Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[15] and the garlic flavors of Kipling, there was in America a student of life, who painted with the skill that Scott revered in Miss Austen, but not on the two inches of ivory that Miss Austen chose. He painted on a canvas large enough for the tragedies of New York, large enough for the future of America. Rich and luminous as George Eliot, he had the sense of form and symmetry which she had not; graphic in his characterization as Hardy, he did not stop, like Hardy, with a single circle of villagers. What the future critic will say, we too should be ready to perceive. If England finds him tiresome, so much the worse for England; if England prefers dime novels and cut-and-thrust Christmas melodramas, and finds in what Howells writes only ‘transatlantic kickshaws’ because he paints character and life, we must say, as our fathers did, ‘Farewell, dear England,’ and seek what is our own. Emerson set free our poetry, our prose; Howell is setting free our fiction; he himself is as yet only half out of the chrysalis, but the wings are there.

It must always be remembered that in literature, alone of all arts, place is of secondary importance,