by their contributions, it will perhaps be well to adopt regarding them a
course analogous to that which Napoleon is said to have pursued with the
letters sent to him while in Italy. He left them unread until a certain
time had elapsed, and then found that most of them no longer needed
attention. We are thus brought face to face with the two men with whom
every critic of American novelists has to reckon; who represent what is
carefullest and newest in American fiction; and it remains to inquire how
far their work has been moulded by the skeptical or radical spirit of
which Turguenieff is the chief exemplar.

The author of "Daisy Miller" had been writing for several years before the
bearings of his course could be confidently calculated. Some of his
earlier tales,--as, for example, "The Madonna of the Future,"--while
keeping near reality on one side, are on the other eminently fanciful and
ideal. He seemed to feel the attraction of fairyland, but to lack
resolution to swallow it whole; so, instead of idealizing both persons and
plot, as Hawthorne had ventured to do, he tried to persuade real persons
to work out an ideal destiny. But the tact, delicacy, and reticence with
which these attempts were made did not blind him to the essential
incongruity; either realism or idealism had to go, and step by step he
dismissed the latter, until at length Turguenieff's current caught him. By
this time, however, his culture had become too wide, and his independent
views too confirmed, to admit of his yielding unconditionally to the great
Russian. Especially his critical familiarity with French literature
operated to broaden, if at the same time to render less trenchant, his
method and expression. His characters are drawn with fastidious care, and
closely follow the tones and fashions of real life. Each utterance is so
exactly like what it ought to be that the reader feels the same sort of
pleased surprise as is afforded by a phonograph which repeats, with all
the accidental pauses and inflections, the speech spoken into it. Yet the