because to Hamsun a home is unthinkable apart from a space of soil
possessed in continuity by successive generations. They are always
despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily,
and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge
of life on a large scale. Greatness is to them inseparably connected
with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing
but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's
ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of
judgment are not their own.

From what has just been said one might conclude that the spirit of
Hamsun is fundamentally unsocial. So it is, in a way, but only in so far
as we have come to think of social and urban as more or less
interchangeable terms. He has a social consciousness and a social
passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of
no greater man than his own Isak of "Growth of the Soil"--a simple
pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth
personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak
passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain
flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it
deliberately in the light of a religious rite--the oldest and most
significant known to man. It is as if the man who starved in
Christiania and the western cities of the United States--not
figuratively, but literally--had once for all conceived a respect for
man's principal food that has colored all subsequent life for him and
determined his own attitude toward everything by a reference to its
connection or lack of connection with that substance.

Taking it all in all, one may well call Hamsun old-fashioned. The
virtues winning his praise and the conditions that stir his longings are