LITMIR.BIZ

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a style so full of color.

Long before he had finished Marie Grubbe, Jacobsen felt a new novel taking shape in his mind. It was to be the story of a modern youth and be called Niels Lyhne. It was written, bit by bit, in Thisted and abroad, and did not appear until December, 1880, four years after Marie Grubbe. In the latter, he had written of Renaissance types, sensual, full-blooded, and impulsive; only in Sti Högh, who was always cutting up the timber of life into thought-shavings, had he foreshadowed that modern reflectiveness which Heidenstam calls the curse of the nineteenth century. Niels Lyhne is the embodiment of this spirit, and is generally accepted as Jacobsen’s self-portrait, although the events of the story are not those of the author’s life. F. Hansen calls it[3] “a casting up of accounts with life by a man whom death had marked. Thence its Pindaric elevation of thought and expression. It is instinct with a spirit like a swan that rises and rises, on broad, slow wings, till it is lost to sight.” It expresses Jacobsen’s struggle, not only against the bodily weakness that laid its paralyzing hand on his faculties, but also against the sluggish, dreamy blood he had inherited, which made all creative work an agonizing effort.

[3] Illustreret Dansk Litteraturhistorie.

      Niels Lyhne is an outsider from life. He seems never to fill any particular place in his world. He has a poetic gift and high artistic ideals, but never writes. Two women leave him for other men less fine and lovable. Finally, he returns to his old home and family traditions, to manage his father’s estate, and to marry a sweet young girl, the daughter of an old neighbor. She and her child are taken away from him by death, and in her last illness she forsakes the atheism he has taught her and turns to the old religion, leaving Niels with a baffled sense that her spirit has left him even before the parting in death. At last Niels himself dies “the difficult death”—the closing words of the book.

      This is perhaps the place to say a few words about the atheism that is a dreary side of Jacobsen’s rich and brilliant personality. Early in life, he became convinced that human beings must rid themselves of the idea that any supernatural power would interfere between themselves and their deeds. He saw a supreme moral value in the doctrine of evolution with its principle of a universe governed by laws of cause and effect. In Niels Lyhne he emphasized again and again the bitter theory that no one ever added an inch to his height by dreams, or changed the consequences of good and evil by wishes and aspirations. Niels tries to instill into himself and his wife the courage to face life as it is, without taking refuge from realities in a world of dreams. Further than this, Jacobsen attacked no sincere faith. It would be interesting to search out how far, since his day, his principle of the immutability of law has penetrated religious thought, but that would be beyond the scope of this sketch.

      For eight years, while writing his two novels, Jacobsen had lived in his little native town in Jutland with occasional trips to the south. After the completion of Niels Lyhne, he resumed his place in the literary circles of Copenhagen, which he had shunned—so he humbly confessed—because he was ashamed of never getting anything finished. His old diffidence seemed to have left him; to the sweetness and quiet whimsicality that had always endeared him to his friends he added a new poise and assurance. He was deeply gratified by the reception given Niels Lyhne by people whose opinion he valued, and when he was told that Ibsen was reading it aloud to his evening circle, and had pronounced it the best book of its kind in modern literature, he characteristically remarked that this was pleasant to hear, even though John Poulson (Ibsen’s friend and biographer) no doubt exaggerated a little.

      This period of Jacobsen’s life was in many ways a happy one, in spite of his declining health. He had his old lodgings and lived there with the same puritanic simplicity as in his student days, and indeed his books never brought him enough money to live otherwise, but he revelled in a luxurious couch, the gift of anonymous women admirers, and in the flowers with which his friends kept his rooms filled. He wrote at this time a few short stories, among them Pesten i Bergamo (“The Plague at Bergamo”) and Fru Fönss. The latter tells of a woman in middle life who had the courage to grasp the happiness that youth had denied her. She dies, and her farewell letter to her children gives Jacobsen the opportunity to express the longing to be remembered which he could never have brought himself to utter in his own person. “Those who are about to die are always poor. I am poor; for all this beautiful world, which has been my rich, blessed home for so many years, is to be taken from me. My chair will be empty; the door will be closed after me, and I shall never set my foot there again. Therefore I look on everything with a prayer in my eyes that it will love me; therefore I come to you and beg you to love me with all the love you once gave me. Remember that to be loved is all the part I shall have in the world of men. Only to be remembered, nothing more.”

      With the last remnant of his strength, Jacobsen recast his poems, which were published after his death. Finally, when his illness could no longer be fought off, he went home to Thisted to be cared for by his mother and brother. There he died, on April 30, 1885, as quietly and bravely as he had lived.

The importance of the two short volumes that contain Jacobsen’s complete works has been more fully realized as they have been seen in the perspective of time. His poems, though few in number, are exquisite. With Niels Lyhne, he introduced the psychological novel in Denmark. While at work on it, he wrote a friend that after all the only interesting thing was “the struggle of one or more human beings for existence, that is their struggle against the existing order of things for their right to exist in their own way.” Vilhelm Andersen points[4] to these casual words as marking the cleavage between the old and the new, saying: “Before Niels Lyhne, the poetic was the general; after this book, the poetic became the personal. The literature whose foremost representative is Adam Oehlenschläger had for its aim the exaltation of the things common to humanity; the art in which J. P. Jacobsen became the first master has only one purpose, the presentation and elucidation of the individual.”

[4] Litteraturbilleder, II.

      Jacobsen has himself told us his ideal of style in a paragraph of Niels Lyhne, where he lets Fru Boye attack the generalities of Oehlenschläger’s description in his poem The Mermaid visits King Helge. “I want a luxuriant, glowing picture,” she exclaims. “I want to be initiated into the mysterious beauty of such a mermaid body, and I ask of you, what can I make of lovely limbs with a piece of gauze spread over them?—Good God!—No, she should have been naked as a wave and with the wild lure of the sea about her. Her skin should have had something of the phosphorescence of the summer ocean and her hair something of the black, tangled horror of the seaweed. Am I not right? Yes, and a thousand tints of the water should come and go in the changeful glitter of her eyes. Her pale breast must be cool with a voluptuous coolness, and her limbs have the flowing lines of the waves. The power of the maelstrom must be in her kiss, and the yielding softness of the foam in the embrace of her arms.” In the same passage, Jacobsen praises the vitality of Shakespeare’s style as a contrast to that of the Danish romanticists.

      His search for unique and characteristic expressions had free play in Marie Grubbe, where he could draw on the store of quaint archaic and foreign words he unearthed in his preliminary studies. To avoid the harsh staccato of the North, he made full use of the redundant words and unaccented syllables that were more common in the old Danish than in the modern, and thereby he gained the effect of prose rhythm. While discarding outworn phrases, he often coins new words, as for instance when he is not satisfied to let the sunlight play on the wings of the doves circling around Frederiksborg castle, or even to make the sunlight golden, but must needs fashion the word “sungold” (solguld), which in two syllables is the concentrated essence of what he wishes to say. Sometimes he gives a sharper edge to a common expression merely by changing the usual order of two coupled words, as when he speaks of Ulrik Christian as slim and tall, instead of tall and slim—a minute touch that really adds vividness to the picture.

      The habit of looking

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