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Knut Hamsun has become identified in our minds with the lonely figure that recurs again and again in his earlier books, the Wanderer who is for ever outside of organized society and for ever pays the penalty of being different from the crowd and unable to conform to its standards. That this lonely creature is really himself in a certain period of his life we know from the testimony of his own works. Yet this vagabond and iconoclast sprang from the most conservative stock of Norway. He is the descendant of an old peasant family in Gudbrandsdalen, one of the interior mountain valleys in the heart of the country.

Gudbrandsdalen is a region of proud historical traditions. There, nine centuries ago, King Saint Olaf struggled to foist the new religion on a stiff-necked race of pagans, and not far from Hamsun's birthplace one of the oldest churches in Norway proclaimed his victory. There, six centuries ago, the Scotch invader Sinclair was annihilated with all his force when "the peasants of Vaage and Lesje and Lom their whetted axes shouldered," as the ballad tells us, and the story is still cherished, still repeated to every traveller. In this as in other secluded valleys in Norway a peasant aristocracy developed, a hard, strong race, intensely proud of its family and land, looking on any one who had been less than three generations in the neighborhood as an interloper, and scorning the classes of people who were not rooted to the soil by inherited homesteads. For the Norwegian roving blood is strangely tempered by a passionate attachment to inherited land, a trait that is perhaps a salutary safeguard against the national restlessness. Artistic handicrafts flourished in the valley. In the Open Air Museum at Lillehammer we may see them even now, marvellous creations of hammered iron, tapestries picturing scenes from the Bible, wood carvings in mellow colors and with a Renaissance exuberance of design overflowing even the commonest kitchen utensils, all of a rich yet disciplined beauty as if built on age-old artistic traditions and standards.

Hamsun counted among his forefathers many of the artistic craftsmen who set their stamp of culture upon their community. His father's father was a worker in metals. The arts did not bring wealth to those who practised them, however, and his parents at the time of his birth were in straitened circumstances. He was born, August 4, 1859, in Lom, in one of the small well-weathered houses which look so bleak and insignificant against the mighty Gudbrandsdalen uplands. When he was four years old his family removed to the Lofoten Islands, Nordland, in an effort to better their fortunes.

Two strains may be traced in Knut Hamsun's personality. By virtue of his blood and birth he had his roots in a community characterized by an unusually firm and solid culture based on centuries of tradition, and this heritage we shall find coming out in him more and more in his later years. The moralist and preacher who wrote "Growth of the Soil" is a true scion of the best old peasant stock. Through the impressions of his childhood and early youth he became affiliated with the volatile race of Nordland, a people as alien from the heavier inland peasant as if they lived on different continents. The fishermen who play with death for the wealth of the sea and depend for their livelihood on the caprices of nature do not easily harden into traditional moulds. Childish and improvident, witty and sentimental, often fond of the melodramatic, simple and yet shrewd, superstitious but brave beyond all praise, the native of Nordland is a type unlike every other Norwegian. Wherever he may roam, he will yearn for the wonderland of his youth. It is from this Nordland type that Hamsun has created his Wanderer hero, and it was from the nature of Nordland with its alternations of melting loveliness and stark gloom that he drew his poetic inspiration.

At the very time when Hamsun was spending his childhood in the Lofoten Islands, Jonas Lie, the literary discoverer of Arctic Norway, wrote his idyllic little story "Second Sight" in which he has really delineated a "Wanderer" type, his hero being a gifted Nordland lad who is set apart from ordinary people by his strange mental malady and who, wherever he goes, feels himself an alien. In this book, written at a time when not even fixed steamship routes united Nordland with the southern part of the country (railroads are even yet unknown), Jonas Lie has given us a classic description of the country in its virgin state of isolation. It gives the key to that mysterious, extravagant strain which belongs to the Nordland type, and throws light on the sources from which Hamsun drew his hero.

The words that to other people convey only commonplaces become magnified in the Nordland mind accustomed to the ecstatic moods of nature, Lie tells us. Fish to a Nordlanding means Lofoten's and Finmarken's millions, an infinite variety, from the spouting whales that penetrate our fjords driving huge masses of fish like a froth before them, to the tiniest minnow. When he speaks of birds, the Nordlanding does not mean merely an eatable fowl or two, but a heavenly host, billowing in the air like white breakers around the bird crags, shrieking and fluttering and filling the air like a veritable snow-storm over the nesting-places. He thinks of the eider-duck and the tystey; the duck and the sea-pie swimming in fjord and sound or perched on the rocks; the gull, the osprey, and the eagle sailing through the air; the owl moaning weirdly in the mountain clefts—a world of birds. A storm at sea to him means sudden hurricanes that sweep down from the mountains and uproot buildings—so that people at home often have to tie down their houses with chains—waves rushing in from the Arctic Ocean fathoms high, burying big rocks and skerries in their froth and then receding so fast that a ship may be left high and dry and be smashed right in the open sea; hosts of brave men sailing before the wind to save not only their own lives but the dearly bought boatload on which the lives of those at home depend.

"There in the North popular fancy from mythical times has imagined the home of all the powers of evil. There the Lapp has made himself feared by his sorceries, and there at the outermost edge of the world, washed by the breakers of the dark, wintry grey Arctic Ocean, stand the gods of primitive times, the demoniacal, terrible, half formless powers of darkness against whom even the Æsir did battle, but who were not entirely vanquished before St. Olaf with his cruciform sword 'set them in stock and stone.'—The terrors of nature have created an army of evil demons that draw people to them, ghosts of drowned men who have not been buried in Christian earth, mountain titans, the sea draug who sails in his half boat and in the winter nights shrieks terribly out on the fjord. Many a man in real danger has perished because his comrades were afraid of the draug, and we of second sight can see him.

"But even though the overwhelming might of nature bears down with oppressive weight on everything living along that dark, wintry, frothing coast, where nine months of the year are a constant twilight and three of these are without even a glimpse of the sun, so that people's minds become filled with fear of the dark, yet Nordland also possesses the opposite extreme in its sun-warmed, clear-skied, scent-filled summers with their endless play of infinitely varied colors and tints, when distances of seventy or eighty miles seem to melt away so that we can shout across them, when the mountain clothes itself in brownish green grass to the very top—in Lofoten to a height of two thousand feet—and the slender birch trees wreathe the tops of the hills and the edges of the mountain clefts like a dance of sixteen-year-old white-clad girls, while the fragrance of strawberries and raspberries rises to you through the warm air as you pass in your shirt sleeves, and the day is so hot that you long to bathe in the sun-filled, rippling sea which is clear to the very bottom.

"The learned say that the intensities of color and fragrance in the far North are due to the power of the light which fills the air when the sun shines without interruption day and night. Therefore one can not pick so aromatic strawberries and raspberries or so fragrant birch boughs in any other clime. If a fairy idyl has any home, it is certainly in the deep fjord valleys of Nordland in the summer. It is as though the sun were kissing nature so much more tenderly because they have such a short time to be together and must soon part again."

Jonas Lie's description, which I have taken the liberty to quote in abbreviated form, gives a picture of the surroundings in which Hamsun spent his boyhood. It would have been impossible to find any spot in the world more suited to nourish the fancy of an imaginative, impressionable boy. Lonely as he was, he had little to interest him or occupy his mind except what he could find for himself out of doors. He was put to work herding cattle, and spent long dreamy hours alone revelling in the loveliness of the light Nordland summer. It was then he laid the foundation for his habit of roaming alone in the woods and fields, and there he gained that intimate, tender knowledge of nature which appears in his works. In telling of his childhood, Hamsun says that the animals and birds became his friends. He speaks also of the deep impression which the sea made upon him. His uncle's house, where he spent some of his boyhood, was built above the ocean stream, Glimma, which rushed over a rocky bottom, sometimes one way, sometimes another, according to the tide, but always in motion. Beyond it lay the open sea.

The sharp contrasts of nature, its alternations between darkness and light, are reflected in the temperament of the Nordland people who are easily swung from one extreme to another. Underneath the brightness and levity there is a consciousness of superstitions that are felt sometimes as dark and sinister forces waiting to drag men away from the light into the gloomy void where the evil powers reign. The boy Knut Hamsun's nature was like a sensitive stringed instrument vibrating to the faintest breath of nature's moods, and we find in his works the nervousness, the quick transitions, and the swinging between extremes of exaltation and despair which belong to the Nordland type. While the brightness predominates, the gloom is also present, especially in his earliest, most personal works.

The years he spent with his clergyman uncle were not happy. The uncle had no idea of how to handle a highstrung boy, and his method of education consisted of many lickings, much hard work, and few hours for play. So lonely and dreary was the boy's life that he found his chief amusement in roaming about in the cemetery, spelling out the inscriptions on crosses and slabs, making up stories about them, and talking to himself, or listening to the wind rustling in the grass that grew tall on neglected graves. Occasionally the old weather vane on the church steeple would let out a terrible shriek when the wind veered. It sounded like "iron gritting its teeth against some other iron." Sometimes he would help the old grave-digger in his work, and he had strict injunctions on what to do if bits of bone or tufts of hair worked their way out to the surface. They were to be put back in place and decently covered. Once, however, he ventured to disobey the gravedigger and take with him a tooth which he thought he could use for some little object he was fashioning. In the short story "A Ghost" in the collection "Things that Have Happened to Me," where he draws this dismal story of his childhood, he tells how the dead owner appeared to him and threatened him at intervals for years afterwards, even after he had left the house of his uncle and was living with his parents, where he shared a room with his brothers and sisters. The apparition froze him with fear and tortured him so that he was often tempted to throw himself in the Glimma and end it all. Of the effect that this incident had upon him he writes: "This man, this red-bearded messenger from the land of death, did me much harm by the unspeakable gloom he cast over my childhood. Since then I have had more than one vision, more than one strange encounter with the inexplicable but nothing that has gripped me with such force. And yet perhaps the effect upon me was not all harmful. I have often thought of that. It has occurred to me that he was one of the first things that made me grit my teeth and harden myself. In my later experiences I have often had need of it."

In view of the high position clergymen hold in Norway, and especially considering the prestige attached to the official class fifty years ago, it seems odd that a clergyman's nephew, an inmate of his house for years, should have been slated for a shoemaker, but evidently there was no money with which to send Knut to school, and perhaps his mental gifts were not of the caliber to promise that he would fit easily into any one of the usual professional niches. After his confirmation, which is the Norwegian boy's entrance to manhood, he was therefore apprenticed to a cobbler in the city of Bodö on the mainland. In his own mind, however, he was quite determined that he was to be a poet, and it was while working for the cobbler that he published his first literary venture, a highly romantic poem called "Meeting Again." This was followed by the story "Björger, by Knud Pedersen Hamsund," a gloomy, introspective tale of an orphaned peasant boy and a lady of high degree who died for love of him—a foreshadowing of the motif in "Victoria." In spite of its immaturity, its absurdity even, the story, according to the judgment of critics to-day, shows flashes of Hamsun's peculiar genius. Alas, there were no critics wise and sympathetic enough to see its promise at the time, if indeed any critics read it. The book was printed by the nineteen-year-old author at his own expense, paid for by his hard-earned savings, and was bought by a few people in Bodö, but hardly circulated beyond the confines of the city.

Naturally the cobbler's bench could not long confine his restlessness, and, after a short experience as a coal-heaver on the docks of Bodö—where his eye-glasses attracted amused attention as out of keeping with his work—Hamsun set out on the wanderings that were to last full ten years. He taught a little school, was clerk in a sheriff's office, and crushed stones on the road.

The experiences of this period were the foundation of his two novels "Under the Autumn Star" and "A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings," bound in the English edition under the common title "Wanderers." Written many years later from the standpoint of an elderly citizen who leaves his home in the city to revisit the haunts of his youth and play at being a vagrant laborer once more, they give his adventures in the softening light of retrospect. A touch of personal description may be found in the lines, "I taught myself to walk with long, tenacious steps. The proletarian appearance I had already in my face and hands."

There is a lingering tenderness in the author's treatment of these years which would indicate that at the time of writing he looked back upon them almost with regretful longing. We do not find the smallest trace of the acrid bitterness which he put into the short stories from his American experiences or into the account of his struggles to gain a foothold in Christiania. The roving life without fixed habitation or routine had its charms for him and it gave him an opportunity to be much out of doors. Strong and capable as he was, the manual labor in itself held no terrors for him, and he was rather proud of his inventive skill. "Under the Autumn Star" recounts a number of small technical triumphs, chief among which was a marvellous saw for cutting timber on the root—an actual invention of Hamsun's. Not many years ago he replied in answer to a question in an enquête that the proudest achievement of his life was the invention of this saw, in the practicability of which he still had faith, although I believe it has never been perfected for actual use.

During the time when he ate and slept with servants and tramped the road with other day laborers, while observing the upper class from the vantage point of his own obscurity, Hamsun garnered a full sheaf of those curious and startling incidents by means of which he keeps his readers in a constant state of surprise. Meanwhile he did not forget his old ambition to become a poet. He felt the need of an education, and gradually worked his way southward to Christiania, where he entered the University.

The experiment was not a success. At that time the University was much more than now under the influence of old academic traditions, and did not welcome the rustic in search of knowledge as cordially as perhaps it would have done to-day. Moreover, the former cobbler and road-laborer was uncouth in his manner, bursting with loud-voiced opinions, and by no means filled with the proper reverence for authority. He soon realized that he was a misfit in University circles, and gave up the attempt in disgust. Of more benefit to him was a trip to the continent which he was enabled to make. After his return he went back to his old life on the road, but his intellect was more and more reaching out beyond the humble work by which he earned his living. Finally he made his escape and took passage to America.