We have heard that a society capable of satisfying the necessities of artists exists abroad. It seems so to us indeed; in Paris, for example, where an American is outside the quarrels of groups and individuals, it seems to him that painters and poets and musicians and critics can meet, without forming rigid groups, and interchange ideas—and even half-ideas.
We do not see such a free interchange in America. In New York one must be "grouped" or not exist. And the intellectual poverty, the thinness, of some of the artists whose natural gifts are great is due in part to this. Mr Van Wyck Brooks has traced in his essays on James a few steps in the passage of a genius who needed an intellectual web more varied, more cunningly and more lovingly wrought than our own. One can anticipate the conclusion that flight from America is inadvisable; for many it is impossible; and the deep damnation which seems to threaten Europe is not reassuring for its own future, not to speak of its capacity to offer anything to a stranger. We must try once more at home for this association of creative minds, we must find for ourselves the means and the method to bring them into fructifying contact.
