Knut Hamsun

by Hanna Astrup Larsen

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.