by accident may be destroyed. The things we do
to maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might preserve
it. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong in their diagnosis of the
causes that engender or destroy it. But they are right in their sense of
its importance; and it will be an interesting result of imperial unity
if we find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the seas
rally round exactly those things in England which we expect them to
declare effete. The Rhodes scholars go to Oxford, not to Birmingham or
Liverpool. And it is Cambridge that peoples the universities of the
Empire with professors.

XI

ANTAEUS

I saw to-day some really remarkable landscapes by an American artist.
So, at least, they seem to me. They have, at any rate, a quality of
imagination which one does not expect to find in this country. "One does
not expect"--why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as undoubtedly
she is, so sterile? Artists must be born here as much as elsewhere.
American civilisation, it is true, repels men of reflection and
sensitiveness, just as it attracts men of action; so that, as far as
immigration is concerned, there is probably a selection working against
the artistic type. But, on the other hand, men of action often produce
sons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed that they do
so as much in America as elsewhere. It must be the environment that is
unfavourable. Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named
"Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to
breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see,
is there to be found a class or a clique of men, respected by others and
respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic
calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit; including
under business Politics and Law, which in this country are only
departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that
is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in
England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no
encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles,
his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only
virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become
chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professorial career; but that, it is
agreed, is adopted only by men of "no ambition." Americans b