_Victoria_ shows an advance away from the “Hamsun ego” of revolt and naturalism towards that of poetry: Johannes, the hero, the miller’s son, is in harmony with nature; even loss in love cannot blight his soul. There are sentences of poetic diction in this novel and in _Munken Vendt_ (1902), the dramatic poem which embodies the character of a lovable, simple vagabond. One recalls the words of Edwin Björkman, in the Introduction to his translation of _Hunger_; “The artist and the vagabond seem equally to have been in the blood of Hamsun from the very start.”[134] Before he attained to the second type of novel--the less subjective and more idealistic group--(if idealism may be so expanded in meaning) Hamsun wrote a trilogy of plays, beginning with _At the Gates of the Kingdom_ (1895) with Kareno, a philosophical student and writer, as hero, and a wife of sexual domination. The author’s tenets about life and government are voiced by Kareno in this drama and _Life’s Play_, ten years later in setting; the third in the cycle, _Sunset_ (1898) shows Kareno at fifty, full of scientific doubts and reactions from earlier aspirations for liberty and truth. The author indulges his satire against professional “moralists” in these plays; sometimes, he indulges, also, his unvarnished frankness of sensual portrayals, and his lack of deference for old age. The play, _In the Grip of Life_, was translated by Graham and Tristan Rawson and issued in 1924 (Knopf). The women in his plays are, generally, animalistic, or erotic, lacking diversity in types.