Nothing growing there?  All things growing there; men and beasts and fruit of the soil.  Isak sowing his corn.  The evening sunlight falls on the corn that flashes out in an arc from his hand, and falls like a dropping of gold to the ground.  Here comes Sivert to the harrowing; after that the roller, and then the harrow again.  Forest and field look on.  All is majesty and power—­a sequence and purpose of things.

Kling ... eling ... say the cow bells far up on the hillside, coming nearer and nearer; the cattle are coming home for the night.  Fifteen head of them, and five-and-forty sheep and goats besides; threescore in all.  There go the women out with their milk-pails, carried on yokes from the shoulder:  Leopoldine, Jensine, and little Rebecca.  All three barefooted.  The Margravine, Inger herself, is not with them; she is indoors preparing the meal.  Tall and stately, as she moves about her house, a Vestal tending the fire of a kitchen stove.  Inger has made her stormy voyage, ’tis true, has lived in a city a while, but now she is home; the world is wide, swarming with tiny specks—­Inger has been one of them.  All but nothing in all humanity, only one speck.

Then comes the evening.

Knut Hamsun

by

W.W.  Worster

Knut Hamsun [Footnote:  December, 1920.]

By W.W.  Worster

Knut Hamsun is now sixty.  For years past he has been regarded as the greatest of living Norwegian writers, but he is still little known in England.  One or two attempts have been made previously to introduce Hamsun’s work into this country, but it was not until this year, with the publication of Growth of the Soil, that he achieved any real success, or became at all generally known, among English readers.

Growth of the Soil (Markens Groede) is Hamsun’s latest work.  Its reception here was one of immediate and unstinted appreciation, such as is rarely accorded to a translated work by an alien author practically unknown even to the critics.  A noticeable feature was the frankness with which experienced bookmen laid aside stock phrases, and dealt with this book as in response to a strong personal appeal.  To the reviewer, aged with much knowledge, hardened by much handling of mediocrity, it is a relief to meet with a book that can and must be dealt with so.

Those readers are, perhaps, most fortunate who come upon such a book as this without foretaste or preparation.  To the mind under spell of an aesthetic or emotional appeal, the steps that went to make it, the stages whereby the author passed, are as irrelevant as the logarithms that went to build an aeroplane.  Yet it is only by knowledge of such steps that the achievement can be fully understood.