This is the Hamsun of Pan.  But Hamsun now is a greater soul than in the days when Glahn, the solitary dweller in the woods, picked up a broken twig from the ground and held it lovingly, because it looked poor and forsaken; or thanked the hillock of stone outside his hut because it stood there faithfully, as a friend that waited his return.  He is stronger now, but no less delicate; he loves not Nature less, but the world more.  He has learned to love his fellow-men.  Knut Pedersen, vagabond, wanders about the country with his tramp-companions, Grindhusen, the painter who can ditch and delve at a pinch, or Falkenberg, farm-labourer in harvest-time, and piano-tuner where pianos are.  Here is brave comradeship, the sharing of adventures, the ready wit of jovial vagrants.  The book is a harmless picaresque, a geste of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with Lavengro and The Cloister and the Hearth, in that ancient, endless order of tales which link up age with age and land with land in the unaltering, unfrontiered fellowship of the road that kept the spirit of poetry alive through the Dark Ages.

The vagabond from Nordland has his own adventures, his bonnes fortunes.  There is a touch of Sterne about the book; not the exaggerated super-Sterne of Tristram Shandy, with eighteenth-century-futurist blanks and marbled pages, but the fluent, casual, follow-your-fancy Sterne of the Sentimental Journey.  Yet the vagabond himself is unobtrusive, ready to step back and be a chronicler the moment other figures enter into constellation.  He moves among youth, himself no longer young, and among gentlefolk, as one making no claim to equal rank.

Both these features are accentuated further in the story of the Wanderer with the Mute.  It is a continuation of Under Hoeststjaernen, and forms the culmination, the acquiescent close, of the self-expressional series that began with Sult.  The discords of tortured loveliness are now resolved into an ultimate harmony of comely resignation and rich content.  “A Wanderer may come to fifty years; he plays more softly then.  Plays with muted strings.”  This is the keynote of the book.  The Wanderer is no longer young; it is for youth to make the stories old men tell.  Tragedy is reserved for those of high estate; a wanderer in corduroy, “such as labourers wear here in the south,” can tell the story of his chatelaine and her lovers with the self-repression of a humbler Henry Esmond, winning nothing for himself even at the last, yet feeling he is still in Nature’s debt.

Hamsun’s next work is Den Siste Gloede (literally “The Last Joy").  The title as it stands is expressive.  The substantive is “joy”—­but it is so qualified by the preceding “last,” a word of overwhelming influence in any combination, that the total effect is one of sadness.  And the book itself is a masterly presentment of gloom.  Masterly—­or most natural:  it is often