It is these intangible forces rather than the outer facts that divide the lovers in "Victoria." Victoria is the patrician among Hamsun's heroines, not only because of her birth and breeding, but by virtue of her character. She is far too noble for deliberate coquetry, and yet she tortures Johannes by an apparent capriciousness that seems out of keeping with her frank, generous nature, while he answers with coldness and hauteur. Why? Victoria has the secret, agonizing consciousness of the promise she has given her father that she would marry a wealthy suitor who can retrieve the fallen fortunes of the family. Johannes feels his own humble birth and his distance from the princess of his dreams. Yet these reasons seem hardly sufficient. It is difficult to imagine that battered old aristocrat, Victoria's father, forcing his daughter into an unhappy marriage to save his home, still more difficult to picture the mother, who knows everything, leading her daughter to the sacrifice. Moreover, Johannes, though of humble birth, has won fame and has developed into a man of substantive personality. He is not only Victoria's lover but her playmate and oldest friend and a favorite of her parents. In fact the sweetness in the relation between cottage and manor is one of the things that entitle "Victoria" to its reputation as the most idyllic among its author's works. Why then do not these four people face the situation together? Why does not at least Victoria talk it over with her lover? Afterwards she writes that she has been hindered by many things but most by her own nature which leads her to be cruel to herself. But the real reason is that Hamsun's art at this stage of his development has no use for fulfillment. With fulfillment comes indifference. It is his to paint the unslaked thirst and the unstilled longing. Therefore the wonderful letter in which Victoria lays bare her heart is not sent until after her death, and therefore she leaves Johannes the legacy of a great tragic feeling which is forever alive and throbbing because it is forever unsatisfied.
Mariane Holmengraa in "Segelfoss City" belongs with Hamsun's young heroines. She has some traits both of Edvarda and of Victoria. But in this much later book the author has begun to take a godfatherly attitude toward his young hero and heroine; their sparring is playful rather than tragic, and he leaves them at the entrance to what promises to be a happy-ever-afterwards.
In "Munken Vendt" the man's waywardness and the woman's pride divide the two who should have belonged to each other. When Iselin, the great lady of Os, stoops to befriend the vagabond student, he tells her brutally that he has no use for her kindness and does not love her. Many years later, when he returns after a long absence, he again rejects her advances. In revenge Iselin orders him to be bound to a tree with uplifted arms until the seed in his hand has sprouted. Munken Vendt bears the torture without a murmur and curses those who would release him before she gives the word, but his hands are crippled by the ordeal, and, partly in consequence of his helplessness, he meets death not long after by an accident. Then Iselin walks backward over the edge of a pier and is drowned. Here the conflict, which appears more veiled in Hamsun's other books, is clearly expressed in terms of savage, impulsive actions possible only in a primitive state of society.
A relation of perfect trust and harmony is that of Isak and Inger in "Growth of the Soil." From their elemental community of interest develops a really beautiful affection, which Inger's straying from the straight path can not long disturb. It is almost as though the author would say: So simple and so primitive must people be in order to make a success of marriage for the complex and the sophisticated there is no such thing as happiness in love. A similar lesson might be drawn from "The Last Joy" where Ingeborg Torsen, a teacher, after various adventures, marries a peasant and becomes happy in sharing his humble work and bearing his children.
The rebellion of a man against the monotony of marriage has been presented again and again by writers great and small from every possible angle. The inner revolt of a woman against the concrete fact of marriage, even with the man she has herself chosen, has not often been pictured, and rarely with the sympathetic divination that Hamsun brings to bear on the subject. Puzzling and contradictory, but very interesting is, for instance, Fru Adelheid in "Children of the Age." She is a woman with a cold manner but with a warmth of temperament revealed only in her voice. At first we do not know whether she is attracted to her husband or repelled by him until she reveals that she has simply reacted against his air of possession. Her husband, the "lieutenant" of Segelfoss manor, knows that his wife has enthralled his soul and senses and that no other woman can mean anything to him, but he can not bring himself to try to patch up what has been broken. Here we have the conflict between two people of maturer years who wake up one day to the realization that it is too late. Life has passed them by and can never be recaptured.
In "Wanderers" the [disintegrating] influence in the marriage of the Falkenbergs is habit that breeds indifference, and Fru Falkenberg, one of Hamsun's most poignantly beautiful and most unhappy heroines, is of too fine a caliber to survive the bruise to her self-respect. In "Shallow Soil" Hanka Tidemand is drawn by the false glamour of genius which surrounds the poet Irgens, and regards her husband as nothing but a commonplace business man. Here, however, the strength and depth of the man's love saves the situation. In its happy ending their story is unique among the author's earlier works.
Among his many wayward heroines Hamsun has painted one woman of calm and benignant steadfastness, Rosa, the heroine of the two Nordland novels, "Benoni" and "Rosa." She is so deeply and innately faithful that she not only clings for many years to her worthless fiancé and finally marries him, but even after she has been forced to divorce him and has been told he is dead, she feels that she can "never be unmarried from" the man whose wife she has once been. It is only after he is really dead and after her child is born that she can be content in her marriage with her devoted old suitor, Benoni. Then the mother instinct, which is her strongest characteristic, awakens and enfolds not only her child but her child's father. Quite alone in the sisterhood of Hamsun heroines stands Martha Gude, a spinster of forty with white hair and young eyes and a child heart. Her goodness and her purity, which has the dewy freshness of morning, draw Nagel to her, although she is twelve years older than he.
Side by side and often intermingled with the ethereal delicacy of his love passages, Hamsun has many pages of such crassness that often, at the first reading of his books, they seem to overshadow and blot out the fineness. He treats the subject of sex sometimes with brutal Old Testament directness, sometimes with a rough, caustic humor akin to that of "Tom Jones" or "Tristam Shandy," but never with sultry eroticism or with innuendo under the guise of morality. There is in his very earthiness something that brings its own cleansing, as water is cleansed by passing through the ground. Probably most of us would willingly have spared from his pages many passages in "Benoni" and "Rosa," "The Last Joy," and more especially in his last book "Women at the Pump," and even in "Growth of the Soil," but they all belong to the author's conception of a true picture of life.
"What was love?" writes Johannes in "Victoria." "A wind soughing in the roses, no, a yellow phosphorescence. Love was music hot as hell which made even the hearts of old men dance. It was like the marguerite which opens wide at the approach of night, and it was like the anemone which closes at a breath and dies at a touch.
"Such was love.