little wizened cripple who is like a deformed reflection of Nagel.
This poor devil carries goodness, meekness, and long-suffering to a
point where it merely rouses the beast in the respectable citizens of
the small town and draws on himself brutal persecution; but
underneath his real goodness there is some abyss of evil which we
are not allowed to fathom, but which Nagel understands by a strange
intuition. His efforts to warn and save his protegé are unavailing.
Unsuccessful too are his efforts to win the confidence of Martha Gude
to whom he turns for consolation when Dagny rejects his love. Nagel
is an artist nature, and in the latter part of the book he is
revealed as a violinist with at least a touch of real genius, but he
has been thoroughly disillusioned regarding himself and his art. He
will not be one of the swarm of little geniuses or cater to the
beef-eaters. Whatever possibilities of achievement still lie dormant
in him are completely destroyed by his unhappy love affair.
Written at a time when Hamsun from the lecture platform was carrying
on a campaign against the older poets and the established literary
standards, "Mysteries" is made the vehicle of many iconoclastic
opinions, and Nagel is to a greater extent than most of his heroes
made the mouthpiece of the author's views. In long rambling talks,
sometimes carried on with himself as sole audience, he attacks
Ibsen, Tolstoy, Gladstone, and other great names of the day. In the
books immediately following "Mysteries," "Editor Lynge" and "Shallow
Soil," Hamsun continues his attacks on the ideals of the day, though
in them he directs his blows rather at the small imitators of the
great.
The Hamsun hero in his relation to nature appears in "Pan" (1894).
Lieutenant Glahn, the central figure of the book, is a hunter who has
lived in the forest until he has himself taken on something of the
nature of an animal in the look of his eyes and in his manner of
moving. He is supremely happy in his hut. His senses are saturated
with the warmth of summer days, the fragrance of roots and trees, the
soughing of the woods, and the tiny noises of all the things that
live in the forest. His spirit rests in the sense that in nature all
things go on, tiny streamlets trickle their melodies against the
mountainside though no one hears them, the brook rushes to the ocean,
and everything is renewed each year regardless of human fates. With
the outdoor life comes the primitive love of shelter which we lose
in cities; a warm sense of home ripples through his whole being when
he returns to his but in the evening, and he talks to his dog about
how comfortable they are.
Glahn has found peace in the forest, but this peace is shattered as
soon as he comes in contact with his fellowmen. Awkward and uncouth,
he is unable to comport himself with dignity even in the little group
of merchants and professional men that constitute society in a
Nordland fishing village. He is too proud and simple to cope with the
caprices of the woman he has fallen in love with, and she soon tires
of him. Then Glahn, moved by a childish desire to make her feel his
existence even though it be only by a big noise, arranges a rock
explosion, and this foolish feat accidently kills the only person who
really loves him, the simple woman whom he has met in the forest.
Against his misery now nature, which a few weeks earlier was all in
all to him, has no remedy.
Between the appearance of "Pan" and "Victoria" (1898) lay a period of
productive work resulting in the publication of the dramatic trilogy
centering in the philosopher Kareno and a volume of short stories
entitled "Siesta." The increasing success of Hamsun's own authorship
set its stamp on the next incarnation of his hero, Johannes, the
miller's son in "Victoria" who becomes a poet. Johannes is the only
one of all his youthful heroes who is fundamentally a harmonious
nature and the only one who masters life. The opening paragraph of
the book is like a happier reflection of Hamsun's own dreamy, lonely
boyhood. "The miller's son went around and thought. He was a big
fellow of fourteen years, brown from sun and wind and full of ideas.
When he was grown up he was going to be a match manufacturer. That
was so deliciously dangerous, he might get sulphur on his fingers so
that no one would dare to shake hands with him. He would be very much
respected by the other boys because of his dangerous trade." Johannes
knows all the birds and is like "a little father" to the trees,
lifting up their branches when they are weighed down by snow. He
preaches to a congregation of boulders in the old granite quarry,
and stands dreaming over the mill dam, following the course of the
bubbles as they burst in foam. "When he was grown up he was going to
be a diver, that's what he was going to be. Then he would step down
into the ocean from the deck of a ship and enter strange kingdoms and
lands where marvellous forests were waving, and a castle of coral
stood on the bottom. And the princess beckons to him from a window
and says, 'Come in!'"
Just as Hamsun's own dreams are echoed in this boyish imagery, so his
own authorship in its happiest time when he felt all his powers in
full swing, is reflected in the later story of Johannes. Between the
rude hunter of "Pan" and the poet of "Victoria" there is a lifetime
of development. Johannes is just as impulsive and irrepressible as
the other Hamsun heroes he is quite likely to burst into loud song in
the middle of the night and disturb the neighbors, if a happy idea
strikes him, but he has really found himself in his work. Johannes is
loved by the young lady of the manor with a love that is strong
enough for death, but not strong enough for life. He loses her, but
the loss does not blight his life. The great emotion she has given
him remains with him to deepen and enrich his nature and to become
the life-sap of his blossoming genius.
Very different from the miller's son and yet of the same family is
the happy-go-lucky swain who gives his name to the dramatic poem
"Munken Vendt" (1902). It is to some degree reminiscent of "Peer
Gynt" both in the verse form and in the chief character; but while
Ibsen wrote a bloody satire of the worst qualities in his race,
Hamsun has drawn a lovable vagabond. Munken Vendt is a student and
hunter whose adventures take place in some Norwegian valley at a
period not definitely fixed, but certainly much more romantic than
the present. He is something of a poet, is clever but unable to turn
his gifts to his own advantage, is clothed in rags but always with a
feather in his cap and ready to give away his last shirt, wins
sweethearts wherever he goes but fails the woman who should have been
his mate, and finally throws away his life in a senseless
extravagance of self-sacrifice. There is about Munken Vendt, for all
his foolishness, a proud defiance of suffering, a noble pathos, a
bigness and elevation of thought, which give his portrait a
distinctive place in the Hamsun gallery.
The books I have mentioned here are generally regarded as the most
individualistic of Hamsun's works and as those that reveal his
personality most intimately. Among them should be counted also "The
Wild Chorus" (1904), a slender volume of poems which, with "Munken
Vendt," constitute all that he has written in metrical form. While
Hamsun is most at home in poetic prose, his poems have a wild, fresh
charm and are intensely personal expressions of his views on the two
subjects that engage him most deeply: love between man and woman and
love of nature.
THE HERO AND THE HEROINE
A veritable Shakespearean gallery of women, drawn with subtle insight
and delicate sympathy, is found in Hamsun's works. Though infinitely
varied in their personalities, they move within certain limits and
have certain traits in common. They are intensely feminine with the
nervous fitfulness and spasmodic capriciousness that go with
overwrought sexual sensibilities. Occasionally he carries a woman
through this phase in her life into a warm and passionate
motherliness, but never into a finer and more complex individual
development. All his heroines have in the highest degree the
unfathomable lure of sex, but what they are above and beyond this we
never learn.
The limitation may be less in the heroines themselves than in the
medium through which we are allowed to see them. If it were possible
to mention in the same breath two such antipodes as Jane Austen and
Knut Hamsun, I might recall what has been said of her that she never
attempts to tell us how men talk when they are away from the presence
of women. He never describes a woman when she is alone. We are never
allowed to be present when his heroines commune with their own
thoughts; we never see them from their own point of view and but
rarely from that of a mere observer. We glimpse only so much of them
as they reveal to their lovers, and while in this way they never lose
the glamour and mystery with which they are surrounded, it is
inevitable that they will seem members of a common sisterhood,
inasmuch as their lover, the Hamsun hero, is always the same.
In the character of Edvarda in "Pan" the qualities of the Hamsun
heroine are heavily underscored. She is a wayward girl with erotic
instincts early awakened and with a flighty imagination which sets
her lovers absurd tasks, and yet there is a certain sweetness and a
primitive freshness about her that attract in spite of better
judgment. Her curiosity is roused by Glahn, the hunter with the "eyes
like an animal's"; she invites him to her father's house and draws
him into their social circle. At a picnic she suddenly flies at him
and kisses him in the presence of the assembled village, and after
this outburst she meets him constantly, circles around his hut by
night, and kisses his very footprints. But in a few days her violence
has exhausted itself; she stays away from their trysts; she insults
and ridicules him in her own home as publicly as she has formerly
favored him, and before many weeks have passed, she has engaged
herself to another man. Yet her love for Glahn is real, and presently
she makes frantic attempts to get him back. Glahn's stubborn
resistance is the measure of the suffering she has inflicted upon
him, and when at last she begs him to leave his dog Æsop with her
when he departs, he shoots his four-footed friend and sends her the
body. He seeks consolation with other women, and there is much
sweetness in his relation with Eva, the simple daughter of the
people, but in spite of her humble, unquestioning devotion and his
real tenderness for her, his feeling never touches the heights or the
depths. Even when he is with her, the thought of Edvarda is like a
constantly smarting wound. Yet he continues to resist Edvarda's
advances. When after the lapse of some years she tries to call him
back, he pretends to himself that he does not care, but he goes away
to the Indian jungle and seeks death.
Edvarda reappears in a subsequent novel "Rosa," a torn and lacerated
soul, forever unsatisfied, with strange gleams of generosity
alternating with petty cruelty. She owns that there have been some
moments in life not so bad as others, and chief among these to her
was the time when she was in love with the strange hunter. In her
desperate longing for something that will take her out of herself,
she has spasms of religion, but at last sinks to the level of having
an erotic adventure with a Lapp in the forest and worshipping his
hideous little stone god.
A repellent creature in many ways is Edvarda, and yet the author has
managed to make us feel her through the perceptions of her lover,
who sees--shall we say a figment of his imagination or the real
Edvarda? Behind her flagrant coquetries he discerns a fount of
purity: "She has such chaste hands." Her girlish affectations, even
her clumsiness, have for him a kind of appeal as of something naïve
and helpless. Glahn and Edvarda are both essentially and deeply
primitive though afflicted with a blight of sophistication. Each
answers to a profound need in the other; each has for the other that
one supreme thing which is higher and deeper than virtue and wisdom
and which no one can give in its full intensity to more than one
person out of the world of men and women. Both know that it is so,
and yet something in themselves prevents them from giving and
receiving that which both long for with undying fervor. Glahn's
passion is strong enough to ruin his life, but it is after all not
strong enough to hold fast through good and bad, in happiness and
unhappiness, and win from the relation the fullness of life which no
one but Edvarda could give him. The conflict of love which Hamsun so
often describes is here present in the most clearcut form because
there is nothing outwardly to divide the lovers. Their tragedy is
entirely of their own making.
Dagny in "Mysteries" is superficially a much more attractive young
woman than Edvarda. She is the clergyman's daughter, sweet and
blithe, with a big blond braid and a habit of blushing when she
speaks. All the village loves her, and we can easily imagine her
visiting the sick and befriending the poor. But Dagny is a far more
inveterate coquette than Edvarda. While Edvarda was moved by her own
thirst for excitement and longed rather to be herself subjugated than
to subjugate others, Dagny is a deliberate flirt who can not bring
herself to release any man once she has him in her power. Whether she
loves Nagel or not he does not know, nor does the reader. She weakens
for a moment under the force of his passion, but she holds fast to
her purpose of marrying her handsome and wealthy fiancé, although she
intrigues to prevent Martha Gude from giving Nagel what she herself
withholds. That his death for her sake shakes her nature to its
depths we learn when we meet her again in "Editor Lynge," where she
owns to herself that at one word more she would have given up
everything and thrown herself on his breast.
This one word Nagel never speaks. Like the hero of "Pan" he seeks the
haven of another woman's tenderness. He yearns toward Martha Gude
with all his heart, longs for the peace and rest and purity she could
have brought into his life, and yet he can not tear himself loose
from the passion that binds his soul and senses. Even while he is
pleading with Martha and tries to win her confidence in a scene drawn
with tender delicacy, his thoughts are with Dagny, and when at last
he has won Martha's shy promise, he rushes out into the night to
whisper Dagny's name to the trees and the earth. The love which
gushes forth irrepressibly from some unquenchable fountain in the
soul, which wells out again and again, warm and fresh, however often
its outlet is clogged and muddied, this love Hamsun has often
pictured and seldom with more tragic force than in the unhappy hero
of "Mysteries." And yet, great and real as his love is--great and
real enough to send him to his death--it is not perfect. It is
poisoned by a lingering doubt, which prevents him from putting forth
the one last effort that would have broken down Dagny's resistance.
The lovers in Hamsun's books are never at peace. They never know the
quiet, gradual opening of heart to heart or the intimate communion of
perfect sympathy. With them the conflict always goes on. Gunnar
Heiberg, the Norwegian dramatist, has said that there is no such
thing as mutual love, because no two people ever love each other
simultaneously. When one has grown warm, the other has grown cold;
and when one advances, the other instinctively recoils. With Hamsun
the conflict is more fine-spun than that which Heiberg has painted
rather crassly. The mutual love is there, but it is a thing so wild
and shy and sensitive that it shrinks back into the dark at a touch
even from the hand of the beloved. Or is perhaps the human soul so
jealous of its freedom that it reacts against having another
individuality fasten upon it even in love?
It is these intangible forces rather than the outer facts that divide
the lovers in "Victoria." Victoria is the patrician among Hamsun's
heroines, not only because of her birth and breeding, but by virtue
of her character. She is far too noble for deliberate coquetry, and
yet she tortures Johannes by an apparent capriciousness that seems
out of keeping with her frank, generous nature, while he answers with
coldness and hauteur. Why? Victoria has the secret, agonizing
consciousness of the promise she has given her father that she would
marry a wealthy suitor who can retrieve the fallen fortunes of the
family. Johannes feels his own humble birth and his distance from the
princess of his dreams. Yet these reasons seem hardly sufficient. It
is difficult to imagine that battered old aristocrat, Victoria's
father, forcing his daughter into an unhappy marriage to save his
home, still more difficult to picture the mother, who knows
everything, leading her daughter to the sacrifice. Moreover,
Johannes, though of humble birth, has won fame and has developed into
a man of substantive personality. He is not only Victoria's lover but
her playmate and oldest friend and a favorite of her parents. In fact
the sweetness in the relation between cottage and manor is one of the
things that entitle "Victoria" to its reputation as the most idyllic
among its author's works. Why then do not these four people face the
situation together? Why does not at least Victoria talk it over with
her lover? Afterwards she writes that she has been hindered by many
things but most by her own nature which leads her to be cruel to
herself. But the real reason is that Hamsun's art at this stage of
his development has no use for fulfillment. With fulfillment comes
indifference. It is his to paint the unslaked thirst and the
unstilled longing. Therefore the wonderful letter in which Victoria
lays bare her heart is not sent until after her death, and therefore
she leaves Johannes the legacy of a great tragic feeling which is
forever alive and throbbing because it is forever unsatisfied.
Mariane Holmengraa in "Segelfoss City" belongs with Hamsun's young
heroines. She has some traits both of Edvarda and of Victoria. But in
this much later book the author has begun to take a godfatherly
attitude toward his young hero and heroine; their sparring is playful
rather than tragic, and he leaves them at the entrance to what
promises to be a happy-ever-afterwards.
In "Munken Vendt" the man's waywardness and the woman's pride divide
the two who should have belonged to each other. When Iselin, the
great lady of Os, stoops to befriend the vagabond student, he tells
her brutally that he has no use for her kindness and does not love
her. Many years later, when he returns after a long absence, he again
rejects her advances. In revenge Iselin orders him to be bound to a
tree with uplifted arms until the seed in his hand has sprouted.
Munken Vendt bears the torture without a murmur and curses those who
would release him before she gives the word, but his hands are
crippled by the ordeal, and, partly in consequence of his
helplessness, he meets death not long after by an accident. Then
Iselin walks backward over the edge of a pier and is drowned. Here
the conflict, which appears more veiled in Hamsun's other books, is
clearly expressed in terms of savage, impulsive actions possible only
in a primitive state of society.
A relation of perfect trust and harmony is that of Isak and Inger in
"Growth of the Soil." From their elemental community of interest
develops a really beautiful affection, which Inger's straying from
the straight path can not long disturb. It is almost as though the
author would say: So simple and so primitive must people be in order
to make a success of marriage for the complex and the sophisticated
there is no such thing as happiness in love. A similar lesson might
be drawn from "The Last Joy" where Ingeborg Torsen, a teacher, after
various adventures, marries a peasant and becomes happy in sharing
his humble work and bearing his children.
The rebellion of a man against the monotony of marriage has been
presented again and again by writers great and small from every
possible angle. The inner revolt of a woman against the concrete fact
of marriage, even with the man she has herself chosen, has not often
been pictured, and rarely with the sympathetic divination that Hamsun
brings to bear on the subject. Puzzling and contradictory, but very
interesting is, for instance, Fru Adelheid in "Children of the Age."
She is a woman with a cold manner but with a warmth of temperament
revealed only in her voice. At first we do not know whether she is
attracted to her husband or repelled by him until she reveals that
she has simply reacted against his air of possession. Her husband,
the "lieutenant" of Segelfoss manor, knows that his wife has
enthralled his soul and senses and that no other woman can mean
anything to him, but he can not bring himself to try to patch up what
has been broken. Here we have the conflict between two people of
maturer years who wake up one day to the realization that it is too
late. Life has passed them by and can never be recaptured.
In "Wanderers" the disintegrating influence in the marriage of the
Falkenbergs is habit that breeds indifference, and Fru Falkenberg,
one of Hamsun's most poignantly beautiful and most unhappy heroines,
is of too fine a caliber to survive the bruise to her self-respect.
In "Shallow Soil" Hanka Tidemand is drawn by the false glamour of
genius which surrounds the poet Irgens, and regards her husband as
nothing but a commonplace business man. Here, however, the strength
and depth of the man's love saves the situation. In its happy ending
their story is unique among the author's earlier works.
Among his many wayward heroines Hamsun has painted one woman of calm
and benignant steadfastness, Rosa, the heroine of the two Nordland
novels, "Benoni" and "Rosa." She is so deeply and innately faithful
that she not only clings for many years to her worthless fiancé and
finally marries him, but even after she has been forced to divorce
him and has been told he is dead, she feels that she can "never be
unmarried from" the man whose wife she has once been. It is only
after he is really dead and after her child is born that she can be
content in her marriage with her devoted old suitor, Benoni. Then the
mother instinct, which is her strongest characteristic, awakens and
enfolds not only her child but her child's father. Quite alone in the
sisterhood of Hamsun heroines stands Martha Gude, a spinster of forty
with white hair and young eyes and a child heart. Her goodness and
her purity, which has the dewy freshness of morning, draw Nagel to
her, although she is twelve years older than he.
Side by side and often intermingled with the ethereal delicacy of his
love passages, Hamsun has many pages of such crassness that often, at
the first reading of his books, they seem to overshadow and blot out
the fineness. He treats the subject of sex sometimes with brutal Old
Testament directness, sometimes with a rough, caustic humor akin to
that of "Tom Jones" or "Tristam Shandy," but never with sultry
eroticism or with innuendo under the guise of morality. There is in
his very earthiness something that brings its own cleansing, as water
is cleansed by passing through the ground. Probably most of us would
willingly have spared from his pages many passages in "Benoni" and
"Rosa," "The Last Joy," and more especially in his last book "Women
at the Pump," and even in "Growth of the Soil," but they all belong
to the author's conception of a true picture of life.
"What was love?" writes Johannes in "Victoria." "A wind soughing in
the roses, no, a yellow phosphorescence. Love was music hot as hell
which made even the hearts of old men dance. It was like the
marguerite which opens wide at the approach of night, and it was like
the anemone which closes at a breath and dies at a touch.
"Such was love.
"It could ruin a man, raise him up, and brand him again; it could
love me to-day, you to-morrow, and him to-morrow night, so fickle was
it. But it could also hold fast like an unbreakable seal and glow
unquenchably in the hour of death, so everlasting was it. What then
was love?
"Oh, love it was like a summer night with stars in the heavens and
fragrance on earth. But why does it make the youth go on secret
paths, and why does it make the old man stand on tiptoe in his lonely
chamber? Alas, love makes the human heart into a garden of
toadstools, a luxuriant and shameless garden in which secret and
immodest toadstools grow.
"Does it not make the monk sneak by stealth through closed gardens
and put his eye to the windows of sleepers at night? And does it not
strike the nun with foolishness and darken the understanding of the
princess? It lays the head of the king low on the road so that his
hair sweeps all the dust of the road, and he whispers indecent words
to himself and sticks his tongue out.
"Such was love.