Marie Grubbe, a Lady of the Seventeenth Century

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 points[4] 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."

[4] Litteraturbilleder, II.

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.