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Jacobsen’s complete works has been more fully realized as
they have been seen in the perspective of time. His poems,
though few in number, are exquisite. With Niels Lyhne, he
introduced the psychological novel in Denmark. While at
work on it, he wrote a friend that after all the only
interesting thing was “the struggle of one or more human beings
for existence, that is their struggle against the existing order
of things for their right to exist in their own way.” Vilhelm
Andersen points [1] to these casual words as marking the
cleavage between the old and the new, saying: “Before
Niels Lyhne, the poetic was the general; after this book, the
poetic became the personal. The literature whose foremost
representative is Adam Oehlenschlager had for its aim the
exaltation of the things common to humanity; the art in
which J. P. Jacobsen became the first master has only one
purpose, the presentation and elucidation of the individual.”
Jacobsen has himself told us his ideal of style in a
paragraph of Niels Lyhne, where he lets Fru Boye attack the
generalities of Oehlenschlager’s description in his poem
The Mermaid visits King Helge. “I want a luxuriant,
glowing picture,” she exclaims. “I want to be initiated into the
mysterious beauty of such a mermaid body, and I ask of
you, what can I make of lovely limbs with a piece of gauze
spread over them?—Good God!—No, she should have
been naked as a wave and with the wild lure of the sea about
her. Her skin should have had something of the
phosphorescence of the summer ocean and her hair something of the
black, tangled horror of the seaweed. Am I not right? Yes,
and a thousand tints of the water should come and go in the
changeful glitter of her eyes. Her pale breast must be cool
with a voluptuous coolness, and her limbs have the flowing
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