through the trees from the town; they were ringing for afternoon service; and I thought I had never noticed before how beautiful it was here. It was as if my eyesight had been sharpened. I saw things which I had never noticed before a little island, for instance, with trees bending their heads down to gaze into the water like Narcissus, sick with its own beauty; then innumerable small sounds that came from the rushes by the lake, the depths of the wood, from the grass, from insects singing, birds that fluttered among the leaves, and fish that sent up bubbles to the surface of the water. I fell into wondering at the ever-changing forms of the clouds; they looked at first sight so quiet, so changeless in the still summer air, but for all that when one noticed their slow moving over the vast space you saw that they changedto golden laughing islands, to great sailing birds, and then they disappeared like a flock of little cloud-children.

I took in the whole picture in a wide glance and said to myself, "If you should never come back here again, you will never forget how it looks today!"

I wandered into the recesses of the wood. The same sort of solemn alertness was upon me, a sort of pondering receptiveness. Then all of a sudden I remembered that I was going about with his letter in my pocket. I felt a sudden blow at my heart, my soul trembled with a shuddering chill. My knees knocked under me, I had to support myself against a tree, or I should have fallen; I crushed the letter in my hands, and, without reading it, saw every word he had written before my eyes. It was true then. He had abandoned me. It was all true.

Indeed, I had said all this before. I had gone with his words in my mind all the time. Now for the first time they reached my heart and made me moan with pain.

Over! All over! Never to see him again! What did he look like now? I sought to call his image up before my mind. It escaped me; I saw parts only, now a pair of large dark eyes that

17 "Julles Dagbog," pp. 242-6.

looked at me sharply, ironically, unfriendlily.

I

I cried to heaven in my misery. deceived myself, and prayed that it might not be true. "I know that I deserve punishment, God. But have you not punished me enough? Now I will shut my eyes. When I open them again, let it all turn out to be a dream."

... Now I stood again by the water. My madness was overpassed. I was only driven to death. I cried softly and quietly, I saw the summer landscape spread out before me. I who was still so young, and nothing more to hope for in life.

Then a voice spoke within me, "There is hope yet; perhaps even now there is a telegram waiting for you, or another quite different letter is on its way to you."

There was no telegram and no letter the next day."

Obstfelder's "The Cross" is another love story (Kjærlighedshistorie) on very similar lines. It is certainly not strictly moral, but it too is never offensive; the sentiment is always romantic, not sensual, and it is full of charm and pathos. The manner of all these stories-nay, we may say it is the manner of Scandinavian literature taken as a whole-is in the direction of overchildishness. simplicity, almost We noted the characteristic in Fröken Lagerlöf. But in this particular tale of Obstfelder's one hardly wishes it otherwise.

The initial description of Rebecca, the heroine, seems, through this quality of extreme simplicity, to mark her off at once from one's notion of an English girl or a French. And the charm goes on growing, as her power to harm others becomes apparent, on until the end, which is so foolishly, meaninglessly, yet most skilfully sad. Rebecca springs out of the void. How the liaison between her and the narrator began we are not told-"he never

18 "Korset."

thinks of asking about her past, her belongings." Thus she is like the creature of a fairy tale, some Undine of modern Christiania. Then the hero makes acquaintance with an engraver, hardly less a being from the void, and going to his studio discovers to his horror that Rebecca's face and figure are everywhere. But he keeps these things to himself, and ponders them in his heart. Matters go on till the proofs of the girl's faithlessness seem conclusive and there is an awful night in which the hero, after following Rebecca to town, wanders about in her traces, finds her shut up in the engraver's studio, and meets her husband (for Rebecca had once been actually married -"in church," as her husband says), and hears his cynical account of her changes of taste. Then Rebecca, finding out how her lover has followed her about and has lost all belief in her, goes home, takes out a boat to sea and drowns herself. After her burial the man discovers a packet, which he dare not open at first, he is so certain it is of other men's love-letters. It is, in fact, a diary, showing that whatever she had been to other people, Rebecca had never swerved in her devotion to him.

Such is the class of book produced by the "Young Norse" type of writer, running much towards diaries (of Obstfelder we have "A Parson's Diary," and "The Cross" is in diary form, as are both "Marie" and "Julia" of Nansen and Hamsun's "Pan"); in other words, not attempting any wide sweep in the portrayal of human nature, but sharply distinguished from books like Thomas Krag's, in that they are what people call "psychological," not romantic. "Psychological" is an abominable word, for an artistic study has nothing to do with science; but it is in use, and it would not be easy to find a substitute. It is on account of this last element, its introspectiveness, that VOL. XIV. 726

LIVING AGE.

with this class of book we associate Hamsun's "Hunger," for all that in plot it in no wise resembles those just described. "Hunger" has what they have, or, in a still higher degree, an extraordinary naïveté and candor, such as you will not perhaps find in any other literature, not even in the Russian. It has no plot at all, and works up to no dénouement. It is merely a description of the writer's struggle for cxistence in the town of his choice. One gathers that he had been to the university there, had passed through a time of comparative ease. Now he is merely penniless, and we have nothing else than the record of days of starvation and semi-starvation, and the rare moments intervening when he earns something by his pen. No one among contemporary English novelists deserves better to be cited as a type of the true realist than Mr. George Gissing; his "New Grub Street" is already almost a classic. And yet compared with the awful candor of Hamsun's narrative "New Grub Street" seems almost artificial. We are spared no detail-of how the writer has to wear the same clothes for days and days, weeks it almost seems; or of his chewing chips of wood to stay the pangs of hunger; or again of his insane and useless and self-detrimental lies; his blasphemies; his eccentric, utterly inexplicable pieces of generosity, as when he pawns a waistcoat to give the chief part of the proceeds to a man whom he has known for some five minutes only, and then as an inconvenient neighbor; his allowing a shopman to pay him change not due, and directly after, ashamed of his theft, pouring all into the lap of a cake-seller at the street corner. The little love episode is of such a futile character that it is hardly possible to imagine a Frenchman confessing to a like gaucherie. And our author is so self-restrained in never giving us a hint or explanation, that

a dozen persons might read the episode of the landlady and her accounts, and remain as blind as the narrator did at the time to its true significance. At last the tale that begins in nothing ends in nothing. The starving author does not finally get recognized; rather he does in a sense get recognized, but by some fatality this seems to have no improving effect on his fortunes. In the end he embarks to work his passage on a ship bound for America, and the lights of the cruel city are the last things that he and we see as he passes down the fjord.

9919

All this-or almost all-we are justified in assuming, is simply autobiography. For it is certainly historical that Knut Hamsun went to America and stayed there for some years to try and push his fortunes. If any one should think that the acts or thoughts recorded in this sort of "confession" were too insane to be typical of human nature, let him read the book which records the result of Hamsun's experiences on the other side of the Atlantic, "Amerikas Aandsliv," as it is called. In that book, bitter as it is and through its bitterness limited and sometimes almost stupid, yet alert also and witty to no common degree, there is not the smallest trace of a disordered mind. The truth is we are all less sane than we imagine, and far less than we should appear if a record could be kept of all our passing moods and whims. Our own minds forget them almost as soon as they are gone, or rationize them into a connected system of thought. The astonishing part of Knut Hamsun's book is the exactitude (apparent, we are forced to add, but it is an appearance that carries conviction) with which he has preserved the transient acts and feelings which most forget.

19 "America's Spiritual and Intellectual Life" is the only possible translation. For the reason

In this brief essay on the Scandinavian novel we have thought it best to select only some few typical authors, and of each one's works not more than one or two for notice, lest, by multiplying examples, we should give to the whole the appearance of a catalogue rather than a criticism. There are many more writers who might seem to call for mention-certain ones who, from some characteristic quality, especially deserve it. In contrasting, for example, the meagreness of the human interest in Krag's books with what one might reasonably expect or demand, we should willingly have cited the work of a young writer, "Kamp," by F. K. Tranaas (1900), which, along with purity of style and a great sense of natural beauty, has a very rich vein of human interest. Another writer, who is notable in that he follows quite other models than those which have attracted the Scandinavians as a class, is Sophus Bauditz. His "From a Garrison Town" is, if anything, more like the German novel of thirty years ago than anything else; but it has a fuller sense of reality than have most of its prototypes. It is, however, as they are, somewhat conventional. More especially do the contrasted fortunes and rewards of the lieutenant and the schoolmaster in this story remind one of the German romance of the time of Freytag. Amelia Skramm is another writer who claim to distinction, but not a very high claim. Her writings have a kinship with those of some of her English sisters whose books are called powerful by the reviewers just in proportion as they approach or overstep the bounds' of modesty. And it need not be said that the "woman question" is a very prominent feature in Scandina-" vian fiction as a whole-in the

has

that "Aand" has not its English equivalent we have left the title in the original.

them no Tudor age nor silver age, no Pleiads and no Encyclopædists, no Cervantes nor Calderon, no Dante nor any of the innumerable poets and prose writers of the Italian Renaissance; their best substitutes for Goethe and Schiller are Ibsen and Björnson. present the languages of all the three countries are poor, and their vocabulary is

At

meagre. The Scandinavian writers are, as a class, lacking in dignity-Ibsen himself is scarcely an exception, Björnson is not an exceptionand their followers have not developed in a direction to fill up this want. This is not the place to speak of recent Scandinavian poetry. But we may say that that too, as a whole, is rather trifling in subject and in scope. It has been subjected, too (more than the prose), to foreign, that is to say, to French influences. In one poet the influence of Verlain is very discernible, in another that of Mallarmé. From drawbacks such as these the Scandinavian fiction recovers much by those qualities which we have so often insisted on its sincerity and candor., These give it a kind of dignity even when it is a little childish. We do not propose to draw a comparison between the Scandinavian novel as a whole and the English novel; but, as compared with those types of the latter which gain the largest suffrage from the public and the press, we may say that the Scandinavian novel has something of the charm that a child has side by side with an affected man or woman of the world. We can, indeed, boast of-in Edinburgh Review.

trade language-an enormous "output" in this particular literature. An immense series of romances-some all of adventure, running, so to say, with blood, the others all of style, as of a fencing master at a duel (the one of sound, the other of fury)-are to our account; and a series equally vast of the novels of manners (it is the best word) varied and witty, and tied to a wholly conventional presentation of life as conventional as is our drama; and now and again a book which is simple and sincere. But out of this great production how much forms the contribution to the finer literature of Europe of how much would the historian of European letters be obliged to take account? Whatever in fiction is good for us, very little indeed possesses the special merits which we look for in the realistic novel. To each age its peculiar type of literature, and on each type of literature lie its special obligations. Realism, the higher realism which attempts to be the mirror of life-life outward and inward-is bound by some of the duties which life itself imposes, and that rule which Marcus Aurelius lays down for his own conduct might very well be exacted of it. "Remember always to do what thou hast in hand," the Emperor says, "with complete and simple dignity and feeling of affection and freedom and justice." "With feeling of affection" to avoid the moroseness of the French, of the pessimists of all lands, but with justice to comprehend and apprehend all phases of human nature; and above all, with freedom and with dignity such as can never be the lot of those who are forever watching the set of public taste and trimming their sails to catch a favoring breeze. There is less of this commercial instinct in Scandinavia than here; and so, with all its defects, the fiction of these lands holds for the nonce a more important place than does our own.

IX.

I am extremely glad that I induced my excellent friend, Mr. Soulsby, to let me republish in these pages some Jottings from his Journal. The circulation of the "Cornhill" is, I believe, considerably larger than that of "St. Ursula's Parish Magazine," and the republication has put the Vicar in touch with friends and sympathizers all over the country, of whose existence he was previously unaware. He says, with winning meekness, that he had lived through many a lonely decade

Without a hope on earth to find A mirror in an answering mind,

Now, I

for even Mrs. Soulsby was not always able to follow the trend of his heartlongings, and now, suddenly, the air all round him is vocal with responsive notes, and he stands no longer isolated and alone in the great world of intellect and spirit. Sympathetic correspondence on psychical and æsthetic themes pours into the Vicarage letter-box, and the demand for the "Parish Magazine" rivals that for Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff's 9th and 10th volumes. am well aware that, even without these newly-developed interests, Mr. Soulsby leads what he calls "a very full life" (though young Bumpstead and Bertha between them seem to do most of the parish work), and I hope, therefore, that I shall not be understood as reflecting injuriously on a friend and pastor, if I say that diary-keeping seems to be the natural occupation of an idle man. I quite willingly admit the bearing of this stern judgment on the rough memoranda out of which the "Log-Book" is evolved. When, like the House of Lords in "Iolanthe," one

Saw the Learned Goose, and I was not a little surprised at seeing it discover the cards mamma and myself had chosen out of a Pack, and afterwards shuffled in the Pack. After looking at a watch, it discovered the hour, etc. But what most surprised me was that the Goose explained which of us had drawn the several cards. Α Learned Pig also displayed very wonderful Abilities and Sagacity. He instantly obeyed the Man who told him to keep his Ears and Tail quite still.

This being Christmas Day, myself and wife at Church in the morning. At the collection, my wife gave 6d.; but, they not asking me, I gave nothing. O! may we increase in Faith and Good Works, and maintain the good Intentions we have this day taken up.

Those two entries, when I casually encountered them, seemed, as they say, to strike a chord. In that enviable faculty of being easily amused by simple pleasures, I recognize a leading feature of my own character; and Selina was not slow to point out that my ancestor's meditations on Christmas bore a strong resemblance to my own. "He put nothing in the plate, and then