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Title: Mogens and Other Stories
Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss

Author: Jens Peter Jacobsen

Translator: Anna Grabow, 1921

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6765]
Posting Date: April 21, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOGENS AND OTHER STORIES ***

Produced by Eric Eldred

MOGENS AND OTHER STORIES

(1882)

By Jens Peter Jacobsen

(1847-1885)

Translated from the Danish By Anna Grabow

(1921)

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 an