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An introduction to the background, genesis, themes and reception of the book.
Of the six volumes that constitute Main Currents in 19th Century Literature, The Reaction in France is the least literary and most historically oriented. Nevertheless, it occupies a central position within Brandes’ peculiar form of literary history. The reactionary currents of the Empire (1804-14) and the Restoration (1814-30) mark the negative pole in his portrait of the intellectual and emotional life of the first half of the 19th century. The first two volumes trace the steadily rising reaction against 18th century ideals of freedom, first in the literature of French emigres and then in German Romanticism. Now Brandes describes the triumph of the reaction. History winds its way from Voltaire’s Kingdom of Reason through Rousseau’s Kingdom of Feeling, only to end up in a delta of conservative, nationalistic and repressive attitudes. This delta Brandes subsumes under the term “the principal of authority.”
In his presentation of this historical development, especially in the first half of the volume, aesthetic literary criticism fades somewhat into the background in favor of a focus on historical fact and on the history of ideas as they are expressed in the form of philosophical and social treatises. Yet this apparent shift in perspective points toward something more fundamental in his larger project. Brandes writes at precisely the moment at which comparative literature is about to establish itself as an independent discipline in Europe and the United States. He has often been identified as a central figure in the development of comparative literary studies, or even more strongly as its principal founder. But how does Brandes understand what he refers to as a “comparative literary perspective” (Brandes 1872:8), and what role do “the currents” play in it?
The theoretical frame of Main Currents is a peculiar construction blending together quite distinct theoretical positions. The influence of French aesthetic theory is palpable, particularly Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine, whom Brandes had discussed in his 1870 dissertation. But Brandes supplements French aesthetic theory with a Hegelian frame, albeit in a modified form. Whereas Hegel had defined the motor of (literary) history as metaphysics, Brandes replaces this with an alloy of ideas, feelings, and moods. It is this alloy that constitutes the essence of Brandes’ “currents,” these elements that determine history and whose character and development can be extrapolated from literature.
This composite theoretical construction manifests itself throughout on the plane of metaphor. Alongside concepts from the empirical sciences, primarily botany and zoology, Brandes employs a recurring metaphorics of water: ideas surge forth in torrents, moods ferment in the morass, feelings are dammed up by dykes but soon flood the banks. Brandes develops a kind of hydraulic literary theory to represent the ebb and flow of the main literary currents, for the task of the comparatist is, according to Brandes, to describe through literature the development and the movement of the ideas, feelings and moods of a given historical period, and to channel their energies into the present.
The Reaction in France (and Main Currents as such), in its comparative methodology, and its peculiar metaphorics, thus amounts at the same time to a history of ideas, a literary history and a history of feelings of the first half of the 19th century.
1873 was a productive year for Brandes. In February and March he delivered twelve lectures on the German Romantic school, which were quickly published as the second volume of Main Currents on May 3rd. Now it was time to prepare for the next volume on the reaction in France.
In June Brandes left Denmark for Germany, where he remained for the next four months. Aside from shorter excursions to Dresden and Leipzig he was chiefly in Berlin and in Munich, where he wrote the first four lectures at the library. Since his student years Brandes’ social life had vacillated between a gregarious desire for dialogue and debate and a contemplative hermetic existence. That Janus-faced tendency revealed itself again during his sojourn in Germany. When he was not sequestered in the Munich library he often found himself in the company of the poet Paul Heyse, with whom he maintained a long written correspondence. Heyse’s cheerful and optimistic disposition lifted Brandes’ spirits, who, as he notes himself, had been in the habit of seeing only “how damned awful everything really was” (Brandes 1907:133).
Heyse and Brandes also had their intellectual differences. This became clear, for example, in their discussions of the relation between literature and the age in which it was written. As is evident from the first two volumes of Main Currents, Brandes subscribed to a strong historical determinism. No author existed outside historical circumstances, and literary works were directly conditioned by them. Heyse’s response, that the laws which govern intellectual development are far more indeterminate and capricious than those that govern nature, began to weaken Brandes’ fundamental understanding of the relation between the particular and the universal and thus the status of the literary work in relation to broader historical developments. While this change was yet to manifest itself in the design of the third volume, Brandes did revel in the lavish praise Heyse had for The Romantic School in Germany, which had been subjected to harsh treatment in Denmark (Brandes 1907:127-33).
In Berlin Brandes vacillated between an almost ascetic existence and its opposite. “There is not much to report on my part,” he wrote to his brother Edvard.
Nothing terrible has happened to me. No one has the slightest thought of such. Moreover I have not visited anyone, which has been made all the easier, since all my acquaintances are away from Berlin such that no one knows I am here again. I read almost the entire day in preparation for my book (Edvard and Georg Brandes 1972:83).
His German translator Adolf Strodtmann and his wife Henriette, however, also lived in the Steglitz district where Brandes was staying.
Their interactions during the summer develop into a stormy affair between Brandes and Henny, as Brandes calls her. A certain ambivalence is present on his part, nevertheless Brandes writes to Heyse down in Munich: “I could well do without that person. But were I to succeed in breaking it off, I would lose all faith in anything solid here in the world” (Brandes 1966:67) [Ich konnte wol [sic] dieses Wesen entbehren. Aber gelang es mir den Faden zu zerreissen, dann hätte ich allen Glauben an irgend etwas Festes in der Welt verloren]. Brandes initially tries to compel Henny to divorce, but she is reluctant. It is a precarious situation, hardly eased by the fact that Strodtmann has yet to finish translating Main Currents, seeing that Brandes himself has yet to complete the project. They decide not to reveal their relationship until Brandes has finished the work and Strodtmann has translated it. But in the end the lovers cannot wait that long. Already a year later the affair is revealed, and two years after Henriette Strodtmann becomes Gerda Brandes (Knudsen 1985:327-40). In the meantime Brandes leaves Germany alone on September 30th, returning to Copenhagen to complete the lectures. He delivers the first of the these on October 28th, and The Reaction in France is published on February 13th, 1874.
From the very beginning any reader will be struck by the tone of the work. in The Reaction in France Brandes’ usual confrontational style reaches its apex; he himself referred to it as “the most polemical of all my writings” (Brandes 1907:143). This is due not only to the theme – the powerful conservative forces he describes – but also to the political conditions of his own time as well as his personal situation. The reactionary assault on Brandes by a segment of the Danish press, the dismissal of his application for a lectureship, and the monarchical and religious political tendencies present especially in France are distilled into a more combative attitude:
I labored strenuously, plagued by dismay, poverty, and the hostility of my surroundings. This part of the work was according to the plan the most negative, in that it was the most fruitful opportunity to give voice to the bitterness that had accumulated in my mind, to my hatred of those who would lobotomize humanity and of the very air breathed by the oppressors. I was thinking of the reaction in contemporary France while I wrote about the reaction of the past. (Brandes 1907:151)
The dismissal the previous year of his application for an interim lectureship in aesthetics or general literary history has also contributed to his bad mood, especially because no one on the selection committee doubted his scientific qualifications. The objection was to Brandes’ progressive views with respect to established institutions such as society, the family and religion. In his two-page opinion, the Slavicist C.W. Smith, the only member of the committee to have attended his lectures, wrote that while no one could require Brandes to be a Christian, “one can demand of a Danish man of conscience that he not desire to undermine the respect for the institutions considered holy by the nation among an impressionable youth (the majority of which are of the other sex)” (Larsen 2016:90).
Brandes was thus completely surrounded by reactionary forces, including those present in contemporary European politics, the newspapers and the Danish university as well as by the reactionary nature of the literary and historical material with which he was occupied. Together these forces incited the inner polemicist in Brandes, sharpening his pen into barbed, uncompromising and often remarkably well-written attacks on the authority principle and its advocates. The Reaction in France is therefore shaped by the dismay and bitterness that the present age had inculcated in Brandes, which he tried to transform into a combative polemic against reaction and ignorance. In the afterword to the second volume, written to his teacher Hans Brøchner, Brandes had been very clear: “a book for me is an act” (Brandes 1873:379). This statement could serve as the epigraph of the third volume. With rhetorical excess and polemical sting, Brandes battles against the reaction not only in history, but also in his own time, on the political stage, in the newspapers, and at the University of Copenhagen.
Literature seems to play a secondary role in The Reaction in France. In large sections of the volume literary works are most notable for their absence in Brandes’ portrayal of the development, triumph and fall of an idea – the idea he calls the authority principle. He dives deep into the Empire and Restoration in order to identify manifestations of the principle in the historical circumstances of the Concordat of 1801, that is the acknowledgment and privileging of the Catholic Church by the French state, and in the conservative social-philosophical treatises of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald on matters such as religion and marriage. The authority principle has taken such a hold that it now constitutes the reigning idea of the era. For Brandes the Church is the central core of the principle, for in his words this was “the golden age of the priests” (Brandes 1874:337). Thus in the first part of The Reaction in France Brandes interrogates the political and social ideas about religion, state and marriage represented by the Church, as well as decisive historical events such as Napoleon’s effort to employ a restored Church as a central power player. Only later does he concern himself with the literary works of the period. From these works he extrapolates the emergence of conservative ideas, after which he rounds out the volume with the overcoming of the authority principle both on the formal plane of literature and on the concrete plane of politics and society.
That Brandes is less occupied with literature in the third volume reveals a fundamental characteristic of Main Currents as a whole. Brandes is interested in large ideas – freedom, emancipation, enlightenment – and in the zigzagging progress of these ideas in the struggle against their opposites – authority, reaction, ignorance. Already in the introductory lecture of 1871 he declares this clearly: “the central subject of these lectures is the reaction in the initial decades of the 19th century against the literature of the 18th century, and the overcoming of that reaction” (Brandes 1872:7-8).
Brandes’ literary analyses in The Reaction in France follow along in the slipstream of his account of the history of ideas. In this manner the status of literature as empirical material in the scientific project is made apparent. One of Brandes’ central perspectives on literature is to view it as a symptom, a surface phenomenon from which one can extrapolate the more deeply rooted movement of the history of ideas. Because the idea “stamps” all literary genres, “the epic, the novel, the poem, the ode, even the theater, with its distinguishing mark” (Brandes 1874:122), Brandes can say of his approach to Victor Hugo:
In these initial odes of Hugo let us study less the poet than the age in which he came into existence. They go through the whole of France’s history from 1789 onward to 1825 and contain the entirety of the Restoration’s official system of views. (Brandes 1874:276)
We might say that Brandes writes literary history in the service of the history of ideas. When he holds up a literary text to the light, it is the silhouettes of the ideas of the age that appear to his analytical gaze.
However prominently ideas feature in the third volume of Main Currents, Brandes is not exclusively a historian of ideas. Literature also represents a different and more fundamental phenomenon. The works of Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo are not just symptomatic of a series of clearly defined ideas, but also of more obscure and more formless feelings and moods. As Brandes repeatedly notes throughout the six volumes, his primary task is “to provide an outline of the psychology of the first half of the 19th century” (Brandes 1890:570). By reading “literary history as psychologically as possible,” Brandes believes that he can “grasp the movements of the soul, which farthest back, deepest down and in every case, prepare and bring forth literature into existence [italics mine]” (Brandes 1873:4). Brandes is once again reading literature symptomatically, but as empirical material it has precedence over the philosophical treatises and commentaries of Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre and Félicité de Lammenais. Whereas they provide access to the ideas, literature can provide insight into the changing moods and feelings of the period. Already in his dissertation on Contemporary French Aesthetics, Brandes asserts the privileged status of literature when he writes that “a superb poem, a good novel, the confession of a great man, all these are more instructive than letters of state or political treatises” (Brandes 1903, 13:247).
The aesthetic theory underpinning this conception of literature is the critical praxis of C.A. Sainte-Beuve. In a revolt against philosophical criticism, which had isolated the work from history and from the author just as the New Criticism of the 20th century would do once again, Sainte-Beuve practiced a psychological criticism that traced the work back to the personality and the character of the author. For Brandes this constituted a wholly decisive shift that asserted the precedence of literature over ordinary historical inquiry.
Thus Sainte-Beauve’s reforms have made literary history, which before had been an adjunct to actual historical studies, into its trailblazer, the most soulful, most lively form of history, because literature constitutes altogether the most interesting and richest material with which the historian can grapple. (Brandes 1882:494-5)
Only in literature can we get a sense of the enthusiasm, the hatred, the erotic spark or the seraphic-platonic coldness, the languor or the downcast self-ironic attitude that an author has felt at any given point. Yet Sainte-Beauve’s pointillist form of criticism of individual authors did not permit larger syntheses. Brandes takes the further step of expanding the psychological approach from the individual to the period. From the animating feelings of the individual work he infers the feelings of the author, from which he then infers a group of feelings, which together constitute the soul of the period (Brandes 1873:20). In The Reaction in France the poetic-religious spirit of the Restoration is incarnated in figures such as Chateaubriand and de Vigny, but especially in Madame de Krüdener, since as Brandes asserts “if as a rule the spirit of an age is typically mirrored in its most prominent figures, then it is doubly so with respect to those whose character is defined by being a convert to that spirit, especially if this personality is a woman” (Brandes 1874:203). In gathering together the isolated literary expressions of the era, Brandes is able to form the whole he seeks – a psychology of the first half of the 19th century. The fact that Brandes found the Restoration authors mediocre and regarded the social commentators of the period as nothing short of criminals is in this context of secondary importance. They have all, in a mediocre and criminal manner, articulated the reigning ideas and feelings of the age. They must therefore be included, for otherwise Brandes’ grand account of the psychology of European humanity would contain a lacuna.
On the one side ideas, on the other feelings and moods. These are the twin components of Brandes’ system. In Main Currents they appear as two historical principles that feed into one another. The two principles are also baptized: Voltaire and Rousseau.
Employing his usual sense for synthesis and mediation, the intellectual life of the 18th century is boiled down to “the principle of freedom or of brotherhood” represented respectively by Voltaire’s rationalism and Rousseau’s feeling. In Emigrant Literature the reaction began with Madame de Staël’s shift from Voltaire to Rousseau, with the reaction of feeling against reason (Brandes 1872:167). In The Reaction in France the development is completed with the Church’s reaction against feeling. History thus winds its way through the Kingdom or Reason through the Kingdom of Feeling toward the authority principle (Brandes 1874:101).
It is important to take notice of the linear development of thought. The authority principle does not merely assert power and submission in the world of ideas, but just as much in the domain of feeling. The whole of the reaction is an attempt to contain an intense feeling, that of revolutionary enthusiasm:
And now it is as if all that which the heroes of the intellect have thought and for which they have suffered martyrdom should be able to be shoved aside as useless and futile! As if that which had stirred up the noblest of hearts, that which had infused them with courage on the battlefield and on the scaffold, all that enthusiasm should now be able to be bottled up anew like the genie in the bottle of the fairytale, and that the bottle could be permanently sealed by an Emperor and a Pope! (Brandes 1874:87)
The denial of the freedom to think by the Empire and the Restoration is just as much a denial of the freedom to feel. In Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny and Madame de Krüdener eroticism, for Brandes the most important literary sentiment, withers into a pale and prudish Platonism, or it is moralistically repressed and manifests itself as sin and shame – Eros becomes Satan himself (Brandes 1874:260). In Brandes’ view the renewed Catholic tendency either distorts the emotional experiential world of human beings into religious spiritualism or represses it entirely in the assertion of the authority principle. Whether it is in the form of active enthusiasm and warm-blooded eroticism or the hatred and sin of the reaction, the spectrum of feeling is as important as the spectrum of ideas.
In Brandes’ evolutionary history, ideas and feelings thus follow one another only to be suppressed by the authority principle. But the historical perspective does not stand alone. As already suggested ideas and feelings constitute the two fundamental components of Brandes’ system, fundamental components that together form a permanent matrix for historical development. Even when feelings are suppressed by the reaction they constitute an essential object of study, in that they represent that which is distorted, garbled and subjugated. Conversely, Brandes criticizes German Romanticism for its moonshine mood and its wallowing in emotion (Brandes 1873:309,215). He thus simultaneously seeks “the concealed feeling and the abstract idea underlying everything” (Brandes 1873:4). Here there is no suggestion of transmission from the one to the other, but of the simultaneous existence of two modes of human psychology.
It is easy to read Brandes exclusively as a historian of ideas. The ideas have sharp contours. As a rule they have a clear origin that can be identified and their development can relatively easily be traced. Feelings on the contrary are diffuse and frayed at the edges, and imperceptibly they morph into formless moods that cannot so easily be identified, localized or traced. Here for example is the mood that reigned during the French reaction: “thus the mood of the period, worn out but complex, full of disappointments, expectations and an impulse toward personal reveries, is not a mood conducive to action, but to mediation and contemplation” (Brandes 1874:243). Despite its complex and fluid character, however, the emotional element has a decisive explanatory potential, for as Brandes continues: “it is this popular mood that explains how Lamartine’s “Meditations” could become the most beloved poems of the age [italics mine]” (Brandes 1874:243). But the moods do not just explain the literary preferences of the period. They are often described as the actual subject of history. An author like Ludwig Börne, for example, is merely a passive medium through which a more foundational emotional energy is channeled: “Börne is here only an organ for a feeling that had seized the largest part of the many in Germany who were receptive to enthusiasm” (Brandes 190:35).
In this manner feelings and moods constitute the intangible yet effective raw material of history. Not at all was it the soldiers who drove Napoleon out of Germany in 1813. It was “national feeling” (Brandes 1890:21). And when Brandes describes how Napoleon reestablished the Concordat in 1801, he does not first and foremost point to historical events. He seeks rather a psychological explanation:
A change in external circumstances is always prepared by a change in moods and further brings forth still more moods that correspond to the new circumstances. The moods and ideas that prepared the ground for the Concordat were, when it was established, granted full freedom to speak and to call forth similar moods. And since these moods and ideas now expressed themselves in literature, a new literary movement emerged that corresponded to the Concordat, translating it, so to speak, into the language of literature. (Brandes 1874:93-4).
Both history and literature are surface phenomena that emerge out of deeper sources – the moods of the period. Brandes often speaks of moods, feelings and ideas in the same sentence, but what is their internal relationship? They are almost always closely entangled with one another. A mood can be a symptom of a pantheistic mindset (Brandes 1875:62), but ideas can also be the product of feelings. Brandes cites the famous assertion by the English poet William Wordsworth that the “influxes of feelings are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representations of all our past feelings” (Brandes 1875:72). Here moods exist at a deeper level in the chain of causation, for vague moods gradually take on form and become “more defined moods,” which again crystallize in still clearer “ideas,” which together constitute the conditions for the emergence of the Concordat. However fluid and vague feelings and moods might be, the alloy of emotions and ideas comes to bear a heavy explanatory burden as the ultimate ground of both history and literary hermeneutics. Taken together, moods, feelings and ideas create history and explain literature. What, then, does Brandes call this alloy of emotions and ideas, this psychological force that shapes history and structures his entire work of literary history? He calls them currents.
The original title of the lecture series was Fundamental Currents in 19th Century Literature. Because Brandes’ teacher Hans Brøchner did not care for this title, Brandes replaced “fundamental currents” with the now well-known “main currents” (Fenger 1957:211-12). Brandes did not just maintain the metaphor, he also expanded its semantic field to a larger complex of metaphors. Moods, feelings and ideas flow along in broad streams through rivers and thousands of channels, they break down into vortexes, ferment in swamps, divide themselves into surface and undercurrents, they burst the dikes of the reaction or determine its countercurrent. Brandes speaks of “the revolutionary current” (Brandes 1872:14), “the mental current of the age” (Brandes 1882:448) and “the course of the intellectual currents” (Brandes 1882:50). Together the multitude of currents make up the fluid material that binds together Brandes’ analyses and permits him to postulate connections between a series of often loosely related authors and events.
In the introduction to the second volume, The Romantic School in Germany, he explicitly formulates the premise and the approach of the work: “The method consists, as is known to the reader, in psychologically tracing the deeper movements in literature from country to country, showing how now and then the fluid material is compressed, crystallizing in one or another clearly defined type” (Brandes 1873:19). Here Brandes articulates a hydraulic literary theory, in which literature and its characters are manifestations in more stable form of the moods, feelings and ideas that flow across national boundaries. Thus he writes of Chateaubriand’s German-influenced 1802 short story René: “again the thoughts and feelings flow back over the borders of France, and on French ground this river is called René” (Brandes 1872:38). Furthermore, the central object of Brandes’ research, the literary schools, are themselves products of such aquatic convergences. The Romantic school in France, for example, emerges from the efforts of a number of authors “to exchange with youthful haste their ideas, inform each other of their hatreds, their sympathies and antipathies. And this profusion of feelings flows together in brooks that form a river” (Brandes 1882:22). The task of the comparatist – the new possibility offered by the comparative analysis of literature – is precisely to describe, through the crystals that make up literature and its schools, the currents that lie beneath them and that give them form and clarity.
So moods, feelings and ideas flow. They flow together and form schools, they flow geographically back and forth between the European countries, but they also flow through time. The many intricate water metaphors are organized by an overriding historical-dialectical schema of Hegelian appearance. The question is are how Hegel’s philosophy of history coheres with the French aesthetics of Sainte-Beuve and Taine, and with the ontology inherent in Brandes’ pervasive water metaphorics.
It is unsurprising that Main Currents has many Hegelian traits. Hegelianism predominated at the University of Copenhagen in the 1860s, and Brandes’ teacher Hans Brøchner was himself strongly influenced by it. The degree to which Brandes’ intellectual development during his students years was shaped by Hegelian ideas is most clearly apparent from a note in his diary on October 4th, 1861, written after his first reading of Hegel’s Encyclopedia (1817): “Blessed beyond compare to study this, to kiss this book, altogether intoxicated by it” (Dagbog 1861-3:119). His enthusiasm cooled over the years, yet the historical-dialectical manner of thinking, in which actions lead to reactions and further to new actions and thereby drive forward the idea of freedom slowly but surely, is indeed employed by Brandes as the frame of Main Currents. In the sixth volume he describes Hegelianism as such: “world history was one continuous drama, one great drama of freedom” (Brandes 1890:310). It is precisely as a Hegelian drama of freedom that Brandes stages Main Currents from the very beginning. Actions and reactions contain their own antitheses, and when a movement becomes suitably strong it compels the reversal with the force of “historical necessity” (Brandes 1873:377).
As Gunnar Ahlström noticed early on, Brandes adopted the German historian G.G. Gervinus’ Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts seit den Weiner Verträgen (1855-66) as a model (Ahlström 1937:46-54). Beyond borrowing the concept of “emigrant literature,” Brandes appropriated – without acknowledgment – Gervinus’ overall account of how the revolutionary potential drowned in reactionary Romanticism, and how these circumstances prevailed until the Byronic reversal. But more than that: He also borrowed Gervinus’ Hegelian scheme of literary historical development along with his metaphorics of water. As Gervinus writes in his introductory volume, Einleitung in die Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, which had appeared a few years prior, the macro-historical perspective provides insight into the fundamental patterns of movement in history:
All history, when it is observed in a shorter time span, moves in a uniform manner formed by certain reigning influences. Looked at in longer periods it draws a picture of continuous vacillation between incongruous driving forces that counteract every instance of the predominance of a single idea by virtue of a governing power or movement. When we look at entire centuries, a steady current in a specific direction, the unmistakable progress of a reigning idea, emerges out of this ebb and flow. (Gervinus 1853:12)
[Alle Geschichte, in kleineren Zeiträumen betrachtet, bewegt sich in einem gleichartigen Charakter, der von bestimmten vorherrschenden Einflüssen gestaltet wird. In grössere Perioden zusammengefasst, gewährt sie das Bild steter Schwankungen zwischen entgegengesetzten Antrieben, die allem Uebergewichte einer einzelnen Idee, einer leitenden Macht oder Bewegung zuwiderwirken. Ganz im grossen Verlaufe der Jahrhunderte überschaut, ist dann wieder in diesem Wechsel von Ebbe and Flut eine stete Strömung nach einer bestimmten Richtung, der Fortschritt einer herrschenden Idee ganz unverkennbar].
There are indeed many ideas and metaphors that have flowed from Gervinus into Brandes’ Main Currents. In Brandes the bodies of water in his many streams, rivers and channels even flow in precisely the same manner; he finds “the norm of the movements” in the “great rhythm of ebb and flow” (Brandes 1890:571).
Coupled with the teleological understanding of history as the revelation of the idea of freedom, one could therefore easily be lead to view all the metaphorical water that runs through Main Currents as a metaphysical entity, as Gervinus’ and thereby Brandes’ visualization of the Hegelian Geist (see for example Lundtofte 2003:102). In a later newspaper article Brandes himself makes the link:
When I began work on Main Currents in 1871, I was still metaphysically minded in my intellectual orientation. I overlooked the personalities; they were for me only the organs of the ideas. As the title suggested, it was only the currents within the world of ideas that interested me. The individual personalities were carried by the currents, swept along by them; they were mouthpieces for the ideas. Their personalities were not of interest to the author. (Brandes 1887)
It wasn’t quite that simple. Because of a dispute over the rights to the German edition of Main Currents, it was now in Brandes’ interest to draw the largest possible contrast between Strodtmann’s original translation and his own later translation, in which he had made a number of revisions and toned down the Hegelian vocabulary. Moreover, in his dissertation from 1870, Brandes had devoted himself to recent French aesthetics and in particular to Hippolyte Taine’s attempt to replace speculative metaphysics with an empirically based scientific approach to literature. Rather than a manifestation of a metaphysical rationality, literature, according to this understanding, was conceived as the natural product formed by three elements: “race,” “milieu” and “moment.” In other words history was a product of a concrete culture, of the mentality that reigned at a given point in time. Literature, for its part, emerged as a monument to “the manner in which human beings have felt and thought many centuries prior” (Taine 1866:iii) [la façon don’t les hommes avaient senti et pensé il y a plusieurs siècles]. In his dissertation Brandes summarizes Taine’s fundamental insight: “the purpose of literature is to sketch out and to preserve feelings,” and thereby “history is at its base an examination of the soul.” (Brandes 1903:13:247).
Brandes had his reservations, yet he was persuaded by Taine’s more worldly approach to literature. Not speculative idealism, but empirical science became Brandes’ model. When in the final volume (Young Germany) he arrives at Hegel, he must demonstrate that Hegel’s system “has collapsed and that the all too delicate instrument of its methodology has broken apart in our hands, such that only a few great fundamental thoughts remain”(Brandes 1890:310). In Main Currents Brandes thus modifies the Hegelian frame. On the one hand, he needs the Hegelian dialectic to bind the whole work together; thus the repeated invocations of actions and reactions and the internal necessity of development. On the other hand, Brandes’ currents become steadily less commensurate with Hegel’s ontology and metaphysics as the work progresses.
But not even in the first volume of Main Currents do we find a metaphysical rationality driving history forward. When Brandes states directly what the metaphor of the current refers to, he repeatedly points to the reigning moods, feelings and ideas of a given period. In other words he appropriates Hegel’s scheme as a formal concept, as a drama that provides him with a structure and a plot, but he empties it of metaphysical content and replaces it with emotions and concrete social and political ideas. The rhythmic ebb and flow of historical movement certainly recalls Hegel’s dialectic, but in contrast to the metaphysical water in Gervinus the fluctuating bodies of water that flow through Main Currents consist of empirical individuals’ natural psychology.
It is a curious theoretical construct: French content in German form, an empirical history of literature, culture and mentalities encased within a historical-dialectical corset. Its complex nature also manifests itself on the metaphorical plane. Other metaphors taken from zoology and botany are quite frequently blended with the currents. Comparing his perspective to that of the “intrepid eye of the natural scientist and the physician,” Brandes botanizes literature, describing the “soil” from which literary works sprout and employing it as a thermometer to measure “the temperature of the whole emotional life of an age” (Brandes 1873:6; 1875:31; 1874:251). Natural science is the model for the concrete praxis of literary analysis. Despite their larger movements, the streams, rivers and channels are thus more important for the frame Brandes erects than for his analyses. As the work progresses, the water metaphorics is employed less and less, and when it does appear, it is typically in the introductions and the concluding summaries. Thus the fourth volume concludes with an exercise in dizzying aquatic acrobatics:
European poetry was flowing on like a sluggish, smooth river; those who walked along its banks found little for the eye to rest on. All at once, as a continuation of the stream, appeared this poetry, under which the ground so often gave way that it precipitated itself in cataracts from one level to another – and the eyes of all inevitably turn to that part of a river where its stream becomes a waterfall. In Byron’s poetry the river boiled and foamed, and the roar of its waters made music that mounted up to heaven. In its seething fury it formed whirlpools, tore itself and whatever came in its way, and in the end undermined the very rocks. But, “in the midst of the infernal surge,” sat such an Iris as the poet himself has described in Childe Harold – a glorious rainbow, the emblem of freedom and peace – invisible to many , but clearly seen by all who, with the sun above them in the sky, place themselves in the right position. It presaged better days for Europe. (Brandes 1875:526-7)
The reader, who after five hundred pages has forgotten the central metaphor of Main Currents, is here thrown into the river. It soon becomes clear, however, that Brandes is compensating for the absence of the water metaphorics throughout the work. In the literary analyses he is rarely interested in specific influences. When he occasionally points to concrete authors and works as sources of inspiration for the works of other authors, he often dissolves philological accuracy in the abstract concept of the current. The river that acquired the name of Réne in France as noted above, is none other than Goethe’s Werther.
Even though the current plays a wholly decisive role for the cohesion of Brandes’ project, it is a category without much analytic value. The works are often analyzed as independent artefacts that may well provide an open window on to the general atmosphere of moods, feelings and ideas, yet their specific referents and concrete connections to literary history rarely form a part of his large gestures. Chateaubriand’s Le genie du christianisme [The Genius of Christianity] from 1802, for example, becomes “the book of the moment” in that it “in the wrappings of sentimentality smuggled in the authority principle that would soon mount the throne” (Brandes 1874:135).
But Brandes is not interested in substantiating his assertion of “its colossal success and immense influence” (Brandes 1874:134). Instead he devotes thirty pages to a sarcastic critique of the Christian conservative ideas in Chateaubriand’s epic The Martyrs, or the Triumph of the Christian Religion [Les Martyrs, ou Le triomphe de la religion chrétienne] from 1809, where Brandes acting the engaged and polemic literary critic is truly in his element (Brandes 1874:171-202). Accordingly he viewed traditional philology with a skepticism bordering on arrogance. Through Paul Heyse he encountered the professor of literature Michael Bernays, whose career had been built upon the strictly philological method. It is difficult to miss Brandes’ contempt in his characterization of him:
He had cleansed Goethe’s Werther of all original as well as later typographical errors, just as Madvig had cleansed Livius of scribal errors. He was the most passionate admirer of Goethe, and since he was equipped with the memory of a mnemonist, he could recite Egmont or Iphigenie by heart from end to end, not to mention the ballads or the lesser poems. He knew exactly where every sentence one might cite was found in Goethe. (Brandes 1907:136)
This kind of micrology was for lesser intellects than Brandes. He gladly left to others the arduous work of tracking down concrete connections, influences and developments and documenting them with detailed empirical evidence and philological minutiae. The current is the category of macro-history and broad developments and as such it is best reserved for introductions and conclusions. In between lie the literary works, like well-demarcated islands on which Brandes can botanize.
The relationship between the broad currents and the individual authors is therefore precarious. Do the authors exclusively articulate the feelings and the ideas carried along by the currents? Or are they also autonomous individuals who themselves set the course? In other words, how strong is the current in Brandes’ Main Currents?
In his correspondence with Heyse Brandes, as mentioned above, had maintained that the currents were more important than the individuals, because every author is conditioned by the age. Yet Heyse’s defense of the individual ultimately shook Brandes’ philosophical determinism, awakening within him a slumbering yet passionate individualism (Brandes 1907:128). This account is found in the second volume of Brandes’ memoirs, and naturally it is written in retrospect. After his engagement with Nietzsche in the late 1880s individual genius becomes much more prominent in his thinking, as evidenced in his later monographs on, for example, Shakespeare, Goethe and Julius Caesar. In Main Currents, however, especially in the first volume, genius is pushed to the side. According to Kant’s definition the genius is the one who breaks an existing rule and thereby sets a new one (Kant 2001:193-4). But in Brandes the authors are captive to the currents, which are so strong that “even characters with such a natural inclination to revolt as Ibsen have been submerged in them” (Brandes 1872:25-6). The genius, who exists outside the artistic tradition and does not draw sustenance from it, remains isolated and wastes away. Even though Brandes acknowledges the singular artistic talents of Heinrich von Kleist and Percy Bysshe Shelley, they fall outside the history of ideas and feelings he outlines. Whereas Hegel’s famous thesis of “the cunning of reason” asserted that reason allowed its battles to be fought out by individuals while it itself remained securely in the background, in Brandes it is the underlying currents of ideas and feelings that determine the emotional and ideological manifestations of the concrete literary work. Feelings are first experienced en masse, before they are experienced individually.
Nevertheless, the power of the current is limited. Already in his dissertation Brandes had criticized Taine for “overlooking the remarkable spontaneous power of the individual genius” (Brandes 1870:110). There is therefore a certain weakness in the argumentation of Main Currents when we survey the entire work: the authors articulate the feelings of the period, but the period is possessed of precisely the feelings articulated by the authors. By means of this circular logic the historical representativeness of the literary feelings is simultaneously secured and undermined. Despite his programmatic theoretical proclamations, Brandes often formulates his thoughts ambiguously. Madame de Staël channels the moods and feelings of the period, yet she is also the literary source of the reaction in French intellectual life (Brandes 1874:350). The independent powers of the individual are seen most clearly in the position Brandes attributes to Byron. From the very beginning of the lecture series he functions as the decisive peripety of the grand drama, as Brandes later formulates it: “An Englishman such as Byron was required to single-handedly stem the tide flowing from the Holy Alliance” (Brandes 1875:20). The English poet on the one side, the current of the reaction on the other.
That Byron was not just a medium for broader feelings and moods but himself produced them is clear from the analysis. Of all the oeuvres Brandes treats in Main Currents, no other encompasses the spectrum of feelings and the intensity of their articulation than that of Byron. Withdrawn melancholy vacillates with choleric explosions of ire and indignation. Of course Byron writes against the foil of the Greek Revolution, but is by virtue of “the fearsome outburst of revolutionary anger” in his poetry that he inaugurates the counter-reaction that constitutes the turning point (Brandes 1875:515). Rather than being the product of a current, Byron himself sets a river in motion. Brandes compares him to the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham who had tried to undermine the reaction by speaking to human interests. Byron is much more effective. Because he “let loose all the passions” he was able to “revolutionize minds” (Brandes 1874:349). The broad current again reveals its importance, but now it is the result of literature and not the other way around.
The Byronic reversal is therefor also a reversal in the relationship between literature and history. As Brandes writes of the reaction in the third volume, its literature could not cope with the powerful feelings the Napoleonic wars had awakened. The greatest Iliad of the age was Napoleon’s series of victories and defeats; the invasion of Russia its greatest tragedy (Brandes 1874:163). In Byron, literature for the first time returns as the source of feelings that can equal and even exceed those of history. The reversal thus marks the high point not only in the larger plot of the unfolding of freedom, but also in the theory that the individual and literature – in other words, the author – is possessed of an independent spontaneous power: that the author and not the current is the true subject of history.
In Main Currents Brandes is never able to escape the circularity between the authors and the currents, the particular and the universal. Literary works appear both as the encapsulation of the age as well as the source of new moods, feelings and ideas. In different ways, Hegel and Taine had given him the tools that made it possible to erect the scaffolding of a grandiose comparative project, but its execution also reveals Brandes’ increasing aversion to his own construction, to the main currents that organized European literature and consigned the literary work and the author to secondary roles as merely well articulated but passive intermediaries.
Over time, his understanding of the relative strength of the current and the individual, as previously noted, evolved into “its opposite” (Brandes 1887), thus resulting in efforts to loosen the Hegelian corset. But this unresolved conflict is present already in the early volumes of the 1870s. As he worked on The Reaction in France in 1873, the tension between his philosophical and his political-aesthetic persuasions was palpable. From Munich he wrote home to Hans Brøchner, decrying that it was the lot of human beings to rise or fall on one of the waves of world history, especially if one found oneself atop a wave about to sink (Brandes 1907:143-4). But at the same time Brandes was troubled by the contemporary forces of reaction, and thus attempted to agitate against them in his merciless excoriation of the authority principle. The introductory lecture of Main Currents also makes clear the real aim of the entire project: “the major part of the work will involve opening up a multiplicity of channels through which can flow the streams and currents that have their origin in the revolution and the age of progress, thereby putting a stop to reaction in all those areas in which its task has historically come to an end” (Brandes 1872:28).
Brandes’ version of literary history is not descriptive but operative. The role of the critic is not that of describing, but of productively organizing history in order to put it to use. Like the artist who gives form to the material or the engineer who builds dykes and dams, the critic must shape literary history into currents that flow so powerfully that they can break into the present and transform it. Brandes’ hydraulic model now acquires a different function. Hydraulics, as is known, signifies not only a technical discipline that describes the movement and pressure of liquids – as Brandes describes the movements in the energies of the European states of mind. It is also a concrete technical contraption, in which liquids are used to transfer pressure and energy. It is just such a technical contraption Brandes constructs in Main Currents. Despite the deterministic philosophy it is not the main currents in themselves, but the Main Currents as written by Georg Brandes that must stem the tide of reaction.
The Reaction in France is – like Main Currents on the whole – an incitement to action. The model is precisely the poet who thirty years prior had set the reversal in motion. Just as Byron with his literature had revolutionized minds with indignation and enthusiasm, so Brandes wants to revolutionize his own age with his comparative literary history. And again as with Byron feelings are the means. When Brandes recounts 1848 he does not merely seek to describe “the emotional life and the wealth of moods of the revolutionary years.” He also wants to “place the reader inside them” (Brandes 1890:563). According to an aesthetic theory Brandes sketches rather quickly in the final volume, the value of art rests on
the originality and the strength of that inner life and those palpitations of the mind of which the work is an expression, combined with with the capacity of the work to infect us with them (Brandes 1890:50).
The measure of literature as well as of literary criticism is their capacity to infect the reader with feelings. Thus the metaphor of the drama takes on a different meaning than the purely plot-oriented and structural function. As in Aristotle’s theory of the impact of tragedy on the spectator, the six acts of Main Currents must provoke in the reader a number of feelings, if not fear and pity, then contempt for the reaction and enthusiasm for the idea of revolution and its realization in the present. Main Currents is itself a balancing act between between historical-dialectical teleology and individual autonomy: The work channels the currents of the past into the quagmire of the present, but Brandes must at the same time actively shape history in opposition to the feelings and ideas of his own age, in order to effectuate the revolution of the mind Main Currents is intended to bring about. The reader can already sense the enthusiasm for this revolution toward the conclusion of the third act of Brandes’ drama, for in The Reaction in France Brandes channels the idea and the feeling of freedom safely through the dark years of the emergence, diffusion, fall and dissolution of the authority principle. “Finally this principle falls, never to rise again,” Brandes proclaims in conclusion (Brandes 1874:352). The way was paved for Byron, for English Naturalism and for the great reversal in Europe’s political, emotional and literary currents.
If Brandes had believed that the publication of The Reaction in France constituted an action that would revolutionize the Danish public, he was disappointed. He did have good reason to expect a certain amount of attention, however. Leading journals in Germany, England and France had discussed the first volume quite positively, and he himself felt that recognition would be forthcoming in his homeland. But when the third volume appears on February 13th, 1874, it is largely greeted with silence. Only two reviews appeared in Denmark. In April the critic at Berlingske Tidende praises the book for its lively presentation, for its wealth of detail and for its review of the literature, but politically he cannot sanction Brandes’ critique of the authority principle. “No state, not even the freest,” according to the reviewer, can “do without authority,” and thus Brandes’ book constitutes an incitement to “anarchy” and “terrorism” (anon. 1874:1-3). Six months later the second and last contemporary Danish review appeared in Fyens Stiftstidende. It follows in the footsteps of the critic at Berlingske, acknowledging Brandes’ immense knowledge, but distancing itself from his, in the opinion of the reviewer, one-sided and superficial characterization of the authority principle. Nearly twenty years pass before Sophus Schandorph attempts to push back against the critical reception with a highly descriptive and hardly insightful, yet at the same time effusive review of the second revised edition in Tilskueren. Schandorph, who “in all essence shares the author’s view of literature,” painstakingly goes through the content of the volume and Brandes’ formulations in an effort, through the power of repetition, to overcome “all the resistance this work has faced” – a resistance he chiefly ascribes to narrow-mindedness “and that sweet Danish preeminent characteristic: envy” (Schandorph 1893:490).
Once again Brandes draws greater attention outside of Denmark. Whereas the Danish Brandes is jeered for his politicization or passed over in silence, the European Brandes is of a different stature. In Sweden he is praised for his presentation (see anon. 1874, Aftonbladet; anon. 1874, Ny illustrerad Tidning), while in Norway for his method that breaks with speculative criticism and places the work in its historical context (see anon. 1877). The largest measure of attention, however, was in Germany. Despite the painful marital situation Strodtmann is hard at work, and already in April the first three volumes appear in German as a single edition. The journal Deutsche Rundschau is the first to publish a complete review, praising not just the presentation but also Brandes’ distinctive method, his wholly original manner of writing literary history. Instead of approaching the works bibliographically or employing philology and genealogy to trace their internal development, the reviewer writes, Brandes focuses on the “restless mental labor” and the main changes in moods and mental currents” that condition the development of literature (Kreyssig 1874:140) [“rastlose Gedankenarbeit,” “die maßgebenden Stimmungswechsel und Geistesströmungen”].
Despite the accolades there are also critical voices. Overall the German critics praise The Reaction in France at the expense of the previous volume on German Romanticism. Brandes is accused, not entirely incorrectly, of a thinly veiled Francophilia that disfigures his reading of German literature. Moreover, it is noted that he has taken much of his inspiration from other critics and historians, such as Gervinus (see anon. 1874; Jung 1877; Kuh 1876).
A second wave of reviews appears in the 1890s, this time of all six volumes. These reviews are written in retrospect and are just as concerned with the historical impact of Main Currents. There is general agreement on the enormous significance of the work in Germany. It is presented as an epochal work, decisive for the introduction of Taine’s methods in Germany and the best guide to the European literature of the first half of the 19th century (see anon. 1893; anon. 1894; Morgenstern 1894; Sauer 1898). Especially interesting, however, is Franz Mehring’s judgement in Neue Zeit that the overarching construction of the work does not hold up to closer scrutiny (Mehring 1893-4:311). Some years later, the German literary scholar Samuel Lublinski follows up with a devastating critique of Brandes’ methodology. In 1899 and 1900 Lublinski published Literatur und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert – the first systematic sociological literary history. Having read review that elevated Brandes at the expense of his own work, Lublinski was quick to respond. He levels his accusation in no uncertain terms: “I contend that Georg Brandes doesn’t know the slightest about fundamental currents. What he does know something about is precisely the opposite – superficial currents” (Lublinski 1900:872) [“Ich behaupte, Georg Brandes hat von Grundströmungen keine Ahnung. Was er kennt, ist das Gegenteil davon: die Oberströmung]. In other words, Brandes has only observed the superficial currents as they appear in literary-political salons. The moods of the salon is all he has analyzed. A fundamental sociological literary history like Lublinski’s is on the contrary concerned with mass phenomena. It dives deep into the intellectual mass psychology of the age in all its manifestations. Lublinski asserts that he himself presents empirical material en masse, while Brandes offers close readings of only a handful of authors and then supplements his readings with anecdotes. Brandes’ conception of Romanticism is thus “as if it had been shot out of a pistol” (Lublinski 1900:873) [Freilich ist bei ihm die Romantik wie aus der Pistole herausgeschossen]. Brandes never shows what the currents actually consist of, how they are connected or how they develop. They remain empty postulates and the slogans of an exclusive group of authors tell us nothing about them.
The critique of the current as a concept and thus of Brandes’ methodology points both sideways and forward. The long gestation period of Main Currents between 1871 and 1890 coincided with the institutionalization of comparative literature as an independent discipline. In 1877 in Hungary Hugo Meltzl founded its first journal, “Comparative Literary Journal” (after 1879 Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum); in 1886 H.M. Posnett’s book Comparative Literature was published; a year later in Germany Max Koch founded Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte; and in France the first professorship in Littératures Modernes Comparées was established in 1896 in Lyon. On the other side of the Atlantic a professor at Cornell taught “General and Comparative Literature” from 1871, just as Brandes delivered his first lectures in Copenhagen. And in 1890, the same year the sixth and final volume appeared, the first American Department of Comparative Literature was founded at Harvard University.
Given the transnational perspective and broad international impact of Main Currents, Brandes was therefore counted among the founders of the discipline, if not downright “le père du comparatisme” – the father of comparative literature (Madsen 2004:65).
Yet the ambivalence that characterized the contemporary reception of Brandes’ methodology also manifested itself later on. On the one hand, his originality and ingenuity is credited with opening up a wholly new manner of reading literature. On the other, his concept of the current is criticized as empty and incoherent. Upon Brandes’ death in 1927, Fernand Baldensperger wrote that his work is obsolete “because of the superficial level of its information and because of the all too fragile structure.” (Baldensperger 1927:370) [par sa superficialité d’information et par la structure trop légère de sa bâtisse]. And in an echo of Lublinski, René Wellek writes in 1955 that the sociology of literature did not lose much with the passing of Georg Brandes. He does indeed possess a large measure of psychological insight and “a power of marshalling currents and movements,” yet Wellek’s final verdict is that Brandes is merely “a middleman without originality and substance” (Wellek 1955:368-9,357).
Brandes remains an ambiguous figure in the history of comparative literature. However much he was feted internationally in his time, he and his Main Currents quickly vanished into thin air after his death. Nevertheless, Brandes’ method with the current as its central element, at once maligned and admired, demonstrates an aspect that has remained essential to the field: the necessity of methodological experimentation.
When Erich Auerbach, upon the publication in 1946 of his Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländische Literatur, assumed the status of the central figure in the history of comparative literature, it was by virtue of a work that in various ways differs significantly from Main Currents. Auerbach’s focus is stylistics, and he operates neither with a concept of the current nor with an overarching historical-dialectical frame. Yet like Brandes he lifts his gaze from the national state and adopts a European perspective, and in his own way he attempts in a coupling of minute explications de texte with the contextualization of social history and the history of ideas. And as with Brandes, Auerbach’s key concepts, such as mimesis, representation and reality, are vaguely defined, shape-shifting entities. Nevertheless Mimesis remains a standard reference in the history of the discipline. Auerbach managed to transform the problem of method into a hitherto undiscovered opportunity, namely the synthesis of European literary history across language, geography and time. With this ingenious maneuver, he and comparative literature have an important forerunner in Brandes’ currents.
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