Hanna Astrup Larsen

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After supper, when he has lit his pipe, Hamsun generally selects a chair near the sofa where he has placed his visitor, and then he unbends. Quietly and naturally, the conversation turns on many things. He can ask questions, and he can tell a story well, vividly and entertainingly, in a vein all his own. His comments are often startling, full of cut and thrust, never malicious, but instinct with kindliness and understanding. As he talks, the listener is deeply conscious of the fact that he is a good man, a sensitive nature, with a heart and a spirit open to the weal and woe of humanity. ”

“ Glahn's stubborn resistance is the measure of the suffering she has inflicted upon him, and when at last she begs him to leave his dog Æsop with her when he departs, he shoots his four-footed friend and sends her the body. He seeks consolation with other women, and there is much sweetness in his relation with Eva, the simple daughter of the people, but in spite of her humble, unquestioning devotion and his real tenderness for her, his feeling never touches the heights or the depths. Even when he is with her, the thought of Edvarda is like a constantly smarting wound. ”

“ In his great novels picturing the life of whole communities, Hamsun has thrown the glamour of his art over a big gallery of insignificant people. Mere puppets for his amusement they seem at first, and yet, as we penetrate more deeply into his work, we feel behind the smile a great sweetness, a broad humanity, and at bottom a faith that life fashions its own ends out of all this human dross and fashions not badly. ”

“ In the early eighties, when Hamsun started out for America, the tide of Norwegian immigration was at its height. Not only were thousands and thousands of young men and women going across the sea to try to better their worldly status, but America had come to be looked upon as a spiritual as well as an economic land of promise. The poets, Björnson, Ibsen, Kielland, Jonas Lie and others were busy sending their heroes and heroines over there to find expansion of life or perhaps to come back and be the fresh, salty stream in the back waters of Norwegian narrowness and prejudice. ”

“ Childish and improvident, witty and sentimental, often fond of the melodramatic, simple and yet shrewd, superstitious but brave beyond all praise, the native of Nordland is a type unlike every other Norwegian. Wherever he may roam, he will yearn for the wonderland of his youth. It is from this Nordland type that Hamsun has created his Wanderer hero, and it was from the nature of Nordland with its alternations of melting loveliness and stark gloom that he drew his poetic inspiration. ”

“ He is supremely happy in his hut. His senses are saturated with the warmth of summer days, the fragrance of roots and trees, the soughing of the woods, and the tiny noises of all the things that live in the forest. His spirit rests in the sense that in nature all things go on, tiny streamlets trickle their melodies against the mountainside though no one hears them, the brook rushes to the ocean, and everything is renewed each year regardless of human fates. With the outdoor life comes the primitive love of shelter which we lose in cities ”

“ We have been told that nature is cruel; Hamsun says that nature is friendly and beneficent. We have been told that all existence rests on fierce competition in which the weaker must go under. He does not deny that the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift; Isak does what no weaker man could have compassed, but Isak treads down no one on his way. On the contrary, his strength is the shelter under which the weaker can grow and flourish. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You do not need a sword in your hands; you meet life bare-headed and bare-handed in the midst of a great friendliness. Look, there is nature, it belongs to you and to your people! Men and nature are not bombarding each other, they agree. They are not competing or running a race, they go together. In the midst of this you Sellanraa people exist. The mountains, the woods, the moors, the meadows, the heavens, and the stars—oh, nothing of this is poor and grudging, it is without measure. ”

“ He is always a dreamer and one who stands outside of organized society; but this aloofness is not self-sought. On the contrary, he often suffers in his loneliness, and is longing and struggling to come within the circle of human fellowship, but there is something in his own nature which unfits him to be a cog in the common machinery. His pulses are differently attuned from those of other people. The standards by which happiness and success are usually measured mean nothing to him, but he can be lifted to exaltation by the fragrance of a flower or the humming of an insect. ”

“ Hamsun's humor is all-pervasive it is the yeast that lightens his loaf. When Albert Engström, the Swedish humorist, ended an appreciation of Hamsun by saying, "And finally I love you for the gleam in your left eye," he found an apt expression for the personality that shines through Hamsun's works. His humor has less of wit than of comicality, less of the laugh than the smile with a gleam in his eye; and he is as ready to smile at his own intensities as at the weaknesses of humanity. ”

“ Isak's superstitions always take the form of thinking that when he does what is required of him, fate will be merciful. His dim religious sense, drawing all the small things of life in under the shelter of a great fundamental rightness which rules the world and in some mysterious way takes cognizance of his affairs, reminds me of "Adam Bede." Isak never read any book except the almanac and could not formulate his thoughts on religion, but he feels God in the loneliness, under the starry heavens, and in the might of the forest. ”

“ He fells and trims the logs for his house, cuts them in a saw-mill which he has made with infinite effort and cogitation, and fits them together in the expert fashion which he has learned by studying the methods used in the village. The foundation has been laid of stones from his own land, lifted with his own brawny strength. An especially huge stone or an unusually big piece of timber put in its place is to him as real a triumph as the honors and emoluments of the world are to the more sophisticated. Isak revels in his work, and his powers grow with his tasks. He is a happy man. ”

“ A storm at sea to him means sudden hurricanes that sweep down from the mountains and uproot buildings—so that people at home often have to tie down their houses with chains—waves rushing in from the Arctic Ocean fathoms high, burying big rocks and skerries in their froth and then receding so fast that a ship may be left high and dry and be smashed right in the open sea; hosts of brave men sailing before the wind to save not only their own lives but the dearly bought boatload on which the lives of those at home depend. ”

“ The typical Hamsun hero, a Glahn or a Nagel, is not to be measured with the yardstick of ordinary standards. What interests their creator is not the patent virtues and vices which can easily be catalogued, but the fugitive life-spark that defies analysis and yet is what constitutes personality. To the poet the intangible and elusive is the real, the evanescent is the stable. ”

“ Hanka Tidemand, a really sweet and chaste nature, has accustomed herself to the rôle of sympathizing with genius, and when she gives herself to Irgens it is almost with a sense of being a pious burnt-offering on the altar of his poetry. Aagot, a fresh, pretty country girl, one of Hamsun's brightest and youngest heroines, is dazzled by the glamour of the literary circle into which she is introduced, and becomes the poet's next victim. ”

“ Between the rude hunter of "Pan" and the poet of "Victoria" there is a lifetime of development. Johannes is just as impulsive and irrepressible as the other Hamsun heroes he is quite likely to burst into loud song in the middle of the night and disturb the neighbors, if a happy idea strikes him, but he has really found himself in his work. Johannes is loved by the young lady of the manor with a love that is strong enough for death, but not strong enough for life. He loses her, but the loss does not blight his life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hamsun's social theories will be sufficiently evident from the above recapitulation of the novels in which he is holding up the mirror to his generation. He rebels against all that would cripple individual effort and against all modern standardizing whether it applies to the choice of a profession or to the cut of a garment. The levelling process which, inasmuch as it can not make all great, must achieve equality by making all small, he believes to be a disadvantage for the small, who thus lose an ideal and an element of romance in their lives. ”

“ The feeling of being one with nature, of enfolding all things with affection and being oneself enfolded in a universal goodness, is typical of Hamsun's attitude. He never paints nature merely as the scenic background for his human drama, and he never romances about nature for its own sake. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has a melting tenderness and a warm intimacy of knowledge which can only come from much living out of doors, as the author did when he herded cattle as a boy, and later when he roved through the country as a vagrant laborer. To read it is like nothing else but lying on your back and gazing up to the mountains until you feel the breath of the forest as your own breath and sense no stirring of life except that which sways the trees above you. ”

“ With Hamsun the conflict is more fine-spun than that which Heiberg has painted rather crassly. The mutual love is there, but it is a thing so wild and shy and sensitive that it shrinks back into the dark at a touch even from the hand of the beloved. ”

“ Like a child which buries its face on its mother's breast and does not know whether her features are homely or beautiful, he seems to be hiding his face in the grass and listening to the pulse-beats of the earth rather than standing off and looking at it. "I seem to be lying face to face with the bottom of the universe," says Glahn, as he gazes into a clear sunset sky, "and my heart seems to beat tenderly against this bottom and to be at home here." ”

“ We see his shadow falling over the path of another person or feel his presence like a breath of wind. Perhaps we hear no more of him at the time, but in another book we meet him again, and now he is the hero, whom we follow until we think we know him like a dog-eared schoolbook—until some sudden turn upsets our theories, and we leave him in the last chapter with a baffled sense of imperfect understanding. ”

“ In this as in other secluded valleys in Norway a peasant aristocracy developed, a hard, strong race, intensely proud of its family and land, looking on any one who had been less than three generations in the neighborhood as an interloper, and scorning the classes of people who were not rooted to the soil by inherited homesteads. For the Norwegian roving blood is strangely tempered by a passionate attachment to inherited land, a trait that is perhaps a salutary safeguard against the national restlessness. ”

“ In his estimate of the so-called advancement of woman Hamsun reaches some of the same conclusions as Ellen Key, but in his preoccupation with the physical side of sex he fails to see what Ellen Key always insists on, that motherhood consists not only in bearing but in rearing, and that teaching is a profession which more than any other gives women who are not mothers an outlet for the moral qualities of motherhood. He fails to remember also that women as well as men may burn with the pure fire of a thirst for knowledge. ”

“ It has always been regarded as the function of the artist to separate the great from the small, the essential from the unessential, and to make a character, a human life, or an event stand out in sculptured clearness freed from the accidental and the extraneous. With this ideal in view, writers have concentrated their efforts on the great revealing scenes in the career of their heroes. Hamsun breaks entirely with this tradition. ”

“ Underneath the brightness and levity there is a consciousness of superstitions that are felt sometimes as dark and sinister forces waiting to drag men away from the light into the gloomy void where the evil powers reign. The boy Knut Hamsun's nature was like a sensitive stringed instrument vibrating to the faintest breath of nature's moods, and we find in his works the nervousness, the quick transitions, and the swinging between extremes of exaltation and despair which belong to the Nordland type. ”

“ The meadows yield grass, the grain ripens for harvest. Everything grows and thrives, grain, animals, human beings. There is a fruitfulness, a teeming, a bringing forth of everything that lives on the earth and by the earth. It is like looking on at a bit of the creation of the world. And there are Biblical parallels too with the man who came across the moor with a bag of bread and cheese and became the patriarch of a countryside.
Isak's strong, unused brain is developed by the necessity for helping himself. ”

“ What matters, after all, is not what critics will say of its esthetic merits. The supreme importance of the book lies in the fact that to Hamsun's own generation it has given poetic form to a message for which the world was thirsting. At a time when humanity was sick of destruction he reminded us that nature's fountain of renewal is inexhaustible. In an age which has been saddened by the pernicious doctrine of competition, the survival of the fittest, and all the slogans of false Darwinism, he preached the gospel of friendliness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is poisoned by a lingering doubt, which prevents him from putting forth the one last effort that would have broken down Dagny's resistance.
The lovers in Hamsun's books are never at peace. They never know the quiet, gradual opening of heart to heart or the intimate communion of perfect sympathy. With them the conflict always goes on. Gunnar Heiberg, the Norwegian dramatist, has said that there is no such thing as mutual love, because no two people ever love each other simultaneously. When one has grown warm, the other has grown cold; and when one advances, the other instinctively recoils. ”

“ 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. ”