measures by the spectacle of their struggle.

The Northland, with its glaring lights and black shadows, its unearthly
joys and abysmal despairs, is present and dominant in every line that
Hamsun ever wrote. In that country his best tales and dramas are laid.
By that country his heroes are stamped wherever they roam. Out of that
country they draw their principal claims to probability. Only in that
country do they seem quite at home. Today we know, however, that the
pathological case represents nothing but an extension of perfectly
normal tendencies. In the same way we know that the miraculous
atmosphere of the Northland serves merely to develop and emphasize
traits that lie slumbering in men and women everywhere. And on this
basis the fantastic figures created by Hamsun relate themselves to
ordinary humanity as the microscopic enlargement of a cross section to
the living tissues. What we see is true in everything but proportion.

The artist and the vagabond seem equally to have been in the blood of
Hamsun from the very start. Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he used his
scant savings to arrange for the private printing of a long poem and a
short novel produced at the age of eighteen, when he was still signing
himself Knud Pedersen Hamsund. This done, he abruptly quit his
apprenticeship and entered on that period of restless roving through
trades and continents which lasted until his first real artistic
achievement with "Hunger," In 1888-90. It has often been noted that
practically every one of Hamsun's heroes is of the same age as he was
then, and that their creator takes particular pain to accentuate this
fact. It is almost as if, during those days of feverish literary
struggle, he had risen to heights where he saw things so clearly that
no subsequent experience could add anything but occasional details.