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.  It is well for us, no doubt, that this is so.  But we are grateful for their showing that such things are, as we are grateful for Kensington Gardens who cannot live where trees are everywhere.  The figures Hamsun sets before us as confessedly unsuited to the realities of life, his vagabonds, his failures, his fools, have power at times to make us question whether our world of comfort, luxury, success, is what we thought; if it were not well lost in exchange for the power to feel as they.

It has been said that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.  Humanly speaking, it is one of the greatest merits of Hamsun’s work that he shows otherwise.  His attitude towards life is throughout one of feeling, yet he makes of life no tragedy, but a beautiful story.

“I will be young until I die,” says Kareno in Aftenroede.  The words are not so much a challenge to fate as a denial of fact; he is not fighting, only refusing to acknowledge the power that is already hard upon him.

Kareno is an intellectual character.  He is a philosopher, a man whose perceptions and activity lie predominantly in the sphere of thought, not of feeling.  His attempt to carry the fire of youth beyond the grave of youth ends in disaster; an unnecessary debacle 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.  The emotion which fails to find adequate outlet, even in such works as Sult, Mysterier, Victoria, and Pan, might well seem more of a peril than the quixotic stubbornness of Kareno’s philosophy.  Such a flood, in its tempestuous unrest, might seem to threaten destruction, or at best the vain dispersal of its own power into chaos.  But by some rare guidance it is led, after the storm of Munken Vendt, into channels of beneficent fertility.

In 1904, after an interval of short stories, letters of travel, and poems, came the story entitled Svoermere.  The word means “Moths.”  It also stands for something else; something for which we English, as a sensible people, have no word.  Something pleasantly futile, deliciously unprofitable—­foolish lovers, hovering like moths about a lamp.

But there is more than this that is untranslatable in the title. As a title it suggests an attitude of gentleness, tenderness, sympathy, toward whomsoever it describes.  It is a new note in Hamsun; the opening of a new motif.