LITERARY GENIUS

Taranaki Daily News, 11 May 1935, Page 21 (Supplement)

LITERARY GENIUS

LUDWIG HOLBERG OF NORWAY. A MAN OF GREAT ACHIEVEMENT. This is the '2soth year of a man who founded a nation’s literature and gave marriage outfits to its poor girls. Both Norway and Denmark have been celebrating the 250th birthday of Ludwig Holberg, the great Scandinavian dramatist of the 17th century who has been called the Father of Danish literature because he lived, wrote, and died in Denmark, though he was born in NorHolberg’s fame rests on his satirical comedies, which, though on the surface strongly reminiscent of Moliere, bear the' unmistakable hall-markiof genius and so*’ mirror the qualities of the Danish people that they could not.'have sprung from*, any other soil than Denmark’s. As so often happens, Holberg himself attached little importance to the work for which posterity was to cherish him. He looked on himself one whose real mission lay in educating his own people, in bringing to it the treasures pf culture and learning frotn -oth>r-‘ lands,and familiarising it with the currents of modem thought of the day. Eminently fitted for this (for he had read and travelled more widely than Anyone in the Denmark of his cenvury) he had nevertheless the ■ uphill- task, of all pioneers, and was through- a . long course of years subjected. toj virulent: attacks; yet he went/ his ..chosen way, laying the foundations of the intellectual life of his adopted country, writing the first'Danish history of-the-world as well As fiction and: poetry. . / / ■' It l was only by accident that he took to writing, coiriedies, ■Up -'till that time Denmark had no national- drama, .but the ' idea of a national stage began to take shape,-and Holberg'.was .approached “by certain highly-placed personages who could not ; -be gainsaid” with the request that he should, write plays for it. He consented, and within three years wrote 26. delightful comedies ip -which the -Danish people have ever , since recognised their own ’ most intimate, traits amusingly caricatured. . If Holberg’s eyes were quicker .to see faults arid defects than virtues, he had in compensation an exquisite, .sense of humour which never failetr ~to discover the comic side.of things, even where his own person was concerned. A man of few friends and no domestic ties, his-life could not have been but a lonely one, yet he must have had a soft spot in his heart, for when he . died, a crusty old bachelor of 80, it was found that he had left a fund for providing impecunious young girls with a marriage outfit. .