This one word Nagel never speaks. Like the hero of "Pan" he seeks the haven of another woman's tenderness. He yearns toward Martha Gude with all his heart, longs for the peace and rest and purity she could have brought into his life, and yet he can not tear himself loose from the passion that binds his soul and senses. Even while he is pleading with Martha and tries to win her confidence in a scene drawn with tender delicacy, his thoughts are with Dagny, and when at last he has won Martha's shy promise, he rushes out into the night to whisper Dagny's name to the trees and the earth. The love which gushes forth irrepressibly from some unquenchable fountain in the soul, which wells out again and again, warm and fresh, however often its outlet is clogged and muddied, this love Hamsun has often pictured and seldom with more tragic force than in the unhappy hero of "Mysteries." And yet, great and real as his love is--great and real enough to send him to his death--it is not perfect. It is poisoned by a lingering doubt, which prevents him from putting forth the one last effort that would have broken down Dagny's resistance.
The lovers in Hamsun's books are never at peace. They never know the quiet, gradual opening of heart to heart or the intimate communion of perfect sympathy. With them the conflict always goes on. Gunnar Heiberg, the Norwegian dramatist, has said that there is no such thing as mutual love, because no two people ever love each other simultaneously. When one has grown warm, the other has grown cold; and when one advances, the other instinctively recoils. With Hamsun the conflict is more fine-spun than that which Heiberg has painted rather crassly. The mutual love is there, but it is a thing so wild and shy and sensitive that it shrinks back into the dark at a touch even from the hand of the beloved. Or is perhaps the human soul so jealous of its freedom that it reacts against having another individuality fasten upon it even in love?
It is these intangible forces rather than the outer facts that divide the lovers in "Victoria." Victoria is the patrician among Hamsun's heroines, not only because of her birth and breeding, but by virtue of her character. She is far too noble for deliberate coquetry, and yet she tortures Johannes by an apparent capriciousness that seems out of keeping with her frank, generous nature, while he answers with coldness and hauteur. Why? Victoria has the secret, agonizing consciousness of the promise she has given her father that she would marry a wealthy suitor who can retrieve the fallen fortunes of the family. Johannes feels his own humble birth and his distance from the princess of his dreams. Yet these reasons seem hardly sufficient. It is difficult to imagine that battered old aristocrat, Victoria's father, forcing his daughter into an unhappy marriage to save his home, still more difficult to picture the mother, who knows everything, leading her daughter to the sacrifice. Moreover, Johannes, though of humble birth, has won fame and has developed into a man of substantive personality. He is not only Victoria's lover but her playmate and oldest friend and a favorite of her parents. In fact the sweetness in the relation between cottage and manor is one of the things that entitle "Victoria" to its reputation as the most idyllic among its author's works. Why then do not these four people face the situation together? Why does not at least Victoria talk it over with her lover? Afterwards she writes that she has been hindered by many things but most by her own nature which leads her to be cruel to herself. But the real reason is that Hamsun's art at this stage of his development has no use for fulfillment. With fulfillment comes indifference. It is his to paint the unslaked thirst and the unstilled longing. Therefore the wonderful letter in which Victoria lays bare her heart is not sent until after her death, and therefore she leaves Johannes the legacy of a great tragic feeling which is forever alive and throbbing because it is forever unsatisfied.