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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises 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, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 1: discontinuance of the guide-board (search)
no such enchantment; and he has written the only novel of illicit love, perhaps, in which the offenders-both being persons otherwise high-minded and noble-fail to derive from their sin one hour of even temporary happiness. From the moment of their yielding we see the shadow already over them; the author is as merciless to these beings of his own construction as if he hated them; and one feels like calling in an Omar Khayyam to defend once more the created against an unjust creator. Yet Anna Karenina has often been condemned as immoral, in the absence of the guide-board. If, now, we consider, in the light of these striking instances, what it is that has brought about this gradual disuse of the overt and visible moral, we shall soon see that it is a part of the general tendency of modern literature to do without external aids to make its meaning clear. There is undoubtedly a tendency to rely more and more upon what has been well called the presumption of brains in the reader. No
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises, XXIV. a half-century of American literature (1857-1907） (search)
neous, joyous Greek waywardness of fancy, for the temperature of passion and the subtler thrill of ideality, you might as well look to a wrought-iron derrick. Whatever charges can be brought against the American people, no one has yet attributed to them any want of self-confidence or self-esteem; and though this trait may be sometimes unattractive, the philosophers agree that it is the only path to greatness. The only nations which ever come to be called historic, says Tolstoi in his Anna Karenina, are those which recognize the importance and worth of their own institutions. Emerson, putting the thing more tersely, as is his wont, says that no man can do anything well who does not think that what he does is the centre of the visible universe. The history of the American republic was really the most interesting in the world, from the outset, were it only from the mere fact that however small its scale, it yet showed a self-governing people in a condition never before witnessed on
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, IV (search)
IV On taking ourselves seriously Tolstoi says, in Anna Karenina, that no nation will ever come to anything unless it attaches some importance to itself. (Les seules nations qui agent de l'avenir, les seules qu'on puisse nommer historiques, sont celles qui sentent l'importance et le valeur de leur institutions.) It is curious that ours seems to be the only contemporary nation which is denied this simple privilege of taking itself seriously. What is criticised in us is not so much that our social life is inadequate, as that we find it worth studying; not so much that our literature is insufficient, as that we think it, in Matthew Arnold's disdainful phrase, important. In short, we are denied not merely the pleasure of being attractive to other people, which can easily be spared, but the privilege that is usually conceded to the humblest, of being of some interest to ourselves. The bad results of this are very plain. They are, indeed, so great that the evils which were sup