"whcbn10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howells William Dean)

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 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