Niels Lyhne

Foreword

To the student of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s life and works, Niels Lyhne has a value apart from its greatness as literature from the fact that it is the book in which the author recorded his own spiritual struggles and embodied the faith on which he came, finally, to rest his soul in death as in life. It tells of his early dreams and ideals, his efforts to know and to achieve, his revolt against the dream-swathed dogmas in which people take refuge from harsh reality, and his brave acceptance of what he conceived to be the truth, however dreary and bitter.

The person of the hero is marked for a self-portrait by the description, “Niels Lyhne of Lønborggård, who was twenty-three years old, walked with a slight stoop, had beautiful hands and small ears, and was a little timid,”—though friends of Jacobsen’s youth declare that “a little timid” was far from describing the excessive shyness from which he suffered. He himself would sometimes joke about his “North Cimbrian heaviness,” for like Niels Lyhne he was a native of Jutland, where the people are more sluggish than the sprightly islanders. Like him, again, he had a mother who kept alive her romantic spirit in rather humdrum, prosaic surroundings, and who instilled into her son’s mind from childhood the idea that he was to be a poet. It is Jacobsen’s own youthful ideal speaking through Niels Lyhne’s mouth when he says: “Mother—I am a poet—really—through my whole soul. Don’t imagine it’s childish dreams or dreams fed by vanity. … I shall be one of those who fight for the greatest, and I promise you that I shall not fail, that I shall always be faithful to you and to my gift. Nothing but the best shall be good enough. No compromise, mother! When I weigh what I’ve done and feel that it isn’t sterling, or when I hear that it’s got a crack or a flaw—into the melting-pot it goes! Every single work must be my best!”

Niels Lyhne never wrote the poems he had fashioned in his mind. On the intellectual side of his nature he remained always a dreamer, floundering around in a slough of doubt and self-analysis. Edvard Brandes, in his introduction to J. P. Jacobsen’s letters,1 calls attention to “the place dreams occupy in this book, which begins with the childish fancies of the three boys, in which the mother dreams with her son of the future and of distant lands, while Edele dreams her love, and Bigum dreams his genius and his passion—he who is put into the novel as a tragic caricature of Niels Lyhne himself, as he goes about dreaming, in the midst of people and yet far away from them. In his youth, Niels Lyhne never attained to anything but dreams of great deeds and of love. … Read Niels Lyhne, and on almost every page you will find the word dream! Read about Niels Lyhne’s mother who ‘dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions, and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting—what is so easily forgotten—that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul,’ and who goes on dreaming because ‘a life soberly lived, without the fair vice of dreams, was no life at all.’ ”

In his strictures on dreams and dreamers Jacobsen scourged his own sluggish temperament, and the story of Niels Lyhne’s futile efforts is in part the record of the author’s own youth. From the time he was ten years old, he tells us, his one sure dogma was that he was to be a poet, and there must have been years of his boyhood and early manhood when he was haunted by visions of what he wanted to write without being able to frame it in a form satisfactory to himself. He was almost twenty-five years old when his first story, “Mogens,” appeared, in 1872, and after that his other short stories followed only at intervals of years. It is true, he was by no means idle. He won distinction as a botanist; he introduced Darwin to the Scandinavian reading public by translations and magazine articles, and he familiarized himself with the literature not only of Denmark, but of England, France, Germany, and Italy. He had a theory that anyone aspiring to produce creative literature ought to know what had been written by great minds before him, and we recognize himself in the picture of Niels Lyhne restlessly trying to absorb all the knowledge and wisdom of the ages while he felt like a child trying to dip out the ocean in his hollow hand.

Unlike Niels Lyhne, who never formed in his own image the clay he had carted together for his Adam, Jacobsen shaped his material in the image of the vision that had taken possession of him at the inception of his idea. Though execution always cost him an agonizing effort, he did not shirk it, and though he worked four years on each of his two novels, Marie Grubbe and Niels Lyhne, he never lost sight of his goal. The truth is that, however much he might abuse his own slothfulness—which was due largely to failing health—Jacobsen had a slow, deep strength by virtue of which he managed to write his immortal works.

Niels Lyhne, too, had a kind of strength and was essentially sound though a dreamer. So we see him, when every relation of life was dissolved, when friend and mistress had thrown him back upon himself, gathering himself together in a resolve to find a place in his old home and make it a fixed point in his hitherto aimless existence. There, at last, he tasted life in its fullness, and by an effort of the finest, purest will made his short married life an experience of such beauty that the description, so moving in its simplicity, is one of the most exquisite things Jacobsen ever wrote. He, too, mastered life, though not in the sense of which he had dreamed. The solution of his hero’s problem is perhaps a compromise on Jacobsen’s part; he did not want to drop his other self as a mere failure, but shrank from picturing him as the fêted and admired author he himself became in the latter years of his life.

In this connection, it may not be out of place to state briefly that Niels Lyhne’s love affairs are drawn entirely from the imagination. On this point we have the positive evidence of Edvard Brandes and the negative testimony of Jacobsen’s own letters. Even if he had experienced the great love for which he longed at the same time as he shrank from it, poverty and ill health would have prevented his marriage. His fine rectitude and horror of doing anything that might hurt another human being kept him from questionable adventures.

The revolt of his hero from the accepted religion of his day is in accord with Jacobsen’s own development. The word “atheism,” which falls on our ears with a dead sound, meant to him a revolt against fallacious dreams. He believed that the evangelical religion as taught in Denmark at the time had become a soft mantle in which people wrapped themselves against the bracing winds of truth. As a scientist he refused to accept the facile theory that a Providence outside of man would somehow juggle away the consequences of wrongdoing. The doctrine that immunity could be bought by repentance seemed to him a cheap attempt to escape the bitter and wholesome fruit of experience. To our modern consciousness, there is no reason why his sense of the sacredness of law should have driven him away from all religion—it might rather have driven him to a truer conception of Him who said of Himself that He came to fulfil the law—but in this respect he was the child of his day.

For himself, Jacobsen resolved that illness, suffering, and death should not make him accept in weakness the religion that his sober judgement in the fullness of his strength had rejected. Niels Lyhne’s death “in armor” foreshadowed his own, and was perhaps written to steel himself for the ordeal he knew to be approaching. His refusal to lean on any spiritual power outside of his own soul lends an added sadness to the stoicism of his death, which took place in his home in Thisted, in 1885.

In the above paragraphs I have attempted only to sketch the relation of Niels Lyhne to Jacobsen’s own life. For a brief estimate of his position in Northern literature I will refer the reader to my introduction to Marie Grubbe, Scandinavian Classics, VII.

The translation of an author who, as Edvard Brandes says, “worshipped the word,” and who believed that there never was more than one word or one phrase in all the world that could exactly express what he meant in any given instance, is naturally fraught with more than usual difficulty. I have striven, above all, to be faithful, and very often, where my first impulse has been to simplify a paragraph, my second, and I hope better, thought has been to leave it as the master chose to write it, with only such slight changes as the new medium absolutely required. I wish to express my sincere thanks to Professor W. H. Schofield, chairman of the Publication Committee, who has been so good as to read the proof and has helped to solve many problems of language.

I

She had the black, luminous eyes of the Blid family with delicate, straight eyebrows; she had their boldly shaped nose, their strong chin, and full lips. The curious line of mingled pain and sensuousness about the corners of her mouth was likewise an inheritance from them, and so were the restless movements of her head; but her cheek was pale; her hair was soft as silk, and was wound smoothly around her head.

Not so the Blids; their coloring was of roses and bronze. Their hair was rough and curly, heavy as a mane, and their full, deep, resonant voices bore out the tales told of their forefathers, whose noisy hunting-parties, solemn morning prayers, and thousand and one amorous adventures were matters of family tradition.

Her voice was languid and colorless. I am describing her as she was at seventeen. A few years later, after she had been married, her voice gained fullness, her cheek took on a fresher tint, and her eye lost some of its lustre, but seemed even larger and more intensely black.

At seventeen she did not at all resemble her brothers and sisters; nor was there any great intimacy between herself and her parents. The Blid family were practical folk who accepted things as they were; they did their work, slept their sleep, and never thought of demanding any diversions beyond the harvest home and three or four Christmas parties. They never passed through any religious experiences, but they would no more have dreamed of not rendering unto God what was God’s than they would have neglected to pay their taxes. Therefore they said their evening prayers, went to church at Easter and Whitsun, sang their hymns on Christmas Eve, and partook of the Lord’s Supper twice a year. They had no particular thirst for knowledge. As for their love of beauty, they were by no means insensible to the charm of little sentimental ditties, and when summer came with thick, luscious grass in the meadows and grain sprouting in broad fields, they would sometimes say to one another that this was a fine time for travelling about the country, but their natures had nothing of the poetic; beauty never stirred any raptures in them, and they were never visited by vague longings or daydreams.

Bartholine was not of their kind. She had no interest in the affairs of the fields and the stables, no taste for the dairy and the kitchen—none whatever.

She loved poetry.

She lived on poems, dreamed poems, and put her faith in them above everything else in the world. Parents, sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends—none of them ever said a word that was worth listening to. Their thoughts never rose above their land and their business; their eyes never sought anything beyond the conditions and affairs that were right before them.

But the poems! They teemed with new ideas and profound truths about life in the great outside world, where grief was black, and joy was red; they glowed with images, foamed and sparkled with rhythm and rhyme. They were all about young girls, and the girls were noble and beautiful—how noble and beautiful they never knew themselves. Their hearts and their love meant more than the wealth of all the earth; men bore them up in their hands, lifted them high in the sunshine of joy, honored and worshipped them, and were delighted to share with them their thoughts and plans, their triumphs and renown. They would even say that these same fortunate girls had inspired all the plans and achieved all the triumphs.

Why might not she herself be such a girl? They were thus and so—and they never knew it themselves. How was she to know what she really was? And the poets all said very plainly that this was life, and that it was not life to sit and sew, work about the house, and make stupid calls.

When all this was sifted down, it meant little beyond a slightly morbid desire to realize herself, a longing to find herself, which she had in common with many other young girls with talents a little above the ordinary. It was only a pity that there was not in her circle a single individual of sufficient distinction to give her the measure of her own powers. There was not even a kindred nature. So she came to look upon herself as something wonderful, unique, a sort of exotic plant that had grown in these ungentle climes and had barely strength enough to unfold its leaves; though in more genial warmth, under a more powerful sun, it might have shot up, straight and tall, with a gloriously rich and brilliant bloom. Such was the image of her real self that she carried in her mind. She dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting—what is so easily forgotten—that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul.

One fine day a suitor came to her.

Young Lyhne of Lønborggård was the man, and he was the last male scion of a family whose members had for three generations been among the most distinguished people in the county. As burgomasters, revenue-collectors, or royal commissioners, often rewarded with the title of councillor of justice, the Lyhnes in their maturer years had served king and country with diligence and honor. In their younger days they had travelled in France and Germany, and these trips, carefully planned and carried out with great thoroughness, had enriched their receptive minds with all the scenes of beauty and the knowledge of life that foreign lands had to offer. Nor were these years of travel pushed into the background, after their return, as mere reminiscences, like the memory of a feast after the last candle has burned down and the last note of music has died away. No, life in their homes was built on these years; the tastes awakened in this manner were not allowed to languish, but were nourished and developed by every means at their command. Rare copper plates, costly bronzes, German poetry, French juridical works, and French philosophy were everyday matters and common topics in the Lyhne households.

Their bearing had an old-fashioned ease, a courtly graciousness, which contrasted oddly with the heavy majesty and awkward pomposity of the other county families. Their speech was well rounded, delicately precise, a little marred, perhaps, by rhetorical affectation, yet it somehow went well with those large, broad figures with their domelike foreheads, their bushy hair growing far back on their temples, their calm, smiling eyes, and slightly aquiline noses. The lower part of the face was too heavy, however, the mouth too wide, and the lips much too full.

Young Lyhne showed all these physical traits, but more faintly, and, in the same manner, the family intelligence seemed to have grown weary in him. None of the mental problems or finer artistic enjoyments that he encountered stirred him to any zeal or desire whatsoever. He had simply striven with them in a painstaking effort which was never brightened by joy in feeling his own powers unfold or pride in finding them adequate. Mere satisfaction in a task accomplished was the only reward that came to him.

His estate, Lønborggård, had been left him by an uncle who had recently died, and he had returned from the traditional trip abroad in order to take over the management. As the Blid family were the nearest neighbors of his own rank, and his uncle had been intimate with them, he called, met Bartholine, and fell in love with her.

That she should fall in love with him was almost a foregone conclusion.

Here at last was someone from the outside world, someone who had lived in great, distant cities, where forests of spires were etched on a sunlit sky, where the air was vibrant with the chimes of bells, the pealing of organs, and the twanging of mandolins, while festal processions, resplendent with gold and colors, wound their way through broad streets; where marble mansions shone, where noble families flaunted bright escutcheons hung two by two over wide portals, while fans flashed, and veils fluttered over the sculptured vines of curving balconies. Here was one who had sojourned where victorious armies had tramped the roads, where tremendous battles had invested the names of villages and fields with immortal fame, where smoke rising from gipsy fires trailed over the leafy masses of the forest, where red ruins looked down from vine-wreathed hills into the smiling valley, while water surged over the mill wheel, and cowbells tinkled as the herds came home over wide-arched bridges.

All these things he told about, not as the poems did, but in a matter-of-fact way, as familiarly as the people at home talked about the villages in their own county or the next parish. He talked of painters and poets, too, and sometimes he would laud to the skies a name that she had never even heard. He showed her their pictures and read their poems to her in the garden or on the hill where they could look out over the bright waters of the fjord and the brown, billowing heath. Love made him poetic; the view took on beauty, the clouds seemed like those drifting through the poems, and the trees were clothed in the leaves rustling so mournfully in the ballads.

Bartholine was happy; for her love enabled her to dissolve the twenty-four hours into a string of romantic episodes. It was romance when she went down the road to meet him; their meeting was romance, and so was their parting. It was romance when she stood on the hilltop in the light of the setting sun and waved him one last farewell before going up to her quiet little chamber, wistfully happy, to give herself up to thoughts of him; and when she included his name in her evening prayer, that was romance, too.

She no longer felt the old vague desires and longings. The new life with its shifting moods gave her all she craved, and moreover her thoughts and ideas had been clarified through having someone to whom she could speak freely without fear of being misunderstood.

She was changed in another way, too. Happiness had made her more amiable toward her parents and sisters and brothers. She discovered that, after all, they had more intelligence than she had supposed and more feeling.

And so they were married.

The first year passed very much as their courtship; but when their wedded life had lost its newness, Lyhne could no longer conceal from himself that he wearied of always seeking new expressions for his love. He was tired of donning the plumage of romance and eternally spreading his wings to fly through all the heavens of sentiment and all the abysses of thought. He longed to settle peacefully on his own quiet perch and drowse, with his tired head under the soft, feathery shelter of a wing. He had never conceived of love as an ever-wakeful, restless flame, casting its strong, flickering light into every nook and corner of existence, making everything seem fantastically large and strange. Love to him was more like the quiet glow of embers on their bed of ashes, spreading a gentle warmth, while the faint dusk wraps all distant things in forgetfulness and makes the near seem nearer and more intimate.

He was tired, worn out. He could not stand all this romance. He longed for the firm support of the commonplace under his feet, as a fish, suffocating in hot air, languishes for the clear, fresh coolness of the waves. It must end sometime, when it had run its course. Bartholine was no longer inexperienced either in life or books. She knew them as well as he. He had given her all he had—and now he was expected to go on giving. It was impossible; he had nothing more. There was only one comfort: Bartholine was with child.

Bartholine had long realized with sorrow that her conception of Lyhne was changing little by little, and that he no longer stood on the dizzy pinnacle to which she had raised him in the days of their courtship. While she did not yet doubt that he was at bottom what she called a poetic nature, she had begun to feel a little uneasy; for the cloven hoof of prose had shown itself once and again. This only made her pursue romance the more ardently, and she tried to bring back the old state of things by lavishing on him a still greater wealth of sentiment and a still greater rapture, but she met so little response that she almost felt as if she were stilted and unnatural. For awhile she tried to drag Lyhne with her, in spite of his resistance; she refused to accept what she suspected; but when, at last, the failure of her efforts made her begin to doubt whether her own mind and heart really possessed the treasures she had imagined, then she suddenly left him alone, became cool, silent, and reserved, and often went off by herself to grieve over her lost illusions. For she saw it all now, and was bitterly disappointed to find that Lyhne, in his inmost self, was no whit different from the people she used to live among. She had merely been deceived by the very ordinary fact that his love, for a brief moment, had invested him with a fleeting glamor of soulfulness and exaltation—a very common occurrence with persons of a lower nature.

Lyhne was grieved and anxious, too, over the change in their relationship, and he tried to mend matters by unlucky attempts at the old romantic flights, but it all availed nothing except to show Bartholine yet more clearly how great had been her mistake.

Such was the state of things between man and wife when Bartholine brought forth her first child. It was a boy, and they called him Niels.