[VI B 29:105] As is generally known, an author at times italicizes a few particular words in order either to help the reader follow the exposition better or to make the particular word stand out. But if one is to use italicizing successfully, one must understand the relative, for the idea of italics is relative. Lacking this relative understanding, Grundtvig has the matchless understanding: he italicizes absolutely in such a way that finally the notable words are the ones that are not italicized. This, to be sure, is an exaggeration—by Grundtvig, not by me—and when one speaks of Grundtvig, truth as well as esthetic considerations require the precaution of not exaggerating. For Grundtvig the relative does not go only a little way; as soon as he uses it he uses it absolutely. Italicizing seems particularly to increase in his later writings.

* but nevertheless eccentric

** Note. Indeed, also at times remarkable in the same way as when the continual repetition that the written word is dead and powerless was affirmed by a lower court’s decision11—that Grundtvig’s written word was “dead and powerless.”

* Note As a rule, one draws [slutte] correct conclusions; yet empirically one can accidentally draw a wrong conclusion if a special event actually occurs and one is unaware of it. The special event is that a quiet and introverted person in the noble sense, an eminently endowed, educated, and cultured person, decisively joins [slutte sig til] a party, a special event that must be regarded as a psychological phenomenon, the explanation of which can be sought in concreto along different paths or perhaps be completely abandoned But the [following] conclusion is unjustifiable and must not be drawn: neither from the excellence of this individual to that of the party nor from the genius of the party en masse to the insignificance of this individual The person who has and can have significance for himself can religiously belong only incidentally to a party, especially to a party such as the Grundtvigian party, formed on the average of a few volunteer geniuses who by an “adhesive” relation to the universal genius take a shortcut past the more humble places in the world of spirit on to the grandiloquent appointment as almost geniuses with an almost “nearly matchless eye for world history,” in the free language of almost “incarnate universal genius.” For Grundtvig is pure [pure] genius or, if someone prefers, simple [pære] genius; it must not depend on the word—through the relation to him the adherents become almost the same

Now and then an author makes a reference to a train of thought that is certainly somewhat unfamiliar but yet also so well known that it becomes invigorating for the reader, instead of obtaining a new thought in a new dress, to be reminded in a pleasant way of an old thought. The good author does something like this frugally and carefully. Grundtvig does it absolutely. His writing, especially in the later pamphlets, does not include an occasional provocative reference to Norse mythology; no, it has become gibberish, in which nisses and trolls and the Dalby mill15 and a secondhand inventory list of hackneyed poetic phrases and God knows what all appear. One must read him with a lexicon or be prepared not to be able to understand him when he interlards his style with this chattel just as skippers interlard their speech with nautical expressions.

A prose writer who knows his art uses on a rare occasion a compound word, but very carefully, often even comically, because this language does not belong to prose. But Grundtvig does everything absolutely; he and his copiers use compound words with a matchless affectation. Even Aristotle (in his Rhetoric16) cautions against the use of compound words in prose because they only impress the masses and are a poetic reminiscence. [VI B29 106] Plutarch (in Moralia17) tells that King Philip was insulted because someone addressed him in compound words, since he was of the opinion that only the common herd is addressed in this way. —In the lectures he delivered here in 1803, Henrich Steffens made a short, epigrammatic statement about the Romans: that Nero, not Brutus, was the last Roman.18 Even though the statement is unjustified, which is explainable by his partiality to the Greeks, it is short, ingeniously expressed, provocative. As for Grundtvig’s italicized, yard-long annually recurring lecture on the Roman yoke, is there in all that he says any additional category of thought? And then, after having soundly thrashed Hamann19 in the guise of the Romans, he customarily knits to that a hearty and stirring peroration about life and all that lives, life and spirit, the school for life, the high school in Soer,20 in the North, on Skamlings-banken, first and last about the folk academy. Posito, I assume, that all these stirring lectures aroused all of us and we now stand there prepared to carry out Grundtvig’s idea—could it perhaps be that he lacks the more concrete idea and has essentially concentrated on sounding the alarm? His absolute hatred of the Roman yoke and the Romans corresponds to his absolute partiality to the Greeks, who have been engaged by Grundtvig in his role as prophet to appear together with the Icelanders in a future world-historical season. The present author, through reading the Greeks (even though he, in comparing his knowledge with an expert philologist’s learned acquaintance with Greek culture, always admits his weakness), through repeatedly imagining himself back into the state of mind of those people, is in the situation of having found a reassurance he perhaps otherwise would never have found, a propitious guidance for his perhaps confused, perhaps also misled, thinking; he is in the situation of not having been occupied with any person as much as with the greatest intellectual hero in Greece: Socrates—but I wonder if Socrates would understand a single word about the matchless future for which Grundtvig vouches? [VI B 29:107] On the other hand, has Grundtvig said anything about Greece that contains thought categories, while he scoffs at everything German and at what German philologists and philosophers have learned from the Greeks? Do his style, his performance, and his behavior testify to his having learned anything from that very normatively cultured nation, from that beautifully modeled representative of beauty, art, intelligence, and happy balance?

* [Deleted: So, then, his genius as a thinker culminates in the Living Word.] Without quite needing exceptional ability, someone with a somewhat closer acquaintance [in margin: by continual reading] with Pastor Grundtvig’s writing will easily be able to imitate the mysterious discourse about the Living Word since, like witchcraft formulas and other such things, it is produced by arbitrarily tossing together various strong compound words. But it is hard to say what thought there is in this matchless discovery. Is it an esthetic discovery that pertains to the relation between the written and the spoken word? Aristotle has already undertaken such inquiries, and about this relation a connoisseur will be able to make many tasteful and enlightening observations, which would also have psychological value, since the maturity of spiritual development is related to it, and the Living Word decreases in proportion to the increase of intellectuality—something of which Aristotle was already aware. But in vain does one seek development and thought in Grundtvig. For him the Living Word has obtained the meaningless worth of absoluteness. The written word, the dead letters, the black marks on white paper are dead and powerless, have no value whatever, are unable to call forth the spark of life in a human soul. One now lives as in a death (with the exception of the noise that is made in Danish society and on the steamship) because books are written. In comparison with a condition like this, there was a matchless life here in the North in ancient times, since one did not write books—perhaps because one could not write. [VI B 29:108] Esthetically, the discovery that there is a difference between the spoken and the written word would be of the same kind as the discovery that the sun rises, matchless, that is, matchless that anyone would think of calling it a discovery. Therefore the merit can lie solely in the development, in the subtle observation, lest the merit, with the aid of absoluteness, become a matter of making the discovery into nothing at all. [Deleted: This happens easily to Grundtvig, since he has a superstitious belief in the tremendous category of absoluteness. He does not seem to know that it is a deceitful definition, that it also can be nothing at all.