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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Niels Lyhne," Jens Peter Jacobsen presents a profound exploration of existential themes through the life of its titular character, Niels. The narrative unfolds with a lyrical yet realistic prose style, characteristic of Jacobsen's naturalistic approach, which emerged as a response to the romantic ideals prevalent in 19th-century literature. The novel intricately weaves Niels's struggles with his aspirations, disillusionments, and the search for meaning in a world that often seems indifferent to human suffering. Set against the backdrop of Danish society, Jacobsen's work captures the intricacies of the human psyche and the philosophical currents of his time, particularly the influences of existentialism and modernism, marked by intense introspection and the questioning of one's place in the universe. Jens Peter Jacobsen, a pivotal figure in Danish literature, was not only a novelist but also a poet and playwright whose works often reflect his own grappling with artistic and existential dilemmas. Jacobsen's intimate familiarity with the intellectual currents of his time, along with his personal experiences of loss and longing, greatly informed his writing. His search for artistic authenticity and deeper meaning resonates profoundly in "Niels Lyhne," making it a quintessential reflection of his philosophical inquiries. This hauntingly beautiful novel is highly recommended for readers interested in psychological depth and existential philosophy. Jacobsen's ability to intertwine the personal with the universal allows for a rich, reflective reading experience. "Niels Lyhne" will resonate with those who appreciate literature that challenges perceptions of life, art, and the human condition, making it a timeless classic worthy of exploration. 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: 2022
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Niels Lyhne
Table of Contents
Introduction
Between the lucent dream of a life shaped by art and reason and the resistant grain of a world that refuses consolations, Niels Lyhne follows the ache of a modern soul compelled to choose, to doubt, and to continue within the consequences of its choices, measuring every tenderness against the chill of contingency, every belief against the dignity of disbelief, and every act of love against the erosions of time, until the question of how to live without false light becomes indistinguishable from the question of how to live at all.
Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne, first published in 1880, is a Danish novel that fuses psychological realism with naturalist attentiveness to environment and motive. Emerging from the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, it situates its inquiry in nineteenth‑century Denmark, moving through domestic interiors, rural estates, and educated circles where new ideas contend with inherited pieties. Neither melodrama nor manifesto, it is a sober, searching work that studies a single life as a test case for a culture in transition. Readers encounter a bildungsroman stripped of easy uplift, a meditation on coming‑of‑age that treats belief, love, and vocation as problems to be demonstrated rather than affirmed.
At its simplest, the book follows Niels from a sensitive childhood into the volatile threshold of adulthood, tracing how an early hunger for poetry becomes a lifelong attempt to synthesize feeling and thought. The narrative proceeds episodically, presenting encounters in parlors and fields, friendships and infatuations, letters and silences that register as decisive inner weather. From the outset he imagines himself a writer, yet the world he inhabits asks for duties that are not literary, and it is this friction that gives the plot its pulse. Without prefiguring outcomes, Jacobsen lets the reader feel how an idea of life meets life’s unnegotiable terms.
Jacobsen’s voice is both lucid and plaintive, a third‑person narration that closes the distance to its subject without abandoning an observing coolness. The sentences unfurl with musical patience, balancing sensuous description of weather, rooms, and faces with exact psychological notation. Dialogue is often spare, the pressure falling on inner debate and on small gestures that reveal the stakes of a moment. Although associated with naturalism, the novel retains a lyrical shimmer that lets ideals glow even as the analysis of motive is exacting. The tone is reflective rather than polemical, inviting readers to accompany Niels’s thinking rather than to judge it.
The novel’s central themes cohere around belief and its refusal. Atheism here is not a slogan but a temperament tested by intimacy, by suffering, and by the spectacle of nature’s indifference, and the book asks what forms of honesty are available when transcendence recedes. Equally persistent is the conflict between artistic ambition and practical obligation: the allure of creation confronts promises made to others, and ideals meet the everyday. Love appears as both enlargement and trial, freedom as both release and demand. Threaded through is the problem of chance, which unsettles plans and measures character by the responses it elicits.
For contemporary readers, Niels Lyhne remains bracing because it treats secular doubt not as a pose but as a lived ethics, and because it admits that sincerity alone cannot shield anyone from contingency. Its examination of how to make a truthful life without metaphysical guarantees speaks directly to present conversations about meaning, responsibility, and self‑definition. Those who struggle to reconcile creative longing with work, love, and community will recognize the novel’s stubborn questions. Its calm, exact style offers a counterweight to noisy certainty, and its insistence on consequences gives moral weight to choices that might otherwise seem merely private.
Approach the book as one might a finely tuned instrument: its quiet surfaces reward patience, and its cumulative power resides in modulation rather than spectacle. The early chapters establish the habits of seeing and feeling that later scenes will test; the pleasure lies in watching how the same principles hold or fail under new pressures. Jacobsen refuses to resolve the debate between ideal and reality with a single flourish, preferring the slow calibration of a life observed. That modesty is the novel’s courage. It leaves readers not with a lesson but with sharpened attention to what believing, loving, and choosing actually cost.
Synopsis
Niels Lyhne, published in 1880 by Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, follows a sensitive boy growing up in provincial Denmark as he discovers art, language, and the allure of visionary ideals. His childhood is steeped in imagination and the quiet dramas of a household that prizes refinement yet fears disruption. Early encounters with nature and books awaken a longing to become a poet, while everyday rituals of belief leave him curiously unmoved. The novel lets this early unease ripen into a defining tension: the desire to live beautifully and truthfully without recourse to religious consolation or the safety of inherited certainties.
As Niels enters adolescence and early adulthood, broader horizons open through schooling, friendships, and exposure to contemporary ideas. He tests his voice in poems and reveries, half in love with the dream of being an artist and half aware of the hard discipline it would require. Romantic stirrings complicate everything. He learns how quickly fantasies collide with the demands of social life—family expectations, economic needs, the tacit rules of respectability. In this phase the book registers the exhilaration of self-invention alongside the first disillusionments that will shadow his attempts to turn aspiration into a lived vocation.
The narrative deepens as Niels steps into circles where art, conversation, and discreet transgressions mingle. Love becomes a crucible for his ideals: he is drawn into attachments that test responsibility, honesty, and the border between admiration and possession. The novel observes how a passion for authenticity can wound as easily as it liberates, especially when feelings cross the boundaries of marriage and reputation. Jacobsen traces these entanglements with lucid restraint, emphasizing how gestures and silences carry moral weight. Niels’s belief that a life of sincerity is possible meets the resistant textures of other people’s needs, fears, and loyalties.
Loss gathers force, and Niels’s convictions are pressed by bereavements that demand practical decisions as well as inner steadiness. Family obligations compel him to consider a quieter existence, one in which caretaking, work, and the rhythms of daily routine might offer a different form of meaning. The pull of domesticity does not erase his artistic longing, but it reframes it, moving him from prodigy’s dreams to an adult’s negotiations with time. Jacobsen portrays how grief can sharpen attention to the present while provoking questions that no doctrine answers easily, preparing the ground for further tests of belief and purpose.
Throughout, Jacobsen stages debates—spoken and unspoken—about faith, doubt, and the conditions for an ethical life without transcendence. Niels’s atheism is neither bravado nor pose; it is a commitment he measures against love, duty, and suffering. The novel examines whether courage and tenderness can be sustained without promises of ultimate justice. Artistic ambition threads through this inquiry: poems are drafted, abandoned, or inwardly perfected, as he wonders if a work must be written to be real. The prose remains intimate and exacting, attentive to perceptions that reveal character more surely than any program of ideas.
Public events intrude when war arrives, drawing Niels from private dilemmas into the stark economy of risk and solidarity. He volunteers, confronting fear, contingency, and the fragile heroics of men who must act before understanding fully what action entails. Battlefield experiences compress his long-standing questions: Is meaning discovered in sacrifice, or merely attributed after the fact? What, if anything, redeems suffering when explanations fail? Returning from these ordeals, he carries a tempered awareness of chance and responsibility, a knowledge that deepens his compassion without softening his skepticism about metaphysical answers.
By closing on the still-open conflict between vision and reality, Niels Lyhne offers a modern Bildungsroman whose power lies in its clarity rather than resolution. Jacobsen’s style—lucid, sensuous, and psychologically exact—treats doubt as an existential climate rather than an argument to be won. The book’s endurance rests on how it dignifies secular conscience, showing a human life shaped by love, grief, and choice without denying mystery to the finite world. Its resonance extends beyond its Danish setting, anticipating later explorations of disillusionment and authenticity while inviting readers to consider what integrity can mean after certainty fades.
Historical Context
Niels Lyhne, published in 1880 by the Danish writer and scientist Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1885), emerged from a Denmark reshaped by mid-nineteenth‑century reforms. The 1849 constitution created a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church remained the state church. Copenhagen’s University and learned societies anchored intellectual life, while provincial parishes and emerging towns set the social backdrop. The novel’s Denmark is one negotiating between rural traditions and an increasingly urban, educated public. Literary culture centered in Copenhagen salons, theatres, and periodicals provided venues where ideas about faith, morality, and the individual circulated intensely in the decades surrounding the book’s appearance.
In 1871, the critic Georg Brandes delivered his influential University of Copenhagen lectures, “Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature,” urging Scandinavian writers to debate religion, sexuality, and social institutions. The Modern Breakthrough that followed rejected romantic idealization in favor of realism and naturalism. Jacobsen belonged to this milieu, publishing the historical novel Marie Grubbe in 1876 and Niels Lyhne in 1880. Journals, public lectures, and reading societies linked Danish authors to European movements, and controversy over Brandes’s program polarized cultural life. Within this framework, Jacobsen’s psychologically precise prose and secular themes placed him among the most rigorous practitioners of the Breakthrough.
Scientific debate framed the era. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) unsettled traditional accounts of creation and human uniqueness. Jacobsen studied natural sciences at the University of Copenhagen and conducted botanical research; crucially, he translated On the Origin of Species into Danish in 1871 and The Descent of Man in 1874, helping introduce evolutionary theory to a broad Danish readership. The authority of laboratory method, observational precision, and causal explanation shaped literary aims as well, encouraging attention to heredity, environment, and psychology. Niels Lyhne engages this climate of scientific modernity and the ethical questions it posed.
Religious life in nineteenth‑century Denmark was dominated by the Church of Denmark, though the 1849 constitution guaranteed freedom of worship. Two powerful currents influenced public debate: the Grundtvigian movement, which promoted national culture and folk high schools, and the Inner Mission (established 1861), which emphasized personal piety and revivalist discipline. Sermons, pamphlets, and public meetings kept questions of belief and doubt highly visible. Against this backdrop, outspoken freethought and secular ethics were provocative positions. Jacobsen’s novel, portraying an avowed atheist navigating family, love, and society, reflects the tensions between established religious norms and the growing legitimacy of critical, post-theological perspectives.
Denmark’s political and national mood was deeply marked by defeat in the Second Schleswig War (1864), when it ceded Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg to Prussia and Austria. The loss prompted inward‑looking cultural policies and accelerated agricultural and educational reforms. In parliament, liberals (Venstre) and conservatives (Højre) contested taxation, defense, and constitutional prerogatives throughout the 1870s and 1880s, with mounting conflicts over ministerial responsibility. Conscription and army reform remained contentious. This atmosphere of curtailed national ambition, social reorganization, and political polarization shaped everyday life and public discourse, informing literary explorations of identity, responsibility, and the costs of individual conviction in a small, embattled nation.
Danish writers were in active dialogue with European realism and naturalism. Émile Zola’s experiments in literary naturalism and debates over heredity, environment, and social determinism resonated in Copenhagen. In the Nordic region, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) sparked sustained discussion about marriage, personal autonomy, and social hypocrisy. Theatres, lecture halls, and periodicals amplified these controversies, and critics such as the Brandes brothers helped mediate continental trends to Danish audiences. Within this ferment, Jacobsen developed an exacting, image‑rich, psychologically subtle style, using ordinary settings and inward conflict to probe belief, desire, and conscience without recourse to romantic consolations.
Rapid social change provided another frame. Railways and market integration transformed town and countryside from the 1860s onward, and literacy expanded through public schooling. Women’s rights organizations, notably Dansk Kvindesamfund (founded 1871), campaigned for education and legal reforms. In 1875 Danish universities opened pathways for women to take degrees; Nielsine Nielsen began medical studies in 1877 and became the country’s first female physician. Such developments fueled public argument about marriage, motherhood, and female independence. Scandinavian literature increasingly featured complex female characters and scrutinized traditional gender roles, a conversation that Jacobsen’s novel joins through its attention to intimacy, autonomy, and the negotiation of social expectations.
Upon publication in 1880, Niels Lyhne was recognized within the Modern Breakthrough as a daring exploration of secular conscience and psychological realism. Jacobsen’s early death in 1885 curtailed his output, but the novel’s influence proved lasting: writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke admired it and recommended it to readers seeking uncompromising modern sensibility. By unfolding an atheist’s life amid Denmark’s religious establishments, scientific debates, and post‑1864 uncertainties, the book reflects its era’s central disputes while critiquing conformity and consolatory myths. Its measured prose and ethical intransigence helped define Scandinavian literary modernity, insisting that art confront the costs of conviction in a changing society.
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 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[1], 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, 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[1q].
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.
