Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [30]
Eleven o’clock. My shoes, what the hell has become of my shoes? ... Well. But as for14 raising one’s hackles about all and everything—
A tall pale lady, dressed in black and with the rosiest smile—she meant to be kind—pulled my sleeve and tried to stop me. “Why don’t you get a movement started like that poet,” she said, “then you will at least be entitled to participate in the discussion.”
“Heh-heh!” I replied. “I who don’t even know a poet and never spoke to one! I who am an agronomist and have lived among guano and bran mash since I was a child; I who couldn’t even write a poem about an umbrella, much less about life and death and universal peace!”
“Well, some other great man, then,” she says. “You go around giving yourself airs and running down all great men. But the great men are still on their feet, and they will be so as long as you live, you’ll see.”
“Madam!” I answered, bowing respectfully. “Great God, madam, how half-educated what you said just now sounds to me, how intellectually shabby. I’m sorry to speak so plainly, but if you were a man instead of a woman, I would say you were a liberal, as I hope to be saved. I don’t run down all great men, but I don’t judge a man’s greatness by the scope of the movement he has gotten started; I judge him for myself, by the discernment of my own little brain, my mental aptitude for evaluation. I judge him, so to speak, by the taste his activity leaves in my mouth. This is not arrogance on my part, it’s a manifestation of my blood’s subjective logic. The important thing is not to produce a movement, to have Kingo’s hymnal supplanted by Landstad’s in Høivåg township by Lillesand. It’s not at all a question of creating an uproar among a crowd of lawyers, journalists or Galilean fishermen, or of publishing a monograph on Napoleon le petit. The important thing is to affect and educate power, the superior, chosen few, the masters of life, the great ones, Caiaphas, Pilate, and the emperor. What good would it do to create a stir among the rabble if I were to be nailed to the cross, in spite of everything? You can make the rabble so numerous that they’ll manage to seize a scrap of power, fighting tooth and nail; you can put a butcher’s knife into their hands and order them to stab and slash, and you can whip them into gaining the upper hand in a vote. But to win a victory, a victory for fundamental spiritual growth, to win a hand’s-breadth of benefit for the world—that they cannot do, that the rabble cannot do. Great men are excellent topics of conversation, but the superior man, the superior men, the masters, the universal spirits on horseback, have to stop and search their memories merely to know who these so-called great men might be. And so the great man is left with the crowd, the worthless majority—lawyers, schoolmarms, journalists, and the emperor of Brazil—for his admirers.
“Well then,” the lady says ironically—. The chairman bangs the table and asks for silence, but the lady insists and says: “Well then, since you do not attack all great men, mention some, or at least one, who finds favor in your eyes. It would be most interesting to know.”
I answer as follows: “I would be glad to. But the fact is, you will take me all too brutally at my word. If I were to mention one or two or ten, you would simply assume that, apart from those, I knew of no others. Besides, why should I? If I gave you the choice between, say, Leo Tolstoy, Jesus Christ and Immanuel Kant, even you would hesitate before making the correct selection from among them. You would say that all these were great men, each after his fashion, and the entire liberal and progressive press would agree