became in the last instance reducible to a single relationship--that
between the individual and his own self. To be himself was his cry and
his task. With this consummation in view, he plumbed every depth of
human nature. This one thing achieved, all else became insignificant.

Hamsun begins where Ibsen ended, one might say. The one problem never
consciously raised by him as a problem is that of man's duty or ability
to express his own nature. That is taken for granted. The figures
populating the works of Hamsun, whether centrally placed or moving
shadowlike in the periphery, are first of all themselves--agressively,
inevitably, unconsciously so, In other words, they are like their
creator. They may perish tragically or ridiculously as a result of their
common inability to lay violent hand on their own natures. They may go
through life warped and dwarfed for lack of an adjustment that to most
of us might seem both easy and natural. Their own selves may become
more clearly revealed to them by harsh or happy contacts with life, and
they may change their surfaces accordingly. The one thing never
occurring to them is that they might, for the sake of something or some
one outside of themselves, be anything but what they are.

There are interferences, however, and it is from these that Hamsun's
problems spring. A man may prosper or suffer by being himself, and in
neither case is the fault his own. There are factors that more or less
fatally influence and circumscribe the supremely important factor that
is his own self. Roughly these fall into three groups suggestive of
three classes of relationships: (1) between man and his general
environment; (2) between man and that ever-present force of life which
we call love; and (3) between man and life in its entirety, as an
omnipotence that some of us call God and others leave unnamed. Hamsun's
deceptive preference for indirectness is shown by the fact that, while