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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, XIV (search)
hat we must explain the meek gratitude with which our press receives it, when Mr. Bryce apologizes for our deficiencies in the way of literature. Mr. Bryce—whom, it is needless to say, I regard with hearty admiration, and I can add with personal affection, since he has been my guest and I have been his—Mr. Bryce has a chapter on Creative Intellectual Power, in which he has some capital remarks on the impossibility of saying why great men appear in one time or place and not in another—in Florence, for instance, and not in Naples or Milan. Then he goes on to say that there is no reason why the absence of brilliant genius among the sixty millions in the United States should excite any surprise, and adds soon after, It is not to be made a reproach against America that men like Tennyson or Darwin have not been born there. Surely not; nor is it a reproach against England that men like Emerson or Hawthorne have not been born there. But if this last is true, why did it not occur to Mr. <
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, XXV (search)
ad previously said about their own countrymen; and why should we expect to fare any better? It is only in foreign countries that even we Americans stand up resolutely for our own land. I lived for some time with a returned fellow-countryman of very keen wit, who, after long residence in Europe, found nothing to please him at home. One day, meeting one of his European companions, I was asked, How is ——? Does he stand up for everything American, through thick and thin, as he used to do in Florence? Turning upon my neighbor with this unexpected supply of ammunition, I was met with the utmost frankness. He owned that while in Europe he had defended all American ways, through loyalty, and that he criticised them at home for the same reason. I shall abuse my own country, he said, so long as I think it is worth saving. When that hope is gone, I shall praise it. In the once famous poem of Festus, recalled lately to memory by its fiftieth anniversary, there is a fine passage about th