st and most
poignant utterances thus laid in the mouths of poor men clad in
motley. Some of the most daring things in Shakespeare, the newest
heresies of the Renaissance, are voiced by irresponsibles. Of all
dramatic figures, that of the fool is most suited to the expression
of concentrated feeling. There is an arresting question in a play of
recent years, which runs something like this: "Do you think that the
things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and
true than the things they behave sensibly about?"

Most of us have at some time or another felt that uncomfortable,
almost indecently denuding question which comes to us at rare moments
from the stage where some great drama is being played: What is higher,
what is more real: this, or the life we live? In that sudden flash,
the matters of today's and tomorrow's reality in our minds appear as
vulgar trifles, things of which we are ashamed. The feeling lasts but
a moment; for a moment we have been something higher than ourselves,
in the mere desire so to be. Then we fall back to ourselves once more,
to the lower levels upon which alone we can exist. And yet it is by
such potentials that we judge the highest art; by its power to give
us, if only for a moment, something of that which the divinity of our
aspiring minds finds wanting in the confines of reality.

The richness of this quality is one of the most endearing things in
Hamsun's characters. Their sensitiveness is a thing we have been
trained, for self-defence, to repress. It is well for us, no doubt,
that this is so. But we are grateful for their showing that such
things _are_, as we are grateful for Kensington Gardens who cannot
live where trees are everywhere. The figures Hamsun sets before us
as confessedly unsuited to the realities of life, his vagabonds, his
failures, his fools, have power at times to make us question whether
our world of comfort, luxury, success, is what we thought; if it were
not well lost in exchange for the power to _feel_ as they.

It has been said that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy
to those who feel. Humanly speaking, it is one of the greatest merits
of Hamsun's work that he shows otherwise. His attitude towards life
is throughout one of feeling, yet he makes of life no tragedy, but a
beautiful story.

"I will be young until I die," says Kareno in _Aftenroede_. The words
are not so much a challenge to fate as a denial of fact; he is not
fighting,