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.

_Growth of the Soil_ is very far indeed from Hamsun's earliest
beginnings: far even from the books of his early middle period, which
made his name. It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis
and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in
the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian
Highlands. It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its
dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay
of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature
and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and her for the
physical means of life, and the spiritual contentment with life which
she must grant if he be worthy. Modern man faces Nature only by proxy,
or as proxy, through others or for others, and the intimacy is lost.
In the wilds the contact is direct and immediate; it is the foothold
upon earth, the touch of the soil itself, that gives strength.

The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and
unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks
upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet
kindly, as a god. A more objective work of fiction it would be hard to
find--certainly in what used to be called "the neurasthenic North."

And this from the pen of the man who wrote _Sult_, _Mysterier_, and
_Pan_.

Hamsun's early work was subjective in the extreme; so much so, indeed,
as almost to lie outside the limits of aesthetic composition. As a boy
he wrote verse under difficulties--he was born in Gudbrandsdalen,