Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[66] more honorable still; we sometimes see, in a shopkeeper's advertisement, “Saleslady wanted.” No doubt the mere fashionable novelist loses terribly by the change: when all classes may wear the same dress-coat, what is left for him? But he who aims to depict passion and character gains in proportion; his material is increased tenfold. The living realities of American life ought to come in among the tiresome lay-figures of average English fiction like Steven Lawrence into the London drawing-room: tragedy must resume its grander shape, and no longer turn on the vexed question whether the daughter of this or that matchmaker shall marry the baronet. It is the characteristic of a real book that, though the scene be laid in courts, their whole machinery might be struck out and the essential interest of the plot remain the same. In Auerbach's “On the heights,” for instance, the social heights might be abolished and the moral elevation would be enough. The play of human emotion is a thing so absorbing, that the petty distinctions of cottage and castle become as nothing in its presence. Why not waive these small matters in advance, then, and go straight to the real thing?

The greatest transatlantic successes which American novelists have yet attained — those won by Cooper and Mrs. Stowe--have come through a daring Americanism of subject, which introduced in each case a new figure to the European world,--first the Indian, then the negro. Whatever the merit of the work, it was plainly the theme which conquered. Such successes are not easily to be repeated, for they were based on temporary situations, never to recur. But they prepare the way for higher triumphs to be won by a profounder treatment,the introduction into literature, not of new tribes alone,