He chooses an incident, relatively unimportant for the progress of the plot, and describes it distinctly in short, rapidly moving sentences. Action always commands inquiry into the who and the why. Then he presents the necessary description of the character, his situation, and any other details that he deems necessary. And in this last feature Knut Hamsun is a master craftsman. Interest is maintained greatly by the refinement, and consequently the confinement, of description. He is a poet by divine right, some one has said. True. And he is moreover a modern poet, abiding by the same principles that Ezra Pound and his followers recognize: namely, to present instead of to describe; to give direct treatment to the “thing”, whether subject or objective; and to compose in musical phrases.
Victoria is a poetical novel with a strange love for its theme. Formerly Knut Hamsun has been expansive, taking life as a whole for his study; but now he is dealing with love alone, and is therefore able to cast off much of the commonplace in details. He asks, “Ah, what is love?” and gives many conjectures on it. “Love was a music hot as hell which stirs even old men’s hearts to dance. It was like the daisy that opens wide to the coming night, and it was like the anemone that closes at a breath and dies at a touch. It might ruin a man, raise him up again and brand him anew; it might love me to-day, you to-morrow and him to-morrow night, so inconstant was it.
“But again it might hold like an unbreakable seal and burn with an unquenchable flame even to the hour of death, for so eternal was it.
“Does it not lead the friar to slink into closed gardens and glue his eyes to the windows of the sleepers at night? And does it not possess the nun with folly and darken the understanding of the princess? It casts the king’s head to the ground so that his hair sweeps all the dust of the highway, and he whispers unseemly words to himself the while and puts out his tongue.
“No, no, it was again something very different and it was like nothing else in the whole world. It came to earth one spring night when a youth saw two eyes, two eyes. He gazed and saw. He kissed a mouth, and then it was as though two lights met in his heart, a sun flashing towards a star. He fell into an embrace, and then he heard and saw no more in all the world.”
Is there more beautiful treatment in all prose?
The tragical element enters into the form of fate. The Miller’s boy is not to have that love fulfilled, the daughter of the castle shall have it snatched away from her by death; the world is an unhappy place full of all beauties. Knut Hamsun the fatalist! Miss Larsen points out in her exhaustive study of the man that there is no reason why the novel should have been a tragedy except that, like Hardy, Hamsun believed during the period of his life when the book was written that no joy was to be attained. When he saw happiness coming towards any character he would say, “Ah, this must not be! It is not the order of things.” And that would end it. Yet there is strong foundation for an opinion that the tragedy enhances the pathetic charm of the book.
It is Knut Hamsun’s finest romance. Is there any more to say?
A. H. C.