in "Sunset Glow," when, at the age of fifty, he turns renegade in more
senses than one. But even then his realization could not be fully
accepted by the author himself, still only thirty-eight, and so Kareno
steps down into the respectable and honoured sloth of age only to be
succeeded, by another hero who has not yet passed the climacteric
twenty-ninth year. Even Telegraph-Rolandsen in "Dreamers" retains the
youthful glow and charm and irresponsibility that used to be thought
inseparable from the true Hamsun character.

It is therefore with something of a shock one encounters the enigmatic
Knut Pedersen from the Northlands, who has turned from literature to
tramping, who speaks of old age as if he had reached the proverbial
three-score and ten, and who time and again slips into something like
actual whining, as when he says of himself: "Time has worn me out so
that I have grown stupid and sterile and indifferent; now I look upon a
woman merely as literature." The two volumes named "Under the Autumn
Star" and "A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings" form an unbroken cry of
regret, and the object of that regret is the hey-day of youth--that
golden age of twenty-nine--when every woman regardless of age and colour
and caste was a challenging fragment of life.

Something more than the passing of years must have characterized the
period immediately proceeding the production of the two volumes just
mentioned. They mark some sort of crisis reaching to the innermost
depths of the soul it wracked with anguish and pain. Perhaps a clue to
this crisis may be found in the all too brief paragraph devoted to
Hamsun in the Norwegian "Who's who." There is a line that reads as
follows: "Married, 1898, Bergljot Bassoe Bech (marriage dissolved);
1908, Marie Andersen." The man that wrote "Under the Autumn Star" was
unhappy. But he was also an artist. In that book the artist within him