DIY History | Transcribe | Scholarship at Iowa | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897 | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 12

Transcribe
Translate

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 12

It is easy, comparatively speaking, for a novelist to appeal to the emotions, but it is hard to appeal to the heart. This may sound somewhat contradictory at first, nevertheless there is truth in it, The outward emotions are in real life much more the expressions of the temperament than of what we call the heart. What we call the heart in each man and woman seems to mean the whole body of innate and inherited instincts, impulse and beliefs taken together, and in that relation to one another in which they stand after they have been acted upon throughout the individual's life by the inward vicissitudes and outward circumstances to which they have been exposed. When all this is quiescent, I think we call it Self, when roused to emotional activity the Heart; but whatever we call it, it is this Self or Heart that everything which is Ethic and 
9.

Saving...

It is easy, comparatively speaking, for a novelist to appeal to the emotions, but it is hard to appeal to the heart. This may sound somewhat contradictory at first, nevertheless there is truth in it, The outward emotions are in real life much more the expressions of the temperament than of what we call the heart. What we call the heart in each man and woman seems to mean the whole body of innate and inherited instincts, impulse and beliefs taken together, and in that relation to one another in which they stand after they have been acted upon throughout the individual's life by the inward vicissitudes and outward circumstances to which they have been exposed. When all this is quiescent, I think we call it Self, when roused to emotional activity the Heart; but whatever we call it, it is this Self or Heart that everything which is Ethic and 9.