That is why his work has retained its
living colors until to-day, without the least trace of fading.
There is in his work something of the passion for form and style that
one finds in Flaubert and Pater, but where they are often hard,
percussive, like a piano, he is soft and strong and intimate like a
violin on which he plays his reading of life. Such analogies, however,
have little significance, except that they indicate a unique and
powerful artistic personality.
Jacobsen is more than a mere stylist. The art of writers who are too
consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a
formal composition, not a plastic composition. One element
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.
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