LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Brandes). He had first gone to school at the age of four, and
completed his studies at the University of Copenhagen, where
he learnt to know the work of Darwin, whom he introduced to
his countrymen in a series of articles. In the course of time he
translated The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man into
Danish. He lost the firm religious faith of his boyhood, and
constructed for himself a “natural” religion based on the new
biology and the “poetry of science” ; a romanticist at heart, he
rejected all supernatural romantic existences, and, an objectively
minded scientist, sought for spiritual satisfaction in the beauty
of the natural world. He travelled in Germany, Bohemia, Austria
and Italy, and at Florence, when he was twenty-six years old,
consumption declared itself in such a violent form that his
doctors gave Jacobsen a bare two years to live. He actually had
eleven years ahead of him, of life carefully tended and inter-
rupted by frequent ill healch.

His first and best short story, Mogens, had been published when
he was twenty-four, and he now set to work on a historical novel,
Maria Grubbe, which was published when he was twenty-nine,
and extremely well received. Its outspokenness was considered
shocking by a public that had yet to read Ibsen’s Ghosts and
Strindberg’s stories, which appeared later in the same decade.
Four years after Maria Grubbe he published Niels Lyhne, a study
of emotional decadence, the story of the conflict in a young
would-be poet between his inner dream world and the outer
realities of life. The appearance of this book was as perfectly
timed by the Zeitgeist as that of Werther had been, and it was the
forerunner and pattern of much of the decadent literature on the
Continent during the ’nineties. It discussed ideas—mainly the
struggle between romanticism and positivism for the heart of
contemporary youth—in a kind of hot-house haze. As a study
of the disintegration of character that proceeds from weak
romantic illusion, objectively and mercilessly written, it has
been likened to Madame Bovary ; but Lyhne’s neurosis is of the
intellect, not of the heart, and it would in any case be absurd to
compare Jacobsen with Flaubert as a creative artist. The con-
ventional unconventionality of Jacobsen’s religious attitude, a
species of fin-de-siécle humanism, born of materialistic physics

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