Niels Lyhne

Niels Lyhne

By J. P. Jacobsen.

Translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Foreword
4. Niels Lyhne
   1. I
   2. II
   3. III
   4. IV
   5. V
   6. VI
   7. VII
   8. VIII
   9. IX
   10. X
   11. XI
   12. XII
   13. XIII
   14. XIV
5. Endnotes
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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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