other works based on certain local conditions and phases of
development in his own country. The cult of pseudo-genius which it
ridicules is not so prevalent among us that its satire can come home
to us as it did to the author's countrymen. The book will always
appeal, however, by virtue of its literary qualities. The critic Carl
Morburger calls it Hamsun's most finished literary masterpiece. The
subtle delineation of character, the vividness in the portrayal of
contrasting personalities, and the fresh, natural tone save it from
the sententiousness into which a novel with so evident a purpose
would have fallen in the hands of a lesser artist.
The two friends Ole Henriksen and Andreas Tidemand, who are chosen to
illustrate the mental and moral tone acquired from practical work,
are both merchants. It is the occupation which, next to husbandry,
makes the greatest appeal to the author's imagination. He does not,
however, tell us much of the achievements of his heroes. His idea of
the merchant's business as the life-giving artery of a district is
not developed until many years later in the wonderfully ramified
pictures of whole communities, usually with a Nordland background, in
which the trading magnate nearly always occupies the centre of the
stage.
In "Pan" we first encounter the great Mack family which pervades the
Nordland novels. Edvarda's father, the master of Sirilund, is
something of a fop with his diamond shirt studs and his pointed shoes
among the boulders, and rather more of a villain, a man to whom the
neighborhood pays its tribute of wives and maidens as a Zulu tribe to
its chieftain, but for all that a small superman by whose brains the
community exists. In "Dreamers" (1904) we see at close range his
still greater brother Mack of Rosengaard, who hovers like a
fairy-tale in the background of the other books. But Mack of Sirilund
is one of the characters that Hamsun has not been able to leave, and,
fourteen years after the publication of "Pan," we meet him again in
"Benoni" (1908) and "Rosa" (1908). He is a providence and a small god
to the simple people of the neighborhood. Whatever else falls, Mack
stands impregnable as a rock. His existence among them is an earnest
that somehow the world will go on, even if the fishing fails, and
boats are lost at sea. Whoever has no money goes to Mack for credit,
and who has money entrusts it to him; for banks are distant and
mysterious institutions, Mack is real and near. His business is in
fact built on the small sums thus put at his disposal, but he never
deviates from his attitude of conferring a favor upon the lender. His
self-possession, his elegance of dress, his polish of manner are
unfailing. There are ugly pages in Mack's history, ruined homes, and
neglected children who have the blood of the Macks in their veins,
but it is part of the man's mastery that, although every member of
his household knows of his orgies, he can yet command respect--and
Ellen the chambermaid loves him. The description of Mack's erotic
adventures, in spite of the humor Hamsun lavishes on the subject,
occupies an uncomfortably large amount of space in these books, but
they serve the author's purpose of throwing into relief the power of
the man who, in spite of everything, remained a ruler by divine
right. When his scandals became too rampant, his daughter Edvarda,
then in one of her religious moods, attempted to remove the cause of
offense and stirred up a revolt among her father's trusted people.
Mack went to bed and simulated illness, but the confusion resulting
from the absence of his directing hand was such that everybody was
glad to restore the old order and have Mack at his desk again.
Hamsun likes to portray the patrician type to which Mack belonged by
inherited instincts, but he also enjoys seeking out those
tough-fibred people who are not descendants but become ancestors.
Among them Mack's partner Benoni occupies the first place. Hamsun's
playfulness has never been more delightful than when he traces the
evolution of Post-Benoni, who carries the King's mail, to Benoni
Hartvigsen and B. Hartvigsen, then to B. Hartwich, the partner of
Mack and the husband of the great man's niece, Rosa. A big hairy
creature, full of physical vim, strutting and vainglorious, wearing
two coats to church in summer to show that he can afford it, boasting
of his house and his furnishings patterned on Mack's, Benoni is with
all his absurdities sound at the core. He has a childlike goodness
and freshness that seems drawn from some unspoiled well of humanity.
Benoni has his reverses. Occasionally his divinity and patron Mack
finds it necessary to thrust him back into the nothingness from which
he has drawn him, and people begin to call him plain Benoni again.
Then his strutting waxes feeble for a while, but he soon rebounds
and rises higher than before. It is almost unfair that his fallen
fortunes are repaired by the ridiculous transaction of selling a
mineral mountain to a mad Englishman for a fabulous sum; we feel that
Benoni is quite capable of retrieving his losses by his own efforts;
but this is a part of the melodramatic strain which belongs to
Nordland, the country of sudden fortunes. When, in the last chapter
of "Rosa," the young wife, in the dignity of her first motherhood,
gently takes the reins of the household, we feel that Benoni in the
future will prance with spirit, but with discretion too. Benoni and
Rosa with the "prince" in the cradle are firmly rooted in their
environs and have the power of growth. In such people Hamsun sees the
future. They are the human stuff that endures.
In contrast to Benoni we have Rosa's first husband Nikolai Arentsen.
He too is of humble birth, but while Benoni stays in the place where
he has vital contacts, Nikolai pushes himself into a class where he
will never be assimilated. Benoni applies his naturally good brain
to wrestling with the problems near at hand, those of the fish and
the sea. He is engaged in the productive work of helping to haul in
the harvest of the deep. Nikolai learns a great many things by rote.
He studies law and comes home to practise in his native place. At
first he does a thriving business on the easily stimulated mutual
distrust of primitive people, but when they learn that it costs more
to go to law than to make up their quarrels, their distrust is turned
on the lawyer. His income soon dwindles to nothing, and the small
world in which he has really no necessary function goes on without
him. He has entered one of the professions that Hamsun calls sterile.
Hamsun frequently contrasts two brothers one of whom has stayed close
to the soil while the other has tried to work his way into a
supposedly higher sphere. In "Segelfoss City," there is L. Lassen who
is unmade from a good fisherman and not completed to a bishop, while
his brother Julius who has stayed in his natural environment and
become a shrewd hotel-keeper has at least some contact with the
realities. In "Growth of the Soil" Sivert on the farm is contrasted
with Eleseus in the office, and always to the advantage of the
former. In "Women at the Pump" there is a similar pair of brothers.
Abel, the younger, a sweet-tempered, sturdy urchin with a natural
pride in killing snakes, has had to shift for himself and make his
own decisions almost from the day he left the cradle, and has
developed into a fine young man. When the time is ripe, he slips
naturally into the place in the community where he belongs, as the
helper of an old blacksmith who needs a pair of young arms and a
bright young face in the smithy. Within a short time Abel is the
mainstay of the family. Frank, the elder, has been put through school
and has learned a number of languages which, whether living or dead,
will always remain dead to him. He is one of the children who are
being "prepared for farming, fishing, cattle-raising, trade,
industry, family life, dreams and religious worship" by learning "the
number of square miles in Switzerland and the dates of the Punic
wars" and similarly vital facts. He "knew nothing of red outbursts,
he never rose to the skies or fell down again, never went to the
bottom or floated up. He never exposed himself to anything and had
nothing to avoid. Instead of getting out of a scrape, he never got
into one. Cleverly done, meagrely done. God had prepared him for a
philologist."
It seems curious that Hamsun the poet should never have reminded
Hamsun the sociologist that dreams have an intrinsic value, that the
aspirations which carried Frank and Eleseus and the future Bishop
Lassen out from their homes were in themselves a moral asset inasmuch
as they stimulated not only those who went out but also those who
stayed behind and had their horizons opened by contact with the
outside world. It is almost as though he denounced the circulation of
blood between the country and the city as bad in itself. The reason
is, of course, that he has in mind certain standards and valuations
which he combats as wrong and false. He ridicules the self-delusion
of those who imagine they are educated because they have learned a
number of things which they can repeat from books, and who suppose
that "culture" consists in certain inherited or acquired customs that
have nothing to do either with beauty or distinction, but are simply
an absence of the marked, the characteristic, the splendid, or the
primitive,--all that which is neither high nor low, but everlastingly
on the same dull grey level of respectability. He derides those
"whose hands are so sick that they can do nothing but form letters"
and who think there is something superior about that "slave's work"
writing. "It is finer to write and read than to do something with
your hands, says the upper class. The lower class listens. My son
shall not till the earth from which everything that crawls subsists;
let him live on other people's work, says the upper class. And the
lower class listens. Then one day the roar awoke, the roar of the
masses. The masses have themselves learned the arts of the upper
class; they can read and write. Bring here all the good things of the
earth, they are ours!"
In "The Last Joy" Hamsun discusses modern education as it affects
women. Ingeborg Torsen has been put through the mill of normal school
together with a class of girls, some richer, some poorer than
herself, but all intent on graduation and a position where they can
put other girls through the same mill. She was educated away from the
simple, healthy life of her mother and became a teacher without
interest in her work, while her thwarted longing for marriage and
motherhood became perverted into morbid desire. In his estimate of
the so-called advancement of woman Hamsun reaches some of the same
conclusions as Ellen Key, but in his preoccupation with the physical
side of sex he fails to see what Ellen Key always insists on, that
motherhood consists not only in bearing but in rearing, and that
teaching is a profession which more than any other gives women who
are not mothers an outlet for the moral qualities of motherhood. He
fails to remember also that women as well as men may burn with the
pure fire of a thirst for knowledge. Nevertheless, as a satire of
a certain phase in the woman movement, when any other work was
considered superior to that of the home, Hamsun's attack contains a
kernel of bitter truth.
As the only real aristocracy Hamsun sees the big landed proprietors
who ruled over their little world as kings. He does not idealize the
origin of the great families, but thinks that from pride and will
power an aristocracy may develop, provided there is money. "But it
must be wealth, not pennies. Pennies are only to coddle the race and
protect it from wet feet." In "Children of the Age" (1913), and its
big two-volume sequel "Segelfoss City" (1915) we follow the decline
of a big family who once owned all the land that Segelfoss city was
standing on. The first Willatz Holmsen was a lackey who acquired
money somehow and built a palace. The second Willatz Holmsen acquired
culture. He added white columns to the palace and filled it with
books and works of art. With him the rapid economic rise of the
family reached its height. The third acquired personal distinction
and a sense of noblesse oblige which his failing fortune could not
support. The lieutenant, as he is called, whose life we follow in
"Children of the Age," is a proud, lonely figure, unable to confide
to any one that a Willatz Holmsen might not be able to do all that
was expected of him, and mortgaging his house rather than disappoint
any one who looked to him for funds. The fourth is a musician. He is
an aristocrat in his personal habits and in his sense of obligation,
but he has lost his father's gift of command because he has no longer
the old faith in the divine right of his family to rule. He can knock
down an impudent workman, but he can not quell by his mere presence
as his father could. Democracy has seeped into his tissues. He still
flings gifts about in a lavish way as the Holmsens have always done,
but he avoids occasions where he would hold the centre of the stage,
and is at the same time a little hurt that he is not a wonder and a
fairy-tale to the people as his father and mother were. He has the
modern self-doubting habit of mind, and is glad to resign the
position of leadership to the new man, the captain of industry,
Holmengraa. Willatz Holmsen the fourth is, both in his fine, generous
personal character and in his real genius as a musician, an
illustration of Hamsun's theory that wealth in several generations
will produce culture of heart and mind, but the young man's
development carries him inevitably away from Segelfoss, and the
brilliant career which is foreshadowed for him falls outside the
frame of the story. As village potentates the Holmsens have had their
day. Their dynasty is ended.
"King Tobias," as Holmengraa is called, appears in a golden cloud of
romance. He is a peasant's son who has acquired a fortune in South
America and comes back to his native place, turning the sleepy little
village into a small city overnight. His ships bring grain from the
Baltic; his mills grind day and night; he cuts timber; he establishes
a telegraph station, and has work and money for everybody. But
Holmengraa comes in contact with a new power which he is not strong
enough to resist, that of the rising proletariat. His men read the
"Segelfoss Times" which tells them that all the world rests on their
toil, that they are wage slaves, and their employer is an
extortioner. They make larger and larger demands; they become
insolent and scoff at King Tobias who has now sunk to be plain Tobias
to them. Unfortunately Holmengraa, who is a modest, fine-fibred man
and very sympathetically drawn, has his weakness. Like the great
Mack, he is unable to leave the girls alone, but he has not Mack's
brazen assurance, and his position is gradually undermined. It is
found that his fortune is not so great as first supposed, and his day
is short.
So village dynasties rise and fall. At last comes one that is not too
fine-grained or sensitive. Theodor Jensen with the sobriquet "paa
Bua" (in the store) is a selfmade man like Benoni, apparently
slighter and frothier, more of a parody, but in reality possessed of
a harder and more slippery cleverness than that of the expansive
Benoni. Theodor rises out of the most malodorous surroundings, but,
like Benoni, is himself sound, on the whole. The village laughs at
his airs, his rings, his scarf pin made of a gold coin, his absurd
pretensions; but little Theodor has what the former dynasties lacked,
a faculty for meeting every situation as it arises. He has pluck and
shrewdness and is not entirely lacking in generosity. He builds a big
store, and all the affairs of the village revolve about him. He
extends credit, and servant girls are divided into two classes, those
who have credit at Theodor's and those who have not. He brings the
world to Segelfoss: silk dresses, canned goods, store shoes,
fireworks, a theatrical troupe--everything that can be named. In a
year of depression, when everybody was in a funereal frame of mind,
Theodor bethought himself of tomb-stones, and presently the graveyard
blossomed out with a sudden forest of slabs and crosses with "Rest in
Peace" and "Loved and Missed" on graves that had been neglected for a
quarter of a century. Theodor knows what the people want. The future
is his.
Hamsun has a kindness for this merry privateer and enjoys blowing the
wind that swells little Theodor's sails, but underneath the froth
and sparkle there is a bitter didactic purpose in this book. It shows
the reverse side of modern progress, when a backward community learns
to use the material conveniences of the age without any corresponding
mental advancement. The workingmen have learned to make demands, but
while they refuse to yield the old submission to authority, they have
not learned any sense of responsibility to their own conscience, and
therefore grow more and more lazy and inefficient. The women forget
to cook and sew while they buy flimsy readymade clothes at the store
and feed their families on food that is bought ready cooked and
chewed and almost digested. Neither men nor women know what to do
with their leisure, and general demoralization is the result.
"Segelfoss City," with its dying aristocracy, its captain of
industry, and its spoiled working class, is a miniature mirror of the
modern world as Hamsun sees it. In the same category belongs his last
book, "Women at the Pump" (1920), but there the deterioration is more
complete. The events recorded are only a grey dribble from a leaky
town pump. "People in big cities have no idea of standards and
dimensions in the small towns," so runs the opening paragraph. "They
think they can come and stand in the market-place and smile and be
superior. They think they can laugh at the houses and the pavements,
indeed they often think so. But do not old people remember the time
when the houses were still smaller and the pavements still worse? And
there at least C. A. Johnson has built himself a tremendously big
house, a perfect mansion. It has a veranda below and a balcony above
and scroll work all the way around the roof.... The small town too
has its great men, its solid families with their fine sons and
daughters, its immutableness and authority. And the small world is
absorbed in its great men and follows their career with interest. The
good small town folk are really acting to their own advantage in
doing this; they live in the shelter of authority, and it is good for
them."
What indeed would the little town have been without Consul Johnson?
What glory would there have been in life without his silk hat and
his rotund face beaming on the crowds as they make way respectfully?
When the story opens, the village is assembled to watch the departure
of his steamer, the Fia, for foreign waters. While they wait, the
women at the village pump, standing with buckets filled and hands
under their aprons, are discussing a great event that happened six or
seven years ago, but is still undimmed in memories not over-burdened
with weighty affairs. It was the day when "Johnson on the Dock" was
made consul, and everybody who came into his store was treated with
sweet cakes and a drink. Since then other consuls had sprung up like
mushrooms; there was "Barley-Olsen" and Henriksen at the Works, but
Consul Johnson's glory outshone that of all others, and his scandals
only gave an added nimbus to his name. The measure of difference
between Hamsun's earlier books and "Women at the Pump" may be seen in
the distance between the really magnificent reprobate Mack and the
flabby Consul Johnson, a man who has become a village magnate by the
accident of owning the only store in the neighborhood. But village
dynasties rise and fall, and the Johnson dynasty seems tottering,
when it is saved by the consul's young, aggressive, thoroughly modern
son, Schelderup, who suddenly comes home and raises the house of
Johnson to its old glory. The consul's day is over, however, and it
is pathetic to see him shrink back into the obscurity from which
accident had drawn him. In his fall he appeals to us as never before,
and Hamsun makes us feel that the foolish old man is, in his
innermost nature, better than the hard-headed son.
Schelderup brought order into his father's affairs, but into some he
brought disorder. He stopped various pensions that were being paid
for reasons known to Consul Johnson and sometimes to the women at the
pump. Among other drastic steps, he abolished the sinecure at the
Johnson warehouse held by the cripple Oliver, and the annual subsidy
paid to Oliver's son, the philologist Frank. It is Oliver who is the
"hero" of the book; in him "the little town sees itself realized."
Oliver was once a sailor with powerful arms, a dashing young blade
with a pretty sweetheart and his life before him. He goes away on
Consul Johnson's Fia and comes back a wreck. He has lost a leg and
has sustained another injury not yet the property of the village
gossips: he is unable to become a father. Oliver comes home to take
up his life on shore, to fish a little, to lie and cheat his way
through life, to starve sometimes, to "find" sometimes the property
of others, to marry his old sweetheart Petra as a screen for another
man, none less in fact than the great Consul Johnson himself, and to
buy back his mortgaged home as the price of her favors to another
great man of the village, the member of parliament and future cabinet
minister Fredriksen. He lives on the memories of the days when he
went to sea and on two events that have happened to him since his
return. He has once won a tablecloth in a lottery, and he has once
found a derelict ship and sailed it in, a deed which resulted in
putting his name in the paper.
There is only one bright spot in the life of this human wreck, who
grows physically more repulsive as the years go on. Only one thing
unites him in a sweet and natural relation with our common humanity,
and that is his love for the children who are not his. Hamsun here
takes up an interesting psychological question and arrives at the
opposite conclusion from that of Strindberg in "The Father."
He shows that fatherly affection is not a primitive instinct but a
growth of habit. Oliver cares for his wife's children while they are
small, and when they grow up they love him and have no interest in
attaching themselves to their actual fathers. Indeed Oliver's
importance in the community grows in the reflected light from his
successful children, although the truth about their origin has long
since leaked out at the town pump. There is, of course, irony in
this, but there is also a certain optimism. In his great novels
picturing the life of whole communities, Hamsun has thrown the
glamour of his art over a big gallery of insignificant people. Mere
puppets for his amusement they seem at first, and yet, as we
penetrate more deeply into his work, we feel behind the smile a
great sweetness, a broad humanity, and at bottom a faith that life
fashions its own ends out of all this human dross and fashions not
badly.
Hamsun's social theories will be sufficiently evident from the above
recapitulation of the novels in which he is holding up the mirror to
his generation. He rebels against all that would cripple individual
effort and against all modern standardizing whether it applies to the
choice of a profession or to the cut of a garment. The levelling
process which, inasmuch as it can not make all great, must achieve
equality by making all small, he believes to be a disadvantage for
the small, who thus lose an ideal and an element of romance in their
lives. He abjures all modern shams and artificiality and particularly
the false standard that exalts the white collar job above the work
involving a little honest grime. He would like to see his people a
nation of farmers and fishermen with an aristocracy of big landed
proprietors and brainy business men, but with all the middle class of
administrators and clerical workers eliminated. With the latter he
would sweep away most professional men and those who hang on the
fringes of art and literature. The real genius, the poet by the grace
of God, he regards as above and outside of all classes.