Knut Hamsun (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1922. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... THE CITIZEN HOLDING UP THE MIRROR TO HIS GENERATION ERY 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 v 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 naivete 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 t...