The New York herald., 1922-03-05

| IL.
These shortcomings in the present
list of Hamsun translations had to
| be noted to prevent misunderstood
| ings. Once allowance has been made
for them, it is permissible to admit
| that even the list as it now stands
presents a pretty fair map of the
road Travelled by Mr.. Hamsun from
the startling eccentricities of Hum
ger" to the almost Biblical simplicity
and majesty of 'The Growth of the
Soil" AS in the case of every great
artist, SO in the case of Mr.. Hamsun,
too, the total record of his work is
also record of all those experiences
which, as Ibsen once put it, he has
tried ITO write himself free Of" The
man who wrote "The Growth of the
SoiP' is still the same man who
wrote Hunger; he has simply rid
himself of and risen above the cir
1 cumstances inducing the state OF
mind that produced the earlier work.
| The super-tramp who visited our
| shores forty years ago was not q
tramp by choice. He was a fugi-
! tive from a world that would not
understand him, and for years after
ward his art was discolored by the
lurid flames of the resentment caused
by the sufferings of that enforced
} flight And il took him the better
part of a lifetime to discover that,
| in part at least, the misunderstand
/ ing had been mutual. Even then,
I however. the resentment continued
/ 10 smolder at the bottom of his soul,
and probably the most serious charge
that can be made against Mr.. Ham,
suns art is that it has never risen to
a sympathetically satirical presen-
tation of the city life which he first
courted and then contemned.
Hunger" is purely personal in a
| double sense. Not only is it safe to
conclude that. on the whole, it en-
/ bodies the actual experiences of its
author. but the scene of it's action is
entirely laid within the soul of its
central figure. The external hap
penings of the story matter only
through their reverberations within
that figure. Other characters ap-
pear, but only like shadows seen
through mist They are not real
to us, and for the simple reason that
they never assumed complete reality
to the starved and feverish vision
4 from which we have them at second
| hand only. The man who wrote
Hunger and the man about whom
/ it is written were both rebels at war
with all the world Then life in it's
irony decreed that Hunger should
bring the success it's author so long
had sought in vain on both sides of
| the Atlantic, and with its arrival the
scene changed suddenly.
In Shallow Soil' the man who
starved tries to get even with the
world that starved him. Character
istically for his peculiar temperament,
he turns not against the world in its
entirety, not against the men who
form the majority in the world, but
against the small minority of writer's
and artists forming his own particu-
lar part of the world. Shallow Soir'
is a bitter arraignment not only of
all that produce out of their own
minds rather than out of the common
soil but of the very spirit that
prompts them into producing 1t is
an artists attack on the very art
he is trying to create-and how, un-
der the circumstances, could it be
anything but a failure? Further
more, the starved man from Hun
ger" could not hit the men he held
responsible for his starvation be-
cause he had never seen them except
when discolored by the fumes of his
own toxins. Although remarkable
for the cleverness of It's observations,
the book is a telling illustration of
the old assertion that true humor is
impossible without sympathy.
Such a vengeful mood could not
last long in its extreme form. The
very books giving vent to it helped
to end it BY bringing more success
in spite of their bitter onesidedness
In Pan" we find the rebel from
| ..IInnoe,.,, freed frnran tho snectar Of