic movement. In 1802 he happened to meet the young Norwegian Henrik Steffens (1773–1845), who had just returned from a scientific tour in Germany, full of the doctrines of Schelling. Under the immediate direction of Steffens, Öhlenschläger began an entirely new poetic style, and destroyed all his earlier verses. A new epoch in the language began, and the rapidity and matchless facility of the new poetry was the wonder of Steffens himself. The old Scandinavian mythology lived in the hands of Öhlenschläger exactly as the classical Greek religion was born again in Keats. He aroused in his people the slumbering sense of their Scandinavian nationality.
The retirement of Öhlenschläger comparatively early in life, left the way open for the development of his younger contemporaries, among whom several had genius little inferior to his own. Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1848) was a Jutlander, and preserved all through life the characteristics of his sterile and sombre fatherland. After a struggling youth of great poverty, he published, in 1807–1809, a translation of Ossian; in 1814 a volume of lyrical poems; and in 1817 he attracted considerable attention by his descriptive poem of The Tour in Jutland. His real genius, however, did not lie in the direction of verse; and his first signal success was with a story, A Village Sexton’s Diary, in 1824, which was rapidly followed by other tales, descriptive of village life in Jutland, for the next twelve years. These were collected in five volumes (1833–1836). His masterpiece is a collection of short stories, called The Spinning Room. He also produced many national lyrics of great beauty. But it was Blicher’s use of patois which delighted his countrymen with a sense of freshness and strength. They felt as though they heard Danish for the first time spoken in its fulness. The poet Aarestrup (in 1848) declared that Blicher had raised the Danish language to the dignity of Icelandic. Blicher is a stern realist, in many points akin to Crabbe, and takes a singular position among the romantic idealists of the period, being like them, however, in the love of precise and choice language, and hatred of the mere commonplaces of imaginative writing.[2]
Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (q.v.; 1783–1872), like Öhlenschläger, learned the principles of the German romanticism from the lips of Steffens. He adopted the idea of introducing the Old Scandinavian element into art, and even into life, still more earnestly than the older poet. Bernhard Severin Ingemann (q.v.; 1789–1862) contributed to Danish literature historical romances in the style of Sir Walter Scott. Johannes Carsten Hauch (q.v.; 1790–1872) first distinguished himself as a disciple of Öhlenschläger, and fought under him in the strife against the old school and Baggesen. But the master misunderstood the disciple; and the harsh repulse of Öhlenschläger silenced Hauch for many years. He possessed, however, a strong and fluent genius, which eventually made itself heard in a multitude of volumes, poems, dramas and novels. All that Hauch wrote is marked by great qualities, and by distinction; he had a native bias towards the mystical, which, however, he learned to keep in abeyance.
Johan Ludvig Heiberg (q.v.; 1791–1860) was a critic who ruled the world of Danish taste for many years. His mother, the Baroness Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd (q.v.; 1773–1856), wrote a large number of anonymous novels. Her knowledge of life, her sparkling wit and her almost faultless style, make these short stories masterpieces of their kind.
Christian Hviid Bredahl (1784–1860) produced six volumes of Dramatic Scenes[3] (1819–1833) which, in spite of their many brilliant qualities, were little appreciated at the time. Bredahl gave up literature in despair to become a peasant farmer, and died in poverty.
Ludvig Adolf Bödtcher (1793–1874) wrote a single volume of lyrical poems, which he gradually enlarged in succeeding editions. He was a consummate artist in verse, and his impressions are given with the most delicate exactitude of phrase, and in a very fine strain of imagination. He was a quietist and an epicurean, and the closest parallel to Horner in the literature of the North. Most of Bödtcher’s poems deal with Italian life, which he learned to know thoroughly during a long residence in Rome. He was secretary to Thorwaldsen for a considerable time.
Christian Winther (q.v.; 1796–1876) made the island of Zealand his loving study, and that province of Denmark belongs to him no less thoroughly than the Cumberland lakes belong to Wordsworth. Between the latter poet and Winther there was much resemblance. He was, without compeer, the greatest pastoral lyrist of Denmark. His exquisite strains, in which pure imagination is blended with most accurate and realistic descriptions of scenery and rural life, have an extraordinary charm not easily described.
The youngest of the great poets born during the last twenty years of the 18th century was Henrik Hertz (q.v.; 1797–1870). As a satirist and comic poet he followed Baggesen, and in all branches of the poetic art stood a little aside out of the main current of romanticism. He introduced into the Danish literature of his time inestimable elements of lucidity and purity. In his best pieces Hertz is the most modern and most cosmopolitan of the Danish writers of his time.
It is noticeable that all the great poets of the romantic period lived to an advanced age. Their prolonged literary activity—for some of them, like Grundtvig, were busy to the last—had a slightly damping influence on their younger contemporaries, but certain names in the next generation have special prominence. Hans Christian Andersen (q.v.; 1805–1875) was the greatest of modern fabulists. In 1835 there appeared the first collection of his Fairy Tales, and won him a world-wide reputation. Almost every year from this time forward until near his death he published about Christmas time one or two of these unique stories, so delicate in their humour and pathos, and so masterly in their simplicity. Carl Christian Bagger (1807–1846) published volumes in 1834 and 1836 which gave promise of a great future,—a promise broken by his early death. Frederik Paludan-Müller (q.v.; 1809–1876) developed, as a poet, a magnificent career, which contrasted in its abundance with his solitary and silent life as a man. His mythological or pastoral dramas, his great satiric epos of Adam Homo (1841–1848), his comedies, his lyrics, and above all his noble philosophic tragedy of Kalanus, prove the immense breadth of his compass, and the inexhaustible riches of his imagination. C. L. Emil Aarestrup (1800–1856) published in 1838 a volume of vivid erotic poetry, but its quality was only appreciated after his death. Edvard Lembcke (1815–1897) made himself famous as the admirable translator of Shakespeare, but the incidents of 1864 produced from him some volumes of direct and manly patriotic verse.
The poets completely ruled the literature of Denmark during this period. There were, however, eminent men in other departments of letters, and especially in philology. Rasmus Christian Rask (1787–1832) was one of the most original and gifted linguists of his age. His grammars of Old Frisian, Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon were unapproached in his own time, and are still admirable. Niels Matthias Petersen (1791–1862), a disciple of Rask, was the author of an admirable History of Denmark in the Heathen
- ↑ See F. L. Liebenberg, Schack Staffeldts samlede Digte (2 vols., Copenhagen, 1843), and Samlinger til Schack Staffeldts Levnet (4 vols., 1846–1851).]
- ↑ Blicher’s Tales were edited by P. Hansen (3 vols., Copenhagen, 1871), and his Poems in 1870.
- ↑ Edited (3 vols., 2nd ed., 1855, Copenhagen) by F. L. Liebenberg.
