hey were bad, but because by much use they have
lost their freshness. They have come to be mere sounds, and no longer
call up vivid conceptions. An author who has the skill and the courage
to undertake this repolishing and resharpening of the tools of language
is, indeed, a public benefactor; but it requires the finest linguistic
taste and discrimination to do it with success. Most authors are
satisfied if they succeed in giving currency to one happy phrase
involving a novel use of the language, or to an extremely limited
number; I know of no one who has undertaken the renovation of his
mother-tongue on so extensive a scale as Jacobsen. To say that he has in
most cases done it well is, therefore, high praise. "Mistress Marie
Grubbe" is not, however, easy reading; and the author's novelettes,
entitled "Mogens and Other Stories," seem to be written, primarily, for
literary connoisseurs, as their interest as mere stories is scarcely
worth considering. They are, rather, essays in the art of saying things
unusually and yet well. They do not seem to me, even in this respect, a
success. There are single phrases that seem almost an inspiration; there
are bits of description, particularly of flowers and moods of nature,
which are masterly; but the studious avoidance of the commonplace
imparts to the reader something of the strain under which the author has
labored. He begins to feel the sympathetic weariness which often
overcomes one while watching acrobatic feats.

In Jacobsen's third book, "Niels Lyhne," we have again the story of a
Danish Rudin--a nature with a multitude of scattered aspirations,
squandering itself in brilliant talk and fantastic yearnings. It is the
same coquetting with the "advanced" ideas of the age, the same lack of
mental stamina, the same wretched surrender and failure. It is the
complexion of a period which the author is here attempting to give, and
he takes pains to emphasize its typical character. One is almost tempted
to believe that Shakespeare, by a gift of happy divination, made his
Prince of Denmark conform to this national type, though in his day it
could not have been half as pronounced as it is now. Whether the Dane of
the sixteenth century was yet the eloquent mollusk which we are
perpetually encountering in modern Danish fiction is a question which,
at this distance, it is hard to decide. The type, of course, is
universal, and is to be found in all countries. Only in the English
race, on bo