it has won the approval of their own critics on
its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of
their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a
well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American
public will be so much preoccupied with its own literary output--before
that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs--that it will
become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as
Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of
American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the
increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than
in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers.

It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American
literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in
various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know
what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual
workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist--still
less has the general public--formed any adequate conception of the great
mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality.
Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or
American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that
there were more competent historians writing--more scientific
investigators searching into the mysteries--in America than in England
or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men
of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to
look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and
original work.

The English ignorance of American literature extends even more markedly
to other departments of productive art.[159:1] The ordinary educated and
art-loving Englishman would be sore put to it to name any single
American painter or draughtsman, living or dead, except Mr. C. D.
Gibson. Whistler and Sargent, of course, are not counted as Americans.
There is not a single American sculptor whose name is known to one in a
hundred of, again I say, educated and art-loving Englishmen, though I
take it to be indisputable that the United States has produced more
sculptors of individual genius in the last half-century than Great
Britain. American architecture conveys to the educated and art-loving
Englishman no other idea than that of twenty-storey