He got a habit
of mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Huxley's habit of writing.
He got a view of woman from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of all
resemblance. He got a certain fine ambition and gusto out of Balzac, but
all that was French and characteristic he left behind. So with Zola,
Howells, Tolstoi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses quickly becomes
rabbinism, almost cabalism. The differences are huge and sprout up in
all directions. Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial
passion in the current efforts to fit him into a German frame, and make
him an agent of Prussian frightfulness in letters. Such childish gabble
one looks for in the New York _Times_, and there is where one actually
finds it. Even the literary monthlies have stood clear of it; it is
important only as material for that treatise upon the patrioteer and his
bawling which remains to be written. The name of the man, true enough,
is obviously Germanic, and he has told us himself, in "A Traveler at
Forty," how he sought out and found the tombs of his ancestors in some
little town of the Rhine country.
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