William Roscoe Thayer

“ When quiet came again, Kossuth had recovered strength to say that his request should not be taken as a demand for a vote of confidence. “We ask your vote for the preservation of the country; and, sirs, if any breast sighs for freedom, if any desire waits for fulfilment, let that breast suffer a little longer, let it have patience until we have saved the fatherland. You have all risen to a man, and I bow before the great-heartedness of the nation, while I ask one thing more: let your energy equal your patriotism, and the gates of hell itself shall not prevail against Hungary!” ”

“ Every American, young or old, had heard them lauded so unlimitedly that he did not trouble himself to inquire whether they were facts or not; they were words, sonorous and pleasing words, which made his heart throb, and himself feel a worthier creature. And then came along a young zealot, mighty in physical vigor and moral energy, who believed that Justice and Equality were not mere abstractions, were not mere words for politicians and parsons to thrill their audiences by, but were realities, duties, which every man in a Democracy was bound to revere and to make prevail. ”

“ I do not know whether General Sir Henry Clinton was more or less of a man of honor than the other high officers in the British army at that time. We feel instinctively loath to harbor a suspicion against the honor of these officers; and yet, the truth demands us to declare that some one among them engaged in the miserable business of bribing Americans to be traitors. Where the full guilt lies, we shall never know, but the fact that so many of the trails lead back to General Clinton gives us a reason for a strong surmise. ”

“ Since the process of individualization is from lower to higher, from simple to complex, the acknowledged great men in history, or the persons who stand out from any mass, are endowed with unusual qualities, or with common qualities in an uncommon degree—an endowment which gives them more points of contact, more power, more interest, more charm. These are the men and women whom biography perpetuates. The master creations of fiction spring from the human brain; the subjects of biography are the very creations of God himself: the realities of God must forever transcend the fictions of man. ”

“ That Prussian system takes a turnip-fed peasant, and in a few months makes of him a military weapon, the length of whose stride is prescribed in centimetres—a machine which presents arms to a passing lieutenant with as much gravity and precision as if the fate of Prussia hinged on that special act. It takes the average tradesman’s son, puts him into the educational mill, and brings him out a professor,—equipped even to the spectacles,—a nonpareil of knowledge, who fastens on some subject, great or small, timely or remote, with the dispassionate persistence of a leech ”

“ Those who had courage and clear vision, who loved justice, who were patient and humble and unflagging, and who believed with an ineluctable conviction that righteousness exalteth a nation; they were the simple fishermen who in the little church at Torcello predicted the splendor and power of Venice; they were the stern pioneers of Plymouth and Boston who laid the foundations of an empire greater than that of Rome. ”

“ But the old always dies hard after it has long been the blood and mind of a creed, a class, or a party. Terrible also is the blind, remorseless sweep of a custom which may have sprung up from good soil, not less than one spawned and nurtured in iniquity. Frankenstein laboriously constructing his monster seems to personify society at its immemorial task of creating institutions; each institution as it becomes viable rends its creator.
So the Republican Party lived on its traditions, its privileges, its appetites, its arrogance, and it refused to be transmuted by its youngest members. ”

“ In no art has the process of vulgarization gone so far as in fiction. The novelist to-day dares not paint goodness or greatness; his upper limit is mediocrity; his lower is depravity, and he tends more and more to exploit the lower. An art which, pretending to mirror life, instinctively shuts out a large province of life—an art which boasts that it alone can display human personality in all its varieties and yet becomes dumb before the highest manifestations of personality—has no right to rank among the truly universal arts—painting and sculpture, the Elizabethan drama and biography. ”

“ Not less appropriate was it that the genius of Tintoret and of Venetian art should culminate in the representation of Paradise. Of all commonwealths, Venice had enjoyed the longest prosperity; of all peoples, hers had been the most sensitive to the joy of life. Even at the end of the sixteenth century, when her power abroad had been curtailed, and when luxury at home was slowly enervating the integrity of her citizens, she was still outwardly imposing, magnificent. No pope had ever succeeded, either by guile or by force, in ravishing her independence. ”

“ I doubt whether he deluded himself into supposing that the American people would elect so conspicuous a representative of the Big Interests as he was, to be President, but he knew that the fortunes of candidates in political conventions are uncertain, and that if he had a considerable body of delegates to swing from one man to another, he might, if his choice won, become the power behind the new throne as he had been behind McKinley's. And if we could suspect him of humor he may have enjoyed fun to a mild degree in keeping the irrepressible Roosevelt in a state of suspense. ”

“ Though they knew it not, the European settlers in North America were approaching a life-and-death catastrophe. From the days when the English and the French first settled on the continent, Fate ordained for them an irrepressible conflict. Should France prevail? Should England prevail? With the growth of their colonies, both the English and the French felt their rivalry sharpened. Although distances often very broad kept them apart in space, yet both nations were ready to prove the terrible truth that when two men, or two tribes, wish to fight each other, they will find out a way. ”

“ Evidently, great fiction, whether it be in the form of drama, tragedy, or novel, serves the same purpose of taking us out of ourselves, by teaching us how imaginary persons plan and act, undergo joy or pain, conquer or fall. I do not wish to belittle any fiction which can justify itself by substantial charm or symbolical import; and as I shall discuss later some of the relations between fiction and biography, it will suffice to remark now that the highest praise that can be bestowed on the creations of fiction is that they are true to life. ”

“ With the hauling down of the red-white-and-green flag from the citadel of Comorn vanished the last symbol of that revolution which, bursting forth at Palermo in January, 1848, had spread through Europe, shaking the thrones of monarchs, and kindling in down-trodden people the belief that a new epoch, a Golden Age of Liberty, had come. Hopes as splendid as men ever cherished had now been shattered, and in their stead only the bitterest memories remained ”

“ In the autumn of 1793 Jefferson insisted upon resigning as Secretary of State. Washington used all his persuasiveness to dissuade him, but in vain. Jefferson saw the matter in its true light, and insisted. Perhaps it at last occurred to him, as it must occur to every dispassionate critic, that he could not go on forever acting as an important member of an administration which pursued a policy diametrically opposed to his own. After all, even the most adroit politicians must sometimes sacrifice an offering to candor, not to say honesty. ”