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