Intellectually these
"Impressions" are no less weighty; nay, they are more weighty than
anything from the same pen that has preceded them. They show a faculty
to enter sympathetically into an alien civilization, to seize upon its
characteristic phases, to steal into its confidence, as it were, and
coax from it its intimate secrets; and they exhibit, moreover, an
acuteness of observation and an appreciation of significant trifles (or
what to a superficial observer might appear trifles) which no previous
work on the Slavonic nations had displayed. It is obvious that Dr.
Brandes here shuns the linguistic pyrotechnics in which, for instance,
De Amicis indulges in his pictures of Holland and the Orient. It is the
matter, rather than the manner, which he has at heart; and he apparently
takes a curb bit between his teeth in the presence of the Kremlin of
Moscow and the palaces of St. Petersburg, in order to restrain mere
pictorial expression.
Having violated chronology in speaking of these two works out of their
order, I shall have to leap back over a score of years and contemplate
once more the young doctor of philosophy who returned to Copenhagen in
1872 and began a course of trial lectures at the University on modern
literature.
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