alogies, 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 been given a different nature and
disposition than the others; that have a larger heart and a swifter
blood, that wish and demand more, have stronger desires and a yearning
which is wilder 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