d orations, all the Greek paintings
about which we know so little, and the Greek music about which we know
still less, does anybody suppose that this wealth of artistic
expression would furnish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial and
psychological traits of the Greek people?

One may go even further. Does a truly national art exist anywhere,--an
art, that is to say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate
expression of the national temper as a whole? We have but to reflect
upon the European and American judgments, during the last thirty
years, concerning the representative quality of the art of Japan, and
to observe how many of those facile generalizations about the Japanese
character, deduced from vases and prints and enamel, were smashed to
pieces by the Russo-Japanese War. This may illustrate the blunders of
foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than any inadequacy in the racially
representative character of Japanese art. But it is impossible that
critics, and artists themselves, should not err, in the conscious
endeavor to pronounce upon the infinitely complex materials with which
they are called upon to deal. We must confess that the expression of
racial and national characteristics, by means of only one art, such as
literature, or by all the arts together, is at best imperfect, and is
always likely to be misleading unless corroborated by other evidence.

For it is to be remembered that in literature, as in the other fields
of artistic activity, we are dealing with the question of form; of
securing a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of certain emotions. It
may well happen that literature not merely fails to give an adequate
report of the racial or national or personal emotions felt during a
given epoch, but that it fails to report these emotions at all. Not
only the "old, unhappy, far-off" things of racial experience, but the
new and delight-giving experiences of the hour, may lack their poet.
Widespread moods of public elation or wistfulness or depression have
passed without leaving a shadow upon the mirror of art. There was no
one to hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note of Renaissance
criticism, whether in Italy, France, or England, is more striking, and
in a way more touching, than the universal feeling that in the
rediscovery of the classics men had found at last the "terms of art,"
the rules and methods of a game which they had long wished to be
playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of the sixte