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Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, Centennial Contributions (search)
eds to be a talkative person; one that either acts out his internal life, or indirectly exposes it. Hawthorne's best friends do not appear to have known what his real opinions were. This perpetual reserve, this unwillingness to assimilate himself to others, may have been necessary for the perfection of his art. The greater a writer or an artist, the more unique he is,--the more sharply defined from all other members of his class. Hawthorne certainly did not resemble Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray, either in his life or his work. He was perhaps more like Auerbach than any other writer of the nineteenth century, but still more like Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield and the House of the seven Gables are the two perfect romances in the English tongue; and the Deserted Village, though written in poetry, has very much the quality of Hawthorne's shorter sketches. And tales much older than the ale went round is closely akin to Hawthorne's humor; yet there was little outward similarity
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 1: discontinuance of the guide-board (search)
ces, 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. Note, for instance, the steady disappearance of the italic letter from the printed page. Once used as freely as in an epistle from one of Thackeray's fine ladies, it is now employed by careful writers almost wholly to indicate foreign words or book titles; a change in which Emerson and Hawthorne were conspicuous leaders. There is a feeling that only a very crude literary art will now depend on typography for shades of meaning which should be rendered by the very structure of the sentence. The same fate of banishment is overtaking the exclamation-point, so long used by poets-conspicuously by Whittier — as a note of admiration also.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 7: a very moral and nice book (search)
nounced. When the present writer inquired of the late Mr. Froude, twenty years ago, about his neighbor in London, the late Kenelm H. Digby, author of that delightful book The Broad Stone of Honor, the historian proved never to have heard of either the man or the book. A friend of mine, visiting Stoke Pogis last year, had pointed out to her by the verger the grave of the American poet, Thomas Gray. A young English girl of eighteen, just arrived in this country, and looking at the name of Thackeray on my book-shelf, remarked, He is one of your American novelists, is he not? And a well-known Canadian statesman told me that a London maiden had just made to him a similar remark about Tennyson. Yet the least probable of these anecdotes, or the joint improbability of all put together, is brought within the domain of reasonable credibility by the announcement that Mr. Lang is just reading the Waverley Novels, or any one of them, for the first time. For this author, it must be remember
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 17: English and American gentlemen (search)
s. It would be the exceptional mean act of a consciously base man; it would not represent the very organization and structure of society. It was because Scott was personally a man of high tone that this deferential attitude is a thing alarming-and instructive. If he had done it for a particular purpose it would have represented far less. It only shows that the feudal survival is really the thing nearest the heart of those who dwell under its influence, and that the satiric pictures of Thackeray are not obsolete, but really belong to to-day. A nation is tested not by watching the class which looks down, but by the class which looks up. In England the upper classes naturally and innocently look down, and the middle and lower classes look up. In the United States the so-called upper class may or may not look down, but the rest do not look up, and this makes an ineradicable difference. The less favored may point with pride or gaze with curiosity, but they certainly do not manifest
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 31: the prejudice in favor of retiracy (search)
ed to women. Tennyson, whom Lord Lytton called Miss Alfred, in his day, says frankly of the poet generally, His worst he kept, his best he gave, and pleads earnestly that all of his life except what he puts in print may be recognized as his own. Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, and many others have claimed a similar shelter. Longfellow confessed to a dislike to seeing his name in print. Swift, while seeming defiant of the world, read family prayers in secret in his household-in a crypt, as Thackeray said — that they might not be talked about; not only retiring to the Scriptural closet, but taking his whole family there. Shakespeare, while engaged in the most conspicuous of all professions, yet kept his personality so well concealed that there are those who doubt to this day whether he wrote the plays which bear his name, and no one has yet conjectured why he left only his second-best bedstead to his wife. Charles Lamb, when asked for personal details, could remember nothing notable
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 32: the disappearance of ennui (search)
not, like the Englishman, become a landed proprietor and buy an estate in the country a dozen miles from any other estate. As with the old, so with the young. The young clubmen of our cities are not simply swells, like their London prototypes; they must be bankers and speculators also. Pelham and Vivian Grey and the Count d'orsay have ceased to be prototypes; Barnes Newcome is the ideal. The American Van Bibber and Mr. Barnes of New York are merely far-off copies of him. To be sure, Thackeray says, I do not know what there was about this young gentleman which inspired every one of his own sex with a strong desire to kick him, but it is very certain that he was not kicked for yielding to ennui. As to the other sex, we have the assurance of the highest living authority that in New York, at least, unless a fashionable woman attends the opera three times a week, dines out seven days in the week, lunches daily at one house or another, and goes nightly to a ball or dance, she feels
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 5: Bryant and the minor poets (search)
on Seneca Lake. He typified, too, a not altogether ignoble phase of earlier American culture in his zealous acquisitiveness, both in science (he died as state geologist of Wisconsin), and in languages (he wrote verse in Scandinavian and German, and translated from innumerable tongues). But he belongs chiefly to the student of human nature; lonely, shy, unmarried, disappointed, poor, and dirty, he was in appearance and mode of life a character for Dickens, in heart and soul a character for Thackeray or George Eliot. Lowell pilloried him in an essay; Bryant was perhaps juster in his kindlier obituary criticism in The evening Post. He was once a famous man. Samuel Woodworth (1785-1842） See Book II, Chaps. II and VI. and George P. Morris (1802-1864), Knickerbocker editors of literary journals See Book II, Chap. XX. and charitably remembered respectively for The old Oaken Bucket and Woodman, Spare that Tree, were popular song writers in the sentimental fashion (perhaps more d
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Index. (search)
ablet, 234 Tale of a Tub, a, 112, 118 Tale of Cloudland, a, 273 Tales (Byron), 280 Tales of a traveller, 246, 256 Tales of the border, 318 Tales of the Glauber Spa, 278 n. Talisman, the, 240 Taller, I 115, I 16 Tears and Smiles, 220, 227 Tennent, Gilbert, 77 Tenney, Tabitha, 292 Tennyson, 261, 263, 264, 269, 271, 335 Tenth Muse, lately sprung up in America, the, 154 Teresa Contarini, 224 Terrible Tractoration, 174 Thacher, Oxenbridge, 127, 128, 131 Thackeray, 279 Thanatopsis, 163, 212, 262, 262 n., 263, 265, 267 Thomas, Isaiah, 112 n., 120, 123 Thompson, Benjamin, 152, 158 Thompson, D. P., 307, 308, 310 Thomson, Charles, 98 Thomson, James, 161, 162, 163, 181, 215, 262 n., 263, 271 Thoreau, 271, 333, 340, 341, 345, 346, 347 Thoughts on the poets, 243 Thoughts on the revival of religion, 62, 63 Thurloe, John, 4 Thwaites, R. G., 205 Ticknor, George, 332 Tilden, Stephen, 166 n. Tillotson, Bishop, 109 Time,
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.), Chapter 18: Prescott and Motley (search)
o humour in the South, which before the Civil War enlisted at least a dozen considerable names in its ranks. From Georgia also came Major Jones's courtship (1840), intimate and comic letters by William Tappan Thompson (1812-82), who had an interesting career as editor and soldier in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Maryland, and Georgia. One of the best of early Southern humorists was an Alabama editor, Johnson J. Hooper (1815-62), whose Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1846) was admired by Thackeray. Captain Suggs is an amusing rascal, who lives by his wits and who is presented with rare irony by an author who had perhaps the most delicate touch of his time and section. Charles Henry Smith,Bill Arp so-called (1826-1903), wrote from Georgia a series of letters, beginning with the mildly defiant Bill Arp to Abe Linkhorn, which marked him as a brave and sensitive voice for the Confederacy. After the war Bill Arp was the first to smile and relieve the gloom. A trifle later, and farthe
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.), chapter 1.9 (search)
maid, Myrrha. Pictures designed for fine editions of standard authors were often introduced with change of name, and not infrequently the process of illustration was reversed, and poems or tales were written to fit the renamed plate. It is not strange that volumes which are so palpably indicative of the commercial side of publishing, and that appealed to a constituency often more elegant and refined than intellectual, should be treated in later years with scant respect. Charles Lamb, Thackeray, and George Eliot all indulged in humour at the expense of the annuals and their admirers, and in America Miss Agnes Repplier and others who have given them passing notice adopt the same tone. They were not, however, without literary importance. Their exuberances and peculiarities register for the literary historian some of the less admirable qualities of popular taste; and they really contain much work of value. At a time when most of the literary magazines were living but a precarious
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