Wanderers | Page 2

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 Bass?e 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 about now humming a little tune; go about rejoicing, loving every straw and every stone, and feeling as if they cared for me in return.
When I go by the overgrown path, in through the woods, my heart quivers with an unearthly joy. I