Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

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“‘ [374] one drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.’ With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was born.” This remark, which appeared first in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called down the wrath of Matthew Arnold, who missed the point entirely in calling it “tall talk” or a species of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a physiological caution addressed to this nervous race against overworking its children in school. In reality, it was a point of the greatest importance. If Americans are to be merely duplicate Englishmen, Nature might have said, the experiment is not so very interesting, but if they are to represent a new human type, the sooner we know it, the better. No one finally did more toward recognizing this new type than did Matthew Arnold himself, when he afterwards wrote, in 1887, “Our countrymen [namely, the English], with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility” ; and again in the same essay, “The whole American nation may be called ‘intelligent,’ that is to say, ‘quick.’ ” ¹ This would seem to yield the whole point between himself and the American writer whom he had criticised,