de, to make way for the youth
that will be served. "What has age that youth has not? Experience.
Experience, in, all its poor and withered nakedness. And what use
is their experience to us, who must make our own in every single
happening of life?" In _Aftenroede_, the "Sunset" of the trilogy,
Kareno himself deserts the cause of youth, and allies himself to the
party in power. And the final scene shows him telling a story to a
child: "There was once a man who never would give way...."

The madness of _Sult_ is excused as being delirium, due to physical
suffering. Nagel, in _Mysterier_, is shown as a fool, an eccentric
intolerable in ordinary society, though he is disconcertingly human,
paradoxically sane. Glahn, in _Pan_, apologizes for his uncouth
straightforwardness by confessing that he is more at home in the
woods, where he can say and do what he pleases without offence.
Johannes, in _Victoria_, is of humble birth, which counts in
extenuation of his unmannerly frankness in early years. Later he
becomes a poet, and as such is exempt in some degree from the
conventional restraint imposed on those who aspire to polite society.
All these well-chosen characters are made to serve the author's
purpose as channels for poetic utterance that might otherwise seem
irrelevant. The extent to which this is done may be seen from the way
in which Hamsun lets a character in one book enter upon a theme
which later becomes the subject of an independent work by the author
himself. Thus Glahn is haunted by visions of Diderik and Iselin;
Johannes writes fragments supposed to be spoken by one Vendt the Monk.
Five years after _Victoria_, Hamsun gives us the romantic drama of
_Munken Vendt_, in which Diderik and Iselin appear.

Throughout these early works, Hamsun is striving to find expression
for his own sensitive personality; a form and degree of expression
sufficient to relieve his own tension of feeling, without fusing the
medium; adequate to his own needs, yet understandable and tolerable
to ordinary human beings; to the readers of books. The process, in
effect, is simply this: Hamsun is a poet, with a poet's deep and
unusual feeling, and a poet's need of utterance. To gain a hearing, he
chooses figures whom he can conveniently represent as fools. Secretly,
he loves them, for they are himself. But to the world he can present
them with a polite apology, a plea for kindly indulgence.

It is not infrequent in literature to find the wise