The emotion which fails to find adequate
outlet, even in such works as _Sult_, _Mysterier_, _Victoria_, and
_Pan_, might well seem more of a peril than the quixotic stubbornness
of Kareno's philosophy. Such a flood, in its tempestuous unrest, might
seem to threaten destruction, or at best the vain dispersal of its own
power into chaos. But by some rare guidance it is led, after the storm
of _Munken Vendt_, into channels of beneficent fertility.
In 1904, after an interval of short stories, letters of travel, and
poems, came the story entitled _Svoermere_. The word means "Moths." It
also stands for something else; something for which we English, as
a sensible people, have no word. Something pleasantly futile,
deliciously unprofitable--foolish lovers, hovering like moths about a
lamp.
But there is more than this that is untranslatable in the title. _As_
a title it suggests an attitude of gentleness, tenderness, sympathy,
toward whomsoever it describes. It is a new note in Hamsun; the
opening of a new _motif_.
The main thread of the story bears a certain similarity to that of
_Mysterier_, _Vicioria_, and _Pan_, being a love affair of mazy
windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not.
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