Cambridge Neighbors | Page 6

shelves in the Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending
novelist. I do not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the
professor, but literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and
possibly the revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible
young editor, I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the
professor's two o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study,
Boyesen took from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar',
and read it to us.
Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have
both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the
youthful sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect. I
believe it was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing
a 'stev' together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow
tones of the poet's voice in the poet's verse. These were most
characteristic of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the
ethereal wall beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.
Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
professor's roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the

gentle event. Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out
upon each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know
Bjornson's stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama,
which in even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement,
and filled me with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against
convention, that brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the
heart and the speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen's
religion more than the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had
both been spiritually nurtured, and at every step of our mounting
friendship we found ourselves on common ground in our worship of it.
I was a decade his senior, but at thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in
years as not to be able fully to rejoice in the ardor which fused his
whole being in an incandescent poetic mass. I have known no man who
loved poetry more generously and passionately; and I think he was
above all things a poet. His work took the shape of scholarship, fiction,
criticism, but poetry gave it all a touch of grace and beauty. Some years
after this first meeting of ours I remember a pathetic moment with him,
when I asked him why he had not written any verse of late, and he
answered, as if still in sad astonishment at the fact, that he had found
life was not all poetry. In those earlier days I believe he really thought
it was!
Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that stretched
almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see the
poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art. He did battle
valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave people
a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by works in
fiction which better illustrated his motive. Gunnar stands at the
beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in matter
and method stands 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness'. The lovely idyl
won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to him,
though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened life
into it. Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the place in
literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed to me the
very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular effect. Yet I must
own that it has so failed, and I own this without bitterness towards
Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as 'The Mammon of

Unrighteousness' embodied the thought of his manhood.

III.
It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a
struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs
went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every
hint and suggestion of the editor. He was quick to profit by any hint,
and he never made the same mistake twice. He lived his English as fast
as he learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the
wrong word with instant and final