Wanderers | Page 2

on its due course, however, and in reality passion may sink
into neurasthenia without producing suicides. Ivar Kareno discovers it
in "Sunset Glow," when, at the age of fifty, he turns renegade in more
senses than one. But even then his realization could not be fully
accepted by the author himself, still only thirty-eight, and so Kareno
steps down into the respectable and honoured sloth of age only to be
succeeded, by another hero who has not yet passed the climacteric
twenty-ninth year. Even Telegraph-Rolandsen in "Dreamers" retains
the youthful glow and charm and irresponsibility that used to be
thought inseparable from the true Hamsun character.
It is therefore with something of a shock one encounters the enigmatic
Knut Pedersen from the Northlands, who has turned from literature to
tramping, who speaks of old age as if he had reached the proverbial
three-score and ten, and who time and again slips into something like
actual whining, as when he says of himself: "Time has worn me out so
that I have grown stupid and sterile and indifferent; now I look upon a
woman merely as literature." The two volumes named "Under the
Autumn Star" and "A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings" form an
unbroken cry of regret, and the object of that regret is the hey-day of

youth--that golden age of twenty-nine--when every woman regardless
of age and colour and caste was a challenging fragment of life.
Something more than the passing of years must have characterized the
period immediately proceeding the production of the two volumes just
mentioned. They mark some sort of crisis reaching to the innermost
depths of the soul it wracked with anguish and pain. Perhaps a clue to
this crisis may be found in the all too brief paragraph devoted to
Hamsun in the Norwegian "Who's who." There is a line that reads as
follows: "Married, 1898, Bergljot Bassöe Bech (marriage dissolved);
1908, Marie Andersen." The man that wrote "Under the Autumn Star"
was unhappy. But he was also an artist. In that book the artist within
him is struggling for his existence. In "A Wanderer Plays with Muted
Strings" the artist is beginning to assert himself more and more, and
that he had conquered in the meantime we know by "Benoni" and
"Rosa" which appeared in 1908. The crisis was past, but echoes of it
were heard as late as 1912, the year of "Last Joy," which well may be
called Hamsun's most melancholy book. Yet that is the book which
seems to have paved the way and laid the foundation for "The Growth
of the Soil"--just as "Dreamers" was a sketch out of which in due time
grew "Children of the Time" and "Segelfoss Town."
Hamsun's form is always fluid. In the two works now published it
approaches formlessness. "Under the Autumn Star" is a mere sketch,
seemingly lacking both plan and plot. Much of the time Knut Pedersen
is merely thinking aloud. But out of his devious musings a purpose
finally shapes itself, and gradually we find ourselves the spectator of a
marital drama that becomes the dominant note in the sequel. The
development of this main theme is, as I have already suggested,
distinctly Conradian in its method, and looking back from the ironical
epilogue that closes "A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings," one
marvels at the art that could work such a compelling totality out of such
a miscellany of unrelated fragments.
There is a weakness common to both these works which cannot be
passed up in silence. More than once the narrator falls out of his part as
a tramp worker to rail journalistically at various things that have

aroused his particular wrath, such as the tourist traffic, the city worker
and everything relating to Switzerland. It is done very naively, too, but
it is well to remember how frequently in the past this very kind of
naiveté has associated with great genius. And whatever there be of such
shortcomings is more than balanced by the wonderful feeling for and
understanding of nature that most frequently tempt Hamsun into
straying from the straight and narrow path of conventional story telling.
What cannot be forgiven to the man who writes of "faint whisperings
that come from forest and river as if millions of nothingnesses kept
streaming and streaming," and who finds in those whisperings "one
eternity coming to an understanding with another eternity about
something"?
EDWIN BJORKMAN

WANDERERS

I.
Smooth as glass the water was yesterday, and smooth as glass it is
again today. Indian summer on the island, mild and warm--ah! But
there is no sun.
It is many years now since I knew such peace. Twenty or thirty years,
maybe; or maybe it was in another life. But I have felt it some time,
surely, since I go