John Seely Hart

“ Her large and sympathetic heart is attuned to such harmony with humanity, or rather she so expresses this beautiful harmony of her own soul with God, with nature, and with humanity, that the human heart that has suffered or enjoyed, vibrates and responds like a harp-string to the master-hand. ”

“ Love, that most divine of all our sentiments, the bloom and perfume of the tree of Life, the sun that lights and gladdens the night of existence, the one presents to us as burning with all the voluptuous ardour of the senses, the other, as glowing with the sacred fire of the impassioned soul. ”

“ As to Miss Bremer’s future, we do not consider her course by any means as ended. We know that in her works, as in her life, she aspires to that ascending metamorphosis, without which the normal development of life is not accomplished. We know that she aspires to put the romance of individual life in closer connexion with the great romance of humanity, and that her present visit to the New World is connected with this view. ”

“ Mere criticism is the judgment of the intellect alone; but the highest and truest judgment is that where the heart also has a voice, and an object seen through the one or the other medium, intellect or heart, is like those transparencies which in one light represent the dreary desolation of a winter landscape, and in the other, all the luxuriance and beauty of summer. ”

“ We know that “the light of her life’s day, like that of the morning, will be an ascending one, and that whether its beam shine through mist or through clear air, that the day will increase—the life will brighten.” ”

“ The institution of marriage, the root from which society springs, the groundwork upon which it stands, George Sand, with all the force of her genius and eloquence, seeks to degrade and to destroy; while Fredrika Bremer would ennoble, not the institution of marriage only, but she would exalt it into that deeper and holier spiritual union, of which the actual marriage is but the symbol. ”

“ But those who have been elevated by their ennobling spirit, who have drunk at their clear, cool fountains, and felt their strengthening and life-giving influence, who have dwelt with her lovely characters in their happy homes, and participated in their joys and sorrows, would find it as impossible to turn upon them the cold eye of the critic, as to analyze the sunshine and the landscape that delight the eye, or to judge the features of a beloved friend by the strictest rules of beauty or of art. ”

“ If, then, fiction in its effects is to be regarded as possessing equal power with history, it becomes a more important feature, not only in literature, but in morals, and should occupy a higher place than has been assigned to it, and those who people the world with these airy yet actual beings, and present to us in them ideals to contem plate and to imitate, should be regarded as the benefactors of men. ”

“ Since the one gives but the outward and apparent life, while the other enters the secret recesses of the heart, unveils the hidden springs of motive and of action, and lays open to our view, what no history and no confessions ever do, the secret workings of the human soul, that most mysterious and complicated of all the works of God. ”

“ The mischief of such works is, that they lower the standard of human excellence, they unsettle our faith in human nature, and they engender a sceptical and contemptuous spirit, that as fatally extinguishes the higher virtues and aspirations, as fire-damp extinguishes the miner’s lamp. Goethe has somewhere said that if we would make men better, we must treat them as if they were better than they are ”

“ The home affections that she so vividly portrays, though originating in the domestic circle, radiate from that centre until they encompass all that live and suffer, genial as the sun, and embracing as the atmosphere; and, like the sun and air in the outward world, they call forth the verdure and bloom of the inner life in all those whom they thus enfold. ”

“ Besides the French school of romance writers, there is another, to which the works of Miss Bremer offer an equally salutary antidote. We refer to those who, with contempt in their hearts, and bitterness and sarcasm on their lips, go through the world like Mephistopheles, only to sneer at the weaknesses of humanity, to magnify its errors, and to question or despise its virtues, and who, like certain birds of prey, seem to be attracted only by that which is in its nature offensive. ”

“ It may be objected that we assign too great an influence, too prominent a position, to these creations of the imagination, presented to us on the pages of fiction. But fiction, in its action on the mind, has all the effect of history ”

“ He who writes the songs and romances of a people may well leave to others to make their laws. Not, indeed, those lighter romances, intended only to interest or amuse the fancy, but those which embody some deep sentiment, or some vital principle of society or of religion. ”

“ As an instance of the extent of this influence of fiction, we may refer to the writings of that woman, who, possessing the most extraordinary combination of masculine and feminine qualities under the name of George Sand, for the last few years has taken the first rank among the writers of her native language, and from that eminence has exercised such incalculable influence, not only over her own but all other countries. ”

“ The characters Miss Bremer has drawn, while they are free from this charge, do not on the other hand fall into the opposite error of being too favourably depicted. They represent human nature as it often is, as it is always capable of being, refined, elevated, and noble. ”

“ Some one has truly said, that “where nothing great is to be done, the existence of great men is impossible.” Goodness is only one form of greatness, and in opposing the influence of the materializing and disorganizing school of French romances, there was a great good to be attained; and by Miss Bremer, and the class of writers of which she stands at the head, it has been in a measure accomplished ”

“ It seems to be a law of Providence, that good and evil should ever co-exist, both in the outer and inner world; that wherever poisons abound, the antidotes are also to be found; and the contemporaneous appearance of the two leading minds we have been contrasting, is an instance of the verification of this law in the intellectual or moral world. ”

“ Truths and principles thus inculcated or diffused, have their most direct influence upon the youthful mind, and, like the impressions made upon the rock in its transition state, they harden and remain. ”