-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 more and more when he
should have written less and less. He never wr