Growth of the Soil is very far indeed from Hamsun’s earliest beginnings:  far even from the books of his early middle period, which made his name.  It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands.  It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm.  Its dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and her for the physical means of life, and the spiritual contentment with life which she must grant if he be worthy.  Modern man faces Nature only by proxy, or as proxy, through others or for others, and the intimacy is lost.  In the wilds the contact is direct and immediate; it is the foothold upon earth, the touch of the soil itself, that gives strength.

The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity.  The author looks upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet kindly, as a god.  A more objective work of fiction it would be hard to find—­certainly in what used to be called “the neurasthenic North.”

And this from the pen of the man who wrote Sult, Mysterier, and Pan.

Hamsun’s early work was subjective in the extreme; so much so, indeed, as almost to lie outside the limits of aesthetic composition.  As a boy he wrote verse under difficulties—­he was born in Gudbrandsdalen, but came as a child to Bodoe in Lofoten, and worked with a shoemaker there for some years, saving up money for the publication of his juvenile efforts.  He had little education to speak of, and after a period of varying casual occupations, mostly of the humblest sort, he came to Christiania with the object of studying there, but failed to make his way.  Twice he essayed his fortune in America, but without success.  For three years he worked as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks.

His Nordland origin is in itself significant; it means an environment of month-long nights and concentrated summers, in which all feelings are intensified, and love and dread and gratitude and longing are nearer and deeper than in milder and more temperate regions, where elemental opposites are, as it were, reciprocally diluted.

In 1890, at the age of thirty, Hamsun attracted attention by the publication of Sult (Hunger). Sult is a record of weeks of starvation in a city; the semi-delirious confession of a man whose physical and mental faculties have slipped beyond control.  He speaks and acts irrationally, and knows it, watches himself at his mental antics and takes himself to task for the same.  And he asks himself:  Is it a sign of madness?

It might seem so.  The extraordinary associations, the weird fancies and bizarre impulses that are here laid bare give an air of convincing verisimilitude to the supposed confessions of a starving journalist.  But, as a matter of fact, Hamsun has no need of extraneous influences to invest his characters with originality.  Starving or fed, they can be equally erratic.  This is seen in his next book, Mysterier.