Harvey O'Higgins

“ Life had resumed its mask of civilization, its conventional indifference, its public disavowal even of his common humanity.
He turned into the cross street, came to the side door of the hotel, hesitated at the sight of her feather tickler hanging broken over the curbstone—its feathers waving feebly in the wind—and then passed on, with the blank face of a bankrupt who sees his last penny still lying where he had flung it in the mud. ”

“ The quick pace and the girl's high spirits had broken the last restraint of Fasken's awkwardness. He began to talk in a gay voice, with all the freedom that comes of anonymity.
He told her, first, of a memory that had been recalled to him by his meeting with her. As a boy, he and his school companions used to go to the railroad-station in the summer evenings, to see the New-York express "go through" his native town, to watch the travelers at the car-windows, and smile flirtatiously at the girls. ”

“ One of the consequences in war-time is likely to be a charge of treason. What you say or what you print may be construed as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." You may do it innocently, you may do it purposely. To punish you, after you have given the enemy aid, does not further the purposes of war, and most of the European countries have established censorships of the press, the mail, and the telegraph to prevent the enemy from getting aid or comfort either from the innocent or the guilty. ”

“ When the young hoodlums had shoved by and the pressure of the crowd had eased again, she was claimed by a man in an automobile-cap and a woman, who was apparently either French or Jewish. Fasken released her, still holding her hand. The current took her. She drifted away from him, smiling back over her shoulder until another feather tickler was thrust into his face and he lost sight of her.
And now he found himself as intoxicated as were all around him with the spirit of carnival. He wanted to follow the girl, to make love to her; to kiss her. ”

“ It is equally notorious that the judgments of academic criticism have been almost invariably wrong when the judgment was delivered on its contemporary art.
Such considerations need not deceive us into believing that what is popular in American art is therefore good. But they may console us for much of the foreign condemnation of what is popular. As foreign art, as British art particularly, is an entertainment for the leisure classes, so foreign criticism, and particularly British criticism, forms its judgments according to the prejudices of the leisure classes. ”

“ In the freest of countries, in the most peaceful of times, freedom of speech and freedom of the press were never more than the limited freedom to say what you pleased and print what you pleased and take the consequences. ”

“ He received a blow on the top of his hat with a bladder; they were showered with confetti, like a bride and groom. A man reached across him to brush her face with a tickler. Fasken snatched at the stick, got it away from its owner with a sudden turn of the wrist, and gave it to her. She could not make herself heard above the noise, but she thanked him with a pressure on his arm and with an intimate, bright smile when he looked down at her. ”

“ In America, with a democratic ideal and a wholly industrial basis for society, such prejudices are not yet very strong. Our leisure class is not large enough to impose them on us, although it has imported them in some degree for its own edification. We have little of the feeling that a gentleman must be a gentleman of leisure or engage only in pursuits that are not mercenary. We are more inclined to consider idleness a disgrace and to despise an occupation that is merely ornamental. ”

“ Fasken remained a long time, silent, standing in the shadow, with her tickler in his hand. Suddenly, he stepped into the light, raised the stick of feathers above his head—in a convulsive despair of himself and his lot in life—flung it on the sidewalk before him, and ground it into the stones with a murderous heel. ”

“ The same tradition of aristocratic expression in literature has animated academic criticism at all times. American literature will have to endure its condemnation. If we produce a literature that bears the same relation to American life that American plumbing does, for example, we shall be doing a sane thing, but a thing that will surely be anathematized by all the high priests of art. And they will anathematize it, although literature has to be vital to be anything at all ”

“ And then the girl in the white veil, with whom he had had his first encounter, reappeared on the sidewalk, returning toward Madison Square; and with the same audacious demureness as before she whisked her stick of feathers into the faces of the five conspirators on the lowest step. Immediately they pounced upon her like a band of Indians. Fasken shouldered down into the scrimmage to help her. She was shot into his arms, her mouth open, her hands limp, helpless with laughter; and he was carried up the steps with her and pinned against the hotel door.
"Are you hurt? Are you hurt?" ”

“ Thus poetry, the highest form of literary art traditionally, is humorously regarded by our people, and the poet is a common butt in our theater and our press. The painter, unless he is a portrait-painter, is not highly considered, but the illustrator is popular and much admired. ”

“ So the younger son of an English governing family, still, like an Iroquois brave, is unable to seek a career outside of the army, politics, or the church, although amateur sport now carries some of the honors of tribal hunting, and learning, which used to be a part of priestcraft, is as respectable as holy orders. As a further extension of these caste prejudices, a gentleman is a man who does not work for his living, and an occupation is degraded that is pursued for gain. ”

“ Then a young woman, with a white automobile-veil thrown over her hat and loosely knotted under her chin, put her feather tickler in his eyes, and he caught at it and grasped her hand. She was crushed against him by the clogging of the opposing currents of movement on the sidewalk, and she laughed up at him, her cheeks flushed pink against the white chiffon. ”

“ In fact, although academic criticism still rates our arts in the order of comparative honor that they hold abroad, our popular approval seems to rate them according to their utility and their earning power. ”

“ We have preserved our peace-time right to say what we please and take the consequences. We have enlarged the official power to deny the use of the mails to publications that give aid and comfort to the enemy ”

“ The books that live in all libraries are the books that were democratically vital to the readers of their time. It is notorious that no dramatic art that was unsuccessful with its own audience has ever found an audience in posterity. ”

“ Stephens seems to repeat the prejudice when he says "the secret of good writing is to be found in the words used by the writer and the way he uses these words; but before any American writer I know of can escape from mediocrity he or she must jettison their present vocabularies and provide themselves with new ones." ”

“ The past is full of proof that the popular art of one generation is the classical art of the next, and the verdict of the jury, in the lowest court of public approval, has a way of being unexpectedly sustained on appeal to the supreme critical tribunals of posterity. ”

“ He had been reminded of the ants he used to watch as a boy, in the fields at home, hurrying past one another, scrambling over one another, without stopping for a moment to assist or direct, or in any way recognize one another as members of a community engaged in a common task. ”

“ He even made as if to turn back, but the impatience of those whose progress he opposed swept him away, and he went on, bewildered by his own agitation, his hands full of feathers that he had torn from a stick, catching at the girls who attacked him, and determined that if another were forced into his arms he would not let her go so easily. ”

“ IT is one of the sardonic conclusions of modern research that an aristocracy's prejudices against certain vocations and means of livelihood are prejudices that have come down from the early days of savagery, when manual labor and industrial occupations were left to women and slaves, and the free males of the tribe were properly engaged only in war and hunting, government and priestcraft. ”

“ These prejudices are apt to rule against anything in art that is not classic, traditional, stylish, and leisurely in form and high bred, philosophical, and aristocratic in matter. Ruskin was such a critic when he described George Eliot's "Middlemarch" as "the sweepings of a Pentonville bus." James Stephens is such a critic when he declares that we cannot have a literature in America because "without a social order there can be no literature ”

“ When a young man passed a young woman, he tickled her chin with a bunch of feathers fastened to a small stick; and she replied by doing the same to him, by throwing in his face a handful of chopped paper, or by catching the feathers of his "tickler" and struggling to take it from him. ”

“ The sculptor shares in the honors of the architect if he makes expensive public monuments. The musician and the singer have been recently established in general regard by grand-opera salaries and fabulous concert fees. The playwright has to make his fortune to be noted. The actor has to be a star or nothing. ”