Mogens and Other Stories

Mogens and Other Stories

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Title: Mogens and Other Stories
Author: Jens Peter Jacobsen
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MOGENS AND OTHER STORIES (1882)
By JENS PETER JACOBSEN (1847-1885)
Translated from the Danish By ANNA GRABOW (1921)
Reprint of the 1921 ed., which was issued as v. 2. of The Sea gull
library.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
MOGENS
THE PLAGUE AT BERGAMO
THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ROSES
MRS. FONSS

INTRODUCTION
In the decade from 1870 to 1880 a new spirit was stirring in the
intellectual and literary world of Denmark. George Brandes was
delivering his lectures on the _Main Currents of Nineteenth Century
Literature_; from Norway came the deeply probing questionings of the
granitic Ibsen; from across the North Sea from England echoes of the
evolutionary theory and Darwinism. It was a time of controversy and
bitterness, of a conflict joined between the old and the new, both going
to extremes, in which nearly every one had a share. How many of the
works of that period are already out-worn, and how old-fashioned the
theories that were then so violently defended and attacked! Too much
logic, too much contention for its own sake, one might say, and too
little art.
This was the period when Jens Peter Jacobsen began to write, but he
stood aside from the conflict, content to be merely artist, a creator of
beauty and a seeker after truth, eager to bring into the realm of
literature "the eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its

miracles," as he once put it. That is why his work has retained its living
colors until to-day, without the least trace of fading.
There is in his work something of the passion for form and style that
one finds in Flaubert and Pater, but where they are often hard,
percussive, like a piano, he is soft and strong and intimate like a violin
on which he plays his reading of life. Such analogies, however, have
little significance, except that they indicate a unique and powerful
artistic personality.
Jacobsen is more than a mere stylist. The art of writers who are too
consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a formal
composition, not a plastic composition. One element particularly
characteristic of Jacobsen is his accuracy of observation and
minuteness of detail welded with a deep and intimate understanding of
the human heart. His characters are not studied tissue by tissue as under
a scientist's microscope, rather they are built up living cell by living
cell out of the author's experience and imagination. He shows how they
are conditioned and modified by their physical being, their inheritance
and environment, Through each of his senses he lets impressions from
without pour into him. He harmonizes them with a passionate desire for
beauty into marvelously plastic figures and moods. A style which
grows thus organically from within is style out of richness; the other is
style out of poverty.
In a letter he once stated his belief that every book to be of real value
must embody the struggle of one or more persons against all those
things which try to keep one from existing in one's own way. That is
the fundamental ethos which runs through all of Jacobsen's work. It is
in Marie Grubbe, Niels Lyhne, Mogens, and the infinitely tender Mrs.
Fonss.
They are types of the kind he has described in the following passage:
"Know ye not that there is here in this world a secret confraternity,
which one might call the Company of Melancholiacs? That people
there are who by natural constitution have