It would almost seem as if he realised something of this. For in his next work he turns from the capital to the Nordland coast, reverting also, in some degree, to the subjective, keenly sensitive manner of _Sult_, though now with more restraint and concentration.
_Pan_ (1894) is probably Hamsun's best-known work. It is a love-story, but of an extraordinary type, and is, moreover, important from the fact that we are here introduced to some of the characters and types that are destined to reappear again and again in his later works.
Nagel, the exasperating irresponsible of _Mysterier_, is at his maddest in his behaviour towards the woman he loves. It is natural that this should be so. When a man is intoxicated, his essential qualities are emphasised. If he have wit, he will be witty; if a brutal nature, he will be a brute; if he be of a melancholy temper, he will be disposed to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
We see this in _Pan_. The love-making of the hero is characterised by the same irrational impulses, the same extravagant actions, as in _Sult_ and _Mysterier_. But they are now less frequent, and less involved. The book as a whole is toned down, so to speak, from the bewildering tangle of unrestraint in the first two. There is quite sufficient of the erratic and unusual in the character of Glahn, the hero, but the tone is more subdued. The madcap youth of genius has realised that the world looks frigidly at its vagaries, and the secretly proud "_au moins_ je suis autre"--more a boast than a confession--gives place to a wistful, apologetic admission of the difference as a fault. Here already we have something of that resignation which comes later to its fulness in the story of the Wanderer with the Mute.
The love-story in _Pan_ takes the form of a conflict; it is one of those battles between the sexes, duels of wit and _esprit_, such as one finds in the plays of Marivaux. But Hamsun sets his battle in the sign of the heart, not of the head; it is a _marivaudage_ of feeling, none the less deep for its erratic utterance. Moreover, the scene is laid, not in salons and ante-chambers, but in a landscape such as Hamsun loves, the forest-clad hills above a little fishing village, between the _højfjeld_ and the sea. And interwoven with the story, like an eerie breathing from the dark of woods at dusk and dawn, is the haunting presence of Iselin, _la belle dame sans merci_.