As often as he spoke of religion, and his
talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
error concerning him.
It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an
order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think
poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
his "medicated novels." That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it.
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