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
View all matching documents...

Your search returned 417 results in 279 document sections:

... 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 ...
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 25: the complaint of the poor (search)
one expected to see a proposal to take up collections for them in Sunday-schools or by penny-in-a-slot boxes. Since then, moreover, the maximum figure of wealth has increased so rapidly that it haunts the imagination, especially of the poor. All the old theories, as that wealth would be limited, in this country, by the absence of primogeniture, or checked by cutting off the old sources of supply, such as the India trade-all these have vanished. Then the question recurs, for those who are poor and philosophers at the same time, what is the outcome to be? It is almost as difficult to reconcile the principles of republican society with the existence of billionaires as of dukes. Meanwhile, as to the question of outcome, the most courageous theorizers differ fundamentally. Henry George and Edward Bellamy agree as to the disease, but prescribe remedies almost absolutely opposite. It is perhaps fortunate that it is so, for it gives people time to open their eyes and to think. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 26: summer people and county people (search)
ns. The ladies of the summer families do not meet the villagers and the farmers' households on a basis quite so frank as that on which the men meet. They contribute unconsciously many suggestions as to new bonnets, and they may be wholly friendly and public-spirited; but, after all, the social difference is more emphasized. The very fact that it is intangible makes it more difficult to suspend it occasionally, as is done in England at certain harvest balls and the like, or as used to be done in our Southern States sometimes at the marriage of some privileged slave. The summer families are coming more and more to take in our country towns a position not unlike that of the county families or county people in England; and a novel like Hope's A Change of Air, which acutely analyzes this classification in England, suggests curious analogies for the American reader, to whom the varying social currents of his own land have an interest beyond what any English novelist can imagine. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 27: the antidote to money (search)
nd must therefore either be taken wholly from a very well-provided class or else kept in public life, like the Radical and Irish members, by special contribution. It is really a very simple matter, though it puzzled Matthew Arnold, that men and women who take the English view that wealth is primarily a means of personal luxury should live in Europe. How can they help it? To those who incline, however moderately, to what is still a very common American view, that wealth is to be viewed as being in a manner a public trust, there seems every reason why they should live at home, and why, moreover, even their daughters should wish to do this. The only real antidote to wealth, all the world over, lies in the pursuits of intellect and the desire to do good. As for hereditary rank, it is no antidote to wealth, but merely a means of concentrating and perpetuating its power. Was there ever such a carnival of mere wealth, for instance, as at the coronation of the Emperor of Russia? 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 28: the really interesting people (search)
guish by an unexplained suicide in his hotel chamber. Could we look behind the scenes we might perhaps find the explanation to lie in some fancied helplessness, as unfounded as these childish tears, in the outlook on life of this maturer child. With the world before him to enjoy, to help, or to conquer, he finds himself paralyzed with doubts whether he can fill his place. Life alone could test him; but that test he shrinks from applying, and takes refuge in death. The interest of the world lies in the fortunes of the young. The great works of humanity are still to be accomplished; the great book written; the great picture painted; the great city or nation governed. It is not the nineteenth century, but the twentieth, which now becomes interesting. We turn for a theme to the coming generation; but we must not, like that member of Congress who announced himself as addressing posterity, be charged with talking so long that our audience will arrive in season to hear us. （1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 29: acts of homage (search)
under such circumstances as to form but a trivial part of their career. Who can doubt that, fifty years hence, the disproportion will be far greater than now? After all is said and done, the circle of American writers who established our nation's literature, half a century ago, were great because they were first and chiefly American; and of the Americans who have permanently transplanted themselves for literary purposes it is pretty certain that James and Bret Harte would have developed more lasting power had they remained at home. Transplanting helps tulips, but it is a doubtful aid to human intellects. Why is it not as great a thing to be fellow-countrymen of Emerson and Hawthorne as of Tennyson and Browning? Even of these last names, it is to be remembered that Tennyson lived the life of a recluse, and Browning lived so much out of England that the fact was urged strongly by a brother author, James Payn, as a source of objection to his being buried in Westminster Abbey. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 30: our criticism of foreign visitors (search)
far less important than matter in America, even in the eyes of those who call themselves artists. Yet she is spoken of by some leading journals as if she were a mere commonplace gossip, without earnestness or purpose; as if her visit to this country were not the culmination of a long series of services rendered to us, through the greatest of the world's reviews, in the translation of American authors and the elucidation of our social system. We still show national weakness in our over-sensitiveness. Probably all Europe cannot afford any one better fitted than Madame Blanc to discuss precisely those aspects of American life which she touches. And when we consider that it is only a few years since Mr. Philbrick, our Educational Commissioner at the Paris Exposition of 1878, complained that he had never yet found a Frenchman who could be convinced that any American woman had ever studied Greek, we ought to be grateful to the French woman who has at last spoken with knowledge. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 31: the prejudice in favor of retiracy (search)
n seem to authors so remote and worthless; they feel as an apple-tree might feel, if it were human, towards a barrel of its own apples of last season. When to all this is added a woman's lingering tradition of the seclusion due to her sex, it is not strange if authors of that sex hide themselves under initials or feigned names, and decline to publish autobiographies. It is to be observed that those who, like Mr. Bellamy, put into type their dreams of an ideal future state, do not make it clear to us which way we are tending, whether to greater publicity or greater seclusion. Perhaps the more we are destined to have in common, the more we shall take refuge in what we can preserve of retiracy. It is to be noticed that Fourier, the arch-organizer, in the midst of his elaborate groups and intricate series, still recognizes the rights of individuality here and there; and preserves, amid all the inexorable machinery, some little corners where personal privacy may hold its own. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 32: the disappearance of ennui (search)
ate. 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 she is losing her time. But at least she cannot suffer from languor of mind resulting from lack of occupation. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 33: the test of talk (search)
saying different to instead of different from. Another is directly I went rather than directly after I went. It shows how skin-deep is our alleged Anglicism that we Americans hold our own so inflexibly on these points. Probably we are influencing the English in language more than they are affecting us, and not always beneficially; it is now, for instance, far more common to see I expect used for I think by a good English writer than by a good American writer. We are acquiring, it is to be hoped, something more of the English habit of clear and well-cut enunciation, but we are holding out fairly well against the deluge of the coarser class of English words, such as rot and beastly. Nor do we often emulate that high-born young English woman who informed a friend of mine, her hostess, at dinner, that the potatoes were nasty, and on being cautioned that in America we only apply this phrase to something very greasy and offensive, replied that this was precisely what she meant. 1896
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life, Chapter 34: Overclubbableness (search)
s Lady Henry Somerset and Mrs. Chant, we must remember that it was one of our countrywomen who, after living long in England, expressed the opinion that what an English woman would describe as a busy day, an American woman would call an idle day. Especially in regard to domestic service, so perfectly are the wheels of household life oiled in older countries that all this department of care is reduced to a minimum. The comparative poverty of the masses makes English life easier than ours for the well-to-do. An American mother, going to England with young children, finds easily a nursery governess, refined and ladylike, who will rejoice to come and live with her, teaching the children, for £20 a year or about $2 a week, a relief she cannot obtain here for twice the money. But to live as Americans live, and do the work they have to perform for themselves, is a drain which makes overclubbableness simply one more disease for men or women, in a complication of dangerous symptoms. 1896
... 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 ...