Growth of the Soil - Knut Hamsun
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Then comes the evening.
Knut Hamsun
_by_
W.W. Worster
Knut Hamsun [Footnote: December, 1920.]
By W.W. Worster
Knut Hamsun is now sixty. For years past he has been regarded as the
greatest of living Norwegian writers, but he is still little known in
England. One or two attempts have been made previously to introduce
Hamsun's work into this country, but it was not until this year, with
the publication of _Growth of the Soil_, that he achieved any real
success, or became at all generally known, among English readers.
_Growth of the Soil_ (Markens Groede) is Hamsun's latest work. Its
reception here was one of immediate and unstinted appreciation,
such as is rarely accorded to a translated work by an alien author
practically unknown even to the critics. A noticeable feature was the
frankness with which experienced bookmen laid aside stock phrases, and
dealt with this book as in response to a strong personal appeal. To
the reviewer, aged with much knowledge, hardened by much handling of
mediocrity, it is a relief to meet with a book that can and must be
dealt with so.
Those readers are, perhaps, most fortunate who come upon such a book
as this without foretaste or preparation. To the mind under spell of
an aesthetic or emotional appeal, the steps that went to make it, the
stages whereby the author passed, are as irrelevant as the logarithms
that went to build an aeroplane. Yet it is only by knowledge of such
steps that the achievement can be fully understood.
_Growth of the Soil_ is very far indeed from Hamsun's earliest
beginnings: far even from the books of his early middle period, which
made his name. It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis
and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in
the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian
Highlands. It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its
dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay
of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature
and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and her for the
physical means of life, and the spiritual contentment with life which
she must grant if he be worthy. Modern man faces Nature only by proxy,
or as proxy, through others or for others, and the intimacy is lost.
In the wilds the contact is direct and immediate; it is the foothold
upon earth, the touch of the soil itself, that gives strength.
The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and
unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks
upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet
kindly, as a god. A more objective work of fiction it would be hard to
find--certainly in what used to be called "the neurasthenic North."
And this from the pen of the man who wrote _Sult_, _Mysterier_, and
_Pan_.
Hamsun's early work was subjective in the extreme; so much so, indeed,
as almost to lie outside the limits of aesthetic composition. As a boy
he wrote verse under difficulties--he was born in Gudbrandsdalen, but
came as a child to Bodoe in Lofoten, and worked with a shoemaker there
for some years, saving up money for the publication of his juvenile
efforts. He had little education to speak of, and after a period of
varying casual occupations, mostly of the humblest sort, he came to
Christiania with the object of studying there, but failed to make his
way. Twice he essayed his fortune in America, but without success. For
three years he worked as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks.
His Nordland origin is in itself significant; it means an environment
of month-long nights and concentrated summers, in which all feelings
are intensified, and love and dread and gratitude and longing are
nearer and deeper than in milder and more temperate regions, where
elemental opposites are, as it were, reciprocally diluted.
In 1890, at the age of thirty, Hamsun attracted attention by the
publication of _Sult_ (Hunger). _Sult_ is a record of weeks of
starvation in a city; the semi-delirious confession of a man whose
physical and mental faculties have slipped beyond control. He speaks
and acts irrationally, and knows it, watches himself at his mental
antics and takes himself to task for the same. And he asks himself: Is
it a sign of madness?
It might seem so. The extraordinary associations, the weird fancies
and bizarre impulses that are here laid bare give an air of convincing
verisimilitude to the supposed confessions of a starving journalist.
But, as a matter of fact, Hamsun has no need of extraneous influences
to invest his characters with originality. Starving or fed, they can
be equally erratic. This is seen in his next book, _Mysterier_.
Here we have actions and reactions as fantastic as in _Sult_,
though the hero has here no such excuse as in the former case. The
"mysteries," or mystifications, of Nagel, a stranger who comes, for no
particular reason apparent, to stay in a little Norwegian town, arise
entirely out of Nagel's own personality.
_Mysterier_ is one of the most exasperating books that a publisher's
reader, or a conscientious reviewer, could be given to deal with. An
analysis of the principal character is a most baffling task. One is
tempted to call him mad, and have done with it. But, as a matter of
fact, he is uncompromisingly, unrestrainedly human; he goes about
constantly saying and doing things that we, ordinary and respectable
people, are trained and accustomed to refrain from saying or doing at
all. He has the self-consciousness of a sensitive child; he is for
ever thinking of what people think of him, and trying to create an
impression. Then, with a paradoxical sincerity, he confesses that the
motive of this or that action _was_ simply to create an impression,
and thereby destroys the impression. Sometimes he caps this by
wilfully letting it appear that the double move was carefully designed
to produce the reverse impression of the first--until the person
concerned is utterly bewildered, and the reader likewise.
_Mysterier_ appeared in 1893. In the following year Hamsun astonished
his critics with two books, _Ny Jord_ (New Ground) and _Redaktoer
Lynge_, both equally unlike his previous work. With these he passes at
a bound from one-man stories, portrait studies of eccentric characters
in a remote or restricted environment, to group subjects, chosen
from centres of life and culture in Christiania. _Redaktoer
Lynge_--_redaktoer_, of course, means "editor"--deals largely with
political manoeuvres and intrigues, the bitter controversial politics
of Norway prior to the dissolution of the Union with Sweden. _Ny Jord_
gives an unflattering picture of the academic, literary, and
artistic youth of the capital, idlers for the most part, arrogant,
unscrupulous, self-important, and full of disdain for the mere
citizens and merchants whose simple honesty and kindliness are laughed
at or exploited by the newly dominant representatives of culture.
Both these books are technically superior to the first two, inasmuch
as they show mastery of a more difficult form. But their appeal is
not so great; there is lacking a something that might be inspiration,
personal sympathy--some indefinable essential that the author himself
has taught us to expect. They are less _hamsunsk_ than most of
Hamsun's work. Hamsun is at his best among the scenes and characters
he loves; tenderness and sympathy make up so great a part of his charm
that he is hardly recognizable in surroundings or society uncongenial
to himself.
It would almost seem as if he realized something of this. For in his
next work he turns from the capital to the Nordland coast, reverting
also, in some degree, to the subjective, keenly sensitive manner of
_Sult_, though now with more restraint and concentration.
_Pan_ (1894) is probably Hamsun's best-known work. It is a love-story,
but of an extraordinary type, and is, moreover, important from the
fact that we are here introduced to some of the characters and types
that are destined to reappear again and again in his later works.
Nagel, the exasperating irresponsible of _Mysterier_, is at his
maddest in his behaviour towards the woman he loves. It is natural
that this should be so. When a man is intoxicated his essential
qualities are emphasized. If he have wit, he will be witty; if a
brutal nature, he will be a brute; if he be of a melancholy temper, he
will be disposed to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the
death of kings.
We see this in _Pan_. The love-making of the hero is characterized
by the same irrational impulses, the same extravagant actions, as
in _Sult_ and _Mysterier_. But they are now less frequent and less
involved. The book as a whole is toned down, so to speak, from the
bewildering tangle of unrestraint in the first two. There is quite
sufficient of the erratic and unusual in the character of Glahn, the
hero, but the tone is more subdued. The madcap youth of genius has
realized that the world looks frigidly at its vagaries, and the
secretly proud "_au moins_ je suis autre"--more a boast than a
confession--gives place to a wistful, apologetic admission of the
difference as a fault. Here already we have something of that
resignation which comes later to its fulness in the story of the
Wanderer with the Mute.
The love-story in _Pan_ takes the form of a conflict; it is one of
those battles between the sexes, duels of wit and _esprit_, such as
one finds in the plays of Marivaux. But Hamsun sets his battle in the
sign of the heart, not of the head; it is a _marivaudage_ of feeling,
none the less deep for its erratic utterance. Moreover, the scene is
laid, not in salons and ante-chambers, but in a landscape such as
Hamsun loves, the forest-clad hills above a little fishing village,
between the _hoeifjeld_ and the sea. And interwoven with the story,
like an eerie breathing from the dark of woods at dusk and dawn, is
the haunting presence of Iselin, _la belle dame sans merci_.
Otto Weininger, the author of _Sex and Character_, said of _Pan_ that
it was "perhaps the most beautiful novel ever written." Weininger, of
course, was an extremist, and few would accept his judgment without
reserve. It is doubtful whether any writer nowadays would venture to
make such a claim for any book at all.
_Pan_ is a book that offends against all sorts of rules; as a literary
product it is eminently calculated to elicit, especially in England,
the Olympian "this will never do." To begin with, it is not so much a
novel as a _novelle_--a form of art little cultivated in this country,
but which lends itself excellently to delicate artistic handling, and
the creation of that subtle influence which Hamsun's countrymen call
_stemning_, poorly rendered by the English "atmosphere." The epilogue
is disproportionately long; the portion written as by another hand
is all too recognizably in the style of the rest. And with all his
chivalrous sacrifice and violent end, Glahn is at best a quixotic
hero. Men, as men, would think him rather a fool, and women, as
women, might flush at the thought of a cavalier so embarrassingly
unrestrained. He is not to be idolized as a cinema star, or the
literary gymnastic hero of a perennial Earl's Court Exhibition set
to music on the stage. He could not be truthfully portrayed on a
flamboyant wrapper as at all seductively masculine. In a word, he is
neither a man's man nor a woman's man. But he is a human being, keenly
susceptible to influence which most of us have felt, in some degree.
Closely allied to _Pan_ is _Victoria_, likewise a story of conflict
between two lovers. The actual plot can only be described as
hackneyed. Girl and boy, the rich man's daughter and the poor man's
son, playmates in youth, then separated by the barriers of social
standing--few but the most hardened of "best-sellers" catering for
semi-detached suburbia would venture nowadays to handle such a theme.
Yet Hamsun dares, and so insistently unlike all else is the impress
of his personality that the mechanical structure of the story is
forgotten. It is interspersed with irrelevant fancies, visions and
imaginings, a chain of tied notes heard as an undertone through the
action on the surface. The effect is that of something straining
towards an impossible realization; a beating of wings in the void; a
striving for utterance of things beyond speech.
_Victoria_ is the swan-song of Hamsun's subjective period. Already, in
the three plays which appeared during the years immediately following
_Pan_, he faces the merciless law of change; the unrelenting "forward"
which means leaving loved things behind. Kareno, student of life,
begins his career in resolute opposition to the old men, the
established authorities who stand for compromise and resignation. For
twenty years he remains obstinately faithful to his creed, that the
old men must step aside or be thrust aside, to make way for the youth
that will be served. "What has age that youth has not? Experience.
Experience, in, all its poor and withered nakedness. And what use
is their experience to us, who must make our own in every single
happening of life?" In _Aftenroede_, the "Sunset" of the trilogy,
Kareno himself deserts the cause of youth, and allies himself to the
party in power. And the final scene shows him telling a story to a
child: "There was once a man who never would give way...."
The madness of _Sult_ is excused as being delirium, due to physical
suffering. Nagel, in _Mysterier_, is shown as a fool, an eccentric
intolerable in ordinary society, though he is disconcertingly human,
paradoxically sane. Glahn, in _Pan_, apologizes for his uncouth
straightforwardness by confessing that he is more at home in the
woods, where he can say and do what he pleases without offence.
Johannes, in _Victoria_, is of humble birth, which counts in
extenuation of his unmannerly frankness in early years. Later he
becomes a poet, and as such is exempt in some degree from the
conventional restraint imposed on those who aspire to polite society.
All these well-chosen characters are made to serve the author's
purpose as channels for poetic utterance that might otherwise seem
irrelevant. The extent to which this is done may be seen from the way
in which Hamsun lets a character in one book enter upon a theme
which later becomes the subject of an independent work by the author
himself. Thus Glahn is haunted by visions of Diderik and Iselin;
Johannes writes fragments supposed to be spoken by one Vendt the Monk.
Five years after _Victoria_, Hamsun gives us the romantic drama of
_Munken Vendt_, in which Diderik and Iselin appear.
Throughout these early works, Hamsun is striving to find expression
for his own sensitive personality; a form and degree of expression
sufficient to relieve his own tension of feeling, without fusing the
medium; adequate to his own needs, yet understandable and tolerable
to ordinary human beings; to the readers of books. The process, in
effect, is simply this: Hamsun is a poet, with a poet's deep and
unusual feeling, and a poet's need of utterance. To gain a hearing, he
chooses figures whom he can conveniently represent as fools. Secretly,
he loves them, for they are himself. But to the world he can present
them with a polite apology, a plea for kindly indulgence.
It is not infrequent in literature to find the wisest and most
poignant utterances thus laid in the mouths of poor men clad in
motley. Some of the most daring things in Shakespeare, the newest
heresies of the Renaissance, are voiced by irresponsibles. Of all
dramatic figures, that of the fool is most suited to the expression
of concentrated feeling. There is an arresting question in a play of
recent years, which runs something like this: "Do you think that the
things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and
true than the things they behave sensibly about?"
Most of us have at some time or another felt that uncomfortable,
almost indecently denuding question which comes to us at rare moments
from the stage where some great drama is being played: What is higher,
what is more real: this, or the life we live? In that sudden flash,
the matters of today's and tomorrow's reality in our minds appear as
vulgar trifles, things of which we are ashamed. The feeling lasts but
a moment; for a moment we have been something higher than ourselves,
in the mere desire so to be. Then we fall back to ourselves once more,
to the lower levels upon which alone we can exist. And yet it is by
such potentials that we judge the highest art; by its power to give
us, if only for a moment, something of that which the divinity of our
aspiring minds finds wanting in the confines of reality.
The richness of this quality is one of the most endearing things in
Hamsun's characters. Their sensitiveness is a thing we have been
trained, for self-defence, to repress. It is well for us, no doubt,
that this is so. But we are grateful for their showing that such
things _are_, as we are grateful for Kensington Gardens who cannot
live where trees are everywhere. The figures Hamsun sets before us
as confessedly unsuited to the realities of life, his vagabonds, his
failures, his fools, have power at times to make us question whether
our world of comfort, luxury, success, is what we thought; if it were
not well lost in exchange for the power to _feel_ as they.
It has been said that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy
to those who feel. Humanly speaking, it is one of the greatest merits
of Hamsun's work that he shows otherwise. His attitude towards life
is throughout one of feeling, yet he makes of life no tragedy, but a
beautiful story.
"I will be young until I die," says Kareno in _Aftenroede_. The words
are not so much a challenge to fate as a denial of fact; he is not
fighting, only refusing to acknowledge the power that is already hard
upon him.
Kareno is an _intellectual_ character. He is a philosopher, a man
whose perceptions and activity lie predominantly in the sphere of
thought, not of feeling. His attempt to carry the fire of youth beyond
the grave of youth ends in disaster; an unnecessary _debacle_ due to
his gratuitously attempting the impossible.
Hamsun's poet-personality, the spirit we have seen striving for
expression through the figures of Nagel, Glahn, Johannes, and the
rest, is a creature of _feeling_. And here the development proceeds on
altogether different lines. The emotion which fails to find adequate
outlet, even in such works as _Sult_, _Mysterier_, _Victoria_, and
_Pan_, might well seem more of a peril than the quixotic stubbornness
of Kareno's philosophy. Such a flood, in its tempestuous unrest, might
seem to threaten destruction, or at best the vain dispersal of its own
power into chaos. But by some rare guidance it is led, after the storm
of _Munken Vendt_, into channels of beneficent fertility.
In 1904, after an interval of short stories, letters of travel, and
poems, came the story entitled _Svoermere_. The word means "Moths." It
also stands for something else; something for which we English, as
a sensible people, have no word. Something pleasantly futile,
deliciously unprofitable--foolish lovers, hovering like moths about a
lamp.
But there is more than this that is untranslatable in the title. _As_
a title it suggests an attitude of gentleness, tenderness, sympathy,
toward whomsoever it describes. It is a new note in Hamsun; the
opening of a new _motif_.
The main thread of the story bears a certain similarity to that of
_Mysterier_, _Vicioria_, and _Pan_, being a love affair of mazy
windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure
comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with
Elsie Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education
or social standing. He is a cheerful, riotous "blade," who sports
with the girls of the village, gets drunk at times, and serenades the
parson's wife at night with his guitar. _Svoermere_ is the slightest
of little stories in itself, but full of delightful vagaries and the
most winning humour.
The story of _Benoni_, with its continuation _Rosa_, is in like vein;
a tenderly humorous portrayal of love below stairs, the principal
characters being chosen from the class who appear as supers in _Pan_;
subjects or retainers of the all-powerful Trader Mack. It is as if
the sub-plots in one of Shakespeare's plays had been taken out for
separate presentment, and the clown promoted to be hero in a play of
his own. The cast is increased, the _milieu_ lightly drawn in _Pan_
is now shown more comprehensively and in detail, making us gradually
acquainted with a whole little community, a village world, knowing
little of any world beyond, and forming a microcosm in itself.
Hamsun has returned, as it were, to the scene of his passionate
youth, but in altered guise. He plays no part himself now, but is an
onlooker, a stander-by, chronicling, as from a cloistered aloofness,
yet with kindly wisdom always, the little things that matter in the
lives of those around him. Wisdom and kindliness, sympathy and humour
and understanding, these are the dominant notes of the new phase.
_Svoermere_ ends happily--for it is a story of other people's lives.
So also with Benoni and Rosa at the last. And so surely has the author
established his foothold on the new ground that he can even bring in
Edvarda, the "Iselin" figure from _Pan_, once more, thus linking up
his brave and lusty comedies of middle age with the romantic tragedies
of his youth, making a comprehensive pageant-play of large-hearted
humanity.
Meantime, the effect upon himself is seen--and avowed. Between
_Svoermere_ and _Benoni_ comes the frankly first-personal narrative
of a vagabond who describes himself, upon interrogation, as "Knut
Pedersen"--which is two-thirds of Knut Pedersen Hamsund--and hailing
from Nordland--which embraces Lofoten.
It does not need any showing of paper, however, to establish the
identity of Knut Pedersen, vagabond, with the author of _Pan_. The
opening words of the book ("Under Hoeststjaernen") are enough. "Indian
summer, mild and warm ... it is many years now since I knew such
peace. Twenty or thirty years maybe--or maybe it was in another life.
But I have felt it some time, surely, since I go about now humming a
little tune; go about rejoicing, loving every straw and every stone,
and feeling as if they cared for me in return...."
This is the Hamsun of _Pan_. But Hamsun now is a greater soul than in
the days when Glahn, the solitary dweller in the woods, picked up a
broken twig from the ground and held it lovingly, because it looked
poor and forsaken; or thanked the hillock of stone outside his hut
because it stood there faithfully, as a friend that waited his return.
He is stronger now, but no less delicate; he loves not Nature less,
but the world more. He has learned to love his fellow-men.
Knut Pedersen, vagabond, wanders about the country with his
tramp-companions, Grindhusen, the painter who can ditch and delve at a
pinch, or Falkenberg, farm-labourer in harvest-time, and piano-tuner
where pianos are. Here is brave comradeship, the sharing of
adventures, the ready wit of jovial vagrants. The book is a harmless
picaresque, a _geste_ of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with
_Lavengro_ and _The Cloister and the Hearth_, in that ancient, endless
order of tales which link up age with age and land with land in the
unaltering, unfrontiered fellowship of the road that kept the spirit
of poetry alive through the Dark Ages.
The vagabond from Nordland has his own adventures, his _bonnes
fortunes_. There is a touch of Sterne about the book; not
the exaggerated super-Sterne of Tristram Shandy, with
eighteenth-century-futurist blanks and marbled pages, but the fluent,
casual, follow-your-fancy Sterne of the _Sentimental Journey_. Yet
the vagabond himself is unobtrusive, ready to step back and be a
chronicler the moment other figures enter into constellation. He moves
among youth, himself no longer young, and among gentlefolk, as one
making no claim to equal rank.
Both these features are accentuated further in the story of the
Wanderer with the Mute. It is a continuation of _Under Hoeststjaernen_,
and forms the culmination, the acquiescent close, of the
self-expressional series that began with _Sult_. The discords of
tortured loveliness are now resolved into an ultimate harmony of
comely resignation and rich content. "A Wanderer may come to fifty
years; he plays more softly then. Plays with muted strings." This is
the keynote of the book. The Wanderer is no longer young; it is for
youth to make the stories old men tell. Tragedy is reserved for those
of high estate; a wanderer in corduroy, "such as labourers wear here
in the south," can tell the story of his chatelaine and her lovers
with the self-repression of a humbler Henry Esmond, winning nothing
for himself even at the last, yet feeling he is still in Nature's
debt.
Hamsun's next work is _Den Siste Gloede_ (literally "The Last Joy").
The title as it stands is expressive. The substantive is "joy"--but
it is so qualified by the preceding "last," a word of overwhelming
influence in any combination, that the total effect is one of sadness.
And the book itself is a masterly presentment of gloom. Masterly--or
most natural: it is often hard to say how much of Hamsun's effect is
due to superlative technique and how much to the inspired disregard of
all technique. _Den Siste Gloede_ is a diary of wearisome days, spent
for the most part among unattractive, insignificant people at a
holiday resort; the only "action" in it is an altogether pitiful love
affair, in which the narrator is involved to the slightest possible
degree. The writer is throughout despondent; he feels himself out of
the race; his day is past. Solitude and quiet, Nature, and his own
foolish feelings--these are the "last joys" left him now.