tivity. 'Let us eat and drink,' they say, with a hearty and
robust good faith; omitting as irrelevant and morbid the discouraging
appendix, 'for to-morrow we die.' Indeed! What has death to do with
buildings twenty-four stories high, with the fastest trains, the
noisiest cities, the busiest crowds in the world, and generally the
largest, the finest, the most accelerated of everything that exists?
America has sloughed off religion; and as, in the history of Europe,
religion has underlain every other activity, she has sloughed off,
along with it, the whole European system of spiritual life.
Literature, for instance, and Art, do not exist across the Atlantic. I
am aware, of course, that Americans write books and paint pictures.
But their books are not Literature, nor their pictures Art, except in
so far as they represent a faint adumbration of the European tradition.
The true spirit of America has no use for such activities. And even
if, as must occasionally happen in a population of eighty millions,
there is born among them a man of artistic instincts, he is immediately
and inevitably repelled to Europe, whence he derives his training and
his inspiration, and where alone he can live, observe and create. That
this must be so from the nature of the case is obvious when we reflect
that the spirit of Art is disinterested contemplation, while that of
America is cupidous acquisition. Americans, I am aware, believe that
they will produce Literature and Art, as they produce coal and steel
and oil, by the judicious application of intelligence and capital; but
here they do themselves injustice. The qualities that are making them
masters of the world, unfit them for slighter and less serious
pursuits. The Future is for them, the kingdom of elevators, of
telephones, of motor-cars, of flying-machines. Let them not idly hark
back, misled by effete traditions, to the old European dream of the
kingdom of heaven. '_Excudent alii_,' let them say, 'for Europe,
Letters and Art; _tu regere argento populos, Morgane, memento_, let
America rule the world by Syndicates and Trusts!' For such is her true
destiny; and that she conceives it to be such, is evidenced by the
determination with which she has suppressed all irrelevant activities.
Every kind of disinterested intellectual operation she has severely
repudiated. In Europe we take delight in the operations of the mind as
such, we let it play about a subject, merely for the fun of th