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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life 12 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 3 1 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy during the war of 1861-1865, vol. 1: prelminary narrative 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)
but never exchanging a word. Yet both these novels are sometimes classed among the bad books, simply because the guide-board is omitted and the reader left to draw his own moral. The same misjudgment is often passed for the same reason upon Tolstoi's Anna Karinina, which surely is, among all books upon this same theme, the most utterly relentless. Not merely does it not contain, from beginning to end, a prurient scene or even a voluptuous passage, but its plot moves as inexorably and almreek fate. Even Hawthorne allows his guilty lovers, in The Scarlet Letter, a moment of delusive happiness; even Hawthorne recognizes the unquestionable truth that the foremost result of a broken law is sometimes an enchanting sense of freedom. Tolstoi tolerates 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 mo
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 5: a bit of war photography (search)
or two in camp, thirty years ago, must be struck with the extraordinary freshness and vigor of the book. No one except Tolstoi, within my knowledge, has brought out the daily life of war so well; it may be said of these sentences, in Emerson's phro be omitted, not merely by the novelists, but by the regimental histories themselves. I know that when I first read Tolstoi's War and Peace, The Cossacks and Sevastopol, it seemed as if all other so-called military novels must become at once suonflict, while every soldier or sailor is grouped around him, each in heroic attitude and spotless garments. It is this Tolstoi quality — the real tumult and tatters of the thing itself-which amazes the reader of Crane's novel. Moreover, Tolstoy h book is in the way it holds you. I only know that whenever I take it up I find myself reading it over and over, as I do Tolstoi's Cossacks, and find it as hard to put down. None of Doyle's or Weyman's books bear re-reading, in the same way; you mu
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 10: a New nation (search)
ere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to strike. Tennessee's partner, the Outcast of Poker Flat, and all the rest are triumphs of selective skill — as bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at the end of a hard day's labor. That they do not adequately represent the actual California of the fifties, as old Californians obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy characters and consistently romantic action. The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as there is any
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises, XXIV. a half-century of American literature (1857-1907） (search)
or all that spontaneous, 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 b
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy during the war of 1861-1865, vol. 1: prelminary narrative, Preliminary narrative. (search)
Artillery (Capt. John Pickering, Jr.), as pontoniers. The first great battle of the campaign was the battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7, 1864), and it was, very fortunately, almost unique of its kind. It was not, like the later contests, an affair of entrenchments; cavalry had no important share in it, artillery little; it came as near as the invention of gunpowder permitted to the earliest form of hand-to-hand fighting. No description of the merely confused and chaotic side of war by Tolstoi or Zola or Crane equals the simplest soldier's narration of the Battle of the Wilderness. It was, in Swinton's phrase, a collision of brute masses. Decisive Battles of the War, p. 383. Once begun, it soon lost almost the semblance of military formation. Men could not see their own officers, keep in their own ranks or even know whom they were fighting. In the dense woods portions of regiments fired into one another. Badeau describes the region as one tangled mass of stunted evergreen,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Chapter 16: literary life in Cambridge (search)
Fuller of fragrance, than they And as heavy with shadows and night-dews, Hung the heart of the maiden. The calm and magical moonlight Seemed to inundate her soul. It is curious to notice that Chasles makes the same criticism on Evangeline that Holmes made on Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal; namely, that there is in it a mixture of the artificial and the natural. The result is, we may infer, that on the whole one still thinks of it as a work of art and does not—as, for instance, with Tolstoi's Cossacks—think of all the characters as if they lived in the very next street. Yet it is in its way so charming, he finds that although as he says, There is no passion in it, still there is a perpetual air of youth and innocence and tenderness. M. Chasles is also impressed as a Catholic with the poet's wide and liberal comprehension of the Christian ideas. It is not, he thinks, a masterpiece (Il y a loin d'evangeline à un chef-d'oeuvre ),but he points out, what time has so far vindicat
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Index (search)
his Life, quoted, 268; description of, 282. Thacher, Mrs., Peter, 109, 111; Longfellow's letters to, 129, 130,148, 169-171. Thierry, Amedee S. D., 193. Thomson, James, 8. Thoreau, Henry D., 133, 271, 285; his definition of poetry, 277. Thorp, John G., 215. Ticknor, Prof., George, 57, 71, 75, 85, 86, 112, 153; Longfellow dines with, 45, 46; resigns from Harvard College, 84; attracted by Longfellow's translations, 87; elective system tried by, 178. Token, the, 72-74. Tolstoi, Count, 197. Tours, 48. Treadwell, Prof., Daniel, 214. Tripoli, 14. Trumbull, John, 23. Turgenieff, Ivan S., resembled Longfellow in looks, 282. Tyrol, the, 113. Uhland, Johann L., 161, 219; his Das Gluck von Edenhall, mentioned, 149. United States, 116, 240, 250, 251, 255; Sumner elected to Senate of, 186. University Hall, Cambridge, 176. Upsala, University of, 97. Van Winkle, C. S., 69. Vassall, Col., John, 116. Venice, 223, 286. Vere, Aubrey de, 141. Vere,