Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[204] to complain of our foreign visitors, not for knowing too little about us, but for knowing too much. Thus Madame Blanc, whose book on The Condition of Women in the United States justly criticises American women as knowing little of the history of any country except England and America, has been herself reproved for the amount and variety of knowledge which she has crowded into these brief essays. We have probably never had such good criticisms of national ways and manners from any foreign woman, and it goes without saying that to do these things better than any woman is to do them better than any man. She has keenly pointed out faults as well as she has recognized merits; she does not applaud the architecture and decoration of the Woman's Building at Chicago, and fearlessly points out that “manner is 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