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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book 2 0 Browse Search
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Americanism in literature. (search)
et more comprehensive, and therefore more honorable still; we sometimes see, in a shopkeeper's advertisement, Saleslady wanted. No doubt the mere fashionable novelist loses terribly by the change: when all classes may wear the same dress-coat, what is left for him? But he who aims to depict passion and character gains in proportion; his material is increased tenfold. The living realities of American life ought to come in among the tiresome lay-figures of average English fiction like Steven Lawrence into the London drawing-room: tragedy must resume its grander shape, and no longer turn on the vexed question whether the daughter of this or that matchmaker shall marry the baronet. It is the characteristic of a real book that, though the scene be laid in courts, their whole machinery might be struck out and the essential interest of the plot remain the same. In Auerbach's On the heights, for instance, the social heights might be abolished and the moral elevation would be enough. Th
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, The New world and the New book (search)
Italian fiction, we now rarely find a plot turning on some merely conventional difference between the social positions of hero and heroine. In England the change has been made more slowly than elsewhere, so incongruous is it in the midst of a society which still, in the phrase of Brander Matthews, accepts dukes. Indeed, it is curious to observe that for a time it was still found necessary, in the earlier stages of the transition, to label the hero with his precise social position;—as, Steven Lawrence, Yeoman, John Halifax, Gentleman, —whereas in America it would have been left for the reader to find out whether John Halifax was or was not a gentleman, and no label would have been thought needful. And I hasten to add, what I should not always have felt justified in saying, that this American tendency comes to its highest point and is best indicated in the later work of Mr. Howells. Happy is that author whose final admirers are, as heroes used to say, the captives of his bow and