1876

Yet I have, as much as possible, avoided them. Somehow they never seem to fit our way of life at Paris: this includes Bryant, though he and I have met in Europe off and on over the years, usually in Italy. I once debated (and the negative won) taking him to Princess Mathilde's, where he might meet her circle, particularly my especial friend Taine, as well as such amusing novelists as Gautier, the Goncourt brothers and the Russian Turgenev. But somehow I could not imagine William Cullen Bryant in that circle (where even I, after forty years, am still known as the "blond wild Indian"). I fear that that brilliant circle would sooner roast a waterfowl than apostrophize it. Lately the young journalist-writers have been descending on Europe like termites on an ancient frame house, and London has taken them very much to heart. The English can never get enough of the grotesque; they particularly delight in those Americans who seem to them truly American, preferably the ones with long hair and Western twangs, who chew tobacco and tell tall tales—ah, those tall tales of wild Indians and of drunken bears and of jumping frogs. N.P. Willis, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain and, most interesting of all, I am told, a Californian called (I think) Pierce whose work I have not read, but whose brilliant mordant conversation has been reported to me by the Princess Mathilde who hears of him from the Empress at Chislehurst. Our Empress may be bored by literary men and explorers, but appar-ently a son of the American West has discovered how to make her exile amusing. Needless to say, nothing west of Seine-et-Oise interests Paris, including, alas, their former Empress. Stedman mentioned any number of literary men I must meet and I pretended interest, although I have never found congenial the company of professional writers. Also I do not read novels anymore while today's poetry makes me quite angry, since, at best it is no more than carefully ruined prose.

and
From her voice I could not guess her mood. I suspect that this is because we now speak only English to each other and in English she is someone else as am I. Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements.

and
Gilder has sent me a number of books he thinks I should read. The new work by Mark Twain is all about a boy in a small town on the Mississippi. I cannot say that the doings of any boy quite seizes my attention. I suspect that this book is more in the line of William de La Touche Clancey. Thumbing through it, I did find some nice jokes, no doubt taken from the lecture hall. Yet, when it comes to raw Western vernacular, I much prefer the novels of Edward Eggleston, particularly The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Although a clergyman, Eggleston appears not to like Christian-ity, at least in its more wild evangelical frontier manifestations, and I can read him as easily as I do Balzac. I have also been fascinated by a writer named De Forest—a failure according to everyone in publishing. Gilder concedes the man's talent, "but novels are for the ladies and his are much too brutal, too close to sordid life, too full of politics." In other words too interesting and too real. The curious thing about this ongoing "aesthetic" debate be-tween the romantic writers on the one hand and the realists on the other is that neither school achieves anything but romantic false effects. American realists feel that to describe the workings of a factory is somehow to be vivid and truthful, and to a point they are right. But when it comes to writing about the men and women in the factories and what they really do to one another, particularly at work or within marriage, these realists are every bit as romantic and unrealistic as the popular, busy women writ-ers or even, to turn to the highest peak, that dark veiled lady of New England letters Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, faced with any truth about the way we are, swiftly evokes ghosts and haunted houses on those nights when silvery clouds cross a beauteous skull-like but, oh, so fictive moon. If I were more interested I would do something on the French realists, who are not much known here. Howells at the Atlantic seems well-disposed; he has even written on Turgenev. Yet when one reads his own easy lady-flattering fictions, one wonders if for all his intelligence he can ever cease to be the opposite of what he affects to admire. I have several times mentioned Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale as a novel that perfectly shows human life as it is—the undifferentiated drift down the years which most lives are—and yet the author is able to make every eddy in that slow progress glitter with some truthful light, so unlike the fool-ish jokes of a Mark Twain or the melodramatic romances of Hawthorne.