sentimentality is the destroying poison of
art.) Now the most exacerbating experience that fell to me in
America--and it fell more than once--was to hear in discreetly lighted
and luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various mural proofs of trained taste,
and usually from the lips of an elegantly Europeanized American woman
with a sad, agreeable smile: "There is no art in the United States.... I
feel like an exile." A number of these exiles, each believing himself or
herself to be a solitary lamp in the awful darkness, are dotted up and
down the great cities, and it is a curious fact that they bitterly
despise one another. In so doing they are not very wrong. For, in the
first place, these people, like nearly all dilettanti of art, are
extremely unreliable judges of racial characteristics. Their mentality
is allied to that of the praisers of time past, who, having read _Tom
Jones_ and _Clarissa_, are incapable of comprehending that the immense
majority of novels produced in the eighteenth century were nevertheless
terrible rubbish. They go to a foreign land, deliberately confine their
attention to the artistic manifestations of that country, and then
exclaim in ecstasy: "What an artistic country this is! How different
from my own!" To the same class belong certain artistic visitors to the
United States who, having in their own country deliberately cut
themselves off from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visit
America, and, meeting there the average man and woman in bulk, frown
superiorly and exclaim: "This Philistine race thinks of nothing but
dollars!" They cannot see the yet quite evident truth that the rank and
file of every land is about equally inartistic. Modern Italy may in the
mass be more lyrical than America, but in either architecture or
painting Italy is simply not to be named with America.

[Illustration: MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS--UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGO]

Further, and in the second place, these people never did and never will
look in the right quarters for vital art. A really original artist
struggling under their very noses has small chance of being recognized
by them, the reason being that they are imitative, with no real opinion
of their own. They associate art with Florentine frames, matinee hats,
distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead. It would
not occur to them to search for American art in the architecture of
railway stations and the draftsmanship and sketc