h-writing of
newspapers and magazines, because they have not the wit to learn that
genuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine popular demand.

Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that they should not
see and take pride in the spectacular historical facts which prove their
country to be less negligible in art than they would assert. I do not
mean the existence in America of huge and glorious collections of
European masters. I have visited some of these collections, and have
taken keen pleasure therein. But I perceive in them no national
significance--no more national significance than I perceive in the
endowment of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under foreign
conductors, or in the fashionable crowding of classical concerts.
Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy experience to spend hours in a
private palace crammed with artistic loveliness that was apparently
beloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing the
slightest interest in modern American art. No, as a working artist
myself, I was more impressed and reassured by such a sight as the Innes
room at the colossal Art Institute of Chicago than by all the
collections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as a
very distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti would naturally
condescend to the Innes room at Chicago's institute, as to the
long-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school of
Chicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago. But the
dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness in
forgetting that their poor, inartistic Philistine country did provide,
_inter alia_, the great writer who has influenced French imaginative
writers more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron--Edgar
Allan Poe; did produce one of the world's supreme poets--Whitman; did
produce the greatest pure humorist of modern times; did produce the
miraculous Henry James; did produce Stanford White and the incomparable
McKim; and did produce the only two Anglo-Saxon personalities who in
graphic art have been able to impose themselves on modern
Europe--Whistler and John Sargent.

* * * * *

In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many American painters in
Paris that I was particularly anxious to see what American painting was
like at home. My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudged
through enormous exhibitions, and t