Knut Hamsun
From a Painting by Henrik Lund
As he walks on, he begins to feel a strange influence about him. "Something vibrates softly in me, and it seems to me as so often before out of doors that the place has just been left, that some one has just been here and has stepped aside. At this moment I am alone with some one here, and a little later I see a back that vanishes in the forest. It is God, I say to myself. There I stand, I do not speak, I do not sing, I only look. I feel that my face is filled with the vision. It was God, I say to myself. A figment of the imagination, you will reply. No, a little insight into things, I say. Do I make a god of nature? What do you do? Have not the Mohammedans their god and the Jews their god and the Hindoos their god? No one knows God, my little friend, men only know gods. Now and then it seems to me that I meet mine."
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
The superiority of youth over age has been a cardinal doctrine with Hamsun. How seriously he has taken it is best shown by the fact that four of his plays and three of his novels are devoted to the theme. First in point of time is the dramatic trilogy, "At the Gate of the Kingdom" (1895), "The Game of Life" (1896), and "Sunset" (1898), presenting three stages in the life of the philosopher Kareno. Of later date are the three novels, "Under the Autumn Star" (1906), "A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings" (1909), and "The Last Joy" (1912), each marking a milestone in the progress of the Wanderer toward the land of old age. Quite alone stands "In the Power of Life" (1910), a drama which shows an aging courtezan desperately trying to retain a few shreds of her power over men.
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.