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