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 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.