"What was taking place was a perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to repudiate, so far as the past was a positive rather than a negative quantity. There had been plenty in it, assuredly, of the negative, and that was but a shabbiness to disown or a deception to expose; yet there had been an old conscious commemorated life too, and it was this that had become the victim of supersession. The pathos, so to call it, of the impression was somehow that it didn't, the earlier, simpler condition, still resist or protest, or at all expressively flush through; it was consenting to become a past with all the fine candour with which it had tried to affirm itself, in its day, as a present — and very much, for that matter, as with a due ironic forecast of the fate in store for the hungry, triumphant actual."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ch. I: New England, pt. VI (p. 53)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_American_Scene
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"The huge new houses, up and down, looked over their smart, short lawns as with a certain familiar prominence in their…"
"The ample villas, in their full dress, planted each on its little square of brightly-green carpet, and as with their …"
"That, at any rate, would seem in each instance the most direct message of the life displayed to the observer, on the …"
"Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses sa…"
"The reflecting surfaces, of the ironic, of the epic order, suspended in the New York atmosphere, have yet to show sym…"
"The newness of New York — unlike even that of Boston, I seemed to discern — had this mark of its very own, that it af…"
"The social question quite fills the air, in New York, for any spectator whose impressions at all follow themselves up…"
"These adventures of the critical spirit were such mere mild walks and talks as I almost blush to offer, on this reduc…"
"It had been intimated to me that one of these scenes of our climax had entered the sophisticated phase, that of sacri…"
"He is confronted too often, to his sense, with the question of what may be "borne"; but what does he see about him if…"