by Knut Hamsun
Nagel covered his eyes with his hand for a moment, swaying his head back and forth as if his thoughts were in a whirl. He was standing in the middle of the room.
What was I just thinking about? ... All right, she’s afraid of me, but we are in agreement. And I feel in my heart that I’ll always be good to her. I shall break with the world, I’ll return the ring; I’ve been romping like a fool among other fools, committing crazy pranks, even playing the violin, and the people shouted: well roared, lion! I’m nauseated by the unspeakably crude triumph of hearing the carnivores applauding, I refuse to compete any longer with a telegraph operator from Kabelvåg; I shall go to the valley of peace and be the most peaceable creature in the woods, worshiping my god, humming happy songs, turning superstitious, shaving only at flood tide, and noting the cries of certain birds before I sow my grain. And when I’m tired from work, my wife will wave to me from the doorway, and I’ll give her my blessing and thank her for all her endearing smiles.... Martha, we did agree, didn’t we? Your promise was so definite; when I explained it all to you, you wanted it yourself at the end, didn’t you? And yet nothing came of the whole thing. You were abducted, caught off guard and abducted, not to your ruin but to mine....
Dagny, I do not love you, you have blocked me everywhere; I do not love your name, it exasperates me and I sneer at it, calling you Dangni and sticking out my tongue. Listen to me, for Christ’s sake! I’ll come to you at the stroke of the hour, when I’m dead; I’ll show myself to you on the fire wall with the face of the jack of clubs, and I’ll haunt you as a skeleton, dance around you on one leg, and paralyze your arms by my touch. I’ll do it, I’ll do it! God save me from you henceforth and always—I swear it by holy hell, that’s how fervently I pray for it....
And so what? For the seventh and last time, so what? I love you all the same, and you know very well, Dagny, that I love you all the same and that I regret my bitter words. But so what? What good does it do me? And besides, who knows whether it isn’t better this way? If you say it is, then in fact it is so; I feel the same as you, I’m a wanderer brought to a halt. But suppose you had gone along, that you had broken with everyone else and committed yourself to me—which I didn’t deserve, but let’s suppose it anyway—what would it have led to? At most you would have wanted to help me perform my tasks, fulfill my mission in the world. I tell you, it makes me feel ashamed, my heart stops with shame at the thought. I would do as you wished because I loved you, but it would make my soul suffer.... But what on earth is the use of supposing one thing after another, of setting up these impossible points of departure? You refused to break with everybody and commit yourself to me—you decline with thanks, laugh me to scorn, mock me; so what have I to do with you? Period.
Pause. Then, vehemently: For the rest, let me say that I’m drinking this good glass of water and telling you to go straight to hell! It is unspeakably stupid of you to think I love you, that I really should want to bother with that now, when the fullness of time is so near. I loathe your whole taxpayer’s existence, dolled up, groomed, and inane as it is. I loathe it, God knows I do, and I feel indignation rising within me like a rushing mighty wind of the Holy Spirit when I think of you. What would you have turned me into? Heh-heh, I bet you’d have turned me into a great man. Heh-heh, go and show thyself to the priests! In my heart I’m ashamed of your great men.
A great man! How many great men are there in the world? First, there are the great men in Norway, they are the greatest. Then there are the great men in France, in the land of Hugo and the poets. Next come the great men yonder, in the kingdom of Barnum. And all these great men are tumbling about on a planet that, compared to Sirius, is no bigger than the back of a louse. But a great man is not a little man, a great man doesn’t live in Paris, he occupies Paris. A great man stands so tall that he can see himself over his own head. Lavoisier asked to have his beheading postponed until he had completed a chemical experiment; he said, to wit: “Don’t step on my circles!” Heh-heh, what a farce! When not even Euclid, no, not even Euclid with his axioms added more than a pennyworth to the stock of fundamental values! Oh, how poor, frugal and pusillanimous they have made life on God’s earth!
There they go and make great men out of the most incidental experts who, quite by chance, improved the electrical condenser, or quite by chance had the muscle power to straddle their way through Sweden on a bicycle. And they let great men write books to promote the veneration of other great men! Heh-heh, it’s really amusing, it’s worth your money! In the end every village will have its great man, a law graduate, a novelist, a polar skipper of immense stature. And the earth will become perfectly flat and so simple and easy to survey—.
Dagny, it’s my turn now: I decline with thanks, I laugh you to scorn, I mock you; so what do you have to do with me? I’ll never be a great man.
But let us just suppose there is a multitude of great men, a legion of geniuses of this or that magnitude; why not! And so what? Should I be impressed by their number, perhaps? On the contrary, the more of a kind, the more ordinary they will be! Or should I do as the world does? The world is always true to form: here, too, it accepts what the world has accepted previously; it admires, falls on its knees, and runs at the heels of great men shouting hurrah. And should I do the same? What a farce! The great man walks along the street, and one mortal nudges another mortal in the ribs and says, There goes this or that great man! The great man sits in the theater, and one schoolmistress pinches another schoolmistress’ sexless thigh and whispers, Over there, in that white-tie box, sits this or that great man! Heh-heh. And he himself, the great man? He cashes in! He sure does. Those mortals are right, he thinks, accepting their tokens of esteem as his due; he doesn’t reject them, he doesn’t blush. Why should he? Isn’t he a great man?
But here Øien, the student, would protest. He is going to be a great man himself, he is working on a novel during the holidays. He would point out another inconsistency: Mr. Nagel, you’re not consistent, explain what you mean!
And I would explain what I meant.
But young Øien wouldn’t be satisfied; he would ask, So there really aren’t any great men, is that it?
Yes, that’s what he would ask, even after I’d explained what I meant! Heh-heh, that’s how it would look to him. Well, I would still answer him as best I could; feeling in my element, I would say, There is simply a legion of great men. Do you hear what I’m saying? There is a legion of them! But of the greatest men there aren’t, no, there aren’t many. That’s the difference, you see. Soon there will be a great man in every village, but of the greatest men there will probably never be one even in a thousand years. What the world means by a great man is quite simply a talent, a genius, and genius, after all, is a very democratic concept: a diet of so many pounds of beef a day will produce genius in the third, fourth, fifth, or tenth generation. Genius in the popular sense is not the unprecedented, but merely a human apropos: it makes you stop, but not rear up. Imagine the following: You are standing in an observatory some starry night, looking through a telescope at the Orion nebula. Then you hear Fearnley say, “Good evening, good evening!” You look around, Fearnley makes a deep bow—a great man has just come in, a genius, the gentleman in the white-tie box. You smile to yourself and go back to the Orion nebula, isn’t that right? This happened to me once.... Do you understand what I mean? I’m saying that, instead of admiring the ordinary great men who make mortals nudge each other in the ribs with awe, I prefer the small, unknown geniuses, youths who die in their school days because their souls shatter them, delicate, dazzling glowworms one must have met in their lifetimes to know they really existed. That’s how I feel. But above all I say it’s important to distinguish between the highest and the high genius, to keep the highest afloat so that it doesn’t drown amid the proletariat of geniuses. I want to see the unprecedented arch-spirit in his proper place. Do make a selection, force me to sit up, get rid of all those village geniuses! We have to find what exceeds the standard, His Eminence E
xcess....
Whereupon young Øien will say—oh, I know him, he’ll say, But really, this is just theory, paradoxes.
I cannot see it as just theory, I just cannot, God help me, so hopelessly different is my view of things. Is it my fault? I mean, am I personally to blame for it? I’m an alien, a stranger on earth, God’s idée fixe, call me what you will....
With increasing vehemence: I’m telling you, it makes no difference what you call me; I’ll not surrender, never in all my life. I clench my teeth and harden my heart because I’m right; I will stand before the world, one man against all, and not give in! I know what I know, in my heart I’m right; once in a while, at certain moments, I have a hunch of the infinite interconnectedness of all things. I still have something to add which I forgot, I won’t yield: I’ll knock down all your stupid assumptions concerning the great men. Young Øien maintains that my view is nothing but a theory. Good; if my view is a theory I’ll chuck it and come up with one that’s better still. I stick at nothing. And I say—wait a moment, I’m convinced I can say something still better, because my heart is full of rightness: I despise and deride that great man in the white-tie box; my heart tells me he’s a clown and a fool, my lips purse with contempt when I see his puffed-up breast and his supremely confident air. Has the great man fought his way to genius by himself? Wasn’t he born with it? Why, then, make such a song and dance about him?
Young Øien remarks, But you yourself want to put His Eminence Excess in his rightful place; you do, after all, admire the arch-spirit, who didn’t fight his way to genius by himself, either!
Young Øien believes he has caught me once more in an inconsistency, that’s how it looks to him! But I answer him again, because my sense of holy rightness has taken possession of me: I don’t admire the arch-spirit either, I shall crush even His Eminence Excess, if necessary, and sweep the earth clean. The arch-spirit is admired for his greatness, for his excess of genius—as though he had only himself to thank for his genius, as though the genius didn’t belong to our collective humanity, being, literally, a property of matter itself! The fact that the arch-spirit has coincidentally sucked up his great-grandfather‘s, his grandfather’s, his father‘s, his son’s, his grandson’s and his great-grandson’s share of genius, and has laid waste to his lineage for centuries—this is not the fault of the arch-spirit himself, no, it’s not! He discovered the genius within him, understood its purpose and used it.... Theory? No, it’s not theory; consider it my heartfelt conviction! But if this too is theory, I’ll search my brain and find a fresh solution; and more, I’ll come up with a third, fourth, and fifth crushing contradiction, as best I can, and not give up.
But young Øien doesn’t give up either, because he’s backed by the whole world, and he says, Then there’s nothing left to admire, no great man, no genius!
And I answer, making him feel more and more ill at ease as time goes on, because he’s going to be a great man himself. I again throw cold water on him, replying, No, I don’t admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius’s activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.... Will that do? Have you understood me now?
Suddenly, his hands outstretched: Ah, there again I saw the infinite interconnectedness of all things! Oh, what brightness, what brightness! The great explanation was just vouchsafed to me, at this very moment, in the middle of the room! There were no riddles anymore, I saw to the bottom of everything. Oh, what brightness, what brightness!
Pause.
Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay! I’m a stranger among my fellow humans, and soon the clock will strike. Oh well ... And besides, what do I have to do with the great men? Nothing! Except that I find the very idea of great men to be a farce, just humbug and fraud! Good! But isn’t everything a farce, sheer humbug and fraud? To be sure, to be sure, everything is a fraud. Kamma and Miniman and everyone else, love and life—all is a fraud; everything I see and hear and perceive is a fraud, even the blue of the sky is ozone, poison, insidious poison.... And when the sky is quite clear and blue, I quietly sail about up there, letting my boat ripple on through the fraudulent blue ozone. And the boat is of aromatic wood, and the sail—
Dagny herself said it was very beautiful. Dagny, you did say it! Anyway, thank you for saying it, and for making me so happy that I trembled with joy. I remember every word and carry it all with me as I walk along the road pondering everything, I won’t ever forget.... And now you’re going to win, when the hour strikes. I won’t pester you anymore. Nor will I show myself on the fire wall; I said that out of revenge, and you must forgive me. No, I’ll come to you and wave my white wings around you as you sleep, and follow you when you are awake, whispering sweet nothings in your ear. And when you hear me, perhaps you will even give me a smile, yes, perhaps you will, if you feel like it. And if I won’t have white wings myself—if, that is, my wings shouldn’t be very white—I’ll ask an angel of God to do it for me, and I won’t come near you myself but hide in a corner and see you smile at him, perhaps. That’s what I’ll do, if I can, to atone for some of the worst harm I’ve done you. Oh, the very thought makes me happy, I wish I could do it at once. Perhaps I can please you in other wonderful ways as well. I’ll be glad to sing above your head on Sunday morning as you go to church, and I’ll ask the angel to do the same. And if he won’t do it for me and I can’t persuade him to, I’ll throw myself down before him and beseech him more and more humbly until he answers my prayers. I’ll promise to do him a kindness in return, and I’ll also give him something and do him ever so many good turns if he’ll be so kind.... I’m pretty sure I’ll manage, I can’t wait to begin, I’m overjoyed at the thought of it. And it won’t be long now before the time comes, I’ll try to speed it up, with pleasure at that.... “Think of the day when all mists will have vanished, la la la la....”3
Happy and exalted, he ran down the stairs and entered the dining room. He was still singing. Then by mere chance his jubilant high spirits were promptly dashed, making him feel embittered for several hours. He sang as he ate a hurried breakfast, standing up at the table; though he was not alone, he didn’t sit down. When he noticed that the other two guests were sending him angry looks, he quickly apologized: had he noticed them before, he would have behaved more discreetly. He neither saw nor heard anything on such days! Wasn’t it a glorious morning? Why, the flies were buzzing already!
But he received no answer, the two strangers looked as displeased as before and went on with their dignified political discussion. Nagel’s mood plummeted. He fell silent and quietly left the dining room. After visiting a shop down the street to get some cigars, he set out for the woods as usual. It was half-past eleven.
People never changed, did they! There they sat, those two lawyers or agents or landowners, or whatever they were, discussing politics in the dining room and looking hateful and sour just because he happened to be humming for joy in their presence. Chewing away at their breakfasts with an exceedingly reasonable air, they couldn’t tolerate being interrupted. Heh-heh, they both had swag bellies and fat, pudgy fingers; their napkins were tucked under their chins. By rights, he ought to go back to the hotel and taunt them a little. What sort of high and mighty gentlemen were they anyway? Agents in grits, in American hides—God knows if it wasn’t in cheap crockery. Truly something to bowl you over! And yet they had put an end to his happy thoughts in an instant. They weren’t even particularly good-looking! Well, one of them didn’t look too bad, but the other—the one with the hides—had a crooked mouth that only opened on one side, so that it reminded you of a buttonhole. He also had a lot of gray hair growing out of his ears. He was ugly as sin, pfui! But, of course, one mustn’t express one’s joy in a snatch of song when that man had his face in the food trough!
No, people never changed, they certainly didn’t! The gentlemen discuss politics, the gentlemen have noted the latest government appointments; thank God, it wasn’t yet too late for Buskerud County t
o be saved for the Conservatives! Heh-heh, how amusing to observe their mine owners’ faces as they said it. As if Norwegian politics were anything but rotgut wisdom and peasant flimflam! I, Ola Olsen from Lista, agree to a compensation of one hundred and seventy-five kroner to a widow in Nordland, provided I get in return a parish road at three hundred kroner in Fjære parish, Ryfylke County. Heh-heh, flimflam.
But start up a merry song and disturb Ola Upnorth in his parliamentary business, and all hell breaks loose! That gets you into big trouble. For mind you, Ola is thinking, Ola is pondering something. What is he up to? What bill is he going to propose tomorrow? Heh-heh-heh, there he is, a trusted man in Norway’s minuscule world, elected by the people to contribute his lines to the country’s royal farce, dressed in the sacred national shaggy-goat style, puffing away to his heart’s content at his chewing-tobacco pipe, his paper collar soggy with true and honest sweat! Out of the way for the chosen one, stand aside, damn it, give him some elbowroom!4
