other thing in all the world. It came to earth on a night in spring
when a youth saw two eyes, two eyes. He gazed and saw. He kissed a
mouth, then it was as if two lights had met in his heart, as a sun
that struck lightning from a star. He fell in an embrace, then he
heard and saw nothing more in all the world.
"Love is God's first word, the first thought that passed through his
brain. When he said: Let there be light! then love came. And all that
he had made was very good, and he would have none of it unmade again.
And love became the origin of the world and the ruler of the world.
But all its ways are full of blossoms and blood, blossoms and
blood."
GOD IN NATURE
The fervent love of nature which vibrates through everything Hamsun
has written has endeared him to many of his countrymen who are
repelled by his eroticism and out of sympathy with his social
theories. The lyric rhapsodies in "Pan" minister to a deep and real
craving in the Norwegian temperament, and it is not for nothing that
this book has steadfastly held its own as the first in the affections
of the public. "Fair is the valley; never saw I it fairer," said
Gunnar of Hlidarendi in "Njal's Saga," when he turned from the ship
he had made ready to carry him away from his Iceland home, and went
back to face certain death there rather than save himself by
banishment. To the Northerner, whether he be Icelander, Swede, or
Norwegian, natural environment is the determining influence in the
choice of his home; and not only the poet and artist but the average
middle class individual, clerk, teacher, or store-keeper, will forego
social life and endure much discomfort in order to establish himself
in a place where he can satisfy the love of beauty in nature which is
one of the strongest passions in the Northern races. And yet, however
fair the valley of his home, he will yearn to get away from it
sometimes, to rove alone on skis over the snowfields or bury himself
in a forest hut far from the sound of a human voice. The vast
uncultivated stretches of Norway have enabled the people to follow
their bent and seek outdoor solitude, and while the habit has not
fostered in them the pleasant urban virtues of nations that live more
in cities, it has developed a richness and intensity of inner life
which has flowered vividly in their art and literature.
The solitary hunter of "Pan" is perhaps the most typically Norwegian
among the Hamsun heroes, and in him love of nature has deepened into
a veritable passion. This book, which followed several novels of city
and town life and was written during a summer in Norway after a
sojourn abroad, is the first full-toned expression of Hamsun's
feeling for nature. It has a melting tenderness and a warm intimacy
of knowledge which can only come from much living out of doors, as
the author did when he herded cattle as a boy, and later when he
roved through the country as a vagrant laborer. To read it is like
nothing else but lying on your back and gazing up to the mountains
until you feel the breath of the forest as your own breath and sense
no stirring of life except that which sways the trees above you. The
feeling of being one with nature, of enfolding all things with
affection and being oneself enfolded in a universal goodness, is
typical of Hamsun's attitude. He never paints nature merely as the
scenic background for his human drama, and he never romances about
nature for its own sake. He rarely describes in detail; it is as
though he were too near for description. Like a child which buries
its face on its mother's breast and does not know whether her
features are homely or beautiful, he seems to be hiding his face in
the grass and listening to the pulse-beats of the earth rather than
standing off and looking at it. "I seem to be lying face to face with
the bottom of the universe," says Glahn, as he gazes into a clear
sunset sky, "and my heart seems to beat tenderly against this bottom
and to be at home here." Nothing is great or small to him. A boulder
in the road fills him with such a sense of friendliness that he goes
back every day and feels as though he were being welcomed home. A
blade of grass trembling in the sun suffuses his soul with an
infinite sea of tenderness.
"Pan" is full of lyric outbursts. When Glahn revisits the forest on
the first spring day, he is moved to transports. He weeps with love
and joy and is dissolved in thankfulness to all living things. He
calls the birds and trees and rocks by name; nay, even the beetles
and worms are his friends. The mountains seem to call to him, and he
lifts his head to answer them. He can sit for hours listening to the
tiny drip, drip of the water that trickles down the face of the
rocks, singing its own melody year in and year out, and this faint
stirring of life fills his soul with contentment.
Glahn follows the intense seasonal changes of Nordland. At midsummer,
when the sun hardly dips its golden ball in the sea at night, he sees
all nature intoxicated with sex, rushing on to fruition in the few
short weeks of summer. Then mysterious fancies come over him. He
weaves a strange tale about Iselin, the mistress of life, the spirit
of love, who lives in the forest. He dreams that she comes to him and
tells about her first love. The breath of the forest is like her
breath, and he feels her kisses on his lips, and the stars sing in
his blood. The women who meet him in the forest, Eva and the little
goat-girl, seem to him only a part of nature as they expand
unconsciously to love like the flower in the sun, and he takes what
they give him. Yet there is in him a spiritual craving which these
loves of the forest can not satisfy.
Summer passes; the first nipping sense of autumn is in the air, and
the children of nature too feel the benumbing hand of coming winter,
as if the brief thrill of summer in their veins had already
subsided. But in the solitude of the dark, cold "iron nights" the
Northern Pan wins from Nature the highest she has to give him. As he
sits alone, he gives thanks for "the lonely night, for the mountains,
the darkness, and the throbbing ocean.... This stillness that murmurs
in my ear is the blood of all nature that is seething. God who
vibrates through the world and me."
Though "Pan" is Hamsun's first great rapturous hymn to nature, his
earlier novel "Mysteries" contains some beautiful passages that may
be considered a prelude to it. Nagel is absorbed in the affairs of
men and smitten with the modern social unrest. He lives the life of
books and thoughts and is no half-savage hunter like Glahn, but he
seeks in nature the sense of vastness and infinity that his soul
longs for. He loves to lie on his back and feel himself sailing off
into the sea of heaven. "He lost himself in a transport of
contentment. Nothing disturbed him, but up in the air the soft sound
went on, the sound of an immense stamping-mill, God who trod his
wheel. But in the woods round about him there was not a stir, not a
leaf or a pine-needle moved. Nagel curled up with pleasure, drew his
knees up under him, and shivered with a sense of how good it all
was.... He was in a strange frame of mind, filled with psychic
pleasure. Every nerve in him was alive, he felt music in his blood,
felt himself akin to nature and the sun and the mountains and
everything else, felt himself caught up in a vibration of his own ego
from trees and hillocks and blades of grass. His soul expanded and
was like a full-toned organ within him. He never forgot how the soft
music literally rose and fell with the pulsing of his blood."
As in "Pan" and "Mysteries," so in his other books Hamsun makes us
feel the moods of nature through those of his people. In "Victoria"
we are always conscious of the colorful background of heather and
rowan and sparkling blue sea because the minds of Johannes and
Victoria are steeped in the beauty of the land where they have played
as children. In the big Nordland novels, on the other hand, we meet
people who take no direct interest in their natural environments,
and here the author is more chary of his nature lyricism. The
careless, childish, volatile fisherfolk and day labourers in "Benoni"
and "Rosa" and in "Segelfoss Town" take the glory of the sea and the
cliffs with their swarms of white-winged birds very much for granted
and have nothing to say about them, but unconsciously their life
rises and falls with the seasons. "It was spring again" is the almost
invariable prelude to action in the Nordland novels. The warm nights
had come; the red sunlight was over sea and land; the boys and girls
went about singing and laughing and flirting the whole night long,
and even the old felt the stirring of youth in their blood, the
unquenchable old villain Mack got "the strong look" in his eyes
again, and poor old Holmengraa went on devious paths. There is a
glamour and a fairy-tale atmosphere always resting over Nordland
summers, but when autumn comes, a numbed torpor steals over
everything, as if people, like nature, were only lying dormant
waiting for spring to wake them again.
Even that glamour which redeems the littleness in "Segelfoss City"
has died in "Women at the Pump," the author's latest book, in which
he depicts the petty mean, degenerate people of a small town that
seems afflicted with dry rot, and the total absence of feeling for
nature has much to do with the grey and rayless effect of this novel.
In "Growth of the Soil," on the other hand, there is a wonderful
sense of the nearness of nature. Isak could not put his reflections
into words, but a simple awe takes possession of him in the
loneliness of the forest and the moors, where he "meets God." As
Geissler expresses it, the plain people of Sellanraa meet nature
bare-handed in the midst of a great friendliness, and the mountains
stand around and look at them.
Yet Hamsun's feeling for nature is by no means a mere primitive
emotion; it is rather the reasoned expression of a man who has found
his way back to the real sources of life. In its subtlest and most
artistic form it appears in the "Wanderer" books. The overemphasis
and extravagance which could, in "Pan," verge on the hysterical are
gone, and instead there is a mellow sweetness, a poignant tenderness
as of a man who knows that his own autumn has arrived and that winter
is on the way. It is Indian summer in the opening chapter of "Under
the Autumn Star." The air is mild and warm and tranquil, everything
breathes peace after the brief, intense effort of summer to put forth
growth. Round about stand the red rowans and the stiff-necked flowers
refusing to know that fall is here. In these paragraphs the keynote
of the book is given, and throughout this book and its sequel, "A
Wanderer Plays with Muted. Strings," the harmony with nature is
preserved. For all the charm of the story and the pungency of the
reflections on various themes, that which lingers in the reader's
mind is the long autumn road, the nights in the fragrant hayloft, the
smell of freshly felled trees, and the fire in the woods where the
Wanderer is alone at last with nature.
Hamsun loves the warm, expansive moods of nature and has confessed to
a positive dislike of ice and snow. Descriptions of winter are rare
in his books, but the opening chapter of "The Last Joy" finds the
Wanderer snowbound in a hut far up in the mountains, and although he
watches the spring awakening of nature, he knows that in his own life
winter has come to stay. For that very reason he feels as never
before a great upwelling of affection for all things around him,
animate and inanimate. He can sit for hours merely watching the
course of the sun, or speculating about some tiny bug which was born
and will probably die on the one leaf it inhabits, or marvelling at
the wonder of reproduction in a little plant that is releasing its
seed. A lonely little path straggling through the forest affects him
like a child's hand in his own. A lacerated pine stump rouses his
pity as he stands gazing at it until his other, civilized self
reminds him that his eyes have probably acquired the simple animal
expression of people in the Stone Age. He walks over a hillside and
feels a tenderness emanating from it. "It is not really a hillside,
it is a bosom, a lap, so soft is it, and I walk carefully and do not
tramp heavily on it with my feet. I am filled with wonder at it: a
great hillside so tender and helpless that it allows us to use it
as a mother, allows an ant to crawl over it. If there is a boulder
half covered with grass, it has not just happened here; it lives here
and has lived here long."
As he walks on, he begins to feel a strange influence about him.
"Something vibrates softly in me, and it seems to me as so often
before out of doors that the place has just been left, that some one
has just been here and has stepped aside. At this moment I am alone
with some one here, and a little later I see a back that vanishes in
the forest. It is God, I say to myself. There I stand, I do not
speak, I do not sing, I only look. I feel that my face is filled with
the vision. It was God, I say to myself. A figment of the
imagination, you will reply. No, a little insight into things, I say.
Do I make a god of nature? What do you do? Have not the Mohammedans
their god and the Jews their god and the Hindoos their god? No one
knows God, my little friend, men only know gods. Now and then it
seems to me that I meet mine."
In one of his oriental travel sketches Hamsun has said that unlike
most people he never gets through with God, but feels the need of
brooding over him under the starry heavens and listening for his
voice in the breath of the forest. In "The Last Joy" the sense of God
in nature is always present in the background of the narrator's
thoughts. In the great stillness, where he is the only human being,
he feels himself expanding into something greater than himself, he
becomes God's neighbor. The last joy is to retire and sit alone in
the woods and feel the friendly darkness closing around him. "It is
the lofty and religious element in solitude and darkness that makes
us crave them. It is not that we want to get away from other people
because we can not bear to have any one near us--no, no! But it is
the mysterious sense that everything is rushing in on us from afar,
and yet all is near, so that we sit in the midst of an omnipresence.
Perhaps it is God."
WITH MUTED STRINGS
The superiority of youth over age has been a cardinal doctrine with
Hamsun. How seriously he has taken it is best shown by the fact that
four of his plays and three of his novels are devoted to the theme.
First in point of time is the dramatic trilogy, "At the Gate of the
Kingdom" (1895), "The Game of Life" (1896), and "Sunset" (1898),
presenting three stages in the life of the philosopher Kareno. Of
later date are the three novels, "Under the Autumn Star" (1906), "A
Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings" (1909), and "The Last Joy" (1912),
each marking a milestone in the progress of the Wanderer toward the
land of old age. Quite alone stands "In the Power of Life" (1910), a
drama which shows an aging courtezan desperately trying to retain a
few shreds of her power over men.
Kareno, a native of Nordland, has Lapp blood in his veins, which may
in part account for the latent weakness that comes out in him as soon
as the strong impetus of youth has died down. At twenty-nine he
rushes into print gallantly to attack the prevailing ideals of his
day, such as eternal peace, the apotheosis of labor, the humanitarian
efforts to preserve life however worthless, and in general the gods
of liberalism. Spencer and Stuart Mill, who were at that time names
to conjure with, he called mediocrities devoid of inspiration. His
most violent onslaughts were reserved for the doctrine that youth
should honor old age. For these theories he sacrificed wife and home,
career and friends.
In the following play we find him, now thirty-nine, as tutor to a
rich man's children in Nordland. His intellect is already befuddled.
By means of a glass house provided with powerful lenses, which his
patron is helping him to build and equip, he is trying to achieve by
material, technical contrivances the clarity which, after all, he has
proved himself unable to evolve from within. His moral fibre too is
weakened. At twenty-nine he allowed his young wife to leave him
rather than temporize with his conscience; now he becomes absorbed in
a passion for his patron's daughter, Teresita, a wanton, capricious
woman of the Edvarda type but without Edvarda's sweetness. Formerly
he refused to save his home from impending catastrophe by a proferred
loan from his comrade Jerven, because the money was the fruit of
Jerven's apostacy from their common cause; now he is ready to accept
bounty from any source.
A fire which consumes his house and manuscripts terminates his work
in Nordland, and we hear no more of him, before, in the last of the
three plays, we find him in Christiania again. He is now fifty, and
his deterioration is complete. He is settling down to a life of smug
Philistine contentment, enjoying the fortune which his wife has in
the meantime inherited, and accepting the daughter who is the fruit
of his wife's unfaithfulness rather than quarrel with the comforts
she provides for him. Kareno has somehow managed to preserve a
semblance of his former fire and with it a reputation for prowess as
a dauntless fighter, but in his heart he is already out of sympathy
with the cause of youth and ready to turn traitor at the first
beckoning of really substantial honors.
The other characters have gone through the same process of
dissolution. Jerven has continued his inevitable downward course. His
one time fiancée, Miss Hovind, who broke with him because of his
apostacy, has become a silly old maid who glories in her former
connection with the famous professor. Only Höibro, the man outside
the parties who is still at variance with everything accepted, has
kept himself at fifty-one unspotted from the world.
The weakness of the trilogy lies partly in the character of Kareno
which shows not so much the softening of fibre due to old age as the
revelation of a latent meanness, and partly in the nature of the
principles for which he is expected to sacrifice himself. It is true
that he feels in his youth the reality of the spiritual above the
temporal, and in the face of impending ruin he can say: "It is as
though I had been alone on earth last night. There is a wall between
human beings and that which is outside them, but this wall is now
worn thin, and I will try to break it down, to knock my head through
it and see. And _see_!" But what he sees is only temporalities, not
eternal verities. Granted that the liberal movement had become stale
and needed a renewal, there was nothing in that fact to create a
supreme issue. It was one of many movements that have run and will
run their natural course till the inevitable reaction sets in. There
was no great scientific truth or fiery religious passion involved,
nothing to call forth a Galileo or a Luther. As with Kareno, so with
Jerven and Miss Hovind. A girl who breaks with her lover because he
weakens in his denunciations of Spencer and Stuart Mill is a strain
on the reader's credulity.
There is only one of the vaunted principles in the trilogy which has
a universal application, namely the doctrine that a man at fifty is
useless and should resign his place to the young, but this doctrine
Kareno can hardly be expected to hold with the same uncompromising
rigor at fifty as at twenty-nine. The whole situation therefore
becomes farcical, and we can hardly wonder that the middle-aged
philosopher wipes his brow when his young quondam admirer reads in
his ear the following quotation from his own early works:
"What do you demand of the young? That they shall honor the old. Why?
The doctrine was invented by decrepit age itself. When age could no
longer assert itself in the struggle for life, it did not go away and
hide its diminished head, but made itself broad in exalted places and
commanded the young to do honor and pay homage to it. And when the
young obeyed, the old sat up like big sexless birds gloating over the
docility of youth. Listen, you who are young! Set a match under the
old and clear the seat and take your place, for yours is the power
and the glory for ever and ever.... When the old speak, the young are
expected to be silent. Why? Because the old have said it. So age
continues to lead its protected, carefree existence at the expense of
youth. The old hearts are dead to everything except hatred for the
new and the young. And in the worn-out brains there is still strength
left for one more idea, a sly idea: that youth shall honor
toothlessness. And while the young are hampered and thwarted in their
development by this cynical doctrine, the victors themselves sit and
gloat over their marvellous invention and think life is very fine
indeed."
Written while Hamsun was yet under forty, the three Kareno plays are
an aftermath of his own struggles as a young man to break into the
ring of the accepted. They are an outcry against the older men who
had once been iconoclasts, but had standardized their iconoclasm, who
had once been advocates of free thought, but had forged free thought
into a weapon to strike down all who differed from themselves. It is
therefore no accident that Kareno's onslaughts are directed against a
stereotyped liberalism. The trilogy is significant as a subjective
expression of a certain phase in the author's development, but in
psychological interest it is far inferior to the Wanderer books. In
these Hamsun has rid himself of all bitterness and has found a sweet
and mellow tone that is singularly appealing. He is no longer a
theorist but a poet, that is he is himself at his best and highest.
He no longer vaunts a principle but portrays a human being.
The Wanderer is a man who renounces the cafés and boulevards and,
after eighteen years of city life, revisits the haunts of his youth
disguised as a vagrant laborer. Thus he divests himself of whatever
pomp and circumstance surround a successful middle-aged man and well
known citizen, in order to meet youth on equal terms simply as Knud
Pedersen, a man whose muscles are a little stiff and whose beard is
getting grey. "Under the Autumn Star" and "A Wanderer Plays with
Muted Strings," bound together in the English edition under the
common title "Wanderers," relate experiences lying five or six years
apart. In the first the narrator is nearing fifty; in the second he
has passed the mark. The Wanderer in "Under the Autumn Star" is still
full of vim and vigor, loves to feel his contact with the soil again,
and glories in his prowess, notably in the invention of a wonderful
saw which absorbs him. He becomes enamored of Fru Falkenberg, wife of
the captain on whose estate he has taken service, and is young enough
to make frantic attempts to win her, even throwing off his disguise
and appearing in his own character; but when she begs him not to
pursue her, he desists.