* * * *

The death of Howells gave me a shock. I had known him long, though not
intimately. He was my senior by only one month. It had been two years
or more since I had seen him. Last December I read his charming paper on
"Eighty Years and After" and enjoyed it greatly. It is a masterpiece. No
other American man of letters, past or present, could have done that. In
fact, there has been no other American who achieved the all-round
literary craftsmanship that Mr. Howells achieved. His equal in his own
line we have never seen. His felicity on all occasions was a wonder. His
works do not belong to the literature of power, but to the literature of
charm, grace, felicity. His style is as flexible and as limpid as a
mountain rill. Only among the French do we find such qualities in such
perfection. Some of his writings--"Their Wedding Journey," for
instance--are too photographic. We miss the lure of the imagination,
such as Hawthorne gave to all his pictures of real things. Only one of
Howells's volumes have I found too thin for me to finish--his "London
Films" was too filmy for me. I had read Taine's "London Notes" and felt
the force of a different type of mind. But Howells's "Eighty Years and
After" will live as a classic. Oh, the felicity of his style! One of his
later poems on growing old ("On a Bright Winter's Day" it is called) is
a gem.

IX

SUNDOWN PAPERS

RE-READING BERGSON

I am trying again to read Bergson's "Creative Evolution," with poor
success. When I recall how I was taken with the work ten or more years
ago, and carried it with me whenever I went from home, I am wondering
if my mind has become too old and feeble to take it in. But I do not
have such difficulty with any other of my favorite authors. Bergson's
work now seems to me a mixture of two things that won't
mix--metaphysics and natural science. It is full of word-splitting and
conjuring with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. The style
is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. He enlarges upon the
inability of the intellect to understand or grasp Life. The reason is
baffled, but sympathy and the emotional nature and the intuitions
grasp the mystery.

This may be true, the heart often knows what the head does not; but is
it not the intellect that tells us so? The intellect understands the
grounds of our inability. We can and do reason about the limitations
of reason. We do not know how matter and spirit blend