ompany the central figure
through the trilogy, of which the lesson seems to be that every one is
a rebel at 30 and a renegade at 50. But when Kareno, the irreconcilable
rebel of "At the Gates of the Kingdom," the heaven-storming truth-seeker
of "The Game of Life," and the acclaimed radical leader in the first
acts of "Sunset Glow," surrenders at last to the powers that be in order
to gain a safe and sheltered harbor for his declining years, then
another man of 29 stands ready to denounce him and to take up the rebel
cry of youth to which he has become a traitor. Hamsun's ironical humor
and whimsical manner of expression do more than the plot itself to knit
the plays into an organic unit, and several of the characters are
delightfully drawn, particularly the two women who play the greatest
part in Kareno's life: his wife Eline, and Teresita, who is one more
of his many feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable
Northland nature. Any attempt to give a political tendency to the
trilogy must be held wasted. Characteristically, Kareno is a sort of
Nietzschean rebel against the victorious majority, and Hamsun's
seemingly cynical conclusions stress man's capacity for action
rather than the purposes toward which that capacity may be directed.

Of three subsequent plays, "Vendt the Monk," (1903), "Queen Tamara"
(1903) and "At the Mercy of Life" (1910), the first mentioned is by far
the most remarkable. It is a verse drama in eight acts, centred about
one of Hamsun's most typical vagabond heroes. The monk Vendt has much
in common with Peer Gynt without being in any way an imitation or a
duplicate. He is a dreamer in revolt against the world's alleged
injustice, a rebel against the very powers that invisibly move the
universe, and a passionate lover of life who in the end accepts it as
a joyful battle and then dreams of the long peace to come. The vigor
and charm of the verse proved a surprise to the critics when the play
was published, as Hamsun until then had given no proof of any poetic
gift in the narrower sense.

From 1897 to 1912 Hamsun produced a series of volumes that simply marked
a further development of the tendencies shown in his first novels:
"Siesta," short stories, 1897; "Victoria" a novel with a charming love
story that embodies the tenderest note in his production, 1898; "In
Wonderland," travelling sketches from the Caucasus, 1903; "B