Cambridge Neighbors | Page 7

rejection. He had not learned
American English without learning newspaper English, but if one
touched a phrase of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the
ultimate arbiters in such matters, its difference from true American and
true English. It was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in
those days; it seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase
without his choosing. In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune
from the first; his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most
native, most racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over
Gunnar and marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his
phrasing.
I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider
how rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression. Our
speech is rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but
five other writers born to different languages who have handled English
with anything like his mastery. Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and
Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand,
and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled
but none of them surpassed him. Yet he was a man grown when he
began to speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it
somewhat in Norway before he came to America. What English he
knew he learned the use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic
vigor we may be proud of it as Americans.
He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a
critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge.
He had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he
believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad;

but he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His
hand fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the
faith but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration
was more than structure, that make-believe was something you could
live by as you live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in
damnatory criticism. His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in
that, and it rose rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great
authors whom he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude
of his scholarship as well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur.
Here he was almost as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in
his more fortunate essays in fiction.
After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true. He
did not strike it again till he wrote 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness',
and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch.
There are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful
sense of their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of
human nature, and of American character. He understood our character
quite as well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not
to do so. I think these were the times when he was overworked, and
ought to have been resting instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses
command of alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen's
achievements we must never forget that he was born strange to our
language and to our life. In 'Gunnar' he handled the one with grace and
charm; in his great novel he handled both with masterly strength. I call
'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' a great novel, and I am quite
willing to say that I know few novels by born Americans that surpass it
in dealing with American types and conditions. It has the vast horizon
of the masterpieces of fictions; its meanings are not for its characters
alone, but for every reader of it; when you close the book the story is
not at an end.
I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please
him any more. But it was a book worthy the powers which could have
given us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things.
Boyesen could "toil terribly," but for his fame he did not always toil
wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his
best; it was always the best he could do. Several years after our first
meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where

money counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the
world, and he could not resist the temptation to write