Harvey O'Higgins

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”