Knut Hamsun

In one of his oriental travel sketches Hamsun has said that unlike most people he never gets through with God, 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 God 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 God'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 God."

WITH MUTED STRINGS

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 gods 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 glass 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 passion 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 manuscripts 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 fiancée, 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 Höibro, 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 passion 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 assert 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 sexless 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 cafés 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 circumstance 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 title "Wanderers," relate experiences lying five or six years apart. In the first the narrator is nearing fifty; in the second he has passed 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 passion of jealousy, but only a great weary lassitude 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 rôle 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 participant 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 rôle 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 passion 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 passions, 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 incumbent 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. Björnson 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 Björnson 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" Björnson lets Svava formulate the single standard of morality; in "A Bankruptcy" 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 Björnson 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 banality, 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, circumscribing 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 substituted 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 Björnson, 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 Björnson.

In his later years, Hamsun has himself essayed the rôle of the preacher, or, as a Norwegian critic put it, he has assumed Björnson'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 institutional; 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 cumbersome 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 analysis and yet is what constitutes 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 God 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 passage 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 Engström, 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 repetition. 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

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 assumes 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 naïveté in a small country. In making him a peasant lad who had risen into another class without assimilating 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 class without acquiring those in the class he has entered. Their attitude 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 cafés and bask in the popular admiration that is liberally bestowed on even the thinnest rinsings from the wine-glass 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 Öien 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 assume 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 fiancée to be decoyed away from them by the enterprising poet Irgens. Hanka Tidemand, a really sweet and chaste nature, has accustomed herself to the rôle 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 illustrate 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 god 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 institutions, 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 attitude 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 space 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 class where he will never be assimilated. 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. Lassen 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, sturdy 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 scrape, he never got into one. Cleverly done, meagrely done. God 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 Lassen out from their homes were in themselves a moral asset 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 class. The lower class 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 class. And the lower class listens. Then one day the roar awoke, the roar of the masses. The masses have themselves learned the arts of the upper class; 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 class 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 sex 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.