tic, while the Americans are
not.

The reason lies in the fact that the Chinese are homogeneous, while the
Americans are a mixed race, that is injured by the continual
introduction of baser elements. If immigration could be stopped for
fifty years, and the people have a chance to acquire "oneness," they
might become artistic. The middle class, however, is, from an artistic
standpoint, a horror; they have absolutely no art sense, and the
_nouveaux riches_ are often as bad. The latter sometimes place their
money in the hands of an agent, who buys for them; but all at once a man
may break out and insist upon buying something himself, so that in a
splendid collection of European names will appear some artistic horror
to stamp the owner as a parvenu.

The Americans have not produced a great painter. By this I mean a
really great artist, nor have they a great sculptor, one who is or has
been an inspiration. But they have thousands of artists, and many poor
ones thrive in selling their wares. You may see a man with an income of
thirty thousand dollars having paintings on his walls that give one the
vertigo. The poor artist has taken him in, or "pulled his leg," to use
the latest American slang. There are some fine paintings in America. I
have visited the great collections in Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
Washington, Chicago, and those in many private galleries, but the best
of the pictures are always from England, France, Germany, and other
European countries. Old masters are particularly revered. Americans pay
enormous sums for them, but sometimes are deceived.

They have art schools by the hundred, where they study from the nude
and from models of all kinds. There are splendid museums of art,
especially in Boston and New York. The art interests are particularly
active, but not the people; there are a few art lovers only, the people
in the mass being hopeless. Cheap prints, chromos, and other deadly
things are ground out by the million and sold, to clog still deeper the
art sense of an inartistic people. They laugh at our conventional
Chinese art, but the extreme of conventionality is certainly better than
some of the daubs I have seen in American homes. Americans have peculiar
fancies in art. One is called Impressionist Art. As near as I can
understand it, painters claim that while you are looking at an object
you do not really see it all, you merely gain an impression; so they
paint only the impression. In a museum of