Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[118] social life of his day and of futile sentimentalizing in the political life. We miss in his letters that sense of humour which is the touchstone of the philosopher, and which Norton's friend Curtis used as a literary force in his public career. We miss also the light touch of fancy and the quick thrust of wit; while, at times, fastidiousness of language and thought accentuates Norton's aloofness from the ways of other men. When George E. Woodberry sent Norton, in 1881, his verses on America, Norton commented on their surplusage of patriotism in this manner: ‘We love our country, but with keen-eyed and disciplined passion, not blindly exalting her. . . . To do justice to the America that may be, we must not exalt the America that is, beyond her worth.’ This kind of integrity of judgment, this almost bleak disregard of the popular aspect of things, this stoical insistence on the discipline of passion, made Norton a force to be reckoned with, even when, almost alone among our American men of letters, he took fearless issue with the national administration at the time of the war with Spain. Yet his power with the written word was not sufficiently forceful to assure any very vital hold on men of a later day. He was a phenomenon of aesthetic intuition and of intellectual purity to whom we willingly offer tribute of admiration; yet we are aware of that pessimistic drop of acid which made his blood run a little more coldly than that of his fellow authors, precipitating the residue of an ultimately weary expression of New England culture.

One of our earlier essayists, Henry T. Tuckerman,¹ in his Defense of enthusiasm attacked the New England philosophy of life because of its too preponderant insistence on mental capacity and moral tendencies, and wrote: ‘It seems as if the great art of human culture consists chiefly in preserving the glow and freshness of the heart.’ Had Tuckerman lived in the later decades of the last century, he might, indeed, have felt out of sympathy with Norton, but not with many of our other essayists. The Civil War brought New England emotionally into the full flow of that larger national life for which Emerson and his school had prepared it, and while the later American essayists have abstained from chauvinism, and have written with the scholar's appreciation of what foreign culture