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darkness in the room. Not only that, but the entire
description ministers subtly to the allurement of the woman
at the hearth. Almost any writer except J. P. Jacobsen
would have told us how the light played on Marie Grubbe’s
hair and face, but he prefers to let us feel her personality
through her environment. This is true also of his outdoor
pictures, where he uses his flower-lore to good advantage,
as in the first chapter of Marie Grubbe, where we find the
lonely, wayward child playing in the old luxuriant,
neglected garden full of a tangle of quaint old-fashioned flowers.
But when she returns to the home of her childhood, we hear
no more of the famous Tjele garden except as a place to
raise vegetables in; her later history is sketched on a
background of heathery hill, permeated with a strong smell of
sun-scorched earth, which somehow suggests the harsh,
physical realities of life in the class she has entered.
Another means in his favorite method of indirect
approach to a personality is through woman’s dress. Marie
Grubbe’s attire—from the lavender homespun and
billowing linen ruffles of the young maiden to the more
sophisticated daintiness of Ulrik Frederik’s bride in madder red
robe and clocked stockings, the slovenly garb of Palle Dyre’s
wife, and finally the neat simple gown marred by a tawdry
brocaded cap which she dons when she falls in love with
Sören—is a complete index to her moral fall and rise. Sofie
Urne’s shabby velvet, her trailing plumes and red-nosed
shoes, are equally characteristic of her tarnished attractions,
and when her lover bends rapturously over the slim, white
hand which is “not quite clean” we know exactly the
nature of the charm she exercises, though Jacobsen never
comments on her character, as an author of the older school
would have done. Nor does he ask our sympathy for Marie
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