ty of men, the true stuff of
poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which
(like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single
string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave. You
chose, or you were destined

To vary from the kindly race of men;

and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.
For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that
highest success--the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation. By
this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator,
M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr.
Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted
all those ideas of 'progress' which 'came from Hell or Boston.' On
this point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M.
Baudelaire, and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism
and universal suicide or universal opium-eating. But to discuss your
ultimate ideas is perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your
prose romances.

An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them
as 'Hawthorne and delirium tremens.' I am not aware that extreme
orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a
predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If
they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good
deal of delirium tremens in your style. But your ingenuity, your
completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of
jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at
his command. He was a great writer--the greatest writer in prose fiction
whom America has produced. But you and he have not much in common,
except a certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories
about the workings of conscience.

I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would
not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe,
now your countrymen's favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic,
he is eminently uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were
called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute
observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute