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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, The new world and the new book 10 0 Browse Search
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters 4 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men 2 0 Browse Search
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature 2 0 Browse Search
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Browsing named entities in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book. You can also browse the collection for Silas Lapham or search for Silas Lapham in all documents.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, The New world and the New book (search)
ified in saying, that this American tendency comes to its highest point and is best indicated in the later work of Mr. Howells. Happy is that author whose final admirers are, as heroes used to say, the captives of his bow and spear, the men from whom he met his earlier criticism. Happy is that man who has the patience to follow, like Cicero, his own genius, and not to take the opinions of others for his guide. And the earlier work of Mr. Howells —that is, everything before The Rise of Silas Lapham, Annie Kilburn, and The Hazard of New Fortunes—falls now into its right place; its alleged thinness becomes merely that of the painter's sketches and studies before his maturer work begins. As the Emperor Alaric felt always an unseen power drawing him on to Rome, so Howells has evidently felt a magnet drawing him on to New York, and it was not until he set up his canvas there that it had due proportions. My friend Mr. James Parton used to say that students must live in New England, wher
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, VIII (search)
sonality than among New England farmers, whose fathers lived before them on the same soil, or perhaps six generations of ancestors, and who, among all restrictions of hard soil and severe competition, have yet kept their separate characteristics. I have spent summer after summer in the country, and have never yet encountered two farmers alike—two who would not, even if drawn by an unsympathetic though acute observer like Howells, stand out on the canvas with as marked an individuality as Silas Lapham. It is so with our native-born population generally. In the best volume of New England stories ever written—it is perhaps needless to say that I refer to Five Hundred Dollars a Year and Other Stories, by Mr. H. W. Chaplin—there is an inimitable scene in a jury-room where the hero, Eli, holds out during many hours for the innocence of a wronged man. The jurymen are commonplace personages enough—a sea captain, a butcher, a pedler, and so on—and yet their talk through page after page b
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, IX (search)
metropolis has the immeasurably greater advantage of writing for an audience which is, so to speak, unpicked, and which, therefore, includes the picked one, as an apple includes its core. One does not need to be a very great author in America to find that his voice is heard across a continent—a thing more stimulating and more impressive to the imagination than the morning drum-beat of Great Britain. The whole vast nation, but a short time since, was simultaneously following the Rise of Silas Lapham, or The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine. In a few years the humblest of the next generation of writers will be appealing to a possible constituency of a hundred millions. He who writes for a metropolis may unconsciously share its pettiness; he who writes for a hundred millions must feel some expansion in his thoughts, even though his and theirs be still crude. Keats asked his friend to throw a copy of Endymion into the heart of the African desert; is it not better to cast
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, XXI (search)
anscendental movement that swept through Europe and America half a century ago, will probably always have a touch of sentimentalism in their sympathies, a little exuberance somewhere, even when the outside is hard or constrained; and even those who belong to a later school may show traces of that which prevailed when they were in their cradles, as Howells's volume of poems opens with the sentimental and even beautiful strains of Forlorn. This, then, was the path through which he came to Silas Lapham and Lemuel Barker; and very likely, when Mr. Henry James's biography comes to be written, he may yet be found to have begun by taking tremulous footsteps in some such romantic path. After all, sentimentalism is a thing immortal, for it represents the slight overplus and excess of youthful emotion; it bears the same relation to the deeper feelings of later life that the college contests of the football ground bear to life's conflicts. Tennyson, who began by representing it, and then, wit
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book, Index (search)
. P. R., 94. James, Henry, 65, 66, 84, 114, 118, 184. Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 5, 11, 110, 155. Johnson, Samuel, 197. Joubert, Joseph, 26, 96, 194, 195. Jouffroy, T. S., 216. Junius, 190. K. Keats, John, 86, 103. Kipling, Rudyard, 15. Kock, Paul de, 56. Kotzebue, A. F. von, 90. Khayyam, Omar, 229. L. Lafontaine, A. 90. La Fontaine, J. de, 92. Lamartine, Alphonse, 182. Lamb, Charles, 217. Landor, W. S., 69, 197, 217. Lang, Andrew, 41, 199. Lanier, Sidney, 67. Lapham, Silas, 164, 184. Larousse, Pierre, 54. Lawton, W. C., 147. Leland, C. G., 151. Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 16, 67, 84, 155. Literary metropolis, A, 77. Literary pendulum, The, 213. Literary tonics, 62. Liveries, repressive, 75. London, the, of to-day, 80, 93. Longfellow, H. W., 29, 39, 66, 81, 93, 100, 155, 215. Longueville, Duchesse de, 91. Lowell, J. R., 19, 54, 59, 63, 66, 77, 96, 98, 100, 102, 114, 155, 179, 205. Lubbock, James, 217. Lytton, Lord, 179, 180, 181. 182. M.