Recollections of My Childhood and Youth by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes
page 147 of 495 (29%)
page 147 of 495 (29%)
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unassailed in historic fiction. Throughout numerous carefully elaborated
abstractions, extending over 120 folio pages, and in which I aimed at scientific perspicuity, I endeavoured to give a soundly supported theory of the limits of inventive freedom in Historical Romance. The substructure was so painstaking that it absorbed more than half of the treatise. Quite apart from the other defects of this tyro handiwork, it lauded and extolled an aesthetic direction opposed to that of both the men who were to adjudicate upon it. Hegel was mentioned in it as "The supreme exponent of Aesthetics, a man whose imposing greatness it is good to bow before." I likewise held with his emancipated pupil, Fr. Th. Vischer, and vindicated him. Of Danish thinkers, J.L. Heiberg and S. Kierkegaard were almost the only ones discussed. Heiberg was certainly incessantly criticised, but was treated with profound reverence and as a man whose slightest utterance was of importance. Sibbern's artistic and philosophical researches, on the other hand, were quite overlooked, indeed sometimes Vischer was praised as being the first originator of psychological developments, which Sibbern had suggested many years before him. I had, for that matter, made a very far from sufficient study of Sibbern's researches, which were, partly, not systematic enough for me, and partly had repelled me by the peculiar language in which they were couched. Neither was it likely that this worship of Heiberg, which undeniably peeped out through all the proofs of imperfections and self- contradictions in him, would appeal to Hauch. When I add that the work was youthfully doctrinaire, in language not fresh, and that in its skeleton-like thinness it positively tottered under the weight of its definitions, it is no wonder that it did not win |
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