old. It is peculiarly suited to a curious, learned, and polished race of men. In order that it may prosper it demands more cultivation "than all other literary forms."
So, once upon a time, spake Anatole France; and if that curious, learned, and polished Frenchman spake accurately it is scarcely surprising that literary criticism in the United States, if not a lost art, is one which only tentatively has been found. For American traditions are young, American society is but superficially civilized, and American memories are rich principally in terms of Wall Street and the Stock Exchange. It is true that we have produced such men as Whitman, Poe, and Emerson. It is true, also, that we have bred Abraham Lincoln and Samuel Clemens—one the author of an immortal prose-poem, the other the author of Huckleberry Finn. It is likewise true that we are far from hostile to the published dreams of an ancient world: we glibly read Plato and Nietzsche and Shakespeare and Shaw and Shelley; and, at least when our bugles are mute and our flags are furled in peace, we listen as hungrily to Beethoven and Wagner as we do to Bizet and Sir Edward Elgar. We are, in fact, taken by and large, most generous patrons of the arts; for we build museums, erect libraries, construct theatres, endow orchestras, and generally support the aesthetic edifices with a hand seldom closed in avarice and often opened wide in opulence. We let few chances slip of dropping several million dollars in the hat of a passing band of skomorokhi, and we count that day lost whose low-descending sun views from our pocket-books no aesthetic benefaction done.
But one fact remains: our art is almost entirely imported. Our dreams are not dreamed, but bought. Our museums, libraries, theatres, orchestras, and aesthetic edifices generally, are erected by our own hands—and then filled with the treasures of other men. As yet the United States Senate has produced for us neither a Burke nor a Macaulay; St. Patrick’s Cathedral has given us neither a Rubens nor a Michelangelo; our slums breed no Balzacs or Zolas; and our aristocracy has failed to-furnish us with a single Chopin, Liszt, or Tchaikowsky. At times, we may have seemed to be, artistically, a precociously fecund race. But if we have given this impression we have done so, with very few exceptions, by merely playing foster-mother to the arts. We have seldom conceived beauty or
