Cambridge Neighbors | Page 8

more and more
when he should have written less and less. He never wrote anything
that was not worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was
giving himself with all his conscience to his academic work in the
university honored by his gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing
far and near in the vacations which should have been days and weeks
and months of leisure. The wonder is that even such a stock of health as
his could stand the strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only
excesses were in the direction of the work which he loved so well.
When a man adds to his achievements every year, we are apt to forget
the things he has already done; and I think it well to remind the reader
that Boyesen, who died at forty-eight, had written, besides articles,
reviews, and lectures unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism
on German and Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social
essays, a popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve
volumes of fiction, and four books for boys.
Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible. He was not content to be
merely a scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to
take his part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that
most men of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to know
American life better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good
and its evil; and as a matter of fact he knew us very well. His
acquaintance with us had been wide and varied beyond that of most of
our literary men, and touched many aspects of our civilization which
remain unknown to most Americans. When be died he had been a
journalist in Chicago, and a teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in
Cornell University and a literary free lance in New York; and
everywhere his eyes and ears had kept themselves open. As a teacher
he learned to know the more fortunate or the more ambitious of our
youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was continually extending itself
among all ages and classes of Americans.
He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a
very American. Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit
more intimate than the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view
of life; both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me that among the
Norwegians men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the

Frenchmen, and the Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon
common ground. When he explained the democratic character of
society in Norway, I could well understand how he should find us a
little behind his own countrymen in the practice, if not the theory of
equality, though they lived under a king and we under a president. But
he was proud of his American citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at
its best, for humanity. He divined that the true expression of America
was not civic, not social, but domestic almost, and that the people in the
simplest homes, or those who remained in the tradition of a simple
home life, were the true Americans as yet, whatever the future
Americans might be.
When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and
ambition at what he thought his exile in the West. There was, to be sure,
a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it. I
tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends
anywhere who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary
attempts, it was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the
centres of literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had
set his face and his foot Eastward. It was a great step for him from the
Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and
I remember his exultation in making it. But he could not rest there, and
in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York,
where he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which
ended in his appointment in Columbia.
New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other
things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this. I know that there came a
time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed
him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all kinds.
He