Knut Hamsun Part 4

Without the artifice of distant time and place, in the midst of modern conditions painted with realism and often with humor, he has created an illusion of the primeval. It is as though Isak, the man without a surname, coming we know not whence, walking through the forest in search of a place where he can begin to till the soil, were the first man in a newly created world. "There goes a path through the forest. Who made it? The man, the human being, the first one who came." He walks all day over the moors in the great stillness, turning the sod occasionally to examine its possibilities, then walks again until night comes. Then he sleeps a while with his head on his arm, and walks again until he finds the right place for himself, and there he makes his first home on a bed of pine needles under a projecting rock.

After this prelude, which has a cadence like the first chapter of Genesis, Hamsun allows us to follow the story of how the shelter under a rock became a farm. There were no banks for lending money to pioneer farmers and no societies for the reclamation of waste land, or if there were, Isak knew nothing about them. He was only one man who met nature alone. After a while a woman came to him out of nowhere and did not leave him again. Inger was hare-lipped, and Isak with his fierce beard and grotesque strength looked like a troll of the forest; for Hamsun has scorned to throw even the glamour of youth and rustic beauty over the pair. They were simply man and woman, brought together by the most elemental needs, working together, helping each other, meeting the demands of each day as they arose, and resting when night fell. The picture of their early days together, their delight in each other and their surprise at all the wonders that happen to them, is full of innocent, primitive charm.

There is an idyllic beauty about the first chapters of the book, but "Growth of the Soil" is not primarily an idyl. It is the story of human achievement centering in Isak's intense, never-ceasing effort to subdue the small part of the earth which he has taken for his own.

It is almost as though he were really the first man without the acc.u.mulated resources of civilization behind him. He sleeps under the rock until he has completed a sod hut which gives him shelter against the cold and rain, and by and by a window is added to let in the daylight. In the course of time the sod hut gives place to a real house of logs, and the sod hut can be left to the animals. One day Inger disappears leaving Isak feeling very lost and lonely, but presently she comes back leading a cow, an event so great and wonderful that they spend their first wakeful night discussing it.

Isak can hardly believe that the cow is theirs, but he makes the retort courteous by bringing a horse for his contribution. As for goats and sheep, they are already a little herd. The meadows yield gra.s.s, the grain ripens for harvest. Everything grows and thrives, grain, animals, human beings. There is a fruitfulness, a teeming, a bringing forth of everything that lives on the earth and by the earth. It is like looking on at a bit of the creation of the world.

And there are Biblical parallels too with the man who came across the moor with a bag of bread and cheese and became the patriarch of a countryside.

Isak's strong, unused brain is developed by the necessity for helping himself. He invents various clever contrivances. He learns how to plan his work and fit one task into another so that every month of the year is utilized to the utmost advantage. He sows and reaps and mows; he threshes the grain on a threshing-floor of his own construction and grinds it in a mill which he has also made. He fells and trims the logs for his house, cuts them in a saw-mill which he has made with infinite effort and cogitation, and fits them together in the expert fashion which he has learned by studying the methods used in the village. The foundation has been laid of stones from his own land, lifted with his own brawny strength. An especially huge stone or an unusually big piece of timber put in its place is to him as real a triumph as the honors and emoluments of the world are to the more sophisticated. Isak revels in his work, and his powers grow with his tasks. He is a happy man.

The contrast between Isak's absorption in his work and the lazy, discontented apathy of the industrial laborers in "Segelfoss City"

is, of course, evident. In the same manner the upbringing of his boys is contrasted with the education of children who are put through the usual school routine. While the latter are mere pa.s.sive recipients of a knowledge which is thrust upon them from the outside without regard to their needs, the boys in the wilderness are allowed to develop naturally and from within. Every bit of knowledge that they acquire comes in response to the necessity for meeting a practical situation. They are stimulated by their father's example, as they are allowed to help him, and they exert their small brains to give the right answer when he asks their advice in all seriousness. Hamsun here returns to the subject of the transplanted country boy which has engaged his interest from the publication of "Shallow Soil," and allows the elder of Isak's boys, Eleseus, to attract the interest of a visitor who takes him to town and puts him in an office. The result is that the boy wilts like an uprooted plant. He is not bad, he is simply futile. He has lost interest in country pursuits without having any marked ability that would insure him a career in the city, and he has been imbued with the idea that it would be a step downward for him to go back from his poorly paid office job to the work of the farm. When he comes home, he tries hard to please his father, for he is a good, affectionate lad, but he has lost the poise of those who have stayed on the land. He has been infected by the restlessness of those who have no resources in themselves, but are for ever running about to have their emptiness filled by the drippings from other people's lives--from newspapers, moving pictures, street corner gossip. Sivert, the younger brother, stays at home, and it is he who continues to build on the foundation laid by the father.

The people in the wilderness have not had their minds made a sieve for the happenings of the outside world and have not inhaled the mental atmosphere that has been breathed again and again by millions of people. Their imaginations are fresh and strong, and they have time to live to the full in whatever happens to them. From every experience they draw the utmost that it contains of joy or sorrow.

There is stillness and breadth of vision. Everything has its appointed place, and though human beings in their flightiness may stray from their orbit, the great forces that dwell in nature draw them back and hold them.

There is bigness and simplicity in their joys and sorrows and even in their sins. When Inger kills her hare-lipped baby to save it from the suffering she has endured because of the blemish in her own face, the story of how she buries the little body in the baptismal robe of her firstborn and puts a cross on the grave is profoundly touching. Her real grief and repentance, her meek submission to punishment and her thankfulness that her life is spared, Isak's grief and unfailing love, his loneliness and longing for her return from prison, all these belong to people who meet life without evasion or subterfuge.

While Inger's crime is raised to the level of tragedy, the story of the girl Barbro who kills her two children in pure wantonness and is acquitted in the new "humane" spirit after a parody of a trial, is a hideous, sordid tale. Hamsun here contrasts the people who live among the great realities, accepting the consequences of their deeds, with those who have learned to play tricks with life and cheat the G.o.ddess of Justice. This to a certain extent justifies the inclusion of Barbro's story in the book, although it mars the big epic lines of the rest by its rather journalistic attacks on criminal procedure and satire of a certain type of "advanced" woman who espouses Barbro's cause. It was, as a matter of fact, an outgrowth of some polemical articles with the keynote "Hang them!" which Hamsun wrote in the Norwegian press, when the growing slackness in the treatment of women indicted for child murder had roused his indignation. Ugly as the story is, it ends on the note of optimism which runs like a golden vein through "Growth of the Soil." There is a hint that Barbro and her lover, the hard, grasping farmer, as they marry and settle down to till the soil, may be reclaimed by their work in harmony with the beneficent forces of nature. There is a suggestion that nature is great enough to absorb even the vicious and take them into her service.

Isak himself, a tiller of the soil by the grace of G.o.d, is the one person in the book who never deviates from the straight course. He is immutably rooted in the eternal verities. As the story progresses, his figure grows until it a.s.sumes a certain grandeur. He draws from his humble work a deep and gentle comprehension. There is forgiveness in him and strength to raise up what life has shattered. Isak has his oddities, but they light up his character like sunbeams playing over the face of a rock. How inimitable, for instance, the story, told with Hamsun's gift of comicality without malice, of how Isak brings home a mowing-machine, the first seen in the neighborhood; of how he drives solemnly sitting on the machine in his best winter suit and hat, as befits the importance of the occasion, although the sweat is running down his face; how he swells under the admiration of his womankind, and how he pretends that he has forgotten his spectacles, because, in fact, he can make neither head or tail of the printed instructions. When fate plays him the trick of letting the spectacles slip out of his pocket, although the boys pretend they do not see it, Isak is conscious that he is perhaps being punished for his overweening pride.

Isak's superst.i.tions always take the form of thinking that when he does what is required of him, fate will be merciful. His dim religious sense, drawing all the small things of life in under the shelter of a great fundamental rightness which rules the world and in some mysterious way takes cognizance of his affairs, reminds me of "Adam Bede." Isak never read any book except the almanac and could not formulate his thoughts on religion, but he feels G.o.d in the loneliness, under the starry heavens, and in the might of the forest.

He meets G.o.d one night on the moor and does not deny that he has also met the devil, but he drives him away in Jesu name. When the children grow large enough to ask questions, he can not teach them anything out of books, and the Catechism is generally allowed to repose on the shelf with the goat cheeses, but he tells them how the stars are made and implants the dream in their hearts.

An act which has something of an almost priestly function is the sowing of grain. That newfangled fruit, the potato, could be planted by women and children, but grain, which meant bread, had to be sown by the head of the house, and Isak went about his task devoutly as his forefathers had done for hundreds of years, sowing the grain in Jesu name. Twice Hamsun repeats the description of Isak sowing, and it is like a picture by Millet. With head religiously bared, he walks in the setting sun, his great beard and bushy hair standing round him like a wheel, his limbs like gnarled trees, while the tiny grains fly from his hands in an arch and fall like a rain of gold into the ground.

It is difficult at this time to say how future generations will judge "Growth of the Soil." We are still too near the events that made it to us an epochal book. It would be easy to pick flaws, and I have already mentioned what seems to me its most serious fault, the inclusion of an arid waste of discussion on child murder and its punishment. It would be easy, too, to say that its purpose was too patent, its sermon too direct. Nevertheless, the very simplicity and bigness of this purpose make it susceptible to artistic treatment, and I think there can be no question but that Hamsun has produced a great piece of literature which will stand the test of time.

What matters, after all, is not what critics will say of its esthetic merits. The supreme importance of the book lies in the fact that to Hamsun's own generation it has given poetic form to a message for which the world was thirsting. At a time when humanity was sick of destruction he reminded us that nature's fountain of renewal is inexhaustible. In an age which has been saddened by the pernicious doctrine of compet.i.tion, the survival of the fittest, and all the slogans of false Darwinism, he preached the gospel of friendliness.

We have been told that nature is cruel; Hamsun says that nature is friendly and beneficent. We have been told that all existence rests on fierce compet.i.tion in which the weaker must go under. He does not deny that the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift; Isak does what no weaker man could have compa.s.sed, but Isak treads down no one on his way. On the contrary, his strength is the shelter under which the weaker can grow and flourish. He made the first path, but scores of people and hundreds of animals come to live in the wilderness through which he walked alone.

Compet.i.tion with its fear and agony arises because people want to run faster than life. Peace and happiness are found in keeping pace with life. The modern business man is like the lightning which flashes here and there, "But lightning as lightning is sterile," says Geissler, the author's spokesman; and he speaks words of wisdom to young Sivert of Sellanraa: "Look at you Sellanraa people: every day you gaze at some blue mountains. They are not figments of the imagination, they are old mountains sunk deep in the past; and you have them for companions. You live here with heaven and earth and are one with them, you are one with all the broad and deeply-rooted things. You do not need a sword in your hands; you meet life bare-headed and bare-handed in the midst of a great friendliness.

Look, there is nature, it belongs to you and to your people! Men and nature are not bombarding each other, they agree. They are not competing or running a race, they go together. In the midst of this you Sellanraa people exist. The mountains, the woods, the moors, the meadows, the heavens, and the stars--oh, nothing of this is poor and grudging, it is without measure. Listen to me, Sivert, be content!

You have everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in, you are born and produce, you are the necessary ones on earth. Not all are necessary on earth, but you are. You preserve life. From generation to generation you exist in nothing but fruitfulness, and when you die another generation carries it on. That is what is meant by life eternal."

THE WANDERER ARRIVED

Two tendencies war with each other in the temperament of the Norwegians. One has made them vikings, explorers, seafarers, and pioneers; the other has made them home-builders and tillers of the soil. One is restless, impatient of restraint, avid for new experiences and for ever-shifting forms of life; the other longs for the homeland, and seeks to strike roots deep in the spot of earth made sacred by the toil of the forefathers.

In Knut Hamsun both these tendencies are present and are accentuated by his double racial heritage, his birth in an old peasant family of Gudbrandsdalen and his upbringing among the lively, adventurous fisherfolk of Nordland. In his work, the two strains are evident, the former predominating in his earlier, the latter in his recent books.

Glahn, the untamed hunter and nomad, is a true child of the author's spirit, but so is Isak, the farmer and home-builder. The common bond that unites them is that both are closely affiliated with nature, one as the pa.s.sionate lyrical worshipper of Pan, the other as the humble servant of nature's fruitfulness.

In the personal life of the author the same divergent tendencies may be traced. He has been a wanderer on the face of the earth, a vagrant laborer in Norway, a pioneer in America, a visitor to the capitals of Europe, a traveller in the Orient. But deep inherited instincts have always drawn him homeward. He has sought a place where his own life could strike root. Since the year 1896 he has made his home in Norway, and ever since the financial returns of his early books made it possible, has lived on his own land and cultivated it. His first home was in Nordland, at Hamaroy in Salten. There he lived for many years, surrounded by the wild, majestic, yet ingratiating scenery which impressed him in boyhood and which he has so often pictured. In 1917 he removed to the south of Norway, and, after a short residence at Larvik on the Christianiafjord, chose his present home near Grimstad, the small seaport town where Ibsen spent his unhappy youth as an apothecary's apprentice. There he has bought the estate Norholmen with a fine mansion several hundred years old.

Though Hamsun has lived as much as possible in the outskirts of human settlement and has always kept in retirement, denying himself to sightseers and above all to interviewers, the kindliness which breathes from his work and, in spite of his nervous shyness, emanates from his personality, has made him very much beloved in his own country. A very sympathetic picture of his home life is presented by the Norwegian newspaper writer, Thomas Vetlesen, who in the autumn of 1920 was admitted to Hamsun's home through the good offices of the government. As it is the only authentic account we have, I will quote here a portion of the article which appeared in the Norwegian press.

"After a half hour's drive (from Grimstad) we enter a lane of hazel nut bushes, bending over the road weighted by their full, heavy cl.u.s.ters of nuts. Soon we catch sight of Hamsun's white, two-story house at the end of a quiet bight of the sea, not far from the main road. The automobile swings into the large yard with a quick, accustomed motion, and stops in front of the kitchen steps. The noise has announced my arrival, and presently the yard is full of people.

Fru Hamsun and the children receive the stranger and welcome him to their home. There is Tore and Arild and Elinor and the lovely little Cecilie--a pretty four-leaf clover at ages ranging from three to nine summers.

"Within the house the s.p.a.cious rooms with their pleasant old-fashioned style of building breathe a spirit of hospitality.

There is a garden room turning out toward the road, a dining-room, a wide hall with a staircase leading to the upper story and on the other side of it a series of smaller rooms.

"Knut Hamsun comes in quickly from the hall, straight and tall, with powerful shoulders and head unbent by time and mental labor. His handclasp is firm and warm, but in his melodious voice there is an undertone of something veiled, wistful, almost hurt, which suggests the tremendous mental strain his intensive work has subjected him to for many years past.

"At the supper table Hamsun asks about mutual friends, touches lightly on current events, but is not talkative. Occasionally he seems to remember suddenly that he is getting too taciturn. But his thoughts are in Hazel Valley where he has chosen for his work room an ancient cottage built in the wilderness for herders. There he spends the entire day outside of meal hours, surrounded by the great stillness and by what seems a chaos of small bits of white paper filled with writing. Here is his work room, here he can have peace.

Woe to him who would draw near to his circles! As yet no one has ever done it with impunity. There are the wildest reports current about the more than simple appointments of this Tusculum, where he has conceived and written his books for some years past.

"After supper, when he has lit his pipe, Hamsun generally selects a chair near the sofa where he has placed his visitor, and then he unbends. Quietly and naturally, the conversation turns on many things. He can ask questions, and he can tell a story well, vividly and entertainingly, in a vein all his own. His comments are often startling, full of cut and thrust, never malicious, but instinct with kindliness and understanding. As he talks, the listener is deeply conscious of the fact that he is a good man, a sensitive nature, with a heart and a spirit open to the weal and woe of humanity. And there is music in his voice. Even when talks of everyday matters, there is about everything he says an elevation that makes what he says impressive. It is like a glimmer of northern lights, often fantastic, always fascinating and strangely compelling. His sense of humor is never far away, and his laughter has a wonderfully young note rising from his healthy lungs....

"The interest that overshadows everything else in his mind is the farm, the work on the fields, in the barn, and with the cattle. He cares little for any other position and task than that of the farmer--with the possible exception of the sailor and the aviator; he willingly admitted that the latter might have a great future.

Nothing delights him more than when he finds in his children proclivities for the work on the farm.

"It is rare to see a man so fond of children as Hamsun is. He never tires of hearing about the sayings and doings of his four fine children. He pays attention to whatever they say and studies their different apt.i.tudes and their thoughts....

"Hamsun has a very large library containing many rare and curious books. What he likes best to read is memoirs and books of travel. In addition to his absorbing work on his new book 'Women at the Pump,'

he has of late been extremely busy developing his estate Norholmen.

He has accomplished much, but much remains to be done. When in future years it is completed, it will form an interesting Hamsun chapter in itself."

While the author has been living his quiet, retired life, divided between his prodigious industry as a writer and his concern for home and farm, his fame has been spreading to the whole civilized world.

In his own country he has long been acknowledged king, the greatest of living authors, the most widely read, the most beloved. In Sweden critics have acclaimed him as the most popular writer in the Scandinavian North, in spite of the fact that Sweden has among her own authors now living several stars of the first magnitude. In the autumn of 1920, Knut Hamsun received from the hand of the Swedish king the greatest formal recognition that can come to any man of letters, the n.o.bel Prize for literature. Outside of the Scandinavian countries he first became known in Russia, where the people regard him almost as one of their own. In Germany and Austria he has also been widely read for many years past. In France he has only recently become known, while in England and America it was the tremendous impression made by "Growth of the Soil" which drew attention to his earlier works and was the beginning of a popularity that promises to become enduring fame.