[In the following excerpt, Kazin characterizes Boyesen as an important advocate for the broadly-conceived Realist school, although as an author he lacked the necessary talent to achieve greatness within the genre.]

Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen was a Norwegian and professor of German at Columbia who had a wide knowledge of the traditions of European realism and endeavored to emulate the most commonplace of them in his three best-known novels of American manners—The Golden Calf, The Social Strugglers, and The Mammon of Unrighteousness. As early as 1886, in a famous essay on “The American Novelist and His Public,” he ridiculed the “boarding-school” standard of the novel-reading public. Though he was Howells's protégé and a passionately admiring friend, he attacked both him and Henry James for not writing of American politics, as he attacked the fashionable novelist who was content to satisfy the jeune fille taste and the authority of a genteel tradition that obliged the novelist “to repress that which is best in him and offer that which is of slight consequence … a plight to which many a novelist in this paradise of women is reduced.” He laughed at novelists who could remain silent “concerning all the vital things of life,” and repeated Goethe's famous adjuration to American writers to avoid romanticism like the plague.

Though he was a better realist in precept than in practice, even Boyesen's theoretical studies were mediocre. Like Harry Thurston Peck, Percival Pollard, James Gibbons Huneker, and so many cosmopolites of the fin-de-siècle era, Boyesen's service to the emancipation and growth of American taste was to expound the work of the great Continental realists; but despite such valuable pioneer studies as Essays on Scandinavian Literature, Boyesen's mind was not that of a pioneer. He had an alien's disposition to please, and though Howells liked to say of him that Boyesen had “outrealisted him,” the truth is that the handsome, kindly, emotional academician did his best work in his romantic children's stories of Norwegian life. He never found himself in America, and he never found himself in realism. He took a naïve pride in the success of the local-color school, exulted in the fact that by the early nineties all but a dozen states had their “conspicuous novelist,” and exaggerated the quality of their realism, for “local color” had already become so loose a term that Boyesen seems to have confused sentimental historical fiction with the traditions of Bret Harte and George W. Cable. He wrote an essay on “The Progressive Realism of American Fiction,” but he confessed that he was afraid of too rapid a progression. By realism, he insisted, he did not mean

the practice of that extreme wing of the school which believes only that to be true which is disagreeable, and conscientiously omits all cheerful phenomena. Nor do I confine my definition to that minute insistence upon wearisome detail which, ignoring the relation of artistic values, fancies that a mere agglomeration of incontestable facts constitutes a truthful picture.

Boyesen was, in truth, a unique example in America of the Victorian realist. He rejoiced in realism, particularly the German and the Scandinavian, if it signified the adjustment of taste and belief to the Darwinian world view; he fought nobly for Ibsen at a time when it was dangerous even to expound the dramatist's ideas; he could even say, though with characteristic hesitation, that the “morality” of a realistic novel was less important than its “truth.” “The most modern literature, which is impenetrated with the spirit of the age, has a way of asking dangerous questions,” he wrote in Essays on Scandinavian Literature. “… Our old idyllic faith in the goodness and wisdom of all mundane arrangements has undoubtedly received a shock. Our attitude toward the universe is changing with the change of its attitude toward us”—which is Tennyson, and not half so challenging as George Eliot. The worst of Boyesen—or perhaps only his inveterate Victorianism—is seen most clearly in his essay on Georg Brandes, for whom he had the highest praise, but whose Anarchist fling and espousal of “an obscure German iconoclast named Friedrich Nietschke” provoked him to the same ungentlemanly rage provoked in respectable magazine editors of the nineties like R. W. Gilder by the racy passages in the Yellow Book.

In a book of essays, Literary and Social Silhouettes, Boyesen confessed his reluctance to offend the public that bought his books; his novels confirm it. They are solemn failures, but they fail not only because Boyesen was compromised by “prudence,” but largely because, like so many of his daring contemporaries, he was not happy in realism. A facile writer, he was compelled in the manner of his generation to satirize the gross, the squalid, the pretentious; but he had an exceptionally bad ear for dialogue, and his anxiety “to depict persons and conditions which are profoundly American” bogged down in problems of characterization and style for which he simply lacked the necessary skill. His prefatory intentions, as announced in such a novel as The Mammon of Unrighteousness, were apparently militant. “I have disregarded all romantic traditions, and simply asked myself in every instance not whether it was amusing, but whether it was true to the logic of reality—true in color and tone to the American sky, the American soil, the American characterization.” In practice, however, he displayed a most tepid soul; his very choice of incidents and scale of values prove that though he patronized the romantic commercial novelist, he lacked a necessary flair for the novel. His attempts at dialect moved even contemporary readers to ridicule, but he could please by his gentlemanly airs, his chatty style, and a genuine if reluctant feeling for the happy ending.

Boyesen was not, after all, antediluvian; his realistic novels were published in the nineties at a time when Howells was most deeply under the influence of Tolstoy; when prairie realists like Joseph Kirkland and Ed Howe and Hamlin Garland had already taken realism into the most advanced camp. His mockery of the nouveaux riches in The Social Strugglers, or his arraignment of contemporary materialism in The Mammon of Unrighteousness, was less comprehensive than Henry Adams's Democracy. His distinction was a vigor of conscience. Whatever he lacked, it was not the courage to bring the new gospel of realism to the attention of the public, to fight for it and defend it within the limitations of his intelligence and taste. He contributed a little, a very little, to the realization of the literature of the future; but it was from one little man's courage and another's knowledge that realism drew over the long, difficult years of its apprenticeship the ardor and curiosity that enabled it to survive.