artistic sense might stand before a poster and
find himself entirely unable to comprehend it, because the thing
portrayed might be something altogether outside his experience. His
failure would be no indictment either of his perceptivity or of the
merit of the work of art.

It is a pity that Americans as a rule do not consider this, for I know
few things that would so much increase American respect for Englishmen
in the mass as the discovery that the latter were not the ponderous
persons they supposed, but even keener-witted than themselves. At the
time of the Venezuelan incident, it is probable that more than all the
laborious protests of good men on both sides of the ocean, more than all
the petitions and the interchange of assurances of good-will between
societies in either country, the thing that did most to allay American
resentment and bring the American people to its senses was that
delightful message sent (was it not?) by the London Stock Exchange to
their _confreres_ in New York, begging the latter to see that when the
British fleet arrived in New York harbour there should be no crowding by
excursion steamers. Like Mr. Anstey's dear German professor, who had
once laboriously constructed a joke and purposed, when he had ample
leisure, to go about to aedificate a second, will Americans please
believe that Englishmen too, if given time, can certainly make others?

And need I say again that in each of the things that I have said,
whether on the subject of American chivalry, American energy, or
American humour, I am not decrying the American's qualities but only
striving to increase his respect for Englishmen?

* * * * *

Now let us look at the other side of the picture. Just as undue
flattery awoke in the American people an exaggerated notion of their
chivalry and their sense of humour, so the reiteration of savage and
contemptuous criticism made them depreciate their general literary
ability. It goes farther back than the "Who ever reads an American
book?" Three quarters of a century earlier the _Edinburgh Review_ (I am
indebted for the quotation to Mr. Sparks) asked: "Why should Americans
write books when a six-weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue
our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads? Prairies,
steamboats, gristmills are their natural objects for centuries to come."

Franklin's _Autobiography_ and Thoreau's _Walden_ are only just, within
the last few