Danes and the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize of £8,000 (more or less) has now been awarded by the Committee of the Swedish Academy to writers of Denmark. It comes as a Christmas present every year to some very successful author, apparently on the principle that to him who hath more shall be given. Most countries, including England in the person of Mr. Kipling, have enjoyed it once, but not yet, unless we mistake, Italy. Norway (Björnson) and Sweden itself (Selma Lagerlöf) having absorbed the golden shower, it seems to have been felt that the threshing-floor of Denmark should by dry no longer. It is understood that the prize was originally divided between Karl Gjellerup and Henrik Pontoppidan; it has reported later that Pontoppidan has refused his share, and that the whole sum has gone to Gjellerup. We do not pretend to certain information, but we may take this opportunity of saying a few words about the two most popular Danish novelists who survive from the earlier generation. It is natural that they should be thought of together, for their careers have been strictly parallel. They were born within a few days of one another; each, like so many imaginative writers of Scandinavia, is a child of the manse. Each is an extremely fertile and abundant writer of fiction; but there the likeness ends.

Henrik Pontoppidan is unquestionably the leading living novelist of Denmark. He has gained that position, in a rather dead time, by his strenuous independence of foreign models and by the ceaseless industry he has expended on the collection and distribution of facts regarding Danish experience and character. His principal rival, Gjellerup, is a chameleon who takes his colour from whatever intellectual object he rests upon, whereas Pontoppidan has kept himself unaffected by all contemporary influence; and it is in this that the singular contrast between the two distinguished authors principally exists. Pontoppidan was born on July 24, 1857, in his father's parsonage in Fredericia. He began his literary life by publishing melancholy little tales about Jutland peasants; his first good book was a collection of Village Tales in 1883. From the Huts was still better; it dealt with the relation of the paid labour to the peasant proprietor. Henrik Pontoppidan began by writing very short tales and has advanced to the composition of enormous novels, his masterpiece, Lykke Per the first volume of which appeared in 1898, having extended to eight or nine volumes. The hero of this remarkable book, Per Sydonius, is the typical Danish priest's son, who comes into natural contact with every section of country and town life in the Denmark of the nineteenth century.

A curious fact to be noted in the successive novels of Pontoppidan is that the author, who began in a state of active irritation against the world, has settled down into a sort of Olympian calm; the observer, with his enjoyment of the human scene, having ousted the satirist, with his anger at injustice and weakness. Pontoppidan's interest in the movement and colour of life, of life indeed now for its own sake, has made of him at last almost a local Balzac. The foreigner learns more about the real condition and thought of Denmark by reading his novels than by browsing upon many Blue-books; and so, while not pretending to see in the author of The Land of Promise and From the Huts a great writer in the artistic sense, we may recognize that his sincere and laborious novels give as solid an impression of Denmark as is to be found anywhere. The drawing of the principal figures in Lykke Per is so firm, all these parsons, merchants, students and peasants stand out with such a strength in the luminous air of the long-drawn narrative, that we are tempted to place Pontoppidan only just below the great names of European fiction, and national enthusiasm may be excused for ranking him positively in a line with these. […]