hide Matching Documents

The documents where this entity occurs most often are shown below. Click on a document to open it.

Document Max. Freq Min. Freq
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 18 0 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 14 0 Browse Search
Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and letters of Charles Sumner: volume 3 12 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life 10 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 10 0 Browse Search
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.) 10 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises 8 0 Browse Search
The Daily Dispatch: November 5, 1860., [Electronic resource] 8 4 Browse Search
Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches 8 0 Browse Search
George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition. 6 0 Browse Search
View all matching documents...

Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays. You can also browse the collection for Thackeray or search for Thackeray in all documents.

Your search returned 5 results in 4 document sections:

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, A plea for culture. (search)
no cause for fear. If we can only avoid incorporating superficiality into our institutions, literature will come when all is ready, and when it comes will be of the best. It is not enough to make England or France our standard. There is something in the present atmosphere of England which seems fatal to purely literary genius: its fruits do not mature and mellow, but grow more and more acid until they drop. Give Ruskin space enough, and he grows frantic and beats the air like Carlyle. Thackeray was tinged with the same bitterness, but he was the last Englishman who could be said, in any artistic sense, to have a style; as Heine was the last German. The French seems the only prose literature of the present day in which the element of form has any prominent place; and literature in France is after all but a favored slave. This surely leaves a clear field for America. But it is peculiarly important for us to remember that we can make no progress through affectation or spasm, bu
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Literature as an art. (search)
delicate, so brilliant, so equable, so strong,--touching all themes, not with the blacksmith's hand of iron, but with the surgeon's hand of steel? In the average type of French novels, one feels the superiority to the English in quiet power, in the absence of the sensational and exaggerated, and in keeping close to the level of real human life. They rely for success upon perfection of style and the most subtile analysis of human character; and therefore they are often painful,--just as Thackeray is painful,--because they look at artificial society, and paint what they see. Thus they dwell often on unhappy marriages, because such things grow naturally from the false social system in France. On the other hand, in France there is very little house-breaking, and bigamy is almost impossible, so that we hear delightfully little about them; whereas, if you subtract these from the current English novels, what is there left? Germany furnishes at present no models of prose style; and al
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Americanism in literature. (search)
ature does one find the concentrated utterance, the intense and breathing life, the triumphs and despairs, the depth of emotion, the tragedy, the thrill, that meet one everywhere in those Elizabethan pages? What impetuous and commanding men are these, what passionate women; how they love and hate, struggle and endure; how they play with the world ; what a trail of fire they leave behind them as they pass by! Turn now to recent fiction. Dickens's people are amusing and lovable, no doubt; Thackeray's are wicked and witty; but how under-sized they look, and how they loiter on the mere surfaces of life, compared, I will not say with Shakespeare's, but even with Chapman's and Webster's men. Set aside Hawthorne in America, with perhaps Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot in England, and there would scarcely be a fact in prose literature to show that we modern Anglo-Saxons regard a profound human emotion as a thing worth the painting. Who now dares delineate a lover, except with good-natur
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, The Greek goddesses. (search)
lcestis and Antigone are world-renowned delineations of noble and tender womanhood, and there are many companion pictures. I know not where in literature to look for a lovelier touch of feminine feeling,--a trait more unlike those portrayed by Thackeray, for instance,--than in the Deianira of Sophocles (in the Trachiniae), who receives with abundant compassion the female slaves sent home by Hercules, resolves that no added pain shall come to them from her, and even when she discovers one of tof ideal womanhood. Spenser's impersonations, while pure and high, are vague and impalpable. Shakespeare's women seem at best far inferior, in compass and variety, to Shakespeare's men; and if Ruskin glorifies them sublimely on the one side, Thackeray on the other side professes to find in them the justification of his own. Goethe paints carefully a few varieties, avoiding the largest and noblest types. . Where among all these delineations is there a woman who walks the earth like a goddess?