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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
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