have a hunger
for positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing to
one another their travels, their business transactions, their
experiences in trains, in hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feel
you have no alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An American,
broadly speaking, never detaches himself from experience. His mind is
embedded in it; it moves wedged in fact. His only escape is into humour;
and even his humour is but a formula of exaggeration. It implies no
imagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not illuminate a
subject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon every topic the same
grotesque mould. That is why it does not really much amuse the English.
For the English are accustomed to Shakespeare, and to the London cabby.

This may serve to indicate what I mean by lack of culture. I admit, of
course, that neither are the English cultured. But they have culture
among them. They do not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught I
know, value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do not. I
have visited many of their colleges and universities, and everywhere,
except perhaps at Harvard--unless my impressions are very much at
fault--I have found the same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known as
the "Yale spirit," and it is very like that of an English Public School.
It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, all-embracing. It
turns out the whole university to sing rhythmic songs and shout rhythmic
cries at football matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation.
It exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the solitary
person, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. This atmosphere, of
course, exists in English universities. It is imported there from the
Public Schools. But it is not all-pervading. Individuals and cliques
escape. And it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, no
one escapes, or they are too few to count. I know Americans of culture,
know and love them; but I feel them to be lost in the sea of
philistinism. They cannot draw together, as in England, and leaven the
lump. The lump is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour to
them; and all the more loss to America.

Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn about the proper
policy to be pursued at our universities, is a question I will not here
discuss. Culture, I think, is one of those precious things that are
achieved by accident, and