And then, the world of Niels Lyhne is exclusively the world of Niels' proper vision. The very quality of soul of Niels and his mother comes to us through the landscapes and descriptive pieces of the novel. Because of the fatigue, the exquisite sensitiveness, the unsatisfied yearning of the protagonists, the world of the novel is suffused with delicate and tired sunset hues, all the pale and wistful colours of the spectrum. Both the strong vibrancy of noon, and the black passion of night, are absent from its colour-scheme. The novel has the quality of a late autumn afternoon, a windless, tranquil hour of waiting, when both strong desire and strong regret are absent, and when in a mood of reverie and forgiveness we let the world glide from us. A sense of something honey-sweet, faded, and delicate pervades it—the smell of lavender, old spotless rooms, feminine refinement. The springtide when it comes flooding the shores of the smiling lake where the anaemic northern woman lies dying is strangely perfumed and idyllic and caressing, not at all shrill nor humid nor cruel, but pretty almost, a delicate drift of naïve bright flowers, a sparkle of gliding water, a rain of sweet soft lights and scents. And the vignettes of the damp, dreary northern fall, and the wet endless Baltic winter which we are given, are almost equally soft and sweet and faint.
But most contributory of all to the power of the book was the unusual loveliness of its surface. The naturalistic novel is characterized after all by looseness of form and reportorial style. The zest to approximate the appearance of life, to depart from the classical forms and constructions and to utilize the vernacular, had made Zola and his group disregardful of the demands of the medium, the actual problems of their art. Jacobsen, on the contrary, was in love with suave rounded forms and with the ring and timbre of words. How deeply he was the literary artist the Larsen translation unfortunately little reveals. Though it is more faithful to the original than the general run of translations to which we here in America have become accustomed, its prosiness and stiffness, its air of being all too patently the translation, prevent it from representing Jacobsen quite fairly. For Jacobsen is the seraph of Danish literature. Even in the German translations, his novels are prose poems. Frau Marie Grubbe is the work of a sort of prose Vermeer of Delft; its style is suffused with a bland sweet light that recalls the pearly canvases of the magic Dutchman. And Niels Lyhne
