Words were gold in his hands, to be tossed about rough as unwashed nuggets, or beaten into a delicate, fantastic filigree language became a plastic material, capable of expressing the most elusive half-thoughts, the most unrecorded emotions. The effect was startling, as one of his critics aptly said: 'Hamsun had brought something 'American' into the language-a lightning smartness, an audacious trick of phrase, a troll-like humour hitherto unknown.' In a word, he leavened the heaviness in some marvellous way it was as if the spirit of Mark Twain had suddenly obsessed the sober discourse of a meeting of serious elders. He introduced an absolutely new note into his native language, established a new scale of word values, pointed to fresh uses for the older one. Consciously or unconsciously, every young writer in Norway owes Hamsun a debt.

Of one thing he convinced them-that, as stylist, he was second to none in his own country. This son of the people, this self-taught man, whose art was congenital-a growth of his very innermost being, not a graft from outside-had a superb contempt for everything that was not of aesthetic value in his own eyes. Hamsun went his own way, with a genial laugh at his critics, as a schoolboy caught at some trick. One book after the other appeared-'Mysterier' (Mysteries), 'Pan,' 'Redaktör Lynge,' 'Nyjord' (Fresh Soil), 'Siesta' (short stories),-and the critics scourged him alternately as poseur and blageur, poet and genius, creative artist and impudent imitator. 'Hunger' was followed by a course of lectures, in which he beheaded the literary idols of the day (not a few were amongst his audience),-executed them with an audacious, genial impudence, an irritating self-assurance, that made his addresses the sensation of the year. He was an unknown quantity in the society and literature of his country. There was something mysterious, challenging-something alike magnetic and repellent, in the man's personality, as in his work something that invoked opposition. It met with much adverse criticism indeed, it demanded some courage in those days to declare oneself an admirer of 'that dreadful Hamsun!' It made a great sensation was as the flash of some strange meteor, holding perhaps a menace to social life, across the firmament.

It was followed shortly by his first novel 'Sult' ('Hunger'). The intense individuality of its (it must be admitted often wrong-headed) point of view aroused interest and curiosity as to its author.

Ten years ago a little book on 'Intellectual Life in the America of To-day' appeared in Norway.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun