[Vwoolf] "Mrs. Amyot's last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon somebody"

[Stuart N. Clarke]

>From Edith Wharton’s “The Pelican” (1898):

‘Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the "influence" of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on the English drama; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influenced should be absolutely unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other's works. A pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while somebody else had given a "course" on the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.”


Stuart
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