MARIE GKUBBE A LADY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY BY J. P. JACOBSEN Jt
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN NEW YORK THE
AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS 1917 I 9I 7 ty Ih American-Scandinavian Foundation
25. 2. Updike The JWerrymount Press Boston U. INTRODUCTION T
ANGUAGE is like an instrument that requires to be 1 v tuned
occasionally. A few times in the course of a century the literary
language of a country needs 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 can use the language of the
school that went before them. With these words Georg Brandes begins
his discussion 1 of the influence of J. P. Jacobsen, As Brandes
himself was the critic who found new paths, Jacobsen was the
creative artist who moulded his native language into a medium fit
for modern ideas. At the time when Denmark and Norway had come to a
parting of ways intellectually, and the great Norwegians were
forming their own rugged style, 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 character istic. To
a generation that had ceased to accept anything because it was
accepted before, he brought the new power of scientific observation
in the domain of the mind and spirit. In order to understand him it
is necessary to follow the two currents, the one poetic, the other
scientific, that ran through his life. Jens Peter Jacobsen was born
in Jutland, in thelittle town of Thisted, on April 7, 1847, an was
son a merchant in moderate circumstances. From his mother he
inherited a desire to write poetry, which asserted itself while he
was yet a boy. His other chief interest was botany, 1 Det moderne
Genncmbruds vi INTRODUCTION then a new feature of the school
curriculum. He had a fer vent 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 know whether to choose science or poetry for
his life-work, since he felt equally drawn to both. He added If I
could bring into the realm of poetry the eter nal laws of nature,
its glories, its riddles, its miracles, then I feel that my work
would be more than ordinary. He was one of the first in Scandinavia
to realize the im portance of Darwin, and translated The Origin of
Species and The Descent of Man, besides writing magazine articles
elucidating the principles of evolution. Meanwhile he car ried on
his botanical research faithfully and, in 1872, won a gold medal in
the University at Copenhagen for a thesis on the Danish
desmidiactae, a microscopic plant growing in the marshes. In the
same year, he made his literary debut with a short story, Mogens,
which compelled attention by the daring originality of its style.
From that time on, he seems to have had no doubt that his life-work
was litera ture, though he became primarily a master of prose and
not, as he had dreamed in his boyhood, a writer of verse. In the
spring of 1873, e wrote fr m Copenhagen to Edvard Brandes 1 Just
think, I get up every morning at eleven and go to the Royal
Library, where I read old docu mentsand letters and lies and
descriptions of murder, adul tery, corn 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
Grubbe, Interiors from the Seventeenth Century. J. P. Jacobsen. Med
Forord udgivne af Edvard Brandes. INTRODUCTION vii You remember,
she is the one who is mentioned in Hoi bergs Epistles and in The
Goose Girl by Andersen, and who was first married to U. F...
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