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then a new feature of the school curriculum. He had a
fervent love of all plant-life and enjoyed keenly the fairy-tales
of Hans Christian Andersen, in which flowers are endowed
with personality. At twenty, Jacobsen wrote in his diary
that he did not know whether to choose science or poetry
for his life-work, since he felt equally drawn to both. He
added: “If I could bring into the realm of poetry the
eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles, then
I feel that my work would be more than ordinary.”
He was one of the first in Scandinavia to realize the
importance of Darwin, and translated The Origin of Species
and The Descent of Man, besides writing magazine articles
elucidating the principles of evolution. Meanwhile he
carried on his botanical research faithfully and, in 1872, won
a gold medal in the University at Copenhagen for a thesis
on the Danish desmidiaciae, a microscopic plant growing in
the marshes. In the same year, he made his literary debut
with a short story, Mogens, which compelled attention by
the daring originality of its style. From that time on, he
seems to have had no doubt that his life-work was
literature, though he became primarily a master of prose and not,
as he had dreamed in his boyhood, a writer of verse.
In the spring of 1873, he wrote from Copenhagen to
Edvard Brandes:[1] “Just think, I get up every morning at
eleven and go to the Royal Library, where I read old
documents and letters and lies and descriptions of murder,
adultery, corn rates, whoremongery, market prices, gardening,
the siege of Copenhagen, divorce proceedings, christenings,
estate registers, genealogies, and funeral sermons. All this
is to become a wonderful novel to be called ‘Mistress
Marie Grubbe, Interiors from the Seventeenth Century.’
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