e palpable and material things is equally true of
the intangible and intellectual.

Englishmen have long been familiar with one aspect of this fact, in the
honours which America has in the past been ready to shower on any
visiting Englishman of distinction: in the extraordinary number of
dollars that she has been willing to pay to hear him lecture. Of this
particular commodity--the lecturing Englishman--the people has been
fairly sated; but because Americans are no longer eager to lionise any
English author or artist with some measure of a London reputation, it
does not by any means imply that they are not still seeking for, and
grappling, the best in art and letters wherever they can find it. They
only doubt whether the Englishman who comes to lecture is, after all,
the best.

A Frenchman has pronounced American society to be the wittiest in the
world. A German has said that more people read Dante in Boston than in
Berlin. I take it that many more read Shakespeare in the United States
than in Great Britain--and they certainly try harder to understand him.
Nor need it be denied that they have to try harder. Without any
knowledge of actual sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of
the works of any continental European author, of anything like a
first-class reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the
number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen,
Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche--I give the names at
random as they come--of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a
"cult" in the United States than in England--a far larger proportion of
the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in
each. Rodin's works--his name at least and photographs of his
masterpieces--are familiar to tens of thousands of Americans belonging
to classes which in England never heard of him. Helleu's drawings were
almost a commonplace of American illustrated literature six years before
one educated Englishman in a hundred knew his name. Zoern's etchings are
almost as well known in the United States as Whistler's. Englishmen
remain curiously engrossed in English things.

It may be a very disputable judgment to say that the most nearly
Shakespearian literary production of modern times--at least of those
which have gained any measure of fame--is M. Rostand's _Cyrano de
Bergerac_. Immediately on its publication it was greeted in America with
hardly less enthusiasm than in