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This series of SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS is published by The
American-Scandinavian Foundation in the belief that greater familiarity
with the chief literary monuments of the North will help Americans to
a better understanding of Scandinavians, and thus serve to stimulate
their sympathetic coöperation to good ends.
SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS
VOLUME XIII
NIELS LYHNE
by
J. P. JACOBSEN
[Illustration: ESTABLISHED BY NIELS POULSON]
NIELS LYHNE
by
J. P. JACOBSEN
Translated from the Danish
by Hanna Astrup Larsen
New York
The American-Scandinavian Foundation
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919
Copyright, 1919, by The American-Scandinavian Foundation
D. B. Updike · The Merrymount Press · Boston · U. S. A.
_Introduction_
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 Lönborggaard, 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,[A] 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.’”
[A] _Breve fra J. P. Jacobsen. Med et Forord udgivne af Edvard Brandes._
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 any one 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.
H. A. L.
NIELS LYHNE
_Chapter 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
day-dreams.
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 Lönborggaard 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 every-day 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, Lönborggaard, 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 some one from the outside world, some one 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 cow-bells 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 some one 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.
_Chapter II_
In a way, the child brought the parents together again. Over his little
cradle they would meet in a common hope, a common joy, and a common
fear; of him they would think, and of him they would talk, each as
often and as readily as the other, and each was grateful to the other
for the child and for all the happiness and love he brought.
Yet they were still far apart.
Lyhne was quite absorbed in his farming and the affairs of the parish.
Not that he took the position of a leader or even of a reformer, but he
gave scrupulous attention to the existing order of things, looked on
as an interested spectator, and carried out the cautious improvements
recommended, after deliberate—very deliberate—consideration, by his
old head servant or the elders of the parish.
It never occurred to him to make any use of the knowledge he had
acquired in earlier days. He had too little faith in what he called
theories and far too great respect for the time-hallowed, venerable
dogmas of experience which other people called practical. In fact,
there was nothing about him to indicate that he had not lived here and
lived thus all his life—except one little trait. He had a habit of
sitting for half hours at a time, quite motionless, on a stile or a
boundary stone, looking out over the luscious green rye or the golden
top-heavy oats, in a strange, vegetative trance. This was of the old
Lyhne, the young Lyhne.
Bartholine, in her world, was by no means so ready to adapt herself
quickly and with a good grace. No, she first had to voice her sorrow
through the verses of a hundred poets, lamenting, in all the broad
generalities of the period, the thousands of barriers and fetters
that oppress humanity. Sometimes her lament would be clothed in lofty
indignation, flinging its wordy froth against the thrones of emperors
and the dungeons of tyrants; sometimes it would take the form of a
calm, pitying sorrow, looking on as the effulgent light of beauty faded
from a blind and slavish generation cowed and broken by the soulless
bustle of the day; then again it would appear only as a gentle sigh for
the freedom of the bird in its flight and of the cloud drifting lightly
into the distance.
At last she grew tired of lamenting, and the impotence of her grief
goaded her into doubt and bitterness. Like worshippers who beat their
saint and tread him under foot when he refuses to show his power,
she would scoff at the romance she once idolized, and scornfully ask
herself whether she did not expect the bird Roc to appear presently
in the cucumber bed, or Aladdin’s cave to open under the floor of the
milk cellar. She would answer herself in a sort of childish cynicism,
pretending that the world was excessively prosaic, calling the moon
green cheese and the roses potpourri, all with a sense of taking
revenge and at the same time with a half uneasy, half fascinated
feeling that she was committing blasphemy.
These attempts at setting herself free were futile. She sank back into
the dreams of her girlhood, but with the difference that now they were
no longer illumined by hope. Moreover, she had learned that they were
only dreams—distant, illusive dreams, which no longing in the world
could ever draw down to her earth. When she abandoned herself to them
now, it was with a sense of weariness, while an accusing inner voice
told her that she was like the drunkard who knows that his passion
is destroying him, that every debauch means strength taken from his
weakness and added to the power of his desire. But the voice sounded in
vain, for a life soberly lived, without the fair vice of dreams, was no
life at all—life had exactly the value that dreams gave it and no more.
So widely different, then, were Niels Lyhne’s father and mother, the
two friendly powers that struggled unconsciously for mastery over his
young soul from the moment the first gleam of intelligence in him gave
them something to work on. As the child grew older, the struggle became
more intense and was waged with a greater variety of weapons.
The faculty in the boy through which the mother tried to influence him
was his imagination. He had plenty of imagination, but even when he
was a very small boy, it was evident that he felt a great difference
between the fairy world his mother’s words conjured up and the world
that really existed. Often his mother would tell him stories and
describe the woeful plight of the hero, until Niels could not see
any way out of all this trouble, and could not understand how the
misery closing like an impenetrable wall tighter and tighter around
him and the hero could be overcome. Then it happened more than eleven
times that he would suddenly press his cheek against his mother’s
and whisper, with eyes full of tears and lips trembling, “But it
isn’t _really_ true?” And when he had received the comforting answer
he wanted, he would heave a deep sigh of relief and settle down
contentedly to listen to the end.
His mother did not quite like this defection.
When he grew too old for fairy tales, and she tired of inventing them,
she would tell him, with some embroideries of her own, about the heroes
of war and peace, choosing those that lent themselves to pointing a
moral about the power dwelling in a human soul when it wills one thing
only and neither allows itself to be discouraged by the short-sighted
doubts of the moment nor to be enticed into a soft, enervating peace.
All her stories went to this tune, and when history had no more heroes
that suited her, she chose an imaginary hero, one whose deeds and fate
she could shape as she pleased—a hero after her own heart, spirit of
her spirit, ay, flesh of her flesh and blood of hers too.
A few years after Niels was born, she had brought forth a still-born
boy child, and him she chose. All that he might have been and done
she served up before his brother in a confused medley of Promethean
longings, Messianic courage, and Herculean might, with a naïve
travesty, a monstrous distortion, a world of cheap fantasies, having no
more body of reality than had the tiny little skeleton mouldering in
the earth of Lönborg graveyard.
Niels was not deceived about the moral of all these tales. He realized
perfectly that it was contemptible to be like ordinary people, and he
was quite ready to submit to the hard fate that belonged to heroes.
In imagination he willingly suffered the wearisome struggles, the ill
fortune, the martyrdom of being misjudged, and the victories without
peace; but at the same time he felt a wondrous relief in thinking that
it was so far away, that nothing of all this would happen before he was
grown up.
As the dream-figures and dream-tones of night may walk abroad in the
wakeful day like vapory forms, mere shadows of sound, calling on
thought and holding it for a fleeting second, as it listens and wonders
whether any one really called—so the images of that dream-born future
whispered softly through Niels Lyhne’s childhood, reminding him gently
but ceaselessly of the fact that there was a limit set to this happy
time, and that presently one day it would be no more.
This consciousness roused in him a craving to enjoy his childhood to
the full, to suck it up through every sense, not to spill a drop, not a
single one. Therefore his play had an intensity, sometimes lashed into
a passion, under the pressure of an uneasy sense that time was flowing
away from him before he could gather from its treasure-laden waters all
they brought, as one wave broke upon another. He would sometimes throw
himself down on the ground and sob with despair when a holiday hung
heavy on his hands for the lack of one thing or another—playmates,
inventiveness, or fair weather—and he hated to go to bed, because
sleep was empty of events and devoid of sensation.
Yet it was not always so.
It would sometimes happen that he grew weary, and his imagination ran
out of colors. Then he would be quite wretched and feel that he was
too small and insignificant for these ambitious dreams. He seemed to
himself a mean liar, who had brazenly pretended to love and understand
what was great, though, if the truth were told, he cared only for the
petty, loved only the commonplace, and carried all, all low-born wishes
and desires fully alive within him. Sometimes he would even feel that
he had the class-hatred of the rabble against everything exalted, and
that he would joyfully have helped to stone these heroes who were of a
better blood than he and knew that they were.
On such days, he would shun his mother, and, with a sense of following
an ignoble instinct, would seek his father, turning a willing ear and
receptive mind to the latter’s earth-bound thoughts and matter-of-fact
explanations. He felt at home with his father and rejoiced in the
likeness between them, well-nigh forgetting that it was the same father
whom he was wont to look down upon with pity from the pinnacles of his
dream-castle. Of course this was not present in his childish mind with
the clearness and definiteness given it by the spoken word, but it was
all there, though unformed, unborn, in a vague and intangible embryo
form. It was like the curious vegetation at the bottom of the sea when
seen through layers of ice. Break the ice, or draw that which lives
in the dimness out into the full light of speech—what happens is the
same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness,
the shadowy thing that was.
_Chapter III_
The years passed. One Christmas trod upon the heels of another,
leaving the air bright with its festive glow till long after Epiphany.
Whitsun after Whitsun scampered over flower-decked meadows. One summer
holiday after another drew near, celebrated its orgie of fresh air and
sunshine, poured out its fiery wine from brimming goblets, and then
vanished, one day, in a sinking sun; only memory lingered with sunburnt
cheek and wondering eyes and blood that danced.
The years had passed, and the world was no longer the realm of wonder
that it had been. The dim recesses behind the mouldering elder-bushes,
the mysterious attic rooms, the gloomy stone passage under the Klastrup
road—fancied terrors that once thrilled him no longer lurked there.
The hillside that bloomed at the first trill of the lark, hiding the
grass under starry, purple-rimmed daisies and yellow buttercups,
the fantastic wealth of animals and plants in the river, the wild
precipices of the sand-pit, its black rocks and bits of silvery
granite—all these were just flowers, animals, and stones; the shining
fairy gold had turned into withered leaves again.
One game after another grew old and silly, stupid and tiresome like the
pictures in the A B C, and yet they had once been new, inexhaustibly
new. Here they used to roll a barrel-hoop—Niels and the pastor’s
Frithjof—and the hoop was a ship, which was wrecked when it toppled
over, but if you caught it before it fell, then it was casting anchor.
The narrow passage between the outhouses, where you could hardly
squeeze through, was Bab-el-Mandeb or the Portal of Death. On the
stable door “England” was written in chalk, and on the barn door
“France.” The garden gate was Rio Janeiro, but the smithy was Brazil.
Another game was to play Holger the Dane: you _could_ play it among
the tall burs behind the barn; but if you went up in the miller’s
pasture, there were two sink-holes known as the gorges, and there were
the haunts of the veritable Prince Burmand and his wild Saracens, with
reddish gray turbans and yellow plumes in their helmets—burdocks and
Aaron’s rod of the tallest. That was the only _real_ Mauretania. That
rank, succulent growth, that teeming mass of exuberant plant-life,
excited their lust of destruction and intoxicated them with the
voluptuous joy of demolishing. The wooden swords gleamed with the
brightness of steel; the green sap stained the blade with red gore, and
the cut stalks squashing under their feet were Turks’ bodies trampled
under horses’ hoofs with a sound as of bones crunched in flesh.
Sometimes they played down by the fjord: mussel-shells were launched
as ships, and when the vessel got stuck in a clump of seaweed, or
went aground on a sand-bank, it was Columbus in the Sargasso Sea or
the discovery of America. Harbors and mighty embankments were built;
the Nile was dug out in the firm beach sand, and once they made Gurre
Castle out of pebbles—a tiny dead fish in an oyster-shell was the
corpse of Tove, and they were King Valdemar who sat sorrowing by her
side.
But this was all past.
Niels was quite a lad now, twelve years old, nearing thirteen, and he
no longer needed to hack thistles and burdocks in order to feed his
knightly fancies, any more than he had to launch his explorer’s dreams
in a mussel-shell. A book and a corner of the sofa were enough for him
now, and if the book refused to bear him to the coast of his desires,
he would hunt up Frithjof and tell him the tale which the book would
not yield. Arm in arm, they would saunter down the road, one telling,
both listening; but when they wanted to revel to the full and really
give their imagination free play, they would hide in the fragrant
dimness of the hayloft. After a while, these stories, which always
ended just when you had really entered into them, grew into a single
long story that never ended, but lived and died with one generation
after the other; for when the hero had grown old, or you had been
careless enough to let him die, you could always give him a son, who
would inherit everything from the father, and whom, in addition,
you could dower with any other virtues that you happened to value
particularly just at the moment.
Whatever stamped itself on Niels’s mind, what he saw, what he
understood and what he misunderstood, what he admired and what he
knew he ought to admire—all was woven into the story. As running
water is colored by every passing picture, sometimes holding the image
with perfect clearness, sometimes distorting it or throwing it back
in wavering, uncertain lines, then again drowning it completely in
the color and play of its own ripples, so the lad’s story reflected
feelings and thoughts, his own and those of other people, mirrored
human beings and events, life and books, as well as it could. It was a
play life, running side by side with real life. It was a snug retreat,
where you could abandon yourself to dreams of the wildest adventures.
It was a fairy garden that opened at your slightest nod, and received
you in all its glory, shutting out everybody else. Whispering palms
closed overhead; flowers of sunshine and leaves like stars on vines of
coral spread at your feet, and among them a thousand paths led to all
the ages and the climes. If you followed one, it would lead you to one
place, and if you followed another, it would lead you to another place,
to Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, to Vaulunder and Henrik Magnard, to
Niels Klim and Mungo Park, to Peter Simple and Odysseus—and the moment
you wished it, you were home again.
About a month after Niels’s twelfth birthday, two new faces appeared at
Lönborggaard.
One was that of the new tutor; the other was that of Edele Lyhne.
The tutor, Mr. Bigum, was a candidate for orders and was at the
threshold of the forties. He was rather small, but with a stocky
strength like that of a work-horse, broad-chested, high-shouldered, and
slightly stooping. He walked with a heavy, slow, deliberate tread, and
moved his arms in a vague, expressionless way that seemed to require
a great deal of room. His high, wide forehead was flat as a wall,
with two perpendicular lines between the eyebrows; the nose was short
and blunt, the mouth large with thick, fresh lips. His eyes were his
best feature, light in color, mild, and clear. The movements of his
eye-balls showed that he was slightly deaf. Nevertheless, he loved
music and played his violin with passionate devotion; for the notes, he
said, were not heard only with the ears, but with the whole body, eyes,
fingers, and feet; if the ear failed sometimes, the hand would find the
right note without its aid, by a strange, intuitive genius of its own.
Besides, the audible tones were, after all, false, but he who possessed
the divine gift of music carried within him an invisible instrument
compared to which the most wonderful Cremona was like the stringed
calabash of the savage. On this instrument the soul played; its strings
gave forth ideal notes, and upon it the great tone-poets had composed
their immortal works.
The external music, which was borne on the air of reality and heard
with the ears, was nothing but a wretched simulation, a stammering
attempt to say the unutterable. It resembled the music of the soul as
the statue modelled by hands, carved with a chisel, and meted with a
measure resembled the wondrous marble dream of the sculptor which no
eye ever beheld and no lip ever praised.
Music, however, was by no means Mr. Bigum’s chief interest. He was
first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers
who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their
systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across
the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field
was within the snail-shell! And these laws—laws of thought, laws of
nature! Why, the discovery of a law meant nothing but the fixing of
your own limitations: I can see so far and no farther—as if there were
not another horizon beyond the first, and another and yet another,
horizon beyond horizon, law beyond law, in an unending vista! No, he
was not that kind of a philosopher. He did not think he was vain, or
that he overvalued himself, but he could not close his eyes to the
fact that his intellect had a wider span than that of other mortals.
When he meditated upon the works of the great thinkers, it seemed to
him that he strode forward through a region peopled by slumbering
thought-giants, who awoke, bathed in the light of his spirit, to
consciousness of their own strength. And so it was always; every
thought, mood, or sentiment of another person which was vouchsafed
the privilege of awakening within him rose up with his sign on its
forehead, ennobled, purified, with wings strengthened, endowed with a
power and a might that its creator had never dreamed of.
How often had he gazed with an almost humble amazement on the
marvellous wealth of his soul and the divine assurance of his spirit!
For it would often happen that different days would find him judging
the world and the things of the world from entirely divergent points
of view, looking at them through hypotheses that were as far apart as
night and morning; yet these points of view and hypotheses, which he
chose to make his own, never even for one second made him theirs, any
more than the god who has taken on the semblance of a bull or a swan
becomes a bull or a swan and ceases to be a god.
And no one suspected what dwelt within him—all passed him by unseeing.
But he rejoiced in their blindness and felt his contempt for humanity
growing. A day would come when the light of his eye would go out, and
the magnificent structure of his mind would crumble to its foundations
and become as that which had never been, but no work from his hand,
no, not a line, would he leave to tell the tale of what had been lost
in him. His genius should not be crowned with thorns by the world’s
misjudgment, neither should it wear the defiling purple cloak of the
world’s admiration. He exulted at the thought that generation after
generation would be born and die, and the greatest men of all ages
would spend years of their life in the attempt to gain what he could
have given them if he had chosen to open his hand.
The fact that he lived in such a humble fashion gave him a curious
pleasure, simply because there was such a magnificent extravagance in
using his mind to teach children, such a wild incongruity in paying
for his time with mere daily bread, and such a colossal absurdity
in allowing him to earn this bread upon the recommendation of poor,
ordinary mortals, who had vouched for him that he knew enough to take
upon himself the miserable task of a tutor. And they had given him
_non_ in his examination for a degree!
Oh, there was rapture in feeling the brutal stupidity of an existence
that cast him aside as poor chaff and valued as golden grain the empty
husks, while he knew in his own mind that his lightest thought was
worth a world!
Yet there were other times when the solitude of his greatness weighed
upon him and depressed him.
Ah, how often, when he had communed with himself in sacred silence,
hour after hour, and then returned again to consciousness of the
audible, visible life round about him, had he not felt himself a
stranger to its paltriness and corruptibility. Then he had often been
like the monk who listened in the monastery woods to a single trill
of the paradise bird and, when he came back, found that a century
had died. Ah, if the monk was lonely with the generation that lived
among the groves he knew, how much more lonely was the man whose
contemporaries had not yet been born.
In such desolate moments he would sometimes be seized with a cowardly
longing to sink down to the level of the common herd, to share their
low-born happiness, to become a native of their great earth and a
citizen of their little heaven. But soon he would be himself again.
The other newcomer was Edele Lyhne, Lyhne’s twenty-six-year-old sister.
She had lived many years in Copenhagen, first with her mother, who had
moved to the city when she became a widow, and, after her mother’s
death, in the home of a wealthy uncle, Councillor of State Neergaard.
The Neergaards entertained on a large scale and went out a great deal,
so Edele lived in a whirl of balls and festivities.
She was admired wherever she went, and envy, the faithful shadow of
admiration, also followed her. She was talked about as much as one can
be without having done anything scandalous, and whenever men discussed
the three reigning beauties of the town there were always many voices
in favor of striking out one name and substituting that of Edele Lyhne,
but they could never agree on which of two others should yield to
her—as for the third, it was out of the question.
Yet very young men did not admire her. They were abashed in her
presence, and felt twice as stupid as usual when she listened to them
with her look of mild toleration—a maliciously emphasized toleration
which crushed them with a sense that she had heard it all before and
knew it by heart. They made efforts to shine in her eyes and their own
by assuming _blasés_ airs, by inventing wild paradoxes, or, when their
desperation reached a climax, by making bold declarations; but all
these attempts, jostling and crowding one upon the other in the abrupt
transitions of youth, were met with the faint shadow of a smile, a
deadly smile of boredom, which made the victim redden and feel that he
was the one hundred and eleventh fly in the same merciless spider’s web.
Moreover, her beauty had neither the softness nor the fire to ensnare
young hearts. On older hearts and cooler heads she exercised a peculiar
fascination.
She was tall. Her thick, heavy hair was blonde with the faint reddish
sheen of ripening wheat, but fairer and curling where it grew in two
points low on the nape of her neck. Under the high, clean-cut forehead,
her eyebrows were pale and indefinite. The light gray eyes were large
and clear, neither accented by the brows nor borrowing fitful shadows
from the thin, delicate lids. There was something indeterminate and
indeterminable in their expression. They always met you with a full
and open gaze, without any of the changeful play of sidelong glances
or lightning flashes, but almost unnaturally wakeful, invincible,
inscrutable. The vivacity was all in the lower part of the face, the
nostrils, the mouth, and the chin. The eyes merely looked on. The mouth
was particularly expressive. The lips met in a lovely bow with deep,
gracious curves and flexible lines, but their beauty was a little
marred by a hardness of the lower lip, which sometimes melted away in a
smile, and then again stiffened into something akin to brutality.
The bold sweep of the back and the luxuriant fullness of the bosom,
contrasted with the classic severity of the shoulders and arms, gave
her an audacity, an exotic fascination, which was enhanced by the
gleaming whiteness of her skin and the morbid redness of her lips. The
effect was provocative and disquieting.
Her tall, slender figure had a subtle distinction, which she was clever
enough to underscore, especially in her ball dresses, with sure and
conscious art. In fact, her artistic sense applied to her own person
would sometimes speak so loudly from her costume that it barely escaped
a hint of bad taste even when most exquisitely tasteful. To many this
seemed an added charm.