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Updated: June 17, 2025
He has his problems no less than Ibsen had, and he is much preoccupied with them even when he appears lost in ribald laughter. They are different from Ibsen's, however, and in that difference lies one of the chief explanations of Hamsun's position as an artist. All of Ibsen's problems became in the last instance reducible to a single relationship that between the individual and his own self.
His attempt to carry the fire of youth beyond the grave of youth ends in disaster; an unnecessary débâcle due to his gratuitously attempting the impossible. Hamsun's poet-personality, the spirit we have seen striving for expression through the figures of Nagel, Glahn, Johannes, and the rest, is a creature of feeling. And here the development proceeds on altogether different lines.
Masterly or most natural: it is often hard to say how much of Hamsun's effect is due to superlative technique and how much to the inspired disregard of all technique.
Hamsun's deceptive preference for indirectness is shown by the fact that, while he tries to make us believe that his work is chiefly preoccupied with problems of the second class, his mind is really busy with those of the first class. The explanation is simple. Nothing helps like love to bring out the unique qualities of a man's nature.
And yet it is by such potentials that we judge the highest art; by its power to give us, if only for a moment, something of that which the divinity of our aspiring minds finds wanting in the confines of reality. The richness of this quality is one of the most endearing things in Hamsun's characters. Their sensitiveness is a thing we have been trained, for self-defence, to repress.
The one thing never occurring to them is that they might, for the sake of something or some one outside of themselves, be anything but what they are. There are interferences, however, and it is from these that Hamsun's problems spring. A man may prosper or suffer by being himself, and in neither case is the fault his own.
One or two attempts have been made previously to introduce Hamsun's work into this country, but it was not until this year, with the publication of Growth of the Soil, that he achieved any real success, or became at all generally known, among English readers.
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