Niels Lyhne

by J. P. Jacobsen

What a wonderful time full of promise! And how strange to hear with his ears the indistinct, mysterious whisper of his soul now sounding through the air of reality like wild, challenging trumpet-blasts, like the thunder of battering-rams against temple walls, like the whizzing of David’s pebble against Goliath’s brow, like exultant fanfares. It was as though he heard himself speaking with strange tongues, with a clarity and power not his own, about that which belonged to his deepest, innermost self.

This gospel of modernity, with its message of dissolution and perfection, did not sound only from the lips of his contemporaries. There were older men with names that carried weight whose eyes were likewise open to the glories of new ideas. These men used more pompous words and had more magnificent conceptions; the names of past centuries swept along in their train; history was with them—the history of the world and the human mind, the Odyssey of thought. These were men who in their youth had been moved by the very things that now thrilled the young people and had borne witness to the spirit within them; but when they heard in their own voices the sound which tells a man crying in the wilderness that he is alone, they were silenced. The young people, however, remembered only that these men had spoken, not that they had been silent; they were ready to bring laurel wreaths and martyr crowns, willing to admire and happy in their admiration. Nor did the objects of their homage repel this late-born appreciation; they put on the crowns in good faith, looked at themselves in a large and historic light, and poetized out of their past the less heroic features; as for the old conviction, which ill winds had cooled, they soon talked it into a glow again.

Niels Lyhne’s family in Copenhagen, more particularly the old Councillor Neergaards, were not at all pleased with the circle their young relative had entered. It was not the modern ideas that worried them, but rather the fact that some of the young men found long hair, great hunting-boots, and a slight slovenliness favorable to the growth of such ideas, and though Niels himself was not at all fanatical on this point, it was annoying to meet him, and even more annoying to have their friends meet him, in company with youths who could be thus characterized. These things, however, were trifles compared to his intimacy with Mrs. Boye and his frequenting the theatre in company with her and her pale niece.

Not that there was anything in particular to be said against Mrs. Boye, but people talked about her. They said a great many things.

She was well born, a Konneroy, and the Konneroys were among the oldest, most finely patrician families in town. Yet she had broken with them. Some said it was on account of a dissipated brother, whom they had sent off to the colonies to get rid of him. Certain it was that the break was complete, and there were even whispers that old Konneroy had cursed her, and afterwards had had an attack of his bad spring asthma.

All this had happened after she became a widow.

Mr. Boye, her husband, had been a pharmaceutist, an assessor pharmacia, and had been knighted. When he died he was sixty and owned a barrel and a half of gold. So far as any one knew, they had lived quite happily together. In the first three years of their marriage, the elderly husband had been very much in love, but later they had each lived their own life, he busy with his garden and with keeping up his reputation as a great man at stag parties, she with theatres, romantic music, and German poetry.

Then he died.

When the year of mourning was over, the widow went to Italy and lived there for two or three years, spending most of the time in Rome. There was nothing in the rumor that she had smoked opium in the French club, nor in the story that she had allowed herself to be modelled in the same manner as Paulina Borghese; and the little Russian prince who shot himself while she was in Naples did not commit suicide for her sake. It was true, however, that German artists never tired of serenading her; and it was true that one morning she had donned the dress of an Albanian peasant girl and had seated herself on the steps of a church high up in the Via Sistina, where a newly arrived artist had engaged her to stand as a model for him with a pitcher on her head and a little brown boy holding her hand. At least there was such a picture hanging on her wall.

On the way home from Italy she met a countryman, a noted clever critic, who would rather have been a poet. A negative, sceptical nature, people called him, a keen mind, one who dealt harshly and pitilessly with others because he dealt harshly and pitilessly with himself and supposed his brutality to be justified by that fact. Nevertheless, he was not quite what they believed him to be; he was not so repellently uncompromising nor so robustly consistent as he appeared. Although he was always in a state of strife against the idealistic tendencies of the age and called them by more disparaging names, still he felt drawn toward these dreamy, ethereal ideals, this blue-blue mysticism, these unattainable heights and evanescent lights; they appealed to him more than the earth-born opinions for which he did battle and in which, most of the time, he believed.