Knut Hamsun Part 3

he takes up the subject of business integrity, and so on. Among the great creative writers, Jonas Lie and Garborg escaped comparatively unscathed, Jonas Lie because he never could abandon his habit of portraying life instead of reasoning about it, and Garborg because he saved himself in time by going back to the soil and the peasantry, where he discovered a fountain of poetic renewal. The lesser authors followed the lead of Bjornson and Ibsen in their less happy vein and without their genius. The whole tendency, which, to begin with, had had the freshness of revolt, of indignation, and of hope, was becoming smug and standardized.

A scapegoat had to be found for the ills from which the authors'

heroes and heroines were suffering, and Ibsen named it in "A Doll's House," when he let Nora lay the blame for her foolishness on "society"--reasoning so out of keeping with the character of the childish, irresponsible Nora that we can not help wondering how Ibsen ever made it sound plausible. It was accepted because it fell in with the prevailing mood of the day. If only society could be reorganized after a pattern on the reformers' nail all would be well! They forgot what seems to us at this day obvious to the point of ba.n.a.lity, namely that when Nora had taken a full course in commercial arithmetic, and Svava had vowed to die unwed, and all the little Millas and Toras and Thinkas in good Fru Rendalen's school had learned all about the pitfalls that awaited them, there would still be the devastating power of love; and when everybody had a job so that young men could marry at the natural time and young women need not marry except for love, there would still be those sudden, erratic attractions and repulsions which work havoc and create tragedies under the most well-ordered conditions. Moreover, they forgot that, although the wrongs which cry out for reform may be susceptible to artistic treatment, the reforms themselves, circ.u.mscribing as they do ideals by finite achievement, are not food meet for the imaginative writer.

A reformed Marshalsea would not have given us any Little Dorrit. In Norwegian literature, Jonas Lie painted a gallery of splendid women whose grandeur of outline is thrown into relief by the pettiness of their surroundings; his Inger-Johanne and Cecilie are tragic figures when they beat their wings against the bars of convention, but when a later generation of writers attempted to send Inger-Johanne to normal school and let Cecilie learn typewriting, the romance was dead.

Against this whole school of literature with its absorption in types and causes Hamsun protested with all his youthful vehemence and all his power of drastic ridicule. It would not be correct to say that he advocated a return to the principle of art for art's sake. Indeed he has used his own literary work as the vehicle of any opinion that pressed for utterance in him, from his reflections on the state of Norwegian literature in "Mysteries" to those on the evils of the tourist traffic in "The Last Joy." The truth is rather that his poetic sensibilities recoiled from the smug sapience, the heavy sententiousness that would rob life of its spontaneity and reduce it to a pharmaceutical formula: so much democracy, so much popular education, so much reform legislation, and a perfect state of society would follow inevitably. He disliked the thinness and bloodlessness of a literary art that subst.i.tuted reasoning for inspiration. Poets, he said, should not be philosophers; they usually philosophized very badly, as witnessed Ibsen and Tolstoy when they departed from their function as poets and began to prescribe remedies for the ills of the world. As for Bjornson, he revered him not because of his activities as a preacher and a moralist, but in spite of them, because of his humanness, his irrepressibility, his endless power of growth and renewal. One of Hamsun's most beautiful poems is a homage to Bjornson.

In his later years, Hamsun has himself essayed the role of the preacher, or, as a Norwegian critic put it, he has a.s.sumed Bjornson's habit of occasionally chastising the Norwegian nation for its own good in a fatherly fashion. There is a difference, however, between him and his predecessors. They were sometimes inst.i.tutional; he is always personal. They sometimes attempt to construct the world from a diagram of planes and angles; he always follows the flowing lines of the artist. Even when he preaches, his message is in its essence a part of his poetic impulse. His apotheosis of the man with the hoe springs from his longing to get close to the soil and draw strength from primal sources. His impatience with all the modern army of semi-intellectual workers, the clerks and administrators who wind red tape and spoil white paper, is in keeping with his craving to brush aside all that c.u.mbersome machinery which men interpose between the human will and the physical realities. His strident condemnation of the movements that are counted liberal in our day is a protest against the levelling which robs life of its color and sharp contrasts. His imagination demands the peaks and high lights and can find no satisfaction in the modern cult of mediocrity or the dull grey level of utilitarianism.

To Hamsun the abstraction called society, which looms so large in the liberal thought of to-day, has no existence. He sees only individuals, and this is one of the reasons why, even when he waxes didactic, he does not cease to be artistic. Isak, who is his ideal type of citizen, is also one of his great poetic creations. In his earlier and more personal work, however, the element of moralizing is absent. The typical Hamsun hero, a Glahn or a Nagel, is not to be measured with the yardstick of ordinary standards. What interests their creator is not the patent virtues and vices which can easily be catalogued, but the fugitive life-spark that defies a.n.a.lysis and yet is what const.i.tutes personality. To the poet the intangible and elusive is the real, the evanescent is the stable. Why do people do thus and so? "Ask the wind and the stars. Ask the dust on the road and the leaves that fall, ask the mysterious G.o.d of life, for no one else knows."

The message of Hamsun's later works, which has swept them like a life-giving stream over a world made arid by pseudo-civilization, is: Back to nature! Back to the land! The message of his earlier works was: Back to poetry! Away from problems and causes back to the dream and the vision! There is no contradiction between the two; both are equally genuine expressions of a personality which has the richness, the many-sidedness and spontaneity of life itself.

His method of artistic presentment is as fresh and unhackneyed as his subject matter. It has always been regarded as the function of the artist to separate the great from the small, the essential from the unessential, and to make a character, a human life, or an event stand out in sculptured clearness freed from the accidental and the extraneous. With this ideal in view, writers have concentrated their efforts on the great revealing scenes in the career of their heroes.

Hamsun breaks entirely with this tradition. To him nothing is small or extraneous. His books are like broad surfaces rippled by many points of light, and it is only gradually that these points of light, the tiny but pregnant incidents and the flashing bits of description, separate and converge to form images. It is a part of his method in creating an illusion of life to draw his characters into the circle of our acquaintanceship, not by great dramatic scenes leading up to a climax, or by sudden opening of abysses as in Ibsen, still less by long description, but by just such scattered and casual bits of information as usually build up our knowledge of people and events in real life. Some trifle is blown in on our consciousness and finds a lodgement there; it may be a quotation or a word of comment that stirs our expectancy and prepares us to meet an individual. We see his shadow falling over the path of another person or feel his presence like a breath of wind. Perhaps we hear no more of him at the time, but in another book we meet him again, and now he is the hero, whom we follow until we think we know him like a dog-eared schoolbook--until some sudden turn upsets our theories, and we leave him in the last chapter with a baffled sense of imperfect understanding. But the author is not yet done with him. In some later book, which is not a sequel in the ordinary sense but brushes the fringes of the first, we come upon a pa.s.sage that throws a backward light over the ground we have traversed. When we close "Pan," for instance, we know no more of Edvarda than her lover knows, but when we read "Rosa" we find the clue to her nature. In the same manner, Dagny, the heroine of "Mysteries," does not reveal her heart before we meet her again as one of the subordinate characters in "Editor Lynge." It is as though a figure that had once sprung from the author's brain became imbued with such vitality that it continued to live through his later works. J. P. Jacobsen once said that he was forced to let all his people die, because death was the only real end; nothing in life ever ended. Hamsun sometimes resorts to this method, but even then the dead live on in the memory of those who have known them. With him nothing is ever finished or finite.

Hamsun's humor is all-pervasive it is the yeast that lightens his loaf. When Albert Engstrom, the Swedish humorist, ended an appreciation of Hamsun by saying, "And finally I love you for the gleam in your left eye," he found an apt expression for the personality that shines through Hamsun's works. His humor has less of wit than of comicality, less of the laugh than the smile with a gleam in his eye; and he is as ready to smile at his own intensities as at the weaknesses of humanity. His flights of fancy are tempered with irony, his real reverence with a playfulness that often takes the guise of impish irreverence. He loves the far-flung paradox and the sudden transition of thought by which he astonishes his readers.

The quality of unexpectedness in his thought is well simulated in the style he has evolved for himself. This style was fully developed when Hamsun made his first appearance as an author, a fact which adds interest to Sigurd Hoel's opinion that the dash and brilliance of "Hunger" was due to American influence. Certainly Hamsun has never improved upon this style, and it may even be questioned whether its manner with the light staccato touch, the prevalence of interjections and sentences consisting sometimes of a single word, has not in some of his later works hardened into a mannerism that results in a slight weariness of repet.i.tion. Taken as a whole, however, his style has been a bath of rejuvenation to Northern literature. It has the naturalness of the spoken word, following blithely the quips and pranks of thought that give zest to conversation but are usually flattened out before they reach print. The result is a light whimsicality, a capriciousness which Hamsun cultivates with subtle and conscious art, until he attains a sparkle and vividness, an ease and flexibility never before known in the language of his country.

As the literary artist Hamsun gives us apples of gold in pitchers of silver, and the metal for both is entirely of his own forging.

THE CITIZEN

HOLDING UP THE MIRROR TO HIS GENERATION

Very early in his career as an author Hamsun struck the keynote of the message which in his most recent works he has preached with so much power. The two novels "Editor Lynge" (1893) and "Shallow Soil"

(1893), satirizing certain journalistic and literary phenomena in Christiania, showed the reverse side of the ideal in which he believes, and by contrast pointed the way to new standards and new goals.

The main character in "Editor Lynge" is an intellectual parvenue, a peasant lad who has risen to the position of editor-in-chief, not by great and commanding qualities, but by a cheap smartness, a facility for shoving himself in, and a brazen self-possession that never deserts him. He is without real convictions and real courage, and yet manages to hoodwink the public into thinking him a great moral leader. A scandal-monger under pretence of defending virtue, he impudently a.s.sumes the right to pry into other people's affairs and spread them large over the pages of his paper.

Some of the obnoxious sides of Lynge's activity we can, of course, recognize as belonging to the dark side of daily newspaper work everywhere, although they appear with more transparent navete in a small country. In making him a peasant lad who had risen into another cla.s.s without a.s.similating its standards, who attempted to be a leader without having inherited the traditions of leadership, Hamsun had in mind certain phases of a transition period in his own country.

Popular education had opened the professions and government offices to country lads, but could not in a single generation give them real culture. They remained mentally homeless and rootless. In Lynge he portrays a man who has suffered an injury to his soul by a transplantation which could never be complete. Significantly enough, Lynge's most ardent admirer is another transplanted country boy, Endre Bondesen, whose origin is stamped on him in his name (Bondesen, peasant's son). He too has lost his contact with the soil and thereby lost the standards of conduct in his own cla.s.s without acquiring those in the cla.s.s he has entered. Their att.i.tude toward the new possibilities that open before them Hamsun describes as a kind of triumphant snicker: "Tee-hee-hee! what great fellows we are!"

The author of "Hunger," who a few years earlier had described the purgatory prepared for the young genius who is struggling to get into print and to live on the proceeds of his work, did not have to go far afield for the caustic sting with which he scourged the people who make themselves broad in the inner courts of journalism and literature. In "Editor Lynge" he parodied the vaunted power of the press. In "Shallow Soil" he painted a picture of the small geniuses who pose on street corners and in cafes and bask in the popular admiration that is liberally bestowed on even the thinnest rinsings from the wine-gla.s.s of genius. The little poets and artists regard themselves as divinely exempted from all the sordid but necessary work of the world, and believe their own slight productions are sufficient excuse for a parasitical life in vice and idleness. There is oien who is so exhausted after squeezing out of his brain a few small prose poems that he has to be sent to a sanitarium at the expense of his friends, and there is Irgens, the only one who seems actually to bring forth a real book occasionally, using his privilege as a poet to live on the bounty of friends whom he is playing false in the most dastardly way. With them is a crowd of idlers and revellers whose chief ambition is to find some one who will pay for their next meal.

As a contrast to this despicable coterie Hamsun has not raised up a real genius like his own alter ego in "Hunger," but two young business men whom he uses to point the moral of regular work and contact with actualities as the great salvation of modern civilization. The keynote is struck in the opening chapter with a finely-etched picture of the awakening city, when Irgens with waxed mustache and patent leather shoes is strolling home from a night of debauch and finds Ole Henriksen, alert and clear-eyed, already at his desk in his father's big office on the dock, and fortunately able to spare the ten krone bill which the poet needs.

Ole Henriksen and his friend Andreas Tidemand, in their moral cleanliness, their modesty and chivalry, their loyalty to each other and generosity to their friends, are not unlike the ideal young business hero of American novels, but they are afflicted with the cult of genius which was prevalent in their country at the time. They like to be seen dining at the Grand with poets and painters and actors, and gladly a.s.sume the privilege of paying the bills for the crowd, while, with a simplicity that borders on gullibility, they allow the one his wife and the other his fiancee to be decoyed away from them by the enterprising poet Irgens. Hanka Tidemand, a really sweet and chaste nature, has accustomed herself to the role of sympathizing with genius, and when she gives herself to Irgens it is almost with a sense of being a pious burnt-offering on the altar of his poetry. Aagot, a fresh, pretty country girl, one of Hamsun's brightest and youngest heroines, is dazzled by the glamour of the literary circle into which she is introduced, and becomes the poet's next victim. Hanka awakens to a realization that it is her husband whom she loves and returns to him. Aagot, with less stamina, is completely demoralized, and Ole Henriksen shoots himself rather than survive the old Aagot, the innocent Aagot, whom he had loved.

"Shallow Soil" is perhaps to a greater extent than any of Hamsun's 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 G.o.d 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 att.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.s where he will never be a.s.similated. 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. La.s.sen 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, st.u.r.dy 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 sc.r.a.pe, he never got into one. Cleverly done, meagrely done. G.o.d 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 La.s.sen out from their homes were in themselves a moral a.s.set 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 cla.s.s. The lower cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. And the lower cla.s.s listens. Then one day the roar awoke, the roar of the ma.s.ses. The ma.s.ses have themselves learned the arts of the upper cla.s.s; 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 cla.s.s 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 s.e.x 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 n.o.blesse 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.surance, 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sembled 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 ap.r.o.ns, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d, he regards as above and outside of all cla.s.ses.

These theories, to which Hamsun lends the point of his whimsical, 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 pa.s.ses 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 ma.s.sive 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.