Chapter I (3)

It is strange that this man, who learned such an immense amount from French moralists and psychologists like La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort and Stendhal, was able to acquire so little of the self-control of their form. He was never subjected to the restraint which the literary tone of France imposes upon every writer as regards the mention and exhibition of his own person. For a long time he seems to have striven to discover himself and to become completely himself. In order to find himself he crept into his solitude, as Zarathustra into his cave. By the time he had succeeded in arriving at full independent development and felt the rich flow of individual thought within him, he had lost all external standards for measuring his own value; all bridges to the world around him were broken down. The fact that no recognition came from without only aggravated his self-esteem. The first glimmer of recognition further exalted this self-esteem. At last it closed above his head and darkened this rare and commanding intellect.

As he stands disclosed in his incompleted life-work, he is a writer well worth studying.

My principal reason for calling attention to him is that Scandinavian literature appears to me to have been living quite long enough on the ideas that were put forward and discussed in the last decade. It looks as though the power of conceiving great ideas were on the wane, and even as though receptivity for them were fast vanishing; people are still busy with the same doctrines, certain theories of heredity, a little Darwinism, a little emancipation of woman, a little morality of happiness, a little freethought, a little worship of democracy, etc. And as to the culture of our "cultured" people, the level represented approximately by the Revue des Deux Mondes threatens to become the high-water mark of taste. It does not seem yet to have dawned on the best among us that the finer, the only true culture begins on the far side of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ in the great personality, rich in ideas.

The intellectual development of Scandinavia has advanced comparatively rapidly in its literature. We have seen great authors rise above all orthodoxy, though they began by being perfectly simple-hearted believers. This is very honourable, but in the case of those who cannot rise higher still, it is nevertheless rather meagre. In the course of the 'seventies it became clear to almost all Scandinavian authors that it would no longer do to go on writing on the basis of the Augsburg Confession. Some quietly dropped it, others opposed it more or less noisily; while most of those who abandoned it entrenched themselves against the public, and to some extent against the bad conscience of their own childhood, behind the established Protestant morality; now and then, indeed, behind a good, everyday soup-stock morality--I call it thus because so many a soup has been served from it.

But be that as it may, attacks on existing prejudices and defence of existing institutions threaten at present to sink into one and the same commonplace familiarity.

Soon, I believe, we shall once more receive a lively impression that art cannot rest content with ideas and ideals for the average mediocrity, any more than with remnants of the old' catechisms; but that great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance and in aristocratic self-supremacy.