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146 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1880
“There is no God, and man is his prophet,” replied Lyhne bitterly and rather sadly.
“Exactly,” scoffed Hjerrild. “After all, atheism is unspeakably tame. Its end and aim is nothing but a disillusioned humanity. The belief in a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity’s last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but richer, happier? I can’t see it.”
“But don’t you see,” exclaimed Niels Lyhne, “that on that day when men are free to exult and say: ‘There is no God!’ on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not until then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye…”
”You may be sure that women are not the ethereal creatures many a good youth fancies; they are really no more delicate than men and not very different from them. Take my word for it, there has been some filthy clay used in the shaping of them both.”
Of course this was not as clear and definite in [Niels's] childish consciousness as words can express it, but it was all there, unfinished, unborn, in a vague and intangible fetal form. It was like the strange vegetation of the lake bottom, seen through milky ice. Break up the ice or pull what is dimly alive out into the light of words, and the same thing happens—what can now be seen and grasped is, in its clarity, no longer the obscurity that it was.
"Give me that over there," she said, pointing to a red bottle lying on a crumpled handkerchief by her feet.
Niels went over to it; he was beet-red, and as he bent over those matte-white, gently curving legs and those long, narrow feet that had something of a hand's intelligence in their finely cradled contours, he felt quite faint; when, at the same moment, the tip of one foot curled downward with a sudden movement, he was just about to collapse.
He thought with the mind of the conquered, felt with the heart of the defeated, and he understood that if what wins is good, what surrenders is not necessarily bad; and so he took sides, said that his side was better, felt that it was greater, and called the victorious force tyrannical and violent.
Of all the emotional relationships in life, is there any more delicate, more noble, and more intense than a boy's deep and yet so totally bashful love for another boy?
"[G]ood God, why can't we be natural? Oh, I know full well that courage is what's missing. Neither artists nor poets have the courage to to acknowledge human beings for what they are—but Shakespeare did."
"[T]hat adoration, in its fanaticism, is basically tyrannical. We are forced to fit into the man's ideal. Like Cinderella, chop off a heel and snip off a toe! Whatever in us does not match up with his ideal image has to be banished, if not by subjugation then by indifference, by systematic neglect... I call that violence against our nature."
...for that was the time when yellow-lit evening mists hid the Jura Mountains, and the lake, red as a copper mirror with golden flames scalloped by the sun-red glow, seemed to merge with the radiance of the heavens into one vast, brilliant sea of infinity, then once in a great while it was as if her longing were silenced and her soul had found the land that it sought.
The precondition and the price of this immoderate elevation of the subject is, however, the abandonment of any claim to participate in the shaping of the outside world. [...] Jacobsen's novel of disillusionment, which expresses in wonderful lyrical images the author's melancholy over a world 'in which there's so much that is senselessly exquisite', breaks down and disintegrates completely; and the author's attempt to find a desperate positiveness in Niels Lyhne's heroic atheism, his courageous acceptance of his necessary loneliness, strikes us as an aid brought in from outside the actual work. This hero's life which was meant to become a work of literature and instead is only a poor fragment, is actually transformed into a pile of débris by the form-giving process; the cruelty of disillusionment devalues the lyricism of the moods, but it cannot endow the characters and events with substance or with the gravity of existence. The novel remains a beautiful yet unreal mixture of voluptuousness and bitterness, sorrow and scorn, but not a unity; a series of images and aspects, but not a life totality.