Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

Emerson said of our former literary allegiance to England that it was the tax we paid for the priceless gift of English literature; but this tax should surely not be now a heavy one; a few ballades and villanelles seem the chief recent importations. The current American criticism on the latest English literature is that it is brutal or trivial. The London correspondent of the Critic quoted some Englishmen the other day as saying that the principal results of our Civil War had been ‘the development of Henry James, and the adoption of Mr. Robert Stevenson.’ Mr. Stevenson, if adopted, can hardly be brought into the discussion. Mr. James has no doubt placed himself as far as possible beyond reach of the Civil War by keeping the Atlantic Ocean between him and the scene where it occurred; but when I recall that I myself saw his youngest brother, still almost a boy, lying near to death, as it then seemed, in a hospital at Beaufort, S. C., after the charge on Fort Wagner, I can easily imagine that the Civil War may really leave done something