Scandinavian north and finding typical expressions not only in the works
of theretofore unknown writers, but in the changed moods of masters like
Ibsen and Bjornson and Strindberg.

It was followed two years later by "Mysteries," which pretends to be a
novel, but which may be better described as a delightfully irresponsible
and defiantly subjective roaming through any highway or byway of life or
letters that happened to take the author's fancy at the moment of
writing. Some one has said of that book that in its abrupt swingings
from laughter to tears, from irreverence to awe, from the ridiculous to
the sublime, one finds the spirits of Dostoyevski and Mark Twain
blended.

The novels "Editor Lynge" and "New Earth," both published in 1893, were
social studies of Christiania's Bohemia and chiefly characterized by
their violent attacks on the men and women exercising the profession
which Hamsun had just made his own. Then came "Pan" in 1894, and the
real Hamsun, the Hamsun who ever since has moved logically and with
increasing authority to "The Growth of the Soil," stood finally
revealed. It is a novel of the Northland, almost without a plot, and
having its chief interest in a primitively spontaneous man's reactions
to a nature so overwhelming that it makes mere purposeless existence
seem a sufficient end in itself. One may well question whether Hamsun
has ever surpassed the purely lyrical mood of that book, into which he
poured the ecstatic dreams of the little boy from the south as, for the
first time, he saw the forestclad northern mountains bathing their feet
in the ocean and their crowns in the light of a never-setting sun. It is
a wonderful paean to untamed nature and to the forces let loose by it
within the soul of man.