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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[491] and with Ruskin and Carlyle, he never ceases to be interested in the moral forces which they all believed to be at work in the rise and fall of states. This is the characteristic interest of his Historical studies of Church building in the Middle Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence (880).

On the other hand, Norton's emancipation from Ruskin's naturalism was absolute. Humanism is the note of all his later thought and of his influence upon his pupils. It has actuated in several ways a number of men now writing, a group which may perhaps be called ‘the new humanists,’ and which includes Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, John Jay Chapman, and George Edward Woodberry. These all attend to one or another phase of the cleavage between man's way and nature's way—a dualism which, whether it cut between man and external nature, or between the ‘natural man’ and the ‘spiritual man’ within; whether it emphasize the ‘inner check’ in any of its various modes, or, as against the naturalistic ‘education of the senses,’ commend to man the study of his own humane tradition,¹ and summon him to take up the racial torch and hand it on,—in any case places man's hope not upon what nature, whether within or without, may do for him, but upon his making himself more completely man.

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