Taking it all in all, one may well call Hamsun old-fashioned. The
virtues winning his praise and the conditions that stir his longings are
not of the present day. There is in him something primitive that forms a
sharp contrast to the modernity of his own style. Even in his most
romantic exaggerations, as in "Hunger" and "Mysteries," he is a realist,
dealing unrelentingly with life as it appears to us. It would hardly be
too much to call his method scientific. But he uses it to aim tremendous
explosive charges at those human concentrations that made possible the
forging of the weapons he wields so skilfully. Nor does he stop at a
wish to see those concentrations scattered. The very ambitions and
Utopias bred within them are anathema to his soul, that places
simplicity above cleanliness in divine proximity. Characteristically we
find that the one art treated with constant sympathy in his writings is
that of music, which probably is the earliest and certainly the one
least dependent on the herding of men in barracks. In place of what he
wishes to take away he offers nothing but peace and the sense of genuine
creation that comes to the man who has just garnered the harvests of his
own fields into his bulging barns. He is a prophet of plenty, but he has
no answer ready when we ask him what we are going to do with it after we
have got it.
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