Knut Hamsun Part 2

Among his many wayward heroines Hamsun has painted one woman of calm and benignant steadfastness, Rosa, the heroine of the two Nordland novels, "Benoni" and "Rosa." She is so deeply and innately faithful that she not only clings for many years to her worthless fiance and finally marries him, but even after she has been forced to divorce him and has been told he is dead, she feels that she can "never be unmarried from" the man whose wife she has once been. It is only after he is really dead and after her child is born that she can be content in her marriage with her devoted old suitor, Benoni. Then the mother instinct, which is her strongest characteristic, awakens and enfolds not only her child but her child's father. Quite alone in the sisterhood of Hamsun heroines stands Martha Gude, a spinster of forty with white hair and young eyes and a child heart. Her goodness and her purity, which has the dewy freshness of morning, draw Nagel to her, although she is twelve years older than he.

Side by side and often intermingled with the ethereal delicacy of his love pa.s.sages, Hamsun has many pages of such cra.s.sness that often, at the first reading of his books, they seem to overshadow and blot out the fineness. He treats the subject of s.e.x sometimes with brutal Old Testament directness, sometimes with a rough, caustic humor akin to that of "Tom Jones" or "Tristam Shandy," but never with sultry eroticism or with innuendo under the guise of morality. There is in his very earthiness something that brings its own cleansing, as water is cleansed by pa.s.sing through the ground. Probably most of us would willingly have spared from his pages many pa.s.sages in "Benoni" and "Rosa," "The Last Joy," and more especially in his last book "Women at the Pump," and even in "Growth of the Soil," but they all belong to the author's conception of a true picture of life.

"What was love?" writes Johannes in "Victoria." "A wind soughing in the roses, no, a yellow phosph.o.r.escence. Love was music hot as h.e.l.l which made even the hearts of old men dance. It was like the marguerite which opens wide at the approach of night, and it was like the anemone which closes at a breath and dies at a touch.

"Such was love.

"It could ruin a man, raise him up, and brand him again; it could love me to-day, you to-morrow, and him to-morrow night, so fickle was it. But it could also hold fast like an unbreakable seal and glow unquenchably in the hour of death, so everlasting was it. What then was love?

"Oh, love it was like a summer night with stars in the heavens and fragrance on earth. But why does it make the youth go on secret paths, and why does it make the old man stand on tiptoe in his lonely chamber? Alas, love makes the human heart into a garden of toadstools, a luxuriant and shameless garden in which secret and immodest toadstools grow.

"Does it not make the monk sneak by stealth through closed gardens and put his eye to the windows of sleepers at night? And does it not strike the nun with foolishness and darken the understanding of the princess? It lays the head of the king low on the road so that his hair sweeps all the dust of the road, and he whispers indecent words to himself and sticks his tongue out.

"Such was love.

"No, no, it was something very different again, and it was like no other thing in all the world. It came to earth on a night in spring when a youth saw two eyes, two eyes. He gazed and saw. He kissed a mouth, then it was as if two lights had met in his heart, as a sun that struck lightning from a star. He fell in an embrace, then he heard and saw nothing more in all the world.

"Love is G.o.d's first word, the first thought that pa.s.sed through his brain. When he said: Let there be light! then love came. And all that he had made was very good, and he would have none of it unmade again.

And love became the origin of the world and the ruler of the world.

But all its ways are full of blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood."

G.o.d IN NATURE

The fervent love of nature which vibrates through everything Hamsun has written has endeared him to many of his countrymen who are repelled by his eroticism and out of sympathy with his social theories. The lyric rhapsodies in "Pan" minister to a deep and real craving in the Norwegian temperament, and it is not for nothing that this book has steadfastly held its own as the first in the affections of the public. "Fair is the valley; never saw I it fairer," said Gunnar of Hlidarendi in "Njal's Saga," when he turned from the ship he had made ready to carry him away from his Iceland home, and went back to face certain death there rather than save himself by banishment. To the Northerner, whether he be Icelander, Swede, or Norwegian, natural environment is the determining influence in the choice of his home; and not only the poet and artist but the average middle cla.s.s individual, clerk, teacher, or store-keeper, will forego social life and endure much discomfort in order to establish himself in a place where he can satisfy the love of beauty in nature which is one of the strongest pa.s.sions in the Northern races. And yet, however fair the valley of his home, he will yearn to get away from it sometimes, to rove alone on skis over the snowfields or bury himself in a forest hut far from the sound of a human voice. The vast uncultivated stretches of Norway have enabled the people to follow their bent and seek outdoor solitude, and while the habit has not fostered in them the pleasant urban virtues of nations that live more in cities, it has developed a richness and intensity of inner life which has flowered vividly in their art and literature.

The solitary hunter of "Pan" is perhaps the most typically Norwegian among the Hamsun heroes, and in him love of nature has deepened into a veritable pa.s.sion. This book, which followed several novels of city and town life and was written during a summer in Norway after a sojourn abroad, is the first full-toned expression of Hamsun's feeling for nature. It has a melting tenderness and a warm intimacy of knowledge which can only come from much living out of doors, as the author did when he herded cattle as a boy, and later when he roved through the country as a vagrant laborer. To read it is like nothing else but lying on your back and gazing up to the mountains until you feel the breath of the forest as your own breath and sense no stirring of life except that which sways the trees above you. The feeling of being one with nature, of enfolding all things with affection and being oneself enfolded in a universal goodness, is typical of Hamsun's att.i.tude. He never paints nature merely as the scenic background for his human drama, and he never romances about nature for its own sake. He rarely describes in detail; it is as though he were too near for description. Like a child which buries its face on its mother's breast and does not know whether her features are homely or beautiful, he seems to be hiding his face in the gra.s.s and listening to the pulse-beats of the earth rather than standing off and looking at it. "I seem to be lying face to face with the bottom of the universe," says Glahn, as he gazes into a clear sunset sky, "and my heart seems to beat tenderly against this bottom and to be at home here." Nothing is great or small to him. A boulder in the road fills him with such a sense of friendliness that he goes back every day and feels as though he were being welcomed home. A blade of gra.s.s trembling in the sun suffuses his soul with an infinite sea of tenderness.

"Pan" is full of lyric outbursts. When Glahn revisits the forest on the first spring day, he is moved to transports. He weeps with love and joy and is dissolved in thankfulness to all living things. He calls the birds and trees and rocks by name; nay, even the beetles and worms are his friends. The mountains seem to call to him, and he lifts his head to answer them. He can sit for hours listening to the tiny drip, drip of the water that trickles down the face of the rocks, singing its own melody year in and year out, and this faint stirring of life fills his soul with contentment.

Glahn follows the intense seasonal changes of Nordland. At midsummer, when the sun hardly dips its golden ball in the sea at night, he sees all nature intoxicated with s.e.x, rushing on to fruition in the few short weeks of summer. Then mysterious fancies come over him. He weaves a strange tale about Iselin, the mistress of life, the spirit of love, who lives in the forest. He dreams that she comes to him and tells about her first love. The breath of the forest is like her breath, and he feels her kisses on his lips, and the stars sing in his blood. The women who meet him in the forest, Eva and the little goat-girl, seem to him only a part of nature as they expand unconsciously to love like the flower in the sun, and he takes what they give him. Yet there is in him a spiritual craving which these loves of the forest can not satisfy.

Summer pa.s.ses; the first nipping sense of autumn is in the air, and the children of nature too feel the benumbing hand of coming winter, as if the brief thrill of summer in their veins had already subsided. But in the solitude of the dark, cold "iron nights" the Northern Pan wins from Nature the highest she has to give him. As he sits alone, he gives thanks for "the lonely night, for the mountains, the darkness, and the throbbing ocean.... This stillness that murmurs in my ear is the blood of all nature that is seething. G.o.d who vibrates through the world and me."

Though "Pan" is Hamsun's first great rapturous hymn to nature, his earlier novel "Mysteries" contains some beautiful pa.s.sages that may be considered a prelude to it. Nagel is absorbed in the affairs of men and smitten with the modern social unrest. He lives the life of books and thoughts and is no half-savage hunter like Glahn, but he seeks in nature the sense of vastness and infinity that his soul longs for. He loves to lie on his back and feel himself sailing off into the sea of heaven. "He lost himself in a transport of contentment. Nothing disturbed him, but up in the air the soft sound went on, the sound of an immense stamping-mill, G.o.d who trod his wheel. But in the woods round about him there was not a stir, not a leaf or a pine-needle moved. Nagel curled up with pleasure, drew his knees up under him, and shivered with a sense of how good it all was.... He was in a strange frame of mind, filled with psychic pleasure. Every nerve in him was alive, he felt music in his blood, felt himself akin to nature and the sun and the mountains and everything else, felt himself caught up in a vibration of his own ego from trees and hillocks and blades of gra.s.s. His soul expanded and was like a full-toned organ within him. He never forgot how the soft music literally rose and fell with the pulsing of his blood."

As in "Pan" and "Mysteries," so in his other books Hamsun makes us feel the moods of nature through those of his people. In "Victoria"

we are always conscious of the colorful background of heather and rowan and sparkling blue sea because the minds of Johannes and Victoria are steeped in the beauty of the land where they have played as children. In the big Nordland novels, on the other hand, we meet people who take no direct interest in their natural environments, and here the author is more chary of his nature lyricism. The careless, childish, volatile fisherfolk and day labourers in "Benoni"

and "Rosa" and in "Segelfoss Town" take the glory of the sea and the cliffs with their swarms of white-winged birds very much for granted and have nothing to say about them, but unconsciously their life rises and falls with the seasons. "It was spring again" is the almost invariable prelude to action in the Nordland novels. The warm nights had come; the red sunlight was over sea and land; the boys and girls went about singing and laughing and flirting the whole night long, and even the old felt the stirring of youth in their blood, the unquenchable old villain Mack got "the strong look" in his eyes again, and poor old Holmengraa went on devious paths. There is a glamour and a fairy-tale atmosphere always resting over Nordland summers, but when autumn comes, a numbed torpor steals over everything, as if people, like nature, were only lying dormant waiting for spring to wake them again.

Even that glamour which redeems the littleness in "Segelfoss City"

has died in "Women at the Pump," the author's latest book, in which he depicts the petty mean, degenerate people of a small town that seems afflicted with dry rot, and the total absence of feeling for nature has much to do with the grey and rayless effect of this novel.

In "Growth of the Soil," on the other hand, there is a wonderful sense of the nearness of nature. Isak could not put his reflections into words, but a simple awe takes possession of him in the loneliness of the forest and the moors, where he "meets G.o.d." As Geissler expresses it, the plain people of Sellanraa meet nature bare-handed in the midst of a great friendliness, and the mountains stand around and look at them.

Yet Hamsun's feeling for nature is by no means a mere primitive emotion; it is rather the reasoned expression of a man who has found his way back to the real sources of life. In its subtlest and most artistic form it appears in the "Wanderer" books. The overemphasis and extravagance which could, in "Pan," verge on the hysterical are gone, and instead there is a mellow sweetness, a poignant tenderness as of a man who knows that his own autumn has arrived and that winter is on the way. It is Indian summer in the opening chapter of "Under the Autumn Star." The air is mild and warm and tranquil, everything breathes peace after the brief, intense effort of summer to put forth growth. Round about stand the red rowans and the stiff-necked flowers refusing to know that fall is here. In these paragraphs the keynote of the book is given, and throughout this book and its sequel, "A Wanderer Plays with Muted. Strings," the harmony with nature is preserved. For all the charm of the story and the pungency of the reflections on various themes, that which lingers in the reader's mind is the long autumn road, the nights in the fragrant hayloft, the smell of freshly felled trees, and the fire in the woods where the Wanderer is alone at last with nature.

Hamsun loves the warm, expansive moods of nature and has confessed to a positive dislike of ice and snow. Descriptions of winter are rare in his books, but the opening chapter of "The Last Joy" finds the Wanderer s...o...b..und in a hut far up in the mountains, and although he watches the spring awakening of nature, he knows that in his own life winter has come to stay. For that very reason he feels as never before a great upwelling of affection for all things around him, animate and inanimate. He can sit for hours merely watching the course of the sun, or speculating about some tiny bug which was born and will probably die on the one leaf it inhabits, or marvelling at the wonder of reproduction in a little plant that is releasing its seed. A lonely little path straggling through the forest affects him like a child's hand in his own. A lacerated pine stump rouses his pity as he stands gazing at it until his other, civilized self reminds him that his eyes have probably acquired the simple animal expression of people in the Stone Age. He walks over a hillside and feels a tenderness emanating from it. "It is not really a hillside, it is a bosom, a lap, so soft is it, and I walk carefully and do not tramp heavily on it with my feet. I am filled with wonder at it: a great hillside so tender and helpless that it allows us to use it as a mother, allows an ant to crawl over it. If there is a boulder half covered with gra.s.s, it has not just happened here; it lives here and has lived here long."

As he walks on, he begins to feel a strange influence about him.

"Something vibrates softly in me, and it seems to me as so often before out of doors that the place has just been left, that some one has just been here and has stepped aside. At this moment I am alone with some one here, and a little later I see a back that vanishes in the forest. It is G.o.d, I say to myself. There I stand, I do not speak, I do not sing, I only look. I feel that my face is filled with the vision. It was G.o.d, I say to myself. A figment of the imagination, you will reply. No, a little insight into things, I say.

Do I make a G.o.d of nature? What do you do? Have not the Mohammedans their G.o.d and the Jews their G.o.d and the Hindoos their G.o.d? No one knows G.o.d, my little friend, men only know G.o.ds. Now and then it seems to me that I meet mine."

In one of his oriental travel sketches Hamsun has said that unlike most people he never gets through with G.o.d, but feels the need of brooding over him under the starry heavens and listening for his voice in the breath of the forest. In "The Last Joy" the sense of G.o.d in nature is always present in the background of the narrator's thoughts. In the great stillness, where he is the only human being, he feels himself expanding into something greater than himself, he becomes G.o.d's neighbor. The last joy is to retire and sit alone in the woods and feel the friendly darkness closing around him. "It is the lofty and religious element in solitude and darkness that makes us crave them. It is not that we want to get away from other people because we can not bear to have any one near us--no, no! But it is the mysterious sense that everything is rushing in on us from afar, and yet all is near, so that we sit in the midst of an omnipresence.

Perhaps it is G.o.d."

WITH MUTED STRINGS

The superiority of youth over age has been a cardinal doctrine with Hamsun. How seriously he has taken it is best shown by the fact that four of his plays and three of his novels are devoted to the theme.

First in point of time is the dramatic trilogy, "At the Gate of the Kingdom" (1895), "The Game of Life" (1896), and "Sunset" (1898), presenting three stages in the life of the philosopher Kareno. Of later date are the three novels, "Under the Autumn Star" (1906), "A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings" (1909), and "The Last Joy" (1912), each marking a milestone in the progress of the Wanderer toward the land of old age. Quite alone stands "In the Power of Life" (1910), a drama which shows an aging courtezan desperately trying to retain a few shreds of her power over men.

Kareno, a native of Nordland, has Lapp blood in his veins, which may in part account for the latent weakness that comes out in him as soon as the strong impetus of youth has died down. At twenty-nine he rushes into print gallantly to attack the prevailing ideals of his day, such as eternal peace, the apotheosis of labor, the humanitarian efforts to preserve life however worthless, and in general the G.o.ds of liberalism. Spencer and Stuart Mill, who were at that time names to conjure with, he called mediocrities devoid of inspiration. His most violent onslaughts were reserved for the doctrine that youth should honor old age. For these theories he sacrificed wife and home, career and friends.

In the following play we find him, now thirty-nine, as tutor to a rich man's children in Nordland. His intellect is already befuddled.

By means of a gla.s.s house provided with powerful lenses, which his patron is helping him to build and equip, he is trying to achieve by material, technical contrivances the clarity which, after all, he has proved himself unable to evolve from within. His moral fibre too is weakened. At twenty-nine he allowed his young wife to leave him rather than temporize with his conscience; now he becomes absorbed in a pa.s.sion for his patron's daughter, Teresita, a wanton, capricious woman of the Edvarda type but without Edvarda's sweetness. Formerly he refused to save his home from impending catastrophe by a proferred loan from his comrade Jerven, because the money was the fruit of Jerven's apostacy from their common cause; now he is ready to accept bounty from any source.

A fire which consumes his house and ma.n.u.scripts terminates his work in Nordland, and we hear no more of him, before, in the last of the three plays, we find him in Christiania again. He is now fifty, and his deterioration is complete. He is settling down to a life of smug Philistine contentment, enjoying the fortune which his wife has in the meantime inherited, and accepting the daughter who is the fruit of his wife's unfaithfulness rather than quarrel with the comforts she provides for him. Kareno has somehow managed to preserve a semblance of his former fire and with it a reputation for prowess as a dauntless fighter, but in his heart he is already out of sympathy with the cause of youth and ready to turn traitor at the first beckoning of really substantial honors.

The other characters have gone through the same process of dissolution. Jerven has continued his inevitable downward course. His one time fiancee, Miss Hovind, who broke with him because of his apostacy, has become a silly old maid who glories in her former connection with the famous professor. Only Hoibro, the man outside the parties who is still at variance with everything accepted, has kept himself at fifty-one unspotted from the world.

The weakness of the trilogy lies partly in the character of Kareno which shows not so much the softening of fibre due to old age as the revelation of a latent meanness, and partly in the nature of the principles for which he is expected to sacrifice himself. It is true that he feels in his youth the reality of the spiritual above the temporal, and in the face of impending ruin he can say: "It is as though I had been alone on earth last night. There is a wall between human beings and that which is outside them, but this wall is now worn thin, and I will try to break it down, to knock my head through it and see. And _see_!" But what he sees is only temporalities, not eternal verities. Granted that the liberal movement had become stale and needed a renewal, there was nothing in that fact to create a supreme issue. It was one of many movements that have run and will run their natural course till the inevitable reaction sets in. There was no great scientific truth or fiery religious pa.s.sion involved, nothing to call forth a Galileo or a Luther. As with Kareno, so with Jerven and Miss Hovind. A girl who breaks with her lover because he weakens in his denunciations of Spencer and Stuart Mill is a strain on the reader's credulity.

There is only one of the vaunted principles in the trilogy which has a universal application, namely the doctrine that a man at fifty is useless and should resign his place to the young, but this doctrine Kareno can hardly be expected to hold with the same uncompromising rigor at fifty as at twenty-nine. The whole situation therefore becomes farcical, and we can hardly wonder that the middle-aged philosopher wipes his brow when his young quondam admirer reads in his ear the following quotation from his own early works:

"What do you demand of the young? That they shall honor the old. Why?

The doctrine was invented by decrepit age itself. When age could no longer a.s.sert itself in the struggle for life, it did not go away and hide its diminished head, but made itself broad in exalted places and commanded the young to do honor and pay homage to it. And when the young obeyed, the old sat up like big s.e.xless birds gloating over the docility of youth. Listen, you who are young! Set a match under the old and clear the seat and take your place, for yours is the power and the glory for ever and ever.... When the old speak, the young are expected to be silent. Why? Because the old have said it. So age continues to lead its protected, carefree existence at the expense of youth. The old hearts are dead to everything except hatred for the new and the young. And in the worn-out brains there is still strength left for one more idea, a sly idea: that youth shall honor toothlessness. And while the young are hampered and thwarted in their development by this cynical doctrine, the victors themselves sit and gloat over their marvellous invention and think life is very fine indeed."

Written while Hamsun was yet under forty, the three Kareno plays are an aftermath of his own struggles as a young man to break into the ring of the accepted. They are an outcry against the older men who had once been iconoclasts, but had standardized their iconoclasm, who had once been advocates of free thought, but had forged free thought into a weapon to strike down all who differed from themselves. It is therefore no accident that Kareno's onslaughts are directed against a stereotyped liberalism. The trilogy is significant as a subjective expression of a certain phase in the author's development, but in psychological interest it is far inferior to the Wanderer books. In these Hamsun has rid himself of all bitterness and has found a sweet and mellow tone that is singularly appealing. He is no longer a theorist but a poet, that is he is himself at his best and highest.

He no longer vaunts a principle but portrays a human being.

The Wanderer is a man who renounces the cafes and boulevards and, after eighteen years of city life, revisits the haunts of his youth disguised as a vagrant laborer. Thus he divests himself of whatever pomp and circ.u.mstance surround a successful middle-aged man and well known citizen, in order to meet youth on equal terms simply as Knud Pedersen, a man whose muscles are a little stiff and whose beard is getting grey. "Under the Autumn Star" and "A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings," bound together in the English edition under the common t.i.tle "Wanderers," relate experiences lying five or six years apart. In the first the narrator is nearing fifty; in the second he has pa.s.sed the mark. The Wanderer in "Under the Autumn Star" is still full of vim and vigor, loves to feel his contact with the soil again, and glories in his prowess, notably in the invention of a wonderful saw which absorbs him. He becomes enamored of Fru Falkenberg, wife of the captain on whose estate he has taken service, and is young enough to make frantic attempts to win her, even throwing off his disguise and appearing in his own character; but when she begs him not to pursue her, he desists.

Some years later his longing drives him again to the Falkenberg 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 pa.s.sion of jealousy, but only a great weary la.s.situde 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 role 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 partic.i.p.ant 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 role 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions, 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 inc.u.mbent 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. Bjornson 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 Bjornson 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" Bjornson lets Svava formulate the single standard of morality; in "A Bankruptcy"