Knut Hamsun

by Hanna Astrup Larsen

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

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

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

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

As in "Pan" and "Mysteries," so in his other books Hamsun makes us feel the moods of nature through those of his people. In "Victoria" we are always conscious of the colorful background of heather and rowan and sparkling blue sea because the minds of Johannes and Victoria are steeped in the beauty of the land where they have played as children. In the big Nordland novels, on the other hand, we meet people who take no direct interest in their natural environments, and here the author is more chary of his nature lyricism. The careless, childish, volatile fisherfolk and day labourers in "Benoni" and "Rosa" and in "Segelfoss Town" take the glory of the sea and the cliffs with their swarms of white-winged birds very much for granted and have nothing to say about them, but unconsciously their life rises and falls with the seasons. "It was spring again" is the almost invariable prelude to action in the Nordland novels. The warm nights had come; the red sunlight was over sea and land; the boys and girls went about singing and laughing and flirting the whole night long, and even the old felt the stirring of youth in their blood, the unquenchable old villain Mack got "the strong look" in his eyes again, and poor old Holmengraa went on devious paths. There is a glamour and a fairy-tale atmosphere always resting over Nordland summers, but when autumn comes, a numbed torpor steals over everything, as if people, like nature, were only lying dormant waiting for spring to wake them again.

Even that glamour which redeems the littleness in "Segelfoss City" has died in "Women at the Pump," the author's latest book, in which he depicts the petty mean, degenerate people of a small town that seems afflicted with dry rot, and the total absence of feeling for nature has much to do with the grey and rayless effect of this novel. In "Growth of the Soil," on the other hand, there is a wonderful sense of the nearness of nature. Isak could not put his reflections into words, but a simple awe takes possession of him in the loneliness of the forest and the moors, where he "meets God." As Geissler expresses it, the plain people of Sellanraa meet nature bare-handed in the midst of a great friendliness, and the mountains stand around and look at them.

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

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