nation or an individual to
have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten,
every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience
known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a
greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual
to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration,
with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that
individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching
culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with
something less of the aesthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or
disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman
who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the
university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the
intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end
of the ten years of successive _furores_ be the same intellectual
condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has
spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is
probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of
information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards
of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth
remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has
declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is
conspicuously more culture.

When the Englishman hears the American, and especially the American
woman, slip so glibly from Rodin to Rameses, from Kant to kakemonos, he
dubs her superficial. Perhaps she is, considering only the actual
knowledge possessed compared with the potentiality of knowledge on any
one of the topics. There is a story which has been fitted to many
persons and many occasions, but which thirty years ago was told of Mr.
Gladstone, though for all I know it may go back to generations before he
was born. Mr. Gladstone, so the story ran, was present at a dinner where
among the guests was a distinguished Japanese; and, as not seldom
happened, Mr. Gladstone monopolised the conversation, talking with
fluency and seeming omniscience on a vast range of subjects, among which
Japan came in for its share of attention. The distinguished stranger was
asked later for his opinion of the English statesman. "A wonderful man,"
he said, "a truly wonderful man! He seems to know al