hard to say how much of Hamsun’s effect is due to superlative technique and how much to the inspired disregard of all technique. Den Siste Gloede is a diary of wearisome days, spent for the most part among unattractive, insignificant people at a holiday resort; the only “action” in it is an altogether pitiful love affair, in which the narrator is involved to the slightest possible degree.  The writer is throughout despondent; he feels himself out of the race; his day is past.  Solitude and quiet, Nature, and his own foolish feelings—­these are the “last joys” left him now.

The book might have seemed a fitting, if pathetic, ending to the literary career of the author of Pan.  Certainly it holds out no promise of further energy or interest in life or work.  The closing words amount to a personal farewell.

Then, without warning, Hamsun enters upon a new phase of power. Boern av Tilden (Children of the Age) is an objective study, its main theme being the “marriage” conflict touched upon in the Wanderer stories, and here developed in a different setting and with fuller individuality.  Hamsun has here moved up a step in the social scale, from villagers of the Benoni type to the land-owning class.  There is the same conflict of temperaments that we have seen before, but less violent now; the poet’s late-won calm of mind, and the level of culture from which his characters now are drawn—­perhaps by instinctive selection—­make for restraint.  Still a romantic at heart, he becomes more classic in form.

Boern av Tilden is also the story of Segelfoss, in its passing from the tranquil dignity of a semi-feudal estate to the complex and ruthless modernity of an industrial centre. Segelfoss By (1915) treats of the fortunes of the succeeding generation, and the further development of Segelfoss into a township ("By").

Then, with Growth of the Soil, Hamsun achieves his greatest triumph.  Setting aside all that mattered most to himself, he turns, with the experience of a lifetime rich in conflict, to the things that matter to us all.  Deliberately shorn of all that makes for mere effect, Isak stands out as an elemental figure, the symbol of Man at his best, face to face with Nature and life.  There is no greater human character—­reverently said—­in the Bible itself.

* * * * *

These, then, are the steps of Hamsun’s progress as an author, from the passionate chaos of Sult to the Miltonic, monumental calm of Growth of the Soil.  The stages in themselves are full of beauty; the wistfulness of Pan and Victoria, the kindly humour of Svoermere and Benoni, the autumn-tinted resignation of the Wanderer with the Mute—­they follow as the seasons do, each with a charm of its own, yet all deriving from one source.  His muse at first is Iselin, the embodiment of adolescent longing, the dream of those “whom delight flies because they give her chase.”  The hopelessness of his own pursuit fills him with pity for mortals under the same spell, and he steps aside to be a brave, encouraging chorus, or a kindly chronicler of others’ lives.  And his reward is the love of a greater divinity, the goddess of field and homestead.  No will-o’-the-wisp, but a presence of wisdom and calm.