Note 159:1 — Chapter VI

It is merely pathetic to find such a paper as the London Academy at this late day summing up the American æsthetic impulse as follows: "Their culture is now a borrowed thing animated by no life of its own. Their art is become a reflection of French art, their literature a reflection of English literature, their learning a reflection of German learning. A velleity of taste in their women of the richer class seems to be all that maintains in their country the semblance of a high, serious, and disinterested passion for the things of the mind."

It would be interesting to learn from the Academy what school of English writers it is that the American humourists "reflect," who among English novelists are the models for the present school of Western fiction, where in English historiography is to be found the prototype of the great histories of their country, collaborated or otherwise, which the Americans are now producing, which journals published in England are responsible for American newspapers, what English magazine is so happy as to be the father of the Century, Harper's, or Scribner's. The truth is that the writer in the Academy, like most Englishmen, knows nothing of American literature as a whole, or he would know that, whether good or bad, the one quality which it surely possesses is that it is individual and peculiar to the people. The Academy, it is only fair to say, has recently changed hands and I am not sure that under its present direction it would make the same mistake.