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INTRODUCTION
“Language is like an instrument that requires to be
tuned occasionally. A few times in the course of a
century the literary language of a country needs to be tuned
afresh; for as no generation can be satisfied to think the
thoughts of the preceding one, so no group of men in the
world of letters can use the language of the school that went
before them.” With these words Georg Brandes begins his
discussion[1] of the influence of J. P. Jacobsen. As Brandes
himself was the critic who found new paths, Jacobsen was
the creative artist who moulded his native language into a
medium fit for modern ideas. At the time when Denmark
and Norway had come to a parting of ways intellectually,
and the great Norwegians were forming their own rugged
style, Jacobsen gave the Danes a language suited to their
needs, subtle, pliant, and finely modulated. He found new
methods of approach to truth and even a new manner of
seeing nature and humanity. In an age that had wearied of
generalities, he emphasized the unique and the characteristic.
To a generation that had ceased to accept anything
because it was accepted before, he brought the new power
of scientific observation in the domain of the mind and
spirit. In order to understand him it is necessary to follow
the two currents, the one poetic, the other scientific, that
ran through his life.
Jens Peter Jacobsen was born in Jutland, in the little
town of Thisted, on April 7, 1847, and was the son of a
merchant in moderate circumstances. From his mother
he inherited a desire to write poetry, which asserted itself
while he was yet a boy. His other chief interest was botany,
[1] Det moderne Gennembruds Mænd.
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