Mogens and Other Stories | Page 2

and more ardent than that of the common herd. They are fleet as children over whose birth good fairies have presided; their eyes are opened wider; their senses are more subtile in all their perceptions. The gladness and joy of life, they drink with the roots of their heart, the while the others merely grasp them with coarse hands."
He himself was one of these, and in this passage his own art and personality is described better than could be done in thousands of words of commentary.
Jens Peter Jacobsen was born in the little town of Thisted in Jutland, on April 7, 1847. In 1868 he matriculated at the University of Copenhagen, where he displayed a remarkable talent for science, winning the gold medal of the university with a dissertation on Seaweeds. He definitely chose science as a career, and was among the first in Scandinavia to recognize the importance of Darwin. He translated the Origin of Species and Descent of Man into Danish. In 1872 while collecting plants he contracted tuberculosis, and as a consequence, was compelled to give up his scientific career. This was not as great a sacrifice, as it may seem, for he had long been undecided whether to choose science or literature as his life work.
The remainder of his short life--he died April 30, 1885--was one of passionate devotion to literature and a constant struggle with ill health. The greater part of this period was spent in his native town of Thisted, but an advance royalty from his publisher enabled him to visit the South of Europe. His journey was interrupted at Florence by a severe hemorrhage.
He lived simply, unobtrusively, bravely. His method of work was slow and laborious. He shunned the literary circles of the capital with their countless intrusions and interruptions, because he knew that the time allotted him to do his work was short. "When life has sentenced you to suffer," he has written in Niels Lyhne, "the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment," and in this book there is also a corollary, "It is on the healthy in you you must live, it is the healthy that becomes great." The realization of the former has given, perhaps, a subdued tone to his canvasses; the recognition of the other has kept out of them weakness or self-pity.
Under the encouragement of George Brandes his novel Marie Grubbe was begun in 1873, and published in 1876. His other novel Niels Lyhne appeared in 1880. Excluding his early scientific works, these two books together with a collection of short stories, Mogens and Other Tales, published in 1882, and a posthumous volume of poems, constitute Jacobsen's literary testament. The present volume contains Mogens, the story with which he made his literary debut, and other characteristic stories.
The physical measure of Jacobsen's accomplishment was not great, but it was an important milestone in northern literature. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in so far as Scandinavia is concerned he created a new method of literary approach and a new artistic prose. There is scarcely a writer in these countries, since 1880, with any pretension toward literary expression who has not directly or indirectly come under Jacobsen's influence.
O. F. THEIS.

MOGENS

MOGENS
SUMMER it was; in the middle of the day; in a corner of the enclosure. Immediately in front of it stood an old oaktree, of whose trunk one might say, that it agonized in despair because of the lack of harmony between its fresh yellowish foliage and its black and gnarled branches; they resembled most of all grossly misdrawn old gothic arabesques. Behind the oak was a luxuriant thicket of hazel with dark sheenless leaves, which were so dense, that neither trunk nor branches could be seen. Above the hazel rose two straight, joyous maple-trees with gayly indented leaves, red stems and long dangling clusters of green fruit. Behind the maples came the forest--a green evenly rounded slope, where birds went out and in as elves in a grasshill.
All this you could see if you came wandering along the path through the fields beyond the fence. If, however, you were lying in the shadow of the oak with your back against the trunk and looking the other way--and there was a some one, who did that--then you would see first your own legs, then a little spot of short, vigorous grass, next a large cluster of dark nettles, then the hedge of thorn with the big, white convolvulus, the stile, a little of the ryefield outside, finally the councilor's flagpole on the hill, and then the sky.
It was stifling hot, the air was quivering with heat, and then it was very quiet; the leaves were hanging