Pan (1894) is probably Hamsun’s best-known work.  It is a love-story, but of an extraordinary type, and is, moreover, important from the fact that we are here introduced to some of the characters and types that are destined to reappear again and again in his later works.

Nagel, the exasperating irresponsible of Mysterier, is at his maddest in his behaviour towards the woman he loves.  It is natural that this should be so.  When a man is intoxicated his essential qualities are emphasized.  If he have wit, he will be witty; if a brutal nature, he will be a brute; if he be of a melancholy temper, he will be disposed to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

We see this in Pan.  The love-making of the hero is characterized by the same irrational impulses, the same extravagant actions, as in Sult and Mysterier.  But they are now less frequent and less involved.  The book as a whole is toned down, so to speak, from the bewildering tangle of unrestraint in the first two.  There is quite sufficient of the erratic and unusual in the character of Glahn, the hero, but the tone is more subdued.  The madcap youth of genius has realized that the world looks frigidly at its vagaries, and the secretly proud “au moins je suis autre”—­more a boast than a confession—­gives place to a wistful, apologetic admission of the difference as a fault.  Here already we have something of that resignation which comes later to its fulness in the story of the Wanderer with the Mute.

The love-story in Pan takes the form of a conflict; it is one of those battles between the sexes, duels of wit and esprit, such as one finds in the plays of Marivaux.  But Hamsun sets his battle in the sign of the heart, not of the head; it is a marivaudage of feeling, none the less deep for its erratic utterance.  Moreover, the scene is laid, not in salons and ante-chambers, but in a landscape such as Hamsun loves, the forest-clad hills above a little fishing village, between the hoeifjeld and the sea.  And interwoven with the story, like an eerie breathing from the dark of woods at dusk and dawn, is the haunting presence of Iselin, la belle dame sans merci.

Otto Weininger, the author of Sex and Character, said of Pan that it was “perhaps the most beautiful novel ever written.”  Weininger, of course, was an extremist, and few would accept his judgment without reserve.  It is doubtful whether any writer nowadays would venture to make such a claim for any book at all.

Pan is a book that offends against all sorts of rules; as a literary product it is eminently calculated to elicit, especially in England, the Olympian “this will never do.”  To begin with, it is not so much a novel as a novelle—­a form of art little cultivated in this country, but which lends itself excellently to delicate artistic handling, and the creation of that subtle influence which Hamsun’s