s in everything else, we must "worship our dead"; and the
attempt to substitute a vague idealised cosmopolitanism for the
living passionate localised traditions that spring like trees and
flowers out of a particular soil, out of a soil made dear to us by the
ashes of our fathers and consecrated by a thousand pious usages, is
an attempt that can result in no great magical works.

Walt Whitman, for all his celebrations of the huge "ensemble" of the
world, remains and must always remain profoundly and entirely
American.

When Romain Rolland, the author of "Jean Christophe,"--the book
of all books most penetrated by the spirit of race distinctions--appalled
by the atrocity of the war, calls upon us to substitute the
Ideal of Humanity for the ideas of the various tribes of men, he is
really (in re-action from the dreadful scenes around him) renouncing
those flashes of prophetic insight which gave him such living
visions of the diverse souls of the great races. Romain Rolland may
speak rhetorically of the "Ideal of Humanity" to be realised in art
and letters. The thing is a word, a name, a phrase, an illusion. What
we actually have are individuals--individual artists, individual
races--each with its own beautiful and tragical fatality.

And what is true of races is true of persons both in life and in
criticism. All that is really interesting in us springs in the first place
from the traditions of the race to which we belong, springs from the
soil that gave us birth and from our sacred dead and the usages and
customs and habits which bind us to the past; and in the second
place from what is uniquely and peculiarly personal to ourselves,
belonging to our intrinsic and integral character and refusing to be
swamped by any vague cult of "humanity in general."

To talk of literature becoming universal and planetary, becoming a
logical synthesis of the traditions of races and the visions of
individuals, is to talk of something that in its inherent nature is
contrary to the fundamental spirit of art. It implies a confusion
between the spheres of art and philosophy. The function of
philosophy is to synthesise and unite. The function of art is to
differentiate and distinguish. Philosophy and ethics are perfectly
justified in concerning themselves with a "regenerated humanity" in
which race-instincts and race-traditions are blotted out. Let them
produce such a humanity if they can! But while there are any artists
left in the world,