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“Language is like an instrument that requires to be tuned occasionally. A few times in the course of a century the literary language of a country needs to be tuned afresh; for as no generation can be satisfied to think the thoughts of the preceding one, so no group of men in the world of letters can use the language of the school that went before them.” With these words Georg Brandes begins his discussion1 of the influence of J. P. Jacobsen. As Brandes himself was the critic who found new paths, Jacobsen was the creative artist who moulded his native language into a medium fit for modern ideas. At the time when Denmark and Norway had come to a parting of ways intellectually, and the great Norwegians were forming their own rugged style, Jacobsen gave the Danes a language suited to their needs, subtle, pliant, and finely modulated. He found new methods of approach to truth and even a new manner of seeing nature and humanity. In an age that had wearied of generalities, he emphasized the unique and the characteristic. To a generation that had ceased to accept anything because it was accepted before, he brought the new power of scientific observation in the domain of the mind and spirit. In order to understand him it is necessary to follow the two currents, the one poetic, the other scientific, that ran through his life.

Jens Peter Jacobsen was born in Jutland, in the little town of Thisted, on April 7, 1847, and was the son of a merchant in moderate circumstances. From his mother he inherited a desire to write poetry, which asserted itself while he was yet a boy. His other chief interest was botany, then a new feature of the school curriculum. He had a fervent love of all plant-life and enjoyed keenly the fairy-tales of Hans Christian Andersen, in which flowers are endowed with personality. At twenty, Jacobsen wrote in his diary that he did not know whether to choose science or poetry for his life-work, since he felt equally drawn to both. He added: “If I could bring into the realm of poetry the eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles, then I feel that my work would be more than ordinary.”

He was one of the first in Scandinavia to realize the importance of Darwin, and translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, besides writing magazine articles elucidating the principles of evolution. Meanwhile he carried on his botanical research faithfully and, in 1872, won a gold medal in the University at Copenhagen for a thesis on the Danish desmidiaciae, a microscopic plant growing in the marshes. In the same year, he made his literary debut with a short story, Mogens, which compelled attention by the daring originality of its style. From that time on, he seems to have had no doubt that his life-work was literature, though he became primarily a master of prose and not, as he had dreamed in his boyhood, a writer of verse.

In the spring of 1873, he wrote from Copenhagen to Edvard Brandes:2 “Just think, I get up every morning at eleven and go to the Royal Library, where I read old documents and letters and lies and descriptions of murder, adultery, corn rates, whoremongery, market prices, gardening, the siege of Copenhagen, divorce proceedings, christenings, estate registers, genealogies, and funeral sermons. All this is to become a wonderful novel to be called ‘Mistress Marie Grubbe, Interiors from the Seventeenth Century.’ You remember, she is the one who is mentioned in Holberg’s Epistles and in The Goose Girl by Andersen, and who was first married to U. F. Gyldenlöve and afterwards to a ferryman.”

When the first two chapters were finished, an advance honorarium from his publisher enabled him to follow his longing and make a trip to the south of Europe, but his stay there was cut short by an attack of the insidious lung disease that was, eventually, to end his life. At Florence, he had a hemorrhage and was obliged to return home to Thisted, where the family physician declared his illness to be mortal. He recovered partially and lived to write his great works, but for eleven years his life was a constant struggle with physical disability.

Marie Grubbe cost him nearly four years of labor, during which time he published nothing except a short story, Et Skud i Taagen (“A Shot in the Mist”), and a few poems. The first two chapters of his novel appeared under the title Marie Grubbes Barndom (“The Childhood of Marie Grubbe”), and were printed in October, 1873, in a monthly magazine, Det nittende Aarhundrede, edited by Edvard and Georg Brandes. The completed book was published in December, 1876, and had sufficient popular success to warrant a second edition in February. Conservative critics, however, needed time to adjust themselves to so startling a novelty, and one reviewer drew from Georg Brandes the retort that certain people ought to wear blue goggles when looking at 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 it3 “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.

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 points4 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.”

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 for characteristic features, which he had acquired in his botanical studies, became an apt tool of his creative faculty. Sometimes his descriptions seem overloaded with details, as when he uses two pages to tell about the play of the firelight in the little parlor at Aggershus, where Marie Grubbe sits singing to the tones of her lute. Yet the images never blur nor overlap one another. Every word deepens the central idea: the sport of the storm with the fire and the consequent struggle between light and darkness in the room. Not only that, but the entire description ministers subtly to the allurement of the woman at the hearth. Almost any writer except J. P. Jacobsen would have told us how the light played on Marie Grubbe’s hair and face, but he prefers to let us feel her personality through her environment. This is true also of his outdoor pictures, where he uses his flower-lore to good advantage, as in the first chapter of Marie Grubbe, where we find the lonely, wayward child playing in the old luxuriant, neglected garden full of a tangle of quaint old-fashioned flowers. But when she returns to the home of her childhood, we hear no more of the famous Tjele garden except as a place to raise vegetables in; her later history is sketched on a background of heathery hill, permeated with a strong smell of sun-scorched earth, which somehow suggests the harsh, physical realities of life in the class she has entered.

Another means in his favorite method of indirect approach to a personality is through woman’s dress. Marie Grubbe’s attire—from the lavender homespun and billowing linen ruffles of the young maiden to the more sophisticated daintiness of Ulrik Frederik’s bride in madder red robe and clocked stockings, the slovenly garb of Palle Dyre’s wife, and finally the neat simple gown marred by a tawdry brocaded cap which she dons when she falls in love with Sören—is a complete index to her moral fall and rise. Sofie Urne’s shabby velvet, her trailing plumes and red-nosed shoes, are equally characteristic of her tarnished attractions, and when her lover bends rapturously over the slim, white hand which is “not quite clean” we know exactly the nature of the charm she exercises, though Jacobsen never comments on her character, as an author of the older school would have done. Nor does he ask our sympathy for Marie Grubbe, but he lets us feel all the promise and the tragedy of her life in the description of her eyes as a young girl—a paragraph of marvellous poignant beauty.

Jacobsen once jestingly compared himself to the sloth (det berömte Dovendyr Ai-ai) which needed two years to climb to the top of a tree. It was necessary for him to withdraw absolutely from the world and to retire, as it were, within the character he wished to portray before he could set pen to paper. It cannot be denied that the laboriousness of the process is sometimes perceptible in his finished work. His style became too gorgeous in color, too heavy with fragrance. Yet there were signs that Jacobsen’s genius was freeing itself from the faults of over-richness. The very last prose that came from his hand, Fru Fönss, has a clarified simplicity that has induced critics to place it at the very head of his production. Indeed, it is difficult to say to what heights of artistic accomplishment he might have risen had his life been spared beyond the brief span of thirty-eight years. As it is, the books he left us are still, of their kind, unsurpassed in the North.

The translation of Marie Grubbe (a book which Brandes has called one of the greatest tours de force in Danish literature) was a task to be approached with diffidence. The author does not reconstruct exactly, in his dialogue, the language of the period; nor have I attempted it. Even had I been able to do so, the racy English of the Restoration would have been an alien medium for the flourishes and pomposities of Jacobsen’s Danish. On the other hand, it would clearly have been unfair to the author to turn his work into ordinary modern English and so destroy that stiff, rich fabric of curious, archaic words and phrases which he had been at such pains to weave. There seemed only one course open: to follow the original, imitating as far as possible its color and texture, even though the resultant language may not be of any particular time or place. The translation has been a task, but also a pleasure. To live intimately for months with Jacobsen’s style is to find beauty within beauty and truth within truth like “rose upon rose in flowering splendor.”

H. A. L.

New York, July 1, 1917.

1. Det moderne Gennembruds Mænd.

2. Breve fra J. P. Jacobsen. Med Forord udgivne af Edvard Brandes.

3. Illustreret Dansk Litteraturhistorie.

4. Litteraturbilleder, II.