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                          MARIE GRUBBE

                A LADY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

                               BY

                       JENS PETER JACOBSEN

                   TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH
                     BY HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN

                [Illustration: (publisher's logo)]

                            NEW YORK
                         BONI & LIVERIGHT
                              1918


    _Copyright, 1917, by The American Scandinavian Foundation_




INTRODUCTION


"Language is like an instrument that requires to be tuned occasionally.
A few times in the course of a century the literary language of a
country needs to be tuned afresh; for as no generation can be satisfied
to think the thoughts of the preceding one, so no group of men in the
world of letters can use the language of the school that went before
them." With these words Georg Brandes begins his discussion[1] of the
influence of J. P. Jacobsen. As Brandes himself was the critic who
found new paths, Jacobsen was the creative artist who moulded his
native language into a medium fit for modern ideas. At the time when
Denmark and Norway had come to a parting of ways intellectually, and
the great Norwegians were forming their own rugged style, Jacobsen
gave the Danes a language suited to their needs, subtle, pliant, and
finely modulated. He found new methods of approach to truth and even a
new manner of seeing nature and humanity. In an age that had wearied
of generalities, he emphasized the unique and the characteristic.
To a generation that had ceased to accept anything because it was
accepted before, he brought the new power of scientific observation
in the domain of the mind and spirit. In order to understand him it
is necessary to follow the two currents, the one poetic, the other
scientific, that ran through his life.

  [1] _Det moderne Gennembruds Mænd._

Jens Peter Jacobsen was born in Jutland, in the little town of
Thisted, on April 7, 1847, and was the son of a merchant in moderate
circumstances. From his mother he inherited a desire to write poetry,
which asserted itself while he was yet a boy. His other chief interest
was botany, then a new feature of the school curriculum. He had a
fervent love of all plant-life and enjoyed keenly the fairy-tales of
Hans Christian Andersen, in which flowers are endowed with personality.
At twenty, Jacobsen wrote in his diary that he did not know whether
to choose science or poetry for his life-work, since he felt equally
drawn to both. He added: "If I could bring into the realm of poetry the
eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles, then I
feel that my work would be more than ordinary."

He was one of the first in Scandinavia to realize the importance of
Darwin, and translated _The Origin of Species_ and _The Descent of
Man_, besides writing magazine articles elucidating the principles of
evolution. Meanwhile he carried on his botanical research faithfully
and, in 1872, won a gold medal in the University at Copenhagen for a
thesis on the Danish _desmidiaciae_, a microscopic plant growing in
the marshes. In the same year, he made his literary debut with a short
story, _Mogens_, which compelled attention by the daring originality of
its style. From that time on, he seems to have had no doubt that his
life-work was literature, though he became primarily a master of prose
and not, as he had dreamed in his boyhood, a writer of verse.

In the spring of 1873, he wrote from Copenhagen to Edvard Brandes:[2]
"Just think, I get up every morning at eleven and go to the Royal
Library, where I read old documents and letters and lies and
descriptions of murder, adultery, corn rates, whoremongery, market
prices, gardening, the siege of Copenhagen, divorce proceedings,
christenings, estate registers, genealogies, and funeral sermons.
All this is to become a wonderful novel to be called 'Mistress Marie
Grubbe, Interiors from the Seventeenth Century.' You remember, she
is the one who is mentioned in Holberg's Epistles and in _The Goose
Girl_ by Andersen, and who was first married to U. F. Gyldenlöve and
afterwards to a ferryman."

  [2] _Breve fra J. P. Jacobsen._ Med Forord udgivne af Edvard Brandes.

When the first two chapters were finished, an advance honorarium from
his publisher enabled him to follow his longing and make a trip to
the south of Europe, but his stay there