The madness of Sult is excused as being delirium, due to physical suffering.  Nagel, in Mysterier, is shown as a fool, an eccentric intolerable in ordinary society, though he is disconcertingly human, paradoxically sane.  Glahn, in Pan, apologizes for his uncouth straightforwardness by confessing that he is more at home in the woods, where he can say and do what he pleases without offence.  Johannes, in Victoria, is of humble birth, which counts in extenuation of his unmannerly frankness in early years.  Later he becomes a poet, and as such is exempt in some degree from the conventional restraint imposed on those who aspire to polite society.  All these well-chosen characters are made to serve the author’s purpose as channels for poetic utterance that might otherwise seem irrelevant.  The extent to which this is done may be seen from the way in which Hamsun lets a character in one book enter upon a theme which later becomes the subject of an independent work by the author himself.  Thus Glahn is haunted by visions of Diderik and Iselin; Johannes writes fragments supposed to be spoken by one Vendt the Monk.  Five years after Victoria, Hamsun gives us the romantic drama of Munken Vendt, in which Diderik and Iselin appear.

Throughout these early works, Hamsun is striving to find expression for his own sensitive personality; a form and degree of expression sufficient to relieve his own tension of feeling, without fusing the medium; adequate to his own needs, yet understandable and tolerable to ordinary human beings; to the readers of books.  The process, in effect, is simply this:  Hamsun is a poet, with a poet’s deep and unusual feeling, and a poet’s need of utterance.  To gain a hearing, he chooses figures whom he can conveniently represent as fools.  Secretly, he loves them, for they are himself.  But to the world he can present them with a polite apology, a plea for kindly indulgence.

It is not infrequent in literature to find the wisest and most poignant utterances thus laid in the mouths of poor men clad in motley.  Some of the most daring things in Shakespeare, the newest heresies of the Renaissance, are voiced by irresponsibles.  Of all dramatic figures, that of the fool is most suited to the expression of concentrated feeling.  There is an arresting question in a play of recent years, which runs something like this:  “Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about?”

Most of us have at some time or another felt that uncomfortable, almost indecently denuding question which comes to us at rare moments from the stage where some great drama is being played:  What is higher, what is more real:  this, or the life we live?  In that sudden flash, the matters of today’s and tomorrow’s reality in our minds appear as vulgar trifles, things of which we are ashamed.  The feeling lasts but a moment; for a moment we have been something higher than ourselves, in the mere desire so to be.  Then we fall back to ourselves once more, to the lower levels upon which alone we can exist.  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.