Page:Hunger (Hamsun).djvu/337

Rh

The Publishers feel that the production of the first English translation of this famous novel, one of the masterpieces of French literature of the present century, needs very little in the way of introduction or explanation. The Author, a contemporary of Balzac—who described him as "an immense genius," and pronounced "La Chartreuse de Parme" his masterpiece—though not generally recognised at its true value during his lifetime, could say with a confidence which has justified itself: "I shall be understood in 1880"; for, as Bourget has justly observed: "We now speak casually of Balzac and Stendhal as we speak of Hugo and Lamartine, Ingres and Delacroix."