Pan Part 1

Pan.

by Knut Hamsun.

KNUT HAMSUN: FROM HUNGER TO HARVEST

Between "Hunger" and "Growth of the Soil" lies the time generally allotted to a generation, but at first glance the two books seem much farther apart. One expresses the pa.s.sionate revolt of a homeless wanderer against the conventional routine of modern life. The other celebrates a root-fast existence bounded in every direction by monotonous ch.o.r.es. The issuance of two such books from the same pen suggests to the superficial view a complete reversal of position. The truth, however, is that Hamsun stands today where he has always stood.

His objective is the same. If he has changed, it is only in the intensity of his feeling and the mode of his attack. What, above all, he hates and combats is the artificial uselessness of existence which to him has become embodied in the life of the city as opposed to that of the country.

Problems do not enter into the novels of Hamsun in the same manner as they did into the plays of Ibsen. Hamsun would seem to take life as it is, not with any pretense at its complete acceptability, but without hope or avowed intention of making it over. If his tolerance be never free from satire, his satire is on the other hand always easily tolerant. One might almost suspect him of viewing life as something static against which all fight would be futile. Even life's worst brutalities are related with an offhandedness of manner that makes you look for the joke that must be at the bottom of them. The word _reform_ would seem to be strangely eliminated from his dictionary, or, if present, it might be found defined as a humorous conception of something intrinsically unachievable.

Hamsun would not be the artist he is if he were less deceptive. He has his problems no less than Ibsen had, and he is much preoccupied with them even when he appears lost in ribald laughter. They are different from Ibsen's, however, and in that difference lies one of the chief explanations of Hamsun's position as an artist. All of Ibsen's problems became in the last instance reducible to a single relations.h.i.+p--that between the individual and his own self. To be himself was his cry and his task. With this consummation in view, he plumbed every depth of human nature. This one thing achieved, all else became insignificant.

Hamsun begins where Ibsen ended, one might say. The one problem never consciously raised by him as a problem is that of man's duty or ability to express his own nature. That is taken for granted. The figures populating the works of Hamsun, whether centrally placed or moving shadowlike in the periphery, are first of all themselves--agressively, inevitably, unconsciously so, In other words, they are like their creator. They may perish tragically or ridiculously as a result of their common inability to lay violent hand on their own natures. They may go through life warped and dwarfed for lack of an adjustment that to most of us might seem both easy and natural. Their own selves may become more clearly revealed to them by harsh or happy contacts with life, and they may change their surfaces accordingly. The one thing never occurring to them is that they might, for the sake of something or some one outside of themselves, be anything but what they are.

There are interferences, however, and it is from these that Hamsun's problems spring. A man may prosper or suffer by being himself, and in neither case is the fault his own. There are factors that more or less fatally influence and circ.u.mscribe the supremely important factor that is his own self. Roughly these fall into three groups suggestive of three cla.s.ses of relations.h.i.+ps: (1) between man and his general environment; (2) between man and that ever-present force of life which we call love; and (3) between man and life in its entirety, as an omnipotence that some of us call G.o.d and others leave unnamed. Hamsun's deceptive preference for indirectness is shown by the fact that, while he tries to make us believe that his work is chiefly preoccupied with problems of the second cla.s.s, his mind is really busy with those of the first cla.s.s. The explanation is simple. Nothing helps like love to bring out the unique qualities of a man's nature. On the other hand, there is nothing that does more to prevent a man from being himself than the ruts of habit into which his environment always tends to drive him.

There are two kinds of environment, natural and human. Hamsun appears to think that the less you have of one and the more of the other, the better for yourself and for humanity as a whole. The city to him is primarily concentrated human environment, and as such bad. This phase of his att.i.tude toward life almost amounts to a phobia. It must be connected with personal experiences of unusual depth and intensity.

Perhaps it offers a key that may be well worth searching for. Hamsun was born in the country, of and among peasants. In such surroundings he grew up. The removal of his parents from the central inland part of Norway to the rocky northern coast meant a change of natural setting, but not a human contact. The sea must have come into his life as a revelation, and yet it plays an astonis.h.i.+ngly small part in his work. It is always present, but always in the distance. You hear of it, but you are never taken to it.

At about fifteen, Hamsun had an experience which is rarely mentioned as part of the scant biographical material made available by his reserve concerning his own personality. He returned to the old home of his parents in the Gudbrand Valley and worked for a few months as clerk in a country store--a store just like any one of those that figure so conspicuously in almost every one of his novels. The place and the work must have made a revolutionary impression on him. It apparently aroused longings, and it probably laid the basis for resistances and resentments that later blossomed into weedlike abundance as he came in contact with real city life. There runs through his work a strange sense of sympathy for the little store on the border of the wilderness, but it is also stamped as the forerunner and panderer of the lures of the city.

As a boy of eighteen, when working in a tiny coast town as a cobbler's apprentice, he ventured upon his first literary endeavors and actually managed to get two volumes printed at his own cost. The art of writing was in his blood, exercising a call and a command that must have been felt as a pain at times, and as a consecration at other times. Books and writing were connected with the city. Perhaps the hatred that later days developed, had its roots in a thwarted pa.s.sion. Even in the little community where his first scribblings reached print he must have felt himself in urban surroundings, and perhaps those first crude volumes drew upon him laughter and scorn that his sensitive soul never forgot.

If something of the kind happened, the seed thus sown was nourished plentifully afterwards, when, as a young man, Hamsun pitted his ambitions against the indifference first of Christiania and then of Chicago. The result was a defeat that seemed the more bitter because it looked like punishment incurred by straying after false G.o.ds.

Others have suffered in the same way, although, being less rigidly themselves, they may not, like Hamsun, have taken a perverse pleasure in driving home the point of the agony. Others have thought and said harsh things of the cities. But no one that I can recall has equalled Hamsun in his merciless denunciation of the very principle of urbanity. The truth of it seems to be that Hamsun's pilgrimage to the bee hives where modern humanity cl.u.s.ters typically, was an essential violation of something within himself that mattered even more than his literary ambition to his soul's integrity. Perhaps, if I am right, he is the first genuine peasant who has risen to such artistic mastery, reaching its ultimate heights through a belated recognition of his own proper settings. Hamsun was sixty when he wrote "Growth of the Soil." It is the first work in which he celebrates the life of the open country for its own sake, and not merely as a contrast to the artificiality and selfishness of the cities. It was written, too, after he had definitely withdrawn himself from the gathering places of the writers and the artists to give an equal share of his time and attention to the tilling of the soil that was at last his own. It is the harvest of his ultimate self-discovery.

The various phases of his campaign against city life are also interesting and illuminating. Early in his career as a writer he tried an open attack in full force by a couple of novels, "Shallow Soil" and "Editor Lynge", dealing sarcastically with the literary Bohemia of the Norwegian capital. They were, on the whole, failures--artistically rather than commercially. They are among his poorest books. The attack was never repeated in that form. He retired to the country, so to speak, and tried from there to strike at what he could reach of the ever expanding, ever devouring city. After that the city, like the sea, is always found in the distance. One feels it without ever seeing it.

There is fear as well as hatred in his treatment of it.

In the country it is represented not so much by the store, which, after all, fills an unmistakable need on the part of the rural population, as by the representatives of the various professions. For these Hamsun entertains a hostile feeling hardly less marked than that bestowed on their place of origin, whither, to his openly declared disgust, they are always longing. It does not matter whether they are ministers or actors, lawyers or doctors--they are all tarred with the same brush. Their common characteristic is their rootlessness. They have no real home, because to Hamsun a home is unthinkable apart from a s.p.a.ce of soil possessed in continuity by successive generations. They are always despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily, and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge of life on a large scale. Greatness is to them inseparably connected with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of judgment are not their own.

From what has just been said one might conclude that the spirit of Hamsun is fundamentally unsocial. So it is, in a way, but only in so far as we have come to think of social and urban as more or less interchangeable terms. He has a social consciousness and a social pa.s.sion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of no greater man than his own Isak of "Growth of the Soil"--a simple pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak pa.s.sing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it deliberately in the light of a religious rite--the oldest and most significant known to man. It is as if the man who starved in Christiania and the western cities of the United States--not figuratively, but literally--had once for all conceived a respect for man's princ.i.p.al food that has colored all subsequent life for him and determined his own att.i.tude toward everything by a reference to its connection or lack of connection with that substance.

Taking it all in all, one may well call Hamsun old-fas.h.i.+oned. The virtues winning his praise and the conditions that stir his longings are not of the present day. There is in him something primitive that forms a sharp contrast to the modernity of his own style. Even in his most romantic exaggerations, as in "Hunger" and "Mysteries," he is a realist, dealing unrelentingly with life as it appears to us. It would hardly be too much to call his method scientific. But he uses it to aim tremendous explosive charges at those human concentrations that made possible the forging of the weapons he wields so skilfully. Nor does he stop at a wish to see those concentrations scattered. The very ambitions and Utopias bred within them are anathema to his soul, that places simplicity above cleanliness in divine proximity. Characteristically we find that the one art treated with constant sympathy in his writings is that of music, which probably is the earliest and certainly the one least dependent on the herding of men in barracks. In place of what he wishes to take away he offers nothing but peace and the sense of genuine creation that comes to the man who has just garnered the harvests of his own fields into his bulging barns. He is a prophet of plenty, but he has no answer ready when we ask him what we are going to do with it after we have got it. Like a true son of the brooding North, he wishes to set us thinking, but he has no final solutions to offer.

EDWIN BJoRKMAN.

PAN

I

These last few days I have been thinking and thinking of the Nordland summer, with its endless day. Sitting here thinking of that, and of a hut I lived in, and of the woods behind the hut. And writing things down, by way of pa.s.sing the time; to amuse myself, no more. The time goes very slowly; I cannot get it to pa.s.s as quickly as I would, though I have nothing to sorrow for, and live as pleasantly as could be. I am well content withal, and my thirty years are no age to speak of.

A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird's feathers in a sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from a place a long way off; from one who need not have sent them back at all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.

And for the rest I have no troubles, unless for a touch of gout now and again in my left foot, from an old bullet-wound, healed long since.

Two years ago, I remember, the time pa.s.sed quickly--beyond all comparison more quickly than time now. A summer was gone before I knew.

Two years ago it was, in 1855. I will write of it just to amuse myself--of something that happened to me, or something I dreamed. Now, I have forgotten many things belonging to that time, by having scarcely thought of them since. But I remember that the nights were very light.

And many things seemed curious and unnatural. Twelve months to the year--but night was like day, and never a star to be seen in the sky.

And the people I met were strange, and of a different nature from those I had known before; sometimes a single night was enough to make them blossom out from childhood into the full of their glory, ripe and fully grown. No witchery in this; only I had never seen the like before. No.

In a white, roomy home down by the sea I met with one who busied my thoughts for a little time. I do not always think of her now; not any more. No; I have forgotten her. But I think of all the other things: the cry of the sea-birds, my hunting in the woods, my nights, and all the warm hours of that summer. After all, it was only by the merest accident I happened to meet her; save for that, she would never have been in my thoughts for a day.

From the hut where I lived, I could see a confusion of rocks and reefs and islets, and a little of the sea, and a bluish mountain peak or so; behind the hut was the forest. A huge forest it was; and I was glad and grateful beyond measure for the scent of roots and leaves, the thick smell of the fir-sap, that is like the smell of marrow. Only the forest could bring all things to calm within me; my mind was strong and at ease. Day after day I tramped over the wooded hills with aesop at my side, and asked no more than leave to keep on going there day after day, though most of the ground was covered still with snow and soft slush. I had no company but aesop; now it is Cora, but at that time it was aesop, my dog that I afterwards shot.

Often in the evening, when I came back to the hut after being out shooting all day, I could feel that kindly, homely feeling trickling through me from head to foot--a pleasant little inward s.h.i.+vering. And I would talk to aesop about it, saying how comfortable we were. "There, now we'll get a fire going, and roast a bird on the hearth," I would say; "what do you say to that?" And when it was done, and we had both fed, aesop would slip away to his place behind the hearth, while I lit a pipe and lay down on the bench for a while, listening to the dead soughing of the trees. There was a slight breeze bearing down towards the hut, and I could hear quite clearly the clutter of a grouse far away on the ridge behind. Save for that, all was still.

And many a time I fell asleep there as I lay, just as I was, fully dressed and all, and did not wake till the seabirds began calling. And then, looking out of the window, I could see the big white buildings of the trading station, the landing stage at Girilund, the store where I used to get my bread. And I would lie there a while, wondering how I came to be there, in a hut on the fringe of a forest, away up in Nordland.

Then aesop over by the hearth would shake out his long, slender body, rattling his collar, and yawning and wagging his tail, and I would jump up, after those three or four hours of sleep, fully rested and full of joy in everything ... everything.

Many a night pa.s.sed just that way.

II

Rain and storm--'tis not such things that count. Many a time some little joy can come along on a rainy day, and make a man turn off somewhere to be alone with his happiness--stand up somewhere and look out straight ahead, laughing quietly now and again, and looking round. What is there to think of? One clear pane in a window, a ray of sunlight in the pane, the sight of a little brook, or maybe a blue strip of sky between the clouds. It needs no more than that.

At other times, even quite unusual happenings cannot avail to lift a man from dulness and poverty of mind; one can sit in the middle of a ballroom and be cool, indifferent, unaffected by anything. Sorrow and joy are from within oneself.

One day I remember now. I had gone down to the coast. The rain came on suddenly, and I slipped into an open boathouse to sit down for a while.

I was humming a little, but not for any joy or pleasure, only to pa.s.s the time. aesop was with me; he sat up listening, and I stopped humming and listened as well. Voices outside; people coming nearer. A mere chance--nothing more natural. A little party, two men and a girl, came tumbling in suddenly to where I sat, calling to one another and laughing:

"Quick! Get in here till it stops!"

I got up.

One of the men had a white s.h.i.+rt front, soft, and now soaked with rain into the bargain, and all bagging down; and in that wet s.h.i.+rt front a diamond clasp. Long, pointed shoes he wore, too, that looked somewhat affected. I gave him good-day. It was Mack, the trader; I knew him because he was from the store where I used to get my bread. He had asked me to look in at the house any time, but I had not been there yet.

"Aha, it's you, is it?" said Mack at sight of me. "We were going up to the mill, but had to turn back. Ever see such weather--what? And when are you coming up to see us at Sirilund, Lieutenant?"

He introduced the little black-bearded man who was with him; a doctor, staying down near the church.

The girl lifted her veil the least little bit, to her nose, and started talking to aesop in a whisper. I noticed her jacket; I could see from the lining and the b.u.t.tonholes that it had been dyed. Mack introduced me to her as well; his daughter, Edwarda.

Edwarda gave me one glance through her veil, and went on whispering to the dog, and reading on its collar: