he 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 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