Niels Lyhne

by J. P. Jacobsen

He loved her, the young wife he had won, with all the delicacy of thought and feeling, with all the large, deep tenderness of a man who knows the tendency of love to sink and believes in the power of love to rise. How he guarded this young soul which bent toward him with infinite trust and pressed up against him in caressing faith, in implicit reliance that he would do her nothing but good, as the ewe lamb in the parable must have felt toward its shepherd when it ate from his hand and drank of his cup! He had no heart to take her God away from her or to banish all those white hosts of angels that fly singing through the heavens all day and come to earth at eventide and spread their wings from bed to bed, watching faithfully and filling the darkness of night with a protecting wall of invisible light. He shrank from allowing his own heavier, imageless view of life to come between her and the soft blue of the heavens and make her feel uneasy and forsaken.

But she would have it otherwise. She wanted to share everything with him; there must be no place in heaven or on earth where their ways were parted. Say what he would to hold her back, she met it all, if not with the words of the Moabite woman, yet with the same obstinate thought that lay in the words—thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

Then he began to teach her in earnest. He explained to her that all gods were the work of men and, like everything else made by men, could not endure eternally, but must pass away, generation after generation of gods—because humanity is ever-lastingly developing and growing beyond its own ideals. A god on whom the noblest and greatest of men could not lavish the richest gifts of their spirit, a god that did not take his light from men, but had to give light by virtue of his own being, a god that was not developing but stiffened in the historic plaster of dogmas, was no longer a god, but an idol. Therefore Judaism was right against Baal and Astarte, and Christianity was right against Judaism, for an idol is nothing in the world. Humanity had gone on from god to god, and therefore Christ could say, on the one hand, looking toward the old God, that He had not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it, while on the other hand He could point beyond Himself to a yet higher ideal with those mystical words about the sin that shall not be forgiven, the sin against the Holy Ghost.

He went on to teach her how the belief in a personal God who guides everything for the best and who punishes and rewards beyond the grave is a running away from the harsh realities of life, an impotent attempt to take the sting from its arbitrariness. He showed her that it must blunt compassion and make people less ready to exert all their powers in relieving misery, since they could soothe themselves with the thought that suffering in this brief earthly life paved the way for the sufferer to an eternity of glory and joy.

He laid stress on the strength and self-reliance mankind would gain when men had learned faith in themselves, and when the individual strove to bring his life into harmony with what seemed to him, in his best moments, the highest that dwelt in him, instead of seeking it outside of himself in a controlling deity. He made his faith as beautiful and blessed as he could, but he did not conceal from her how crushingly sad and comfortless the truth of atheism would seem in the hour of sorrow compared to the old fair, happy dream of a Heavenly Father who guides and rules. Yet she was brave. It is true, many of his doctrines, and often those he had least expected to affect her, would shake her to the innermost depths of her soul, but her faith knew no bounds; her love carried her with him away from all heavens, and she believed because she loved. Then, after a while, when the new ideas had grown familiar and homelike, she became intolerant in the highest degree and fanatical, as young disciples always are who love their master intensely. Niels often reproached her for it, but that was the one thing she could never understand—that when their belief was true, that of others should not be horrible and reprehensible.

For three years they lived happily together, and much of this happiness shone from a baby face, the face of a little boy who had been born to them in the second year of their marriage.

Happiness usually makes people good, and Niels strove earnestly to make their lives so beautiful, noble, and useful that there should never be any pause in the growth of their souls toward the human ideal in which they both believed. But he no longer thought of carrying the standard of his ideal out into the world; he was content to follow it. Once in a while, he would take out some of his old attempts, and then he would always wonder if it was really he who had written these pretty, artistic things. His own verses invariably brought tears to his eyes, but he would not for anything in the world have changed places with the poor fellow who wrote them.

Suddenly, in the spring, Gerda fell ill and could not recover.

Early one morning—it was the last—Niels was sitting up with her. The sun was about to rise and cast a red glow on the white shade curtains, although the light coming in on either side was still blue, making blue shadows in the folds of the white bed-spread and under Gerda’s pale, thin hands, which lay clasped before her on the sheet. Her cap had slipped off, and, as her head lay far back on the pillow, her features, sharpened and refined by suffering, had an unfamiliar and strangely distinguished air. She moved her lips as if to moisten them, and Niels reached for a glass holding a dark red liquid, but she shook her head faintly. Then suddenly she turned her face to him and gazed anxiously into his mournful countenance. As she looked at the deep sorrow his face revealed and the despair it could not hide, her uneasy foreboding gradually changed to a terrible certainty.

She struggled to rise, but could not.