Niels Lyhne — themes & analysis

Niels Lyhne is one of the first novels in European literature to take the lived consequences of unbelief with full seriousness. Niels casts off God in adolescence after watching his aunt Edele die calmly without faith — calmly, in particular, against the village pastor's patient, well-meaning, almost loving offers of consolation. Edele's refusal is not bitter. She has, simply, no use for the comfort she is being offered, and she dies in possession of herself. The boy who watches her die takes from the bedside a conviction the rest of the novel cannot dislodge: that the consolations of faith are addressed to a fear he refuses to flatter.

The novel then spends thirty years putting the position under pressure. First love disappoints; a great romance ends in the other person's dignified retreat; an affair with a friend's wife becomes the chapter the book cannot recover from; a marriage to a gentle, religious woman ends in her own loss of faith on her deathbed. Each loss is offered to Niels as an occasion to recant. The most exposed test is in chapter 13, when Niels's small son lies dying. Niels — secular, modern, twenty years past Edele's deathbed — finds himself praying. He prays not because he has changed his mind about God but because he is a father with a dying child and there is nothing else to do with the hands. The child dies anyway. Niels gets up from beside the bed and never prays again. The chapter is the novel at its most exact: the prayer was real and the answer was real, and the answer was nothing.

The final test arrives in the last chapter. Niels has enlisted in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 — partly out of patriotism, partly out of the long ache to do something he cannot live inside his head. He is shot, lingers, and is offered the priest. He refuses. Jacobsen does not present the refusal as triumph. The novel's last paragraphs are sober almost to the point of plainness. The hardest thing about losing God, the book insists, is not the metaphysics but what it does to ordinary moments — the bedside of a sick child, the letter to a grieving mother, the temptation to comfort yourself with a prayer you no longer believe. Few books since 1880 have measured the cost more honestly.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (Edele dies without faith), Chapter 13 (Niels prays for his son), Chapter 14 (the priest refused).

Niels stakes his life on the proposition that beauty, feeling, dreams, and the poetic temperament can stand in for what religion used to provide — that an inner life, vivid enough, can ground a meaningful existence even without a heaven beyond it. The novel respects the bet. Jacobsen gives Niels a real talent, real loves, real moments of nearly mystical perception in landscape and music and the shape of a face at evening. The first half of the book is, in places, almost lyric in the German Romantic key — the boy on the heath, the young man in the city, the long Italian journey with his dying mother to the Lake Garda she had imagined for forty years.

And then, with the patience of a man who has been watching his own death approach for years, Jacobsen tests the bet against everything that actually breaks a person. Mrs. Boye, the older Copenhagen widow who treats him as a man for the first time, sees clearly that he is not the partner she needs and lets him go; she marries someone else and Niels learns the news in a newspaper. The friendship with Erik, which has carried him since the university years, ends in his sleeping with Erik's wife and Erik's death by accident a few weeks later. The marriage to Gerda, late and almost saved, ends with her losing her faith on her deathbed and dying frightened, and with their son dying a year later in his arms.

The novel does not declare the bet a failure. It shows what living inside it looks like in long stretches. The aphorism Jacobsen never quite writes but earns is that disillusionment is not a single event but a temperature — a slow cooling of the air around an inner life that had once been warm enough to live in. By the deathbed in chapter 14, Niels has lost almost everything an inner life can lose, and he refuses to take any of it back on terms he no longer believes. Whether romantic feeling can substitute for religion is a question every secular adult since 1880 has had to answer for themselves. Jacobsen is one of the first writers to ask it cleanly.

Where to follow it: Chapter 8 (Niels and Mrs. Boye end; mother dies at Clarens), Chapter 11 (Erik dies, Fennimore turns), Chapter 13 (Gerda and the son).

Niels is a man who lives mostly inside his own head. From the first chapters at Lönborggaard he plans a poet's life: he drafts speeches he will never deliver, conducts entire affairs in his imagination before the real woman has done anything, and falls in love with the version of a person he has built in private rather than with the person standing in the room. The novel is exact about the texture of this kind of inwardness — its luminosity and its paralysis, the way it produces beautiful private worlds and makes ordinary action feel slightly false.

Around him everyone else simply does things. Erik sculpts; Mrs. Boye gives parties and reads books and changes her mind in public; Fennimore takes a lover; Hjerrild argues; the war breaks out and men enlist; Gerda runs a household and prays. Niels, almost alone in the cast, is mostly imagining. He produces no book the world ever sees. He never quite arrives at the poet's life he had been preparing for since boyhood. The closest the novel comes to a definition of his trouble is in the early Copenhagen chapters, where his friends are visibly busy at lives and he is visibly busy at the picture of one. Jacobsen, who had himself been a botanist and translator before he was a novelist, writes from the inside of this temperament without pretending it is a virtue.

The failure is not loud. There is no climactic scene of a manuscript thrown in a fire, no public disgrace at a reading, no rival who gets the laurels Niels deserved. The poet's life simply does not arrive. He grows older. He marries. The years pass and the work does not get written. By the time the war comes in chapter 14, the question of whether Niels would have been a poet has lost its meaning; it has been replaced by the question of how to die. The novel is the ancestor of every later fiction about the over-examined inner life — a fault line that runs through Rilke's Malte, through any number of contemporary biographies of unwritten books, and feeds, even now, much of what people read about themselves online.

Where to follow it: Chapter 3 (Bigum, the boy's imagination), Chapter 7 (the public declaration), Chapter 12 (Riva, Madame Odéro).

Four women set the limits of Niels's adult life, and each one is a different kind of loss. The first is Edele, his young aunt, who dies without faith when Niels is a boy and gives him both the position he will hold for the rest of his life and the standard against which he will measure every later test of it. She is, in the novel's economy, the only woman whose dignity in extremity Niels never sees damaged. Everyone after her will be measured against her bedside.

The second is Mrs. Boye — older, witty, worldly, a Copenhagen widow who treats him as a man for the first time and conducts an affair with him that he is too young to understand. She is the figure who gives Niels his apprenticeship in the modern attitudes: the freedom to argue about books, the freedom to think of women as people, the freedom not to apologize for a private life. She also sees, before he does, that he is not the partner she needs. She marries another man, and he learns it from a newspaper. The relationship leaves him more complicated than it found him, which is exactly what such relationships are for in a novel of this kind.

The third is Fennimore, his friend Erik's wife. The novel's most devastating relationship: Niels visits Erik, who has stopped working and started drinking, and Fennimore, who is lonely and bitter, falls into an affair with Niels almost without deciding to. When Erik dies suddenly in an accident on the road home, the affair collapses under what they have both done. Fennimore turns on Niels in a scene of fury the novel takes seriously and never quite forgives. It is the chapter the book never recovers from. The fourth is Gerda, the gentle, religious young woman Niels marries late after years of drifting. She and Niels have a son. She loses her faith on her deathbed and dies frightened; their son dies soon after. Niels sits with each of them through their last hours — the test the novel has been preparing for him since Edele. What he does and does not do at those bedsides is the moral center of the second half of the book. Jacobsen is not building a thesis about women; he is showing what an inwardly lived man does with the people who get close to him, and how each of them, in turn, slips past the horizon he had hoped they would furnish.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (Edele dies), Chapter 11 (Fennimore's denunciation), Chapter 13 (Gerda and the son).

Niels Lyhne is set in a particular country at a particular moment, and the country itself does some of the work the plot does not. Lönborggaard, the country estate where Niels is born, is the first setting and the last; the novel begins there with his parents' courtship and returns there in chapter 12 when, after the catastrophe at Mariagerfjord and the wandering at Riva, Niels comes home an older man. The estate is the still point of an otherwise drifting life — the place the boy's imagination is shaped, the place the man returns to die.

Between the two stays at Lönborggaard the novel moves through the Denmark of Jacobsen's own youth. Copenhagen in the middle chapters is a city of student rooms and salons, of editors and minor poets and Mrs. Boye's drawing room, of Christmas Eve arguments about God with men like Hjerrild, of the long Italian journey by way of Hamburg and the Alps. The Mariagerfjord chapters take Niels to a manor in north Jutland — the wide brown fjord, the heath, the small village with its parsonage and its road — where he visits Erik and Fennimore and where the catastrophe of chapter 11 happens almost in the way an accident on a country road happens, suddenly and out of weather.

And the novel ends in a war: the Second Schleswig War of 1864, in which Denmark lost a third of its territory to Prussia and Austria and which marked the country, in a way it still has not quite recovered from, with the conviction that history is something that happens to small nations from outside. Niels enlists in part because the war makes the inwardly lived life feel finally insufficient, and he is shot in a minor engagement and dies of his wound. Jacobsen, who was twenty in 1864, writes the war chapter without rhetoric; the country has lost, the men come home with nothing, and Niels dies in a field hospital with a priest at the door and a refusal on his lips. Denmark, as a place and as a defeated nation, is the frame the inward life is finally finished inside.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (Lönborggaard, the marriage), Chapter 6 (Mrs. Boye's Copenhagen), Chapter 14 (the war, the deathbed).