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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Niels Lyhne, a seminal work by Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen, delves into the complexities of existential longing and the quest for artistic authenticity in a world filled with superficiality. Written in a richly lyrical style, the novel interweaves philosophical musings with poignant character development, offering a profound exploration of the human condition. Set against the backdrop of 19th-century Denmark, Jacobsen's narrative deftly captures the tumultuous emotions of its protagonist, Niels Lyhne, as he grapples with his disillusionment in both love and life, ultimately contemplating the role of the artist in society. Jens Peter Jacobsen, a prominent figure in the Danish literary renaissance, was influenced by the naturalist movement and a deep interest in philosophy and aesthetics. His personal struggles with health and identity deeply inform his work, and Niels Lyhne serves as a manifestation of his own existential inquiries. The book reflects Jacobsen's interactions with various philosophical ideas of his time, evoking the tensions between idealism and realism that permeated European literature. Highly recommended for readers interested in existential literature, Niels Lyhne offers a profound reflection on the burdens and beauties of artistic aspiration. Jacobsen's innovative narrative style and deep thematic exploration make this novel a timeless piece that resonates with those seeking deeper understanding of the self and the world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Niels Lyhne
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young man’s attempt to build a life without religious faith confronts the compromises demanded by adulthood. Niels Lyhne is a Danish novel by Jens Peter Jacobsen, first published in 1880, often grouped with the Modern Breakthrough that brought psychological realism and social candor to Scandinavian fiction. Set in nineteenth-century Denmark, it traces interior landscapes as carefully as external ones, depicting salons, households, and countryside with restrained intensity. Jacobsen’s prose blends naturalist observation with lyrical meditation, making a work that feels both intimate and unsparing. Readers encounter a narrative concerned less with event than with consciousness, yet its quiet pages carry a mounting pressure as convictions meet the ordinary exigencies of living.
At its core, the book is a coming-of-age novel shaped by psychological realism, attentive to how ideas and desires sediment into character. The third-person narration keeps close to Niels’s perceptions while maintaining a lucid distance, allowing irony and tenderness to coexist. The style is measured and musical, with long-breathed sentences that bend toward reflection rather than spectacle. Descriptions of rooms, weather, and physical gesture are not decorative; they register the weight of habit and the tremor of longing. The mood alternates between clarity and reverie, inviting slow reading and rewarding attention to nuance, texture, and recurring motifs of nature and art.
The premise is simple: we follow Niels from youth into adulthood as he tests an atheistic worldview and an artistic vocation against the routines and obligations of ordinary life. Family expectations, friendships, and early infatuations shape his sense of self, even as he resists being defined by them. He seeks a code of integrity that does not depend on transcendence, and he wonders what a truthful, generous life might look like under that constraint. The novel does not hurry him toward resolution; instead, it builds an atmosphere in which each choice reveals the cost of living by principle in a social world.
Because it treats belief as a lived question rather than a debate, the book illuminates secular ethics: responsibility without reward, honesty without consolation, fidelity without guarantees. It also studies the friction between art and life, weighing private calling against the claims of work, kinship, and community. Idealism meets the granular realities of time, money, illness, and etiquette, and the result is neither sensational nor schematic but quietly persuasive. Without proposing a program, Jacobsen shows how temperament, culture, and circumstance press upon a person’s convictions. Readers attuned to questions of authenticity, choice, and consequence will find an exacting, humane companion here.
The craft matters as much as the argument. Episodes unfold as linked tableaux, each sharply observed and charged with implication; transitions feel like the natural drift of memory. Landscapes and interiors return as motifs, echoing a character’s state without reducing it. Dialogue is economical, letting small hesitations or abruptness speak. The diction is sensuous but restrained, giving physicality to thought and thinking to physicality. Symbolic patterns emerge gradually—water, light, seasonal change—yet remain supple rather than allegorical. The effect is an immersive rhythm in which the reader inhabits a mind and a milieu, sensing pressures that cannot be resolved by assertion alone.
Placed in the literary debates of the 1870s and 1880s, often called the Modern Breakthrough, the novel approaches contemporary questions with a cool, observant temper. Its 1880 publication situates it amid discussions of realism, secularization, and social roles in nineteenth-century Denmark. Rather than polemic, it offers a lived portrait of doubt and aspiration, letting readers feel how convictions interact with habit, affection, and opportunity. That attention remains relevant to readers today, who contend with competing loyalties and unstable certainties: how to belong without self-betrayal, how to honor commitments without silencing desire, how to speak honestly without hardening into dogma.
Approach this novel as an intimate character study rather than a plot-driven tale. The reward is cumulative: a deepening portrait of a person and a culture. Jacobsen’s restraint gives the book its force, allowing quiet scenes to reverberate long after they pass. For readers who value interiority, moral inquiry, and prose that attends closely to the world before it, this work offers a searching experience. It is not a manual but a mirror held to modern doubt, asking what one recognizes. The pages do not resolve the conflict announced at the start; they let it deepen, quiet, and endure.
Synopsis
Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen is a late nineteenth-century Danish novel that follows its title character from childhood to maturity, tracing his search for identity, vocation, and belief in a rapidly modernizing world. Set mostly in Denmark with excursions abroad, it presents a life marked by art, love, family ties, and public upheaval. The narrative centers on Niels as an aspiring poet and steadfast skeptic who questions inherited faith while confronting ordinary duties and exceptional trials. Without argument or polemic, the book depicts how convictions are formed and tested across changing circumstances, and how private choices intersect with the era's cultural and historical pressures.
Niels grows up on a rural estate, surrounded by fields, water, and long, contemplative days that nourish imagination. A gentle, artistic mother encourages stories, music, and reverie, while a more practical father anchors the household in work and tradition. The child's first awareness of religion is affectionate but tentative; scripture and ceremony are part of the home yet do not fully claim him. Early friendships, games, and solitary wanderings awaken both empathy and skepticism. He begins to write, not to imitate sermons or school lessons, but to capture fleeting moods and landscapes, sensing that poetry might become a calling rather than a pastime.
Adolescence brings sharper tensions between inner desire and outer expectation. Niels experiences first admiration for an older, self-possessed woman and, almost at the same time, a tacit rivalry with peers who accept conventional routes to security. He studies, argues, and experiments with style, seeking a voice that feels honest. Conversations with relatives and cultivated guests introduce him to aesthetic theories and to doubts about the supernatural. One formative disappointment, neither disgraceful nor dramatic, pushes him away from easy consolations and toward a clearer sense of independence. The result is not rebellion for its own sake, but a quieter resolve to think for himself.
As a young man he moves to the city, where salons, cafes, and boarding rooms gather artists, scholars, and political talkers. In Copenhagen he meets mentors and companions whose brilliance is mixed with uncertainty, and he sees that sincerity is hard to sustain amid fashion and ambition. Literary circles welcome his devotion to craft but question his refusal of religious sentiment. He listens, revises, and learns discipline. Family letters remind him of obligations at home, and practical pressures complicate plans for a purely artistic life. He chooses frank unbelief without making it a public crusade, preferring private integrity to noisy controversy.
A central episode involves a profound attachment to a married woman whose intelligence and candor match his own. Their correspondence and encounters develop a bond that sustains him artistically while demanding restraint. The situation tests his principles about honesty, loyalty, and the cost of desire. Rather than seeking secrecy or scandal, Niels tries to uphold clarity and compassion, even when clarity requires distance. The experience leaves a durable impression: he learns how love can be both exalting and limiting, and how the refusal to deceive others must include the refusal to deceive oneself. It refines his ideals without settling his restlessness.
Travel follows, bringing brief residences in other European settings and exposing Niels to new schools of art and thought. Museums, theaters, and friendships broaden his range, while letters from home chronicle changing fortunes on the estate. Illnesses, partings, and other private troubles remind him of life's vulnerability. He revisits the question of belief not as a speculative game but as a response to grief, and he reaffirms his commitment to a worldly ethics based on sympathy and courage. Practical deeds, such as managing responsibilities or helping relatives, temper his ambitions and bind him more closely to the rhythms of ordinary life.
When war breaks out, public duty interrupts private reflection. Niels enlists, not from martial enthusiasm, but from a sober sense of belonging to a community under strain. The novel depicts training grounds, marches, and the precarious calm around field hospitals with concise realism. Fear, pain, and sudden camaraderie reveal how people appeal to faith in extremity. Niels observes prayers and vows without contempt and yet does not adopt them for himself. The campaign forces him to weigh his views on fate and freedom against immediate danger. Courage, in this setting, becomes endurance, and conviction becomes a way of keeping promises.
After the war the story turns toward domesticity. Niels marries and enters the daily work of companionship, livelihood, and parenthood. The quiet satisfactions of home life coexist with artistic ambition and the lingering echo of earlier ideals. Unexpected misfortunes intrude, confronting him with the familiar question of whether faith might offer comfort or explanation. He remains committed to the idea that meaning must be made through human ties, responsibility, and truthful speech. The strain of sorrow and duty tests his marriage and his endurance, yet he continues to act from the convictions he formed earlier, seeking coherence more than consolation.
In its closing movement the narrative gathers its scenes of childhood, love, debate, war, and family into a single portrait of character. Without dramatic revelation, the book shows how a person lives out a choice to forgo transcendence while honoring beauty, loyalty, and work. The emphasis is not on victory or defeat, but on steadiness. Niels Lyhne presents the modern conflict between inherited belief and individual conscience as a continuous practice rather than a final verdict. Its essential message is that a life can be shaped by openly held ideas, and that such clarity carries both costs and quiet dignity.
Historical Context
Niels Lyhne unfolds in Denmark in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a period marked by the transition from a rural, Lutheran, agrarian kingdom to a cautiously modern constitutional state. The novel’s locales—from provincial Jutland estates and small towns to Copenhagen’s bourgeois interiors—mirror a society negotiating new class dynamics and secular ideas after national trauma. The Lutheran state church still shaped daily life, but railways, urban growth, and scientific debate unsettled older certainties. The temporal span aligns with the 1850s–1870s, when Denmark recalibrated identity, law, and social habits in the wake of military defeat, political contention, and an accelerating, if modest, industrialization centered on Copenhagen and key market towns.
The Second Schleswig War (1864) was decisive for Danish society. Triggered by the November Constitution of 1863 and the Schleswig-Holstein question, Prussia and Austria invaded, leading to Danish defeats at Dybbl (18 April 1864) and the loss of Als (29 June 1864). The Treaty of Vienna (30 October 1864) transferred Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg from Denmark, profoundly shrinking the kingdom. The episode ended the ambitions of a multi-ethnic Danish unitary state and generated a culture of introspection and wounded nationalism. In Jacobsens novel, the atmosphere of disillusionment and the testing of individual courage and duty echo this context; wartime experience and post-defeat sobriety frame the protagonists ethical trials and skepticism about patriotic rhetoric.
Denmarks constitutional change began with the June Constitution of 5 June 1849, replacing absolute monarchy with a constitutional system and a bicameral parliament (Folketing and Landsting). The 1866 revision strengthened conservative influence via property-weighted representation. By the 1870s, conflict hardened between Hf8jre (conservatives) and Venstre (agrarian liberals), culminating in the provisorietiden (188594) under Council President J. B. S. Estrup, who governed through provisional financial laws after parliamentary deadlock. Although Niels Lyhne appeared in 1880, the novel captures the mood of institutional paralysis and distrust of authority that matured in these decades, registering how grand public ideals collide with private disillusion and the inadequacies of officialdom.
Scientific naturalism profoundly shaped the era. Jens Peter Jacobsen (18471885), trained as a botanist in Copenhagen, introduced Charles Darwin to Danish readers, translating On the Origin of Species (1872) and The Descent of Man (1874). Darwinian evolution challenged traditional teleology and clerical authority, intensifying debates over human agency, mortality, and meaning. In universities and learned societies, empirical method displaced dogmatic explanations in fields from physiology to philology. Niels Lyhne distills this moment: its protagonist wrestles with unbelief, rejects consolatory metaphysics, and confronts loss without recourse to doctrine, dramatizing how a scientifically informed worldview collides with ingrained religious norms in Danish households and public discourse.
Religious currents were vigorous and divided. The Lutheran Church remained established, yet revivalist movements reshaped piety. N. F. S. Grundtvig (17831872) inspired folk high schools from the 1840s (Rf8dding, 1844), emphasizing popular education and a living Christianity, while Indre Mission, organized in 1861 and led by Vilhelm Beck (18291901), promoted strict evangelical morality, especially in rural Jutland and provincial towns. These forces sometimes opposed liberal theology and secularization advanced by urban elites. The novel registers this terrain of faith and doubt: family expectations, moral surveillance, and clerical counsel weigh on characters whose private experiences of grief, desire, and conscience strain against the communitys insistence on submission and conversion.
Industrialization and urbanization, though modest by European standards, accelerated after mid-century. The first railway (CopenhagenRoskilde) opened in 1847; networks expanded across Zealand, Funen, and Jutland in the 1860s. Copenhagens population grew from roughly 120,000 (1850) to about 180,000 (1870) and over 225,000 (1880), bringing new trades, a salaried middle class, and sharper class contrasts. Gas lighting, newspapers, and department stores altered daily rhythms and aspirations. These changes inform the novels social texture: the contrast between provincial estates and the capitals salons reflects shifting status markers, while the pressures of career, reputation, and marriage market expectations expose the costs of respectability in an increasingly competitive urban society.
Womens rights activism advanced in the same decades. Dansk Kvindesamfund (the Danish Womens Society) was founded in Copenhagen in 1871 by activists including Matilde Bajer and Fredrik Bajer to promote education, economic rights, and later suffrage. In 1875 women were permitted to sit for the university entrance examination; in 1877 Nielsine Nielsen enrolled at the University of Copenhagen and later became Denmarks first female physician, emblematic of new professional opportunities. Legal reforms progressed unevenly, but public debate on marriage, property, and sexual double standards intensified. The novels complex female figures and the negotiation of love, autonomy, and duty resonate with these social developments, exposing constraints imposed by patriarchal law and custom.
As social and political critique, the book strips away consolations prized in post-1864 Denmark: nationalist pathos, clerical certainty, and bourgeois respectability. Its atheist protagonist tests whether integrity is possible without sanctioned beliefs, thereby indicting social coercion that demands conformity in grief, marriage, and public loyalty. By situating private suffering amid constitutional stalemate, religious revivalism, and urban class anxiety, the narrative reveals how institutions protect authority rather than truth or compassion. The work thus challenges the moral economy of the erathe deference to state, church, and family hierarchyand exposes how these structures, in the name of order, deform individual conscience and hinder genuine ethical responsibility.
Niels Lyhne
Chapter I
SHE had the black, luminous eyes of the Blid family[1], 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 luster, 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
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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 traveling about the country, but their natures had nothing of the poetic; beauty never stirred any raptures in them[1q], 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
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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 worshiped 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
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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 country. 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 traveled 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
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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 of 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 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
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had invested the names of villages and fields with immortal fame, where smoke rising from gypsy 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 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.
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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 books or in life. 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 con-
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ception 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 a while 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 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 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.
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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 lusc-
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ious green rye or the golden top-heavy oats, in a strange, vegetative trance. This was a relic of other days; it recalled his former self, 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 worshipers 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[2] 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
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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 quite a number of times that he would suddenly press his cheek against his mother's and whisper, with eyes full of tears
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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, aye, flesh of her flesh and the 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 naive 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 Lonborg 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 fortunes, the martyrdom of being misjudged, and the vic-
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