Nothing worked in Niels’ life. Not for Lyhne, his father, whose wife made him feel “like a fish suffocating in hot air,” or his mother, Bartholine, who continued to live in her confused world of dreams and fantasies as the ship their marriage was sinking.
Not even the birth of Niels could unite his parents. As he grew older, Niels discovered that his relationship with his mother was agonizing. She rejected from her her baffling fables of characters whose destiny she completely controlled, for a world that actually existed. She preferred the simpler, more practical life of her father.
Then there was Niels’s infatuation with Edele Lyhne, the 26-year-old blonde woman with ‘a wildly curving line down her back’. She was this woman that 12-year-old Niels secretly loved and adored, leaving his young heart racing with excitement every time he saw her.
Once again, another revered and divine figure from Niels’ life abandoned him. Edele became seriously ill and died, despite Niels’s fervent appeals to God that he not “take her away from us, because you know how much we love her, you must not, you must not”. With Adele’s death, Niels’ faith also died. She saw her death as God’s violence directed at him. He had always believed in the almighty God and trusted that all of his prayers would be heard.
But with Adele’s death, he believed that his faith had failed him and that prayer was no bulwark against pain. She had knelt at God’s feet and left with shattered hopes of him. It was God, in his young mind, who was indifferent and always ready to suffer towards humanity.
On the day Edele was buried, she stamped her feet in anger whenever the name of the Lord was mentioned. It was for the nurse a grudge against Him for the rest of her life. Faith became for him something like his mother’s fairy tales. He felt a feverish joy in realizing that he loved God less, he could now love himself more.
Even her friendship with the idealistic Eric, with whom she had fallen in love since childhood, did not escape failure and embarrassment. Eric, in later years, married Fennimore, longing for her friend’s company as their marriage faltered. Niels, whose own life was beset by failure, pain and self-pity, was no remedy for the couple’s problems: he was in love with both of them.
He began a passionate relationship with Fennimore behind his friend’s back. And the desperate Fennimore, whose married life was like ‘a bottomless pit of suffering’, indulged him for a time. Cheating became a way of life for the two lovers, with ‘stolen applause under blankets and kisses at doorways and behind doors’. But cunning and cunning did not separate this relationship from failure. Fennimore later, while angrily dismissing Niels, felt tainted by the affair.
She rejected his love as a sin and a violation of an inner moral justice. With this rejection, Niels’ boundless self-confidence and sense of honor were shaken. He, perhaps still a captive of his mother’s fantasy world, was stunned by Fennimore’s cold, raw anger. He believed that he was rescuing a female soul from her suffering and raising her to happiness.
The theme of faith and belief is certainly central to the story, with the patriarchal God, in Niels’ eyes, the villain and the terrorist. He sees him as a petty God, without ears or mercy: one who created humanity only to ‘incite death towards her’. For Niels, there is no learning from failure or growth from adversity, but rather an unrelenting fury at a ruthless god. This is Peter Jacobsen’s ‘Divine Tragedy’, and in it there is only Purgatory.
Niels Lyhne, central figure of the story. he has taken up arms against God. for a childhood tragedy. There is no hope, no inspiration, no abundance and no joy in his existence. Human life is for him a predictable journey towards ‘darkness, towards hell and the damnation of the soul’. And for this he blames God.
As expected, the story does not have a happy ending. After wandering for years in his emotional desert, Niels meets and falls in love with Gerda, a very young girl. His young wife, ‘who leaned on him with complete confidence’, reciprocated his love, and for a few years they lived happily together. A child was born of their union.
Then suddenly one morning Gerda fell ill. And as she did with Edele Lynhe, Niels sat by her bedside and watched her creep slowly toward her grave.
As if Gerda’s death was not enough, Niels, one day, returning from the fields, found his little son seriously ill. No doctor could be found to care for his dying son. In desperation and anger, Niels raised his clenched fist threateningly to the sky, then fell to his knees praying in vain to a God he despised.
With the death of his young wife and son, Niels once again drowns in melancholy. Then the war began, and Niels listed to be useful again. Then one day, he was shot in the chest, a cruel and final end to a miserable life. One wonders if going to war was out of a sense of honor or a deliberate act of suicide.
I asked myself of Niels Lyhne, while reading the book: ‘How do I describe you? That he is an atheist is not in doubt. Was he also an unrepentant sadist? He makes no distinction between married and single, boys and girls, or boys and adults. Was he the ultimate nihilist whose infidelity inflicts catastrophe not only on those he loves, but on himself as well?
It’s hard not to love the character of Niels. He loves and despairs with great intensity. It is also impossible not to feel sorry for him. Even the women who fall in love with him seem to do so out of pity. It is as if they could see the victim that he suffers and that is desperately searching for the meaning of life. It is as if they could discern the anguish of his devastated soul, that he had abandoned the faith for skepticism and had completely surrendered to pessimism.
Niels Lyhne is Jacobsen’s self-portrait, with the writer at his literary best. Unfortunately, his greatest characters, a varied constellation of them, manifest mainly tragedy. The only life and beauty of the story is mainly in the language and its wonderful and elaborate description of the riches of nature. It is as if Jacobsen raised the earth above heaven, with the angels exiled and supplanted by the bounty and beauty of nature.
Niels Lyhne is a supreme achievement. Although some may not be happy with its central theme, it is certainly a rich work, written with singular elegance and dealing with a variety of complex topics, which force us to constantly observe and examine the world we inhabit.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, in his Letters to a Young Poet, praises Jacobsen’s books: “But I can tell you that also later one goes through these books again and again with the same astonishment and that they lose none of the marvelous power and they deliver none of the fabulousness with which they overwhelm one on a first reading.