(Excerpt from The American Scholar of the Twentieth Centur...)
Excerpt from The American Scholar of the Twentieth Century: As Address Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of the Northwestern University Henrik Ibsen, and his way of putting the matter is this: Men still call for special revolutions, for revolutions in politics, in externals. But all that sort of thing is trumpery. It is the human soul that must revolt. If we give this truth its rightful meaning, not misinterpreting it as an excuse for quietism, nor ourselves withdrawing from the arena under its shelter, we shall find it to be the very essence of every philosophy of reform, the prerequisite of every effective effort for the regeneration of our social life. At the close of the summer of 1787, the Fathers of the Republic were completing their arduous task of shaping that instrument of government which we call the Constitution of the United States, and which we hold in veneration as the fundamental law of a free com monwealth based upon the principle of self-government. Thus did our ancestors give lasting political effect to the ideas of the Declara tion of Independence. Exactly half a century later, on the closing day of the summer of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then thirty four years of age, addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College in words that burned themselves upon the minds of his hearers, and marked an epoch in the history of American thought. His theme was The American Scholar, and his utterance has, by common con sent, come to be known as our intellectual Declaration of Independence. The young men who heard this address, says Dr. Holmes, Went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, 'thus saith the Lord From the very first paragraph, the address was a clarion call to the onset in our warfare of the spirit, a prophetic paean sublimely confident of the intellectual victories that our future must have in store. Perhaps the time is already come, said the young speaker, when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, shall one day be the pole star for a thousand years? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(Excerpt from A Quarter-Century of English Literature: 188...)
Excerpt from A Quarter-Century of English Literature: 1880-1905 Let us look at these facts in another light, at the same time making some sort of rude effort to classify them. At the close of 1880, the six great poets who had long made illustrious the Victorian age of English song were all living and all vocal. Within sixteen years, five of the six had passed away, leaving Mr. Swinburne the sole surviving representative of that great period. Less than this number of years had sufficed to extinguish the entire con stellation of our greater American poets, not one of their fellowship being left us tokeep the torch alight. With George Eliot there died the last of the great English novelists, for it could not be soberly urged that she has found a true successor. Two novelists of unquestionably distinguished achievement - Mr. Thomas Hardy and Sir George Meredith - still live to remind us of the great age of English fiction, but their following is an esoteric cult in com parison with the wide acclaim accorded to Dickens and Thackeray. The twentieth century, moreover, finds us as bereft of prophets as of novelists and poets. The wisest of our time must seem but minor prophets when we contrast their utterances with the burning eloquence of Carlyle and Ruskin, or even with the persuasive accents of Arnold and Newman. Truly, the living word as it comes to the ears of our youth of to-day is but a feeble and ineffectual stimulus to noble thought and action in comparison with the call that rang in the ears of the rising generation a quarter of a century ago. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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William Morton Payne was born on February 14, 1858 in Newburyport, Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Henry Morton and Emma Merrill (Tilton) Payne, and the descendant of William Payne, who emigrated from England in 1635 and settled at Watertown. In 1868 his family removed to Chicago, where the remainder of his life was passed.
William Morton Payne was educated in the public schools of Newburyport and Chicago. Financial reverses of his family made it impossible for him to proceed to Harvard, as had been designed. He received an honorary LL. D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1903.
William Morton Payne found employment in the Chicago Public Library (1874 - 1876), and then as a teacher of literature in the high schools of Chicago (1876 - 1919). At the same time, not accepting misfortune supinely, he undertook a course of self-education which involved severe discipline. And his efforts were eminently successful. He became an accomplished linguist, speaking Norwegian, German, and Italian fluently, and French so perfectly that he deceived Frenchmen as to his origin, and attaining besides a competent knowledge of Swedish, Danish, and Spanish. In later years he traveled repeatedly in Europe.
By 1883 William Morton Payne was entering upon his career as a critic and man of letters, and had established a connection with the Chicago Dial. He presently became literary editor of the Chicago Daily News (1884 - 1888), and then of the Chicago Evening Journal (1888 - 92), and thereafter acted as associate editor of the Dial until 1915. In addition, he contributed frequently to periodicals, wrote editorials for the Chicago Journal (1917 - 1918), edited English in American Universities (1895), American Literary Criticism (1904), and two volumes of selections from Swinburne (Selected Poems, 1905, Mary Stuart, 1906), and wrote sixteen essays and made many translations in prose and verse for C. D. Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature. His principal translations, however, were careful and felicitous renderings of Bjornstjerne Bjornson's dramatic trilogy, Sigurd Slembe (1888), and of the same author's epic cycle, Arnljot Gelline (1917).
His remarkable activity did not render Payne a drudge. Inevitably the usefulness of much of his journalistic work was exhausted when the immediate occasion for it had passed; but, taken together, this work represents a consistent force through many years in support of the humanities, in support of liberal culture based upon the classical tradition of literature. Payne's criticism was judicial, was concerned more with ideas than with literary form, and was well calculated to maintain tried standards of taste while communicating the significant influences, old and new, which were powerful in the nineteenth century. Though he was less forceful and less individual than Matthew Arnold, he still aimed at the ends which his older English contemporary set before himself; and in so doing he attained a position of more than local influence. For it was he, more than anybody else, who made the Dial what it was in its best days.
Ninety of Payne's essays for the Dial were reprinted in three small volumes, Little Leaders (1895), Editorial Echoes (1902), and Various Views (1902), which exhibit his critical talent more happily than his two larger, more formal volumes of essays, The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1907) and Leading American Essayists (1910). The former volume was based upon a course of lectures which Payne delivered at the Universities of Wisconsin (1900), Kansas (1904), and Chicago (1904). His work was too quietly performed to gain for him the recognition he deserved in his own day.
At his death after a short illness on July 11, 1919, William Morton Payne was buried from the home of his lifelong friend, Professor Paul Shorey.
(Excerpt from The American Scholar of the Twentieth Centur...)
(Excerpt from A Quarter-Century of English Literature: 188...)
William Morton Payne was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
William Morton Payne was never married.
