estate, but now he is in a different frame of mind. He "plays with
muted strings." He still works with his old energy, but his
invention, the marvellous saw, has become "literature" to him. Women
are "literature." He makes no attempt to approach Fru Falkenberg, but
from his obscure place among her other servants he watches mournfully
her gradual deterioration and philosophizes over the causes that led
to it. The captain and his wife have drifted apart from sheer
idleness, because they have no separate pursuits that might take them
away from each other and give their hours together the freshness of
reunions. In the earlier book, the wife, though she is drifting
hither and thither on the breath of longing and discontent, is so
essentially true that she feels even the homage of her humble admirer
as a danger which she must flee from. When the Wanderer comes back,
the idle years have done their work on her. "She had nothing to do,
but she had three maids in her house; she had no children, but she
had a piano. But she had no children," muses the Wanderer. But while
he himself keeps the distance she has imposed upon him, he sees a
younger, more brazen admirer pushing himself into her favor. The
scruples that bind the man past fifty have no existence for the youth
of twenty-two. The Wanderer feels no passion of jealousy, but only a
great weary lassitude and loneliness. He knows that for him it is
evening. He grieves over her ruin, but can do nothing to avert it.
All he can do is to put his whole heart into the humble task of
preparing her home against her possible return, helping the captain
to paint and refurnish the house. His efforts are of no avail; Fru
Falkenberg returns to her husband, but too many fine threads have
been broken, and their life together proves impossible.
After her death the Wanderer seeks the solitude of a forest hut, and
there he sits looking over his life in retrospect after the fashion
of those who know that life is chiefly behind them. "I remember a
lady, she guarded nothing, least of all herself. She came to such a
bad end. But six or seven years ago I had never believed that any one
could be so fine and lovely to another person as she was. I drove her
carriage on a journey, and she was bashful before me, although she
was my mistress; she blushed and looked down. And the strange thing
was that she made me too bashful before her, although I was her
servant. Only by looking at me with her two eyes when she gave me an
order she revealed to me beauties and values beyond all those I had
known before. I remember it even now. Yes. I am sitting here and
thinking of it yet, and I shake my head and say to myself: How
strange it was, no, no, no! And then she died. What more? Then there
is no more. I am left. But that she died ought not to grieve me; I
had been paid in advance for that when, without my deserving it, she
looked at me with her two eyes." A middle-aged sigh breathes through
these words, the sigh of a man who has known life and felt it to be
good and who is not avid for more. He is a letter that has arrived
and is no longer on the way; that which matters is whether its
contents have brought joy or sorrow or whether they have fallen to
the ground without making any impression. He has come too late to the
berryfields, and there is no more to be said. His only hope is that
he may never become senile enough to imagine himself wise because he
is old.
The two volumes contained in "Wanderers" are among the most finished
of Hamsun's production. I have already spoken of the harmony between
nature and the moods of men. In the human drama, too, the artistic
unity is always preserved. It is held throughout in low tones, and
while the Wanderer enters so well into his rôle that we sometimes
forget he is not really a common laborer, we are never allowed to
forget his age. We are always conscious of the gentle enervation
stealing over his faculties and the gradual loosening of his hold on
life. He becomes all the time less and less of a participant in the
story, more and more of an onlooker.
In "The Last Joy" old age is no longer standing at the door; it has
come in and laid its hand upon him. "I am driven by fire and fettered
by ice," writes the Wanderer in the hut where he has retired to make
the big irons within him glow. In truth he is not sure whether he
still has any irons or whether he can still heat them. The ideas that
once rushed in upon him with overwhelming force now come only at the
cost of painstaking labor. Bodily work too has become irksome to him,
and when he begins to long for intercourse with other people, he does
not, like the Wanderer in the earlier books, hire himself out to
service, but goes to spend some idle months at a tourist hotel. There
he learns that his heart is not too old to give him trouble, when he
falls in love with Ingeborg Torsen. He is attracted by her brilliant
beauty and glowing vitality, and he looks at her waywardness with a
deep and tender comprehension which no young man could have given
her. No doubt he might have won her, but he is restrained by the
horror of being grotesque and indulging in antics unbefitting his
age. So he stands by, and again he is fated to see the woman he loves
ruining herself. But Ingeborg Torsen is of tougher fibre than Fru
Falkenberg, and she saves herself in a marriage which brings her
children and heavy household cares. The Wanderer has played the rôle
of her fatherly friend and confidant, but at last he realizes that
she does not need him any more even in this capacity. The knowledge
hurts, but not for very long, and not very severely. His feeling for
her has been real, the loss of her leaves him a little more sad and
lonely than before, but love with him is no longer the inexorable,
devastating passion that sent Glahn and Nagel to their death.
Hamsun has essayed in "Wanderers" and "The Last Joy" to show the
enervating influence of the years. Again and again he tells us that
age can add nothing but only take away, that age is not ripeness, it
is just age--just toothlessness. Yet the impression left on the
reader's mind is that of a personality gradually being detached,
first from the fetters of its own passions, then from absorption in
other people, and finding at last freedom in loneliness.
THE LITERARY ARTIST
The time immediately preceding Hamsun's authorship was, in Norway, a
period of revolt. All the established canons of public and private
morality were being questioned, and literature was made a platform of
debate in a manner never before known. No poet who respected himself
was content to be merely a songster. He felt it incumbent upon him to
be a thinker and a prophet, a moralist and a reformer. Hence every
new novel or drama that appeared propounded some opinion on free love
or marriage, the doctrines of the established church, the upheavel of
the social order, the position of women, the reform of the school
system, or other topic of timely discussion. To realize the change
that had come over literature we need only compare Ibsen in "Brand"
with Ibsen in "Ghosts." In the former he probed the human heart, laid
bare the weaknesses that are common to humanity under all
conditions, and gave poetic form to the ideals that are the same in
all ages. In the latter he took up a special pathological problem on
which his knowledge could be called in question by any medical
expert. In the same vein, Kielland, the creator of the inimitable
Skipper Worse, devoted his talents to demonstrating in a novel the
evils of silence regarding venereal diseases. Björnson was perhaps
the worst offender of all, and yet his preaching was salved by such a
broad and warm humanity that his pedantry could be forgiven. Among
his novels of the period, "The Kurt Family," which begins with
tremendous power, dribbles out into a treatise on hygiene and
morality, but happily the artist in Björnson is too big to be
confined within the limits he has set himself, and occasionally he
bursts out into delightful scenes. In the end, however, we leave
Thomas Rendalen and Nora clasping hands over a mission instead of
making love in the old-fashioned way. In "A Gauntlet" Björnson lets
Svava formulate the single standard of morality; in "A Bankruptcy"
he takes up the subject of business integrity, and so on. Among the
great creative writers, Jonas Lie and Garborg escaped comparatively
unscathed, Jonas Lie because he never could abandon his habit of
portraying life instead of reasoning about it, and Garborg because he
saved himself in time by going back to the soil and the peasantry,
where he discovered a fountain of poetic renewal. The lesser authors
followed the lead of Björnson and Ibsen in their less happy vein and
without their genius. The whole tendency, which, to begin with, had
had the freshness of revolt, of indignation, and of hope, was
becoming smug and standardized.
A scapegoat had to be found for the ills from which the authors'
heroes and heroines were suffering, and Ibsen named it in "A Doll's
House," when he let Nora lay the blame for her foolishness on
"society"--reasoning so out of keeping with the character of the
childish, irresponsible Nora that we can not help wondering how Ibsen
ever made it sound plausible. It was accepted because it fell in with
the prevailing mood of the day. If only society could be reorganized
after a pattern on the reformers' nail all would be well! They forgot
what seems to us at this day obvious to the point of banality, namely
that when Nora had taken a full course in commercial arithmetic, and
Svava had vowed to die unwed, and all the little Millas and Toras and
Thinkas in good Fru Rendalen's school had learned all about the
pitfalls that awaited them, there would still be the devastating
power of love; and when everybody had a job so that young men could
marry at the natural time and young women need not marry except for
love, there would still be those sudden, erratic attractions and
repulsions which work havoc and create tragedies under the most
well-ordered conditions. Moreover, they forgot that, although the
wrongs which cry out for reform may be susceptible to artistic
treatment, the reforms themselves, circumscribing as they do ideals
by finite achievement, are not food meet for the imaginative writer.
A reformed Marshalsea would not have given us any Little Dorrit. In
Norwegian literature, Jonas Lie painted a gallery of splendid women
whose grandeur of outline is thrown into relief by the pettiness of
their surroundings; his Inger-Johanne and Cecilie are tragic figures
when they beat their wings against the bars of convention, but when a
later generation of writers attempted to send Inger-Johanne to normal
school and let Cecilie learn typewriting, the romance was dead.
Against this whole school of literature with its absorption in types
and causes Hamsun protested with all his youthful vehemence and all
his power of drastic ridicule. It would not be correct to say that he
advocated a return to the principle of art for art's sake. Indeed he
has used his own literary work as the vehicle of any opinion that
pressed for utterance in him, from his reflections on the state of
Norwegian literature in "Mysteries" to those on the evils of the
tourist traffic in "The Last Joy." The truth is rather that his
poetic sensibilities recoiled from the smug sapience, the heavy
sententiousness that would rob life of its spontaneity and reduce it
to a pharmaceutical formula: so much democracy, so much popular
education, so much reform legislation, and a perfect state of society
would follow inevitably. He disliked the thinness and bloodlessness
of a literary art that substituted reasoning for inspiration. Poets,
he said, should not be philosophers; they usually philosophized very
badly, as witnessed Ibsen and Tolstoy when they departed from their
function as poets and began to prescribe remedies for the ills of the
world. As for Björnson, he revered him not because of his activities
as a preacher and a moralist, but in spite of them, because of his
humanness, his irrepressibility, his endless power of growth and
renewal. One of Hamsun's most beautiful poems is a homage to
Björnson.
In his later years, Hamsun has himself essayed the rôle of the
preacher, or, as a Norwegian critic put it, he has assumed Björnson's
habit of occasionally chastising the Norwegian nation for its own
good in a fatherly fashion. There is a difference, however, between
him and his predecessors. They were sometimes institutional; he is
always personal. They sometimes attempt to construct the world from
a diagram of planes and angles; he always follows the flowing lines
of the artist. Even when he preaches, his message is in its essence a
part of his poetic impulse. His apotheosis of the man with the hoe
springs from his longing to get close to the soil and draw strength
from primal sources. His impatience with all the modern army of
semi-intellectual workers, the clerks and administrators who wind red
tape and spoil white paper, is in keeping with his craving to brush
aside all that cumbersome machinery which men interpose between the
human will and the physical realities. His strident condemnation of
the movements that are counted liberal in our day is a protest
against the levelling which robs life of its color and sharp
contrasts. His imagination demands the peaks and high lights and can
find no satisfaction in the modern cult of mediocrity or the dull
grey level of utilitarianism.
To Hamsun the abstraction called society, which looms so large in the
liberal thought of to-day, has no existence. He sees only
individuals, and this is one of the reasons why, even when he waxes
didactic, he does not cease to be artistic. Isak, who is his ideal
type of citizen, is also one of his great poetic creations. In his
earlier and more personal work, however, the element of moralizing is
absent. The typical Hamsun hero, a Glahn or a Nagel, is not to be
measured with the yardstick of ordinary standards. What interests
their creator is not the patent virtues and vices which can easily be
catalogued, but the fugitive life-spark that defies analysis and yet
is what constitutes personality. To the poet the intangible and
elusive is the real, the evanescent is the stable. Why do people do
thus and so? "Ask the wind and the stars. Ask the dust on the road
and the leaves that fall, ask the mysterious God of life, for no one
else knows."
The message of Hamsun's later works, which has swept them like a
life-giving stream over a world made arid by pseudo-civilization, is:
Back to nature! Back to the land! The message of his earlier works
was: Back to poetry! Away from problems and causes back to the dream
and the vision! There is no contradiction between the two; both are
equally genuine expressions of a personality which has the richness,
the many-sidedness and spontaneity of life itself.
His method of artistic presentment is as fresh and unhackneyed as his
subject matter. It has always been regarded as the function of the
artist to separate the great from the small, the essential from the
unessential, and to make a character, a human life, or an event stand
out in sculptured clearness freed from the accidental and the
extraneous. With this ideal in view, writers have concentrated their
efforts on the great revealing scenes in the career of their heroes.
Hamsun breaks entirely with this tradition. To him nothing is small
or extraneous. His books are like broad surfaces rippled by many
points of light, and it is only gradually that these points of light,
the tiny but pregnant incidents and the flashing bits of description,
separate and converge to form images. It is a part of his method in
creating an illusion of life to draw his characters into the circle
of our acquaintanceship, not by great dramatic scenes leading up to
a climax, or by sudden opening of abysses as in Ibsen, still less by
long description, but by just such scattered and casual bits of
information as usually build up our knowledge of people and events in
real life. Some trifle is blown in on our consciousness and finds a
lodgement there; it may be a quotation or a word of comment that
stirs our expectancy and prepares us to meet an individual. We see
his shadow falling over the path of another person or feel his
presence like a breath of wind. Perhaps we hear no more of him at the
time, but in another book we meet him again, and now he is the hero,
whom we follow until we think we know him like a dog-eared
schoolbook--until some sudden turn upsets our theories, and we leave
him in the last chapter with a baffled sense of imperfect
understanding. But the author is not yet done with him. In some later
book, which is not a sequel in the ordinary sense but brushes the
fringes of the first, we come upon a passage that throws a backward
light over the ground we have traversed. When we close "Pan," for
instance, we know no more of Edvarda than her lover knows, but when
we read "Rosa" we find the clue to her nature. In the same manner,
Dagny, the heroine of "Mysteries," does not reveal her heart before
we meet her again as one of the subordinate characters in "Editor
Lynge." It is as though a figure that had once sprung from the
author's brain became imbued with such vitality that it continued to
live through his later works. J. P. Jacobsen once said that he was
forced to let all his people die, because death was the only real
end; nothing in life ever ended. Hamsun sometimes resorts to this
method, but even then the dead live on in the memory of those who
have known them. With him nothing is ever finished or finite.
Hamsun's humor is all-pervasive it is the yeast that lightens his
loaf. When Albert Engström, the Swedish humorist, ended an
appreciation of Hamsun by saying, "And finally I love you for the
gleam in your left eye," he found an apt expression for the
personality that shines through Hamsun's works. His humor has less
of wit than of comicality, less of the laugh than the smile with a
gleam in his eye; and he is as ready to smile at his own intensities
as at the weaknesses of humanity. His flights of fancy are tempered
with irony, his real reverence with a playfulness that often takes
the guise of impish irreverence. He loves the far-flung paradox and
the sudden transition of thought by which he astonishes his readers.
The quality of unexpectedness in his thought is well simulated in the
style he has evolved for himself. This style was fully developed when
Hamsun made his first appearance as an author, a fact which adds
interest to Sigurd Hoel's opinion that the dash and brilliance of
"Hunger" was due to American influence. Certainly Hamsun has never
improved upon this style, and it may even be questioned whether its
manner with the light staccato touch, the prevalence of interjections
and sentences consisting sometimes of a single word, has not in some
of his later works hardened into a mannerism that results in a slight
weariness of repetition. Taken as a whole, however, his style has
been a bath of rejuvenation to Northern literature. It has the
naturalness of the spoken word, following blithely the quips and
pranks of thought that give zest to conversation but are usually
flattened out before they reach print. The result is a light
whimsicality, a capriciousness which Hamsun cultivates with subtle
and conscious art, until he attains a sparkle and vividness, an ease
and flexibility never before known in the language of his country.
As the literary artist Hamsun gives us apples of gold in pitchers of
silver, and the metal for both is entirely of his own forging.
THE CITIZEN
HOLDING UP THE MIRROR TO HIS GENERATION
Very early in his career as an author Hamsun struck the keynote of
the message which in his most recent works he has preached with so
much power. The two novels "Editor Lynge" (1893) and "Shallow Soil"
(1893), satirizing certain journalistic and literary phenomena in
Christiania, showed the reverse side of the ideal in which he
believes, and by contrast pointed the way to new standards and new
goals.
The main character in "Editor Lynge" is an intellectual parvenue, a
peasant lad who has risen to the position of editor-in-chief, not by
great and commanding qualities, but by a cheap smartness, a facility
for shoving himself in, and a brazen self-possession that never
deserts him. He is without real convictions and real courage, and yet
manages to hoodwink the public into thinking him a great moral
leader. A scandal-monger under pretence of defending virtue, he
impudently assumes the right to pry into other people's affairs and
spread them large over the pages of his paper.
Some of the obnoxious sides of Lynge's activity we can, of course,
recognize as belonging to the dark side of daily newspaper work
everywhere, although they appear with more transparent naïveté in a
small country. In making him a peasant lad who had risen into another
class without assimilating its standards, who attempted to be a
leader without having inherited the traditions of leadership, Hamsun
had in mind certain phases of a transition period in his own country.
Popular education had opened the professions and government offices
to country lads, but could not in a single generation give them real
culture. They remained mentally homeless and rootless. In Lynge he
portrays a man who has suffered an injury to his soul by a
transplantation which could never be complete. Significantly enough,
Lynge's most ardent admirer is another transplanted country boy,
Endre Bondesen, whose origin is stamped on him in his name (Bondesen,
peasant's son). He too has lost his contact with the soil and thereby
lost the standards of conduct in his own class without acquiring
those in the class he has entered. Their attitude toward the new
possibilities that open before them Hamsun describes as a kind of
triumphant snicker: "Tee-hee-hee! what great fellows we are!"
The author of "Hunger," who a few years earlier had described the
purgatory prepared for the young genius who is struggling to get into
print and to live on the proceeds of his work, did not have to go far
afield for the caustic sting with which he scourged the people who
make themselves broad in the inner courts of journalism and
literature. In "Editor Lynge" he parodied the vaunted power of the
press. In "Shallow Soil" he painted a picture of the small geniuses
who pose on street corners and in cafés and bask in the popular
admiration that is liberally bestowed on even the thinnest rinsings
from the wine-glass of genius. The little poets and artists regard
themselves as divinely exempted from all the sordid but necessary
work of the world, and believe their own slight productions are
sufficient excuse for a parasitical life in vice and idleness. There
is Öien who is so exhausted after squeezing out of his brain a few
small prose poems that he has to be sent to a sanitarium at the
expense of his friends, and there is Irgens, the only one who seems
actually to bring forth a real book occasionally, using his privilege
as a poet to live on the bounty of friends whom he is playing false
in the most dastardly way. With them is a crowd of idlers and
revellers whose chief ambition is to find some one who will pay for
their next meal.
As a contrast to this despicable coterie Hamsun has not raised up a
real genius like his own alter ego in "Hunger," but two young
business men whom he uses to point the moral of regular work and
contact with actualities as the great salvation of modern
civilization. The keynote is struck in the opening chapter with a
finely-etched picture of the awakening city, when Irgens with waxed
mustache and patent leather shoes is strolling home from a night of
debauch and finds Ole Henriksen, alert and clear-eyed, already at his
desk in his father's big office on the dock, and fortunately able to
spare the ten krone bill which the poet needs.
Ole Henriksen and his friend Andreas Tidemand, in their moral
cleanliness, their modesty and chivalry, their loyalty to each other
and generosity to their friends, are not unlike the ideal young
business hero of American novels, but they are afflicted with the
cult of genius which was prevalent in their country at the time. They
like to be seen dining at the Grand with poets and painters and
actors, and gladly assume the privilege of paying the bills for the
crowd, while, with a simplicity that borders on gullibility, they
allow the one his wife and the other his fiancée to be decoyed away
from them by the enterprising poet Irgens. Hanka Tidemand, a really
sweet and chaste nature, has accustomed herself to the rôle of
sympathizing with genius, and when she gives herself to Irgens it is
almost with a sense of being a pious burnt-offering on the altar of
his poetry. Aagot, a fresh, pretty country girl, one of Hamsun's
brightest and youngest heroines, is dazzled by the glamour of the
literary circle into which she is introduced, and becomes the poet's
next victim. Hanka awakens to a realization that it is her husband
whom she loves and returns to him. Aagot, with less stamina, is
completely demoralized, and Ole Henriksen shoots himself rather than
survive the old Aagot, the innocent Aagot, whom he had loved.