MARIE GRUBBE
A LADY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
BY
JENS PETER JACOBSEN
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH
BY HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN
NEW YORK
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1918
Copyright, 1917, by The American Scandinavian Foundation
INTRODUCTION
“LANGUAGE is like an instrument that requires to betuned occasionally. A few times in the course of acentury the literary language of a country needs to be tunedafresh; for as no generation can be satisfied to think thethoughts of the preceding one, so no group of men in theworld of letters can use the language of the school that wentbefore them.” With these words Georg Brandes begins hisdiscussion[1] of the influence of J. P. Jacobsen. As Brandeshimself was the critic who found new paths, Jacobsen wasthe creative artist who moulded his native language into amedium fit for modern ideas. At the time when Denmarkand Norway had come to a parting of ways intellectually,and the great Norwegians were forming their own ruggedstyle, Jacobsen gave the Danes a language suited to theirneeds, subtle, pliant, and finely modulated. He found newmethods of approach to truth and even a new manner ofseeing nature and humanity. In an age that had wearied ofgeneralities, he emphasized the unique and the characteristic.To a generation that had ceased to accept anythingbecause it was accepted before, he brought the new powerof scientific observation in the domain of the mind andspirit. In order to understand him it is necessary to followthe two currents, the one poetic, the other scientific, thatran through his life.
[1] Det moderne Gennembruds Mænd.
Jens Peter Jacobsen was born in Jutland, in the littletown of Thisted, on April 7, 1847, and was the son of amerchant in moderate circumstances. From his motherhe inherited a desire to write poetry, which asserted itselfwhile he was yet a boy. His other chief interest was botany,- vi -then a new feature of the school curriculum. He had a ferventlove of all plant-life and enjoyed keenly the fairy-talesof Hans Christian Andersen, in which flowers are endowedwith personality. At twenty, Jacobsen wrote in his diarythat he did not know whether to choose science or poetryfor his life-work, since he felt equally drawn to both. Headded: “If I could bring into the realm of poetry the eternallaws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles, thenI feel that my work would be more than ordinary.”
He was one of the first in Scandinavia to realize the importanceof Darwin, and translated The Origin of Speciesand The Descent of Man, besides writing magazine articleselucidating the principles of evolution. Meanwhile he carriedon his botanical research faithfully and, in 1872, wona gold medal in the University at Copenhagen for a thesison the Danish desmidiaciae, a microscopic plant growing inthe marshes. In the same year, he made his literary debu