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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature 4 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book 4 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men 2 0 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors 2 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book. You can also browse the collection for Arthur Dimmesdale or search for Arthur Dimmesdale in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, IV (search)
peculiarities, the simple answer was: I know nothing whatever about boats. I painted only what I saw, or thought I saw. In the same way one can scarcely open a foreign criticism on an American book, without seeing that, however good may be the abstract canons of criticism adopted, the detailed comment is as confused as if a landsman were writing about seamanship. When, for instance, a vivacious Londoner like Mr. Andrew Lang attempts to deal with that profound imaginative creation, Arthur Dimmesdale, in the Scarlet Letter, he fails to comprehend him from an obvious and perhaps natural want of acquaintance with the whole environment of the man. To Mr. Lang he is simply a commonplace clerical Lovelace, a dissenting clergyman caught in a shabby intrigue. But if this clever writer had known the Puritan clergy as we know them, the high priests of a Jewish theocracy, with the whole work of God in a strange land resting on their shoulders, he would have comprehended the awful tragedy in
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, XVI (search)
you are shown every step in the development of the horse from the time when, in pre-historic periods, he was no larger than a fox and had five toes. In science, plot is not only not ignored, but it is almost everything; only it is not called plot, it is called evolution. And conversely, what is called evolution in science is called plot in fiction. Grant that character is first in importance, as it doubtless is, yet plot is the development of character. It is not enough to paint Arthur Dimmesdale, standing with his hand on his heart and despair in his eyes; to paint the hand anatomically correct, the eyes deep in emotion; but we need to know what brought him there; what produced the strange combination, a Puritan Saint with a conscience wrung into distortion. Lear is not Lear, Hamlet not Hamlet, without a glimpse at the conditions that have made them what they are. With the worst villains of the play, we need, as Margaret Fuller profoundly said, to hear the excuses men make t