The quality of unexpectedness in his thought is well simulated in the style he has evolved for himself. This style was fully developed when Hamsun made his first appearance as an author, a fact which adds interest to Sigurd Hoel's opinion that the dash and brilliance of "Hunger" was due to American influence. Certainly Hamsun has never improved upon this style, and it may even be questioned whether its manner with the light staccato touch, the prevalence of interjections and sentences consisting sometimes of a single word, has not in some of his later works hardened into a mannerism that results in a slight weariness of repetition. Taken as a whole, however, his style has been a bath of rejuvenation to Northern literature. It has the naturalness of the spoken word, following blithely the quips and pranks of thought that give zest to conversation but are usually flattened out before they reach print. The result is a light whimsicality, a capriciousness which Hamsun cultivates with subtle and conscious art, until he attains a sparkle and vividness, an ease and flexibility never before known in the language of his country.
As the literary artist Hamsun gives us apples of gold in pitchers of silver, and the metal for both is entirely of his own forging.
THE CITIZEN
HOLDING UP THE MIRROR TO HIS GENERATION
Very early in his career as an author Hamsun struck the keynote of the message which in his most recent works he has preached with so much power. The two novels "Editor Lynge" (1893) and "Shallow Soil" (1893), satirizing certain journalistic and literary phenomena in Christiania, showed the reverse side of the ideal in which he believes, and by contrast pointed the way to new standards and new goals.
The main character in "Editor Lynge" is an intellectual parvenue, a peasant lad who has risen to the position of editor-in-chief, not by great and commanding qualities, but by a cheap smartness, a facility for shoving himself in, and a brazen self-possession that never deserts him. He is without real convictions and real courage, and yet manages to hoodwink the public into thinking him a great moral leader. A scandal-monger under pretence of defending virtue, he impudently assumes the right to pry into other people's affairs and spread them large over the pages of his paper.
Some of the obnoxious sides of Lynge's activity we can, of course, recognize as belonging to the dark side of daily newspaper work everywhere, although they appear with more transparent naïveté in a small country. In making him a peasant lad who had risen into another class without assimilating its standards, who attempted to be a leader without having inherited the traditions of leadership, Hamsun had in mind certain phases of a transition period in his own country. Popular education had opened the professions and government offices to country lads, but could not in a single generation give them real culture. They remained mentally homeless and rootless. In Lynge he portrays a man who has suffered an injury to his soul by a transplantation which could never be complete. Significantly enough, Lynge's most ardent admirer is another transplanted country boy, Endre Bondesen, whose origin is stamped on him in his name (Bondesen, peasant's son). He too has lost his contact with the soil and thereby lost the standards of conduct in his own class without acquiring those in the class he has entered. Their attitude toward the new possibilities that open before them Hamsun describes as a kind of triumphant snicker: "Tee-hee-hee! what great fellows we are!"