paradoxical extravagance, must be seen against a background of
special conditions in a small country with a large number of brain
workers proportionally, and with, perhaps, a tendency to over-value
what passes for culture. Stated coldly and in detail they are, of
course, impracticable. No nation or group of people can detach itself
from the complications of modern civilization. Hamsun the sociologist
is not on a par with Hamsun the poet. But when he leads us back to
the deep, primeval well-springs without which our civilization must
wither and die, it is Hamsun the poet who speaks.
GROWTH OF THE SOIL
In "Growth of the Soil" Hamsun has concentrated the message which, in
more or less fragmentary form lies scattered through his works: that
everything else is small compared with the one essential thing, to be
in unison with nature and to work with nature in "a great
friendliness." There he preaches with massive reiteration that the
salvation of the modern world lies in getting back to the land, and
by his poetic treatment he has linked the doctrine with the fight men
have waged since the beginning of human life on earth.
Without the artifice of distant time and place, in the midst of
modern conditions painted with realism and often with humor, he has
created an illusion of the primeval. It is as though Isak, the man
without a surname, coming we know not whence, walking through the
forest in search of a place where he can begin to till the soil,
were the first man in a newly created world. "There goes a path
through the forest. Who made it? The man, the human being, the first
one who came." He walks all day over the moors in the great
stillness, turning the sod occasionally to examine its possibilities,
then walks again until night comes. Then he sleeps a while with his
head on his arm, and walks again until he finds the right place for
himself, and there he makes his first home on a bed of pine needles
under a projecting rock.
After this prelude, which has a cadence like the first chapter of
Genesis, Hamsun allows us to follow the story of how the shelter
under a rock became a farm. There were no banks for lending money to
pioneer farmers and no societies for the reclamation of waste land,
or if there were, Isak knew nothing about them. He was only one man
who met nature alone. After a while a woman came to him out of
nowhere and did not leave him again. Inger was hare-lipped, and Isak
with his fierce beard and grotesque strength looked like a troll of
the forest; for Hamsun has scorned to throw even the glamour of
youth and rustic beauty over the pair. They were simply man and
woman, brought together by the most elemental needs, working
together, helping each other, meeting the demands of each day as they
arose, and resting when night fell. The picture of their early days
together, their delight in each other and their surprise at all the
wonders that happen to them, is full of innocent, primitive charm.
There is an idyllic beauty about the first chapters of the book, but
"Growth of the Soil" is not primarily an idyl. It is the story of
human achievement centering in Isak's intense, never-ceasing effort
to subdue the small part of the earth which he has taken for his own.
It is almost as though he were really the first man without the
accumulated resources of civilization behind him. He sleeps under the
rock until he has completed a sod hut which gives him shelter against
the cold and rain, and by and by a window is added to let in the
daylight. In the course of time the sod hut gives place to a real
house of logs, and the sod hut can be left to the animals. One day
Inger disappears leaving Isak feeling very lost and lonely, but
presently she comes back leading a cow, an event so great and
wonderful that they spend their first wakeful night discussing it.
Isak can hardly believe that the cow is theirs, but he makes the
retort courteous by bringing a horse for his contribution. As for
goats and sheep, they are already a little herd. The meadows yield
grass, the grain ripens for harvest. Everything grows and thrives,
grain, animals, human beings. There is a fruitfulness, a teeming, a
bringing forth of everything that lives on the earth and by the
earth. It is like looking on at a bit of the creation of the world.
And there are Biblical parallels too with the man who came across the
moor with a bag of bread and cheese and became the patriarch of a
countryside.
Isak's strong, unused brain is developed by the necessity for helping
himself. He invents various clever contrivances. He learns how to
plan his work and fit one task into another so that every month of
the year is utilized to the utmost advantage. He sows and reaps and
mows; he threshes the grain on a threshing-floor of his own
construction and grinds it in a mill which he has also made. He fells
and trims the logs for his house, cuts them in a saw-mill which he
has made with infinite effort and cogitation, and fits them together
in the expert fashion which he has learned by studying the methods
used in the village. The foundation has been laid of stones from his
own land, lifted with his own brawny strength. An especially huge
stone or an unusually big piece of timber put in its place is to him
as real a triumph as the honors and emoluments of the world are to
the more sophisticated. Isak revels in his work, and his powers grow
with his tasks. He is a happy man.
The contrast between Isak's absorption in his work and the lazy,
discontented apathy of the industrial laborers in "Segelfoss City"
is, of course, evident. In the same manner the upbringing of his boys
is contrasted with the education of children who are put through the
usual school routine. While the latter are mere passive recipients of
a knowledge which is thrust upon them from the outside without
regard to their needs, the boys in the wilderness are allowed to
develop naturally and from within. Every bit of knowledge that they
acquire comes in response to the necessity for meeting a practical
situation. They are stimulated by their father's example, as they are
allowed to help him, and they exert their small brains to give the
right answer when he asks their advice in all seriousness. Hamsun
here returns to the subject of the transplanted country boy which has
engaged his interest from the publication of "Shallow Soil," and
allows the elder of Isak's boys, Eleseus, to attract the interest of
a visitor who takes him to town and puts him in an office. The result
is that the boy wilts like an uprooted plant. He is not bad, he is
simply futile. He has lost interest in country pursuits without
having any marked ability that would insure him a career in the city,
and he has been imbued with the idea that it would be a step downward
for him to go back from his poorly paid office job to the work of the
farm. When he comes home, he tries hard to please his father, for he
is a good, affectionate lad, but he has lost the poise of those who
have stayed on the land. He has been infected by the restlessness of
those who have no resources in themselves, but are for ever running
about to have their emptiness filled by the drippings from other
people's lives--from newspapers, moving pictures, street corner
gossip. Sivert, the younger brother, stays at home, and it is he who
continues to build on the foundation laid by the father.
The people in the wilderness have not had their minds made a sieve
for the happenings of the outside world and have not inhaled the
mental atmosphere that has been breathed again and again by millions
of people. Their imaginations are fresh and strong, and they have
time to live to the full in whatever happens to them. From every
experience they draw the utmost that it contains of joy or sorrow.
There is stillness and breadth of vision. Everything has its
appointed place, and though human beings in their flightiness may
stray from their orbit, the great forces that dwell in nature draw
them back and hold them.
There is bigness and simplicity in their joys and sorrows and even in
their sins. When Inger kills her hare-lipped baby to save it from the
suffering she has endured because of the blemish in her own face, the
story of how she buries the little body in the baptismal robe of her
firstborn and puts a cross on the grave is profoundly touching. Her
real grief and repentance, her meek submission to punishment and her
thankfulness that her life is spared, Isak's grief and unfailing
love, his loneliness and longing for her return from prison, all
these belong to people who meet life without evasion or subterfuge.
While Inger's crime is raised to the level of tragedy, the story of
the girl Barbro who kills her two children in pure wantonness and is
acquitted in the new "humane" spirit after a parody of a trial, is a
hideous, sordid tale. Hamsun here contrasts the people who live among
the great realities, accepting the consequences of their deeds, with
those who have learned to play tricks with life and cheat the
Goddess of Justice. This to a certain extent justifies the inclusion
of Barbro's story in the book, although it mars the big epic lines of
the rest by its rather journalistic attacks on criminal procedure and
satire of a certain type of "advanced" woman who espouses Barbro's
cause. It was, as a matter of fact, an outgrowth of some polemical
articles with the keynote "Hang them!" which Hamsun wrote in the
Norwegian press, when the growing slackness in the treatment of women
indicted for child murder had roused his indignation. Ugly as the
story is, it ends on the note of optimism which runs like a golden
vein through "Growth of the Soil." There is a hint that Barbro and
her lover, the hard, grasping farmer, as they marry and settle down
to till the soil, may be reclaimed by their work in harmony with the
beneficent forces of nature. There is a suggestion that nature is
great enough to absorb even the vicious and take them into her
service.
Isak himself, a tiller of the soil by the grace of God, is the one
person in the book who never deviates from the straight course. He
is immutably rooted in the eternal verities. As the story progresses,
his figure grows until it assumes a certain grandeur. He draws from
his humble work a deep and gentle comprehension. There is forgiveness
in him and strength to raise up what life has shattered. Isak has his
oddities, but they light up his character like sunbeams playing over
the face of a rock. How inimitable, for instance, the story, told
with Hamsun's gift of comicality without malice, of how Isak brings
home a mowing-machine, the first seen in the neighborhood; of how he
drives solemnly sitting on the machine in his best winter suit and
hat, as befits the importance of the occasion, although the sweat is
running down his face; how he swells under the admiration of his
womankind, and how he pretends that he has forgotten his spectacles,
because, in fact, he can make neither head or tail of the printed
instructions. When fate plays him the trick of letting the spectacles
slip out of his pocket, although the boys pretend they do not see
it, Isak is conscious that he is perhaps being punished for his
overweening pride.
Isak's superstitions always take the form of thinking that when he
does what is required of him, fate will be merciful. His dim
religious sense, drawing all the small things of life in under the
shelter of a great fundamental rightness which rules the world and in
some mysterious way takes cognizance of his affairs, reminds me of
"Adam Bede." Isak never read any book except the almanac and could
not formulate his thoughts on religion, but he feels God in the
loneliness, under the starry heavens, and in the might of the forest.
He meets God one night on the moor and does not deny that he has also
met the devil, but he drives him away in Jesu name. When the children
grow large enough to ask questions, he can not teach them anything
out of books, and the Catechism is generally allowed to repose on the
shelf with the goat cheeses, but he tells them how the stars are made
and implants the dream in their hearts.
An act which has something of an almost priestly function is the
sowing of grain. That newfangled fruit, the potato, could be planted
by women and children, but grain, which meant bread, had to be sown
by the head of the house, and Isak went about his task devoutly as
his forefathers had done for hundreds of years, sowing the grain in
Jesu name. Twice Hamsun repeats the description of Isak sowing, and
it is like a picture by Millet. With head religiously bared, he walks
in the setting sun, his great beard and bushy hair standing round him
like a wheel, his limbs like gnarled trees, while the tiny grains fly
from his hands in an arch and fall like a rain of gold into the
ground.
It is difficult at this time to say how future generations will judge
"Growth of the Soil." We are still too near the events that made it
to us an epochal book. It would be easy to pick flaws, and I have
already mentioned what seems to me its most serious fault, the
inclusion of an arid waste of discussion on child murder and its
punishment. It would be easy, too, to say that its purpose was too
patent, its sermon too direct. Nevertheless, the very simplicity and
bigness of this purpose make it susceptible to artistic treatment,
and I think there can be no question but that Hamsun has produced a
great piece of literature which will stand the test of time.
What matters, after all, is not what critics will say of its esthetic
merits. The supreme importance of the book lies in the fact that to
Hamsun's own generation it has given poetic form to a message for
which the world was thirsting. At a time when humanity was sick of
destruction he reminded us that nature's fountain of renewal is
inexhaustible. In an age which has been saddened by the pernicious
doctrine of competition, the survival of the fittest, and all the
slogans of false Darwinism, he preached the gospel of friendliness.
We have been told that nature is cruel; Hamsun says that nature is
friendly and beneficent. We have been told that all existence rests
on fierce competition in which the weaker must go under. He does not
deny that the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift; Isak
does what no weaker man could have compassed, but Isak treads down
no one on his way. On the contrary, his strength is the shelter under
which the weaker can grow and flourish. He made the first path, but
scores of people and hundreds of animals come to live in the
wilderness through which he walked alone.
Competition with its fear and agony arises because people want to run
faster than life. Peace and happiness are found in keeping pace with
life. The modern business man is like the lightning which flashes
here and there, "But lightning as lightning is sterile," says
Geissler, the author's spokesman; and he speaks words of wisdom to
young Sivert of Sellanraa: "Look at you Sellanraa people: every day
you gaze at some blue mountains. They are not figments of the
imagination, they are old mountains sunk deep in the past; and you
have them for companions. You live here with heaven and earth and are
one with them, you are one with all the broad and deeply-rooted
things. You do not need a sword in your hands; you meet life
bare-headed and bare-handed in the midst of a great friendliness.
Look, there is nature, it belongs to you and to your people! Men and
nature are not bombarding each other, they agree. They are not
competing or running a race, they go together. In the midst of this
you Sellanraa people exist. The mountains, the woods, the moors, the
meadows, the heavens, and the stars--oh, nothing of this is poor and
grudging, it is without measure. Listen to me, Sivert, be content!
You have everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to
believe in, you are born and produce, you are the necessary ones on
earth. Not all are necessary on earth, but you are. You preserve
life. From generation to generation you exist in nothing but
fruitfulness, and when you die another generation carries it on. That
is what is meant by life eternal."
THE WANDERER ARRIVED
Two tendencies war with each other in the temperament of the
Norwegians. One has made them vikings, explorers, seafarers, and
pioneers; the other has made them home-builders and tillers of the
soil. One is restless, impatient of restraint, avid for new
experiences and for ever-shifting forms of life; the other longs for
the homeland, and seeks to strike roots deep in the spot of earth
made sacred by the toil of the forefathers.
In Knut Hamsun both these tendencies are present and are accentuated
by his double racial heritage, his birth in an old peasant family of
Gudbrandsdalen and his upbringing among the lively, adventurous
fisherfolk of Nordland. In his work, the two strains are evident, the
former predominating in his earlier, the latter in his recent books.
Glahn, the untamed hunter and nomad, is a true child of the author's
spirit, but so is Isak, the farmer and home-builder. The common bond
that unites them is that both are closely affiliated with nature, one
as the passionate lyrical worshipper of Pan, the other as the humble
servant of nature's fruitfulness.
In the personal life of the author the same divergent tendencies may
be traced. He has been a wanderer on the face of the earth, a vagrant
laborer in Norway, a pioneer in America, a visitor to the capitals of
Europe, a traveller in the Orient. But deep inherited instincts have
always drawn him homeward. He has sought a place where his own life
could strike root. Since the year 1896 he has made his home in
Norway, and ever since the financial returns of his early books made
it possible, has lived on his own land and cultivated it. His first
home was in Nordland, at Hamaröy in Salten. There he lived for many
years, surrounded by the wild, majestic, yet ingratiating scenery
which impressed him in boyhood and which he has so often pictured. In
1917 he removed to the south of Norway, and, after a short residence
at Larvik on the Christianiafjord, chose his present home near
Grimstad, the small seaport town where Ibsen spent his unhappy youth
as an apothecary's apprentice. There he has bought the estate
Nörholmen with a fine mansion several hundred years old.
Though Hamsun has lived as much as possible in the outskirts of human
settlement and has always kept in retirement, denying himself to
sightseers and above all to interviewers, the kindliness which
breathes from his work and, in spite of his nervous shyness, emanates
from his personality, has made him very much beloved in his own
country. A very sympathetic picture of his home life is presented by
the Norwegian newspaper writer, Thomas Vetlesen, who in the autumn of
1920 was admitted to Hamsun's home through the good offices of the
government. As it is the only authentic account we have, I will quote
here a portion of the article which appeared in the Norwegian press.
"After a half hour's drive (from Grimstad) we enter a lane of hazel
nut bushes, bending over the road weighted by their full, heavy
clusters of nuts. Soon we catch sight of Hamsun's white, two-story
house at the end of a quiet bight of the sea, not far from the main
road. The automobile swings into the large yard with a quick,
accustomed motion, and stops in front of the kitchen steps. The noise
has announced my arrival, and presently the yard is full of people.
Fru Hamsun and the children receive the stranger and welcome him to
their home. There is Tore and Arild and Elinor and the lovely little
Cecilie--a pretty four-leaf clover at ages ranging from three to nine
summers.
"Within the house the spacious rooms with their pleasant
old-fashioned style of building breathe a spirit of hospitality.
There is a garden room turning out toward the road, a dining-room, a
wide hall with a staircase leading to the upper story and on the
other side of it a series of smaller rooms.
"Knut Hamsun comes in quickly from the hall, straight and tall, with
powerful shoulders and head unbent by time and mental labor. His
handclasp is firm and warm, but in his melodious voice there is an
undertone of something veiled, wistful, almost hurt, which suggests
the tremendous mental strain his intensive work has subjected him to
for many years past.
"At the supper table Hamsun asks about mutual friends, touches
lightly on current events, but is not talkative. Occasionally he
seems to remember suddenly that he is getting too taciturn. But his
thoughts are in Hazel Valley where he has chosen for his work room an
ancient cottage built in the wilderness for herders. There he spends
the entire day outside of meal hours, surrounded by the great
stillness and by what seems a chaos of small bits of white paper
filled with writing. Here is his work room, here he can have peace.
Woe to him who would draw near to his circles! As yet no one has ever
done it with impunity. There are the wildest reports current about
the more than simple appointments of this Tusculum, where he has
conceived and written his books for some years past.
"After supper, when he has lit his pipe, Hamsun generally selects a
chair near the sofa where he has placed his visitor, and then he
unbends. Quietly and naturally, the conversation turns on many
things. He can ask questions, and he can tell a story well, vividly
and entertainingly, in a vein all his own. His comments are often
startling, full of cut and thrust, never malicious, but instinct with
kindliness and understanding. As he talks, the listener is deeply
conscious of the fact that he is a good man, a sensitive nature, with
a heart and a spirit open to the weal and woe of humanity. And there
is music in his voice. Even when talks of everyday matters, there is
about everything he says an elevation that makes what he says
impressive. It is like a glimmer of northern lights, often fantastic,
always fascinating and strangely compelling. His sense of humor is
never far away, and his laughter has a wonderfully young note rising
from his healthy lungs....
"The interest that overshadows everything else in his mind is the
farm, the work on the fields, in the barn, and with the cattle. He
cares little for any other position and task than that of the
farmer--with the possible exception of the sailor and the aviator; he
willingly admitted that the latter might have a great future.
Nothing delights him more than when he finds in his children
proclivities for the work on the farm.
"It is rare to see a man so fond of children as Hamsun is. He never
tires of hearing about the sayings and doings of his four fine
children. He pays attention to whatever they say and studies their
different aptitudes and their thoughts....
"Hamsun has a very large library containing many rare and curious
books. What he likes best to read is memoirs and books of travel. In
addition to his absorbing work on his new book 'Women at the Pump,'
he has of late been extremely busy developing his estate Nörholmen.
He has accomplished much, but much remains to be done. When in future
years it is completed, it will form an interesting Hamsun chapter in
itself."
* * * * *
While the author has been living his quiet, retired life, divided
between his prodigious industry as a writer and his concern for home
and farm, his fame has been spreading to the whole civilized world.
In his own country he has long been acknowledged king, the greatest
of living authors, the most widely read, the most beloved. In Sweden
critics have acclaimed him as the most popular writer in the
Scandinavian North, in spite of the fact that Sweden has among her
own authors now living several stars of the first magnitude. In the
autumn of 1920, Knut Hamsun received from the hand of the Swedish
king the greatest formal recognition that can come to any man of
letters, the Nobel Prize for literature. Outside of the Scandinavian
countries he first became known in Russia, where the people regard
him almost as one of their own. In Germany and Austria he has also
been widely read for many years past. In France he has only recently
become known, while in England and America it was the tremendous
impression made by "Growth of the Soil" which drew attention to his
earlier works and was the beginning of a popularity that promises to
become enduring fame.
Knut Hamsun's Works
HUNGER (_Sult_) 1890. Published in English
MYSTERIES (_Mysterier_) 1892
EDITOR LYNGE (_Redaktör Lynge_) 1893
SHALLOW SOIL (_Ny Jord_) 1893. Published in English
PAN (_Pan_) 1894. Published in English
AT THE GATE OF THE KINGDOM (_Ved Rigets Port_) 1895
THE GAME OF LIFE (_Livets Spil_) 1896
SIESTA (_Siesta_) 1897
SUNSET (_Aftenröde_) 1898