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 of humour
as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear, the
charm of "Daisy Miller." You would admit the unity of effect