lectures, entitled "Byron and his Group," though no
less entertaining than the rest, appears to me less satisfactory. It is
a clever presentation of Byron's case against the British public; but
the case of the British against Byron is inadequately presented. It is
the pleading of an able advocate, not the charge of an impartial judge.
Dr. Brandes has so profound an admiration for the man who dares to rebel
that he fails to do justice to the motives of society in protecting
itself against him. It is not to be denied that the iconoclast may be in
the right and society in the wrong; but it is by no means a foregone
conclusion that such is the case. If society did not, with the fierce
instinct of self-preservation, guard its traditional morality against
such assailants as Byron and Shelley, civilization would suffer. The
conservative bias of the Philistine (though not so outwardly attractive)
is no less valuable as a factor in civilization than the iconoclastic
zeal of the reformer. If the centrifugal force had full sway in human
society, without being counteracted by a centripetal tendency, anarchy
would soon prevail. I cannot (as Dr. Brandes appears to do) discover any
startling merit in outraging the moral sense of the community in which
one lives; and though I may admit that a man who was capable of doing
this was a great poet, I cannot concede that the fact of his being a
great poet justified the outrage. Nor am I sure that Dr. Brandes means
to imply so much; but in all of his writings there is manifested a deep
sympathy with the law-breaker whose Titanic soul refuses to be bound by
the obligations of morality which limit the freedom of ordinary mortals.
Only petty and pusillanimous souls, according to him, submit to these
restraints; the heroic soul breaks them, as did Byron and Shelley,
because he has outgrown them, or because he is too great to recognize
the right of any power to limit his freedom of action or restrain him in
the free assertion of his individuality. This is the undertone in
everything Dr. Brandes has written; but nowhere does it ring out more
boldly than in his treatment of Byron and Shelley, unless it be in the
fifth course of his "Main Currents" dealing with "Young Germany."

These four courses of lectures have been published under the collective
title "The Main Literary Currents in the Nineteenth Century"
(_Hovedstroemningerne i det Nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur_). The
German translation is ent