Niels Lyhne

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Niels Lyhne, by J. P. (Jens Peter) Jacobsen, Translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen
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
ESTABLISHED BY NIELS POULSON
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.
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!”