and steer, without other compass than a sensitive conscience,
toward the rosy dawn of the unknown. There was a desperate need of such
men in Denmark in the seventies, when the little kingdom was sinking
deeply and more deeply into a bog of patriotic delusion and spiritual
stagnation. An infusion of new blood was needed--a re-establishment of
that circulation of thought which keeps the whole civilized world in
vital connection and makes it akin. No country can cut itself off from
this universal world-life without withering like a diseased limb. The
man who undertook to bring Denmark again into _rapport_ with Europe was
Dr. Georg Brandes, whom I have characterized at length in another essay.
It was his admirable book, "The Men of the Modern Transition"
(translated into German under the title _Moderne Geister_) which
impelled me, some years ago, to make the acquaintance of the three
authors who represent whatever there is of promise in contemporary
Danish literature, viz., Sophus Schandorph, Holger Drachmann, and J. P.
Jacobsen. The last named, who died (1884) in the flower of his young
manhood, is, perhaps, not in the strictest sense contemporary. But he is
indispensable to the characterization of the group.

Widely different as these three men are in almost everything, they have
this in common, that they have deeply breathed the air of the nineteenth
century; and they all show more or less the influence of Brandes. That
this influence has been direct and personal seems probable from the
relation which they have sustained to the revolutionary critics. Of this
I am, however, by no means sure. Mr. Jacobsen, who was by profession a
botanist, and translated Darwin into Danish, no doubt came by his
"advanced views" at first hand. In the case of Schandorph it is more
difficult to judge. He is an excellent linguist, and may have had access
to the same sources from which Brandes drew his strength. Drachmann is
so vacillating in his tendencies that he refuses to be permanently
classified in any school of art or thought. Of the three, Schandorph
seems altogether the maturest mind and furnishes the most finished and
satisfactory work. In his novel "Without a Centre" (_Uden Midtpunkt_)
the reader feels himself at once face to face with an interesting and
considerable personality. He has that sense of surprise and delighted
expectation which only the masters of fiction are apt to evoke. It is a
story of a Danish national type--the conv