Marie Grubbe

ds 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 c

e, 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 gener

erne Gennem

t was botany, - vi - 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

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 c

rn 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 Gr

cobsen. Med Forord udg

t 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

he 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 sec

ways 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

et Dansk Litt

urns 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

he 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

hamed 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 value

them Pesten i Bergamo ("The Plague at Bergamo") and Fru F?nss. 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,

th. Finally, when his illness could no longer be fought off, he went home to Thisted to be cared for

ll 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 poe

raturbill

mbs 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 changefu

h 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

the consequent struggle between light and - xiii - 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

at simple gown marred by a tawdry brocaded cap which she dons when she falls in love with S?ren-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" w

hat 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 F?nss, has a clarified simpl

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 - xv - course open: to f

A

y 1, 1917.