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BRANDES, GEORG MORRIS COHEN (1842- ), Danish critic and literary
historian, was born in Copenhagen on the 4th of February 1842. He became
a student in the university in 1859, and first studied jurisprudence.
From this, however, his maturer taste soon turned to philosophy and
aesthetics. In 1862 he won the gold medal of the university for an essay
on _The Nemesis Idea among the Ancients_. Before this, indeed since
1858, he had shown a remarkable gift for verse-writing, the results of
which, however, were not abundant enough to justify separate
publication. Brandes, indeed, did not collect his poems till so late as
1898. At the university, which he left in 1864, Brandes was much under
the influence of the writings of Heiberg in criticism and Soren
Kierkegaard in philosophy, influences which have continued to leave
traces on his work. In 1866 he took part in the controversy raised by
the works of Rasmus Nielsen in a treatise on "Dualism in our Recent
Philosophy." From 1865 to 1871 he travelled much in Europe, acquainting
himself with the condition of literature in the principal centres of
learning. His first important contribution to letters was his _Aesthetic
Studies_ (1868), in which, in several brief monographs on Danish poets,
his maturer method is already foreshadowed. In 1870 he published several
important volumes, _The French Aesthetics of Our Days_, dealing chiefly
with Taine, _Criticisms and Portraits_, and a translation of _The
Subjection of Women_ of John Stuart Mill, whom he had met that year
during a visit to England. Brandes now took his place as the leading
critic of the north of Europe, applying to local conditions and habits
of thought the methods of Taine. He became _docent_ or reader in _Belles
Lettres_ at the university of Copenhagen, where his lectures were the
sensation of the hour. On the professorship of Aesthetics becoming
vacant in 1872, it was taken as a matter of course that Brandes would be
appointed. But the young critic had offended many susceptibilities by
his ardent advocacy of modern ideas; he was known to be a Jew, he was
convicted of being a Radical, he was suspected of being an atheist. The
authorities refused to elect him, but his fitness for the post was so
obvious that the chair of Aesthetics in the university of Copenhagen
remained vacant, no one else daring to place himself in comparison with
Brandes. In the midst of these polemics the critic began to issue the
most ambiti