bat after the sophistic
fashion of Zeno,--showing, first, why we lack that desideratum, a
strictly national school; secondly, that a strictly national school is
not desirable; and thirdly, that we most assuredly have a national
school.

In building a national individuality, as in building a personal
individuality, there is always a period of discipleship under some
older power. When the rudiments and the essentials are once thoroughly
mastered, the shackles of discipleship are thrown off, and personal
expression in an original way begins. This is the story of every
master in every art: The younger Raphael was only Perugino junior.
Beethoven's first sonatas were more completely Haydn's than the word
"gewidmet" would declare. The youthful Canova was swept off his feet
by the unearthing of old Greek masterpieces. Stevenson confesses
frankly his early efforts to copy the mannerisms of Scott and others.
Nations are only clusters of individuals, and subject to the same
rules. Italy borrowed its beginnings from Byzantium; Germany and
France took theirs from Italy; we, ours, from them.

It was inconceivable that America should produce an autocthonous art.
The race is one great mixture of more or less digested foreign
elements; and it is not possible to draw a declaration of artistic, as
of political, independence, and thenceforward be truly free.

Centuries of differentiated environment (in all the senses of the word
environment) are needed to produce a new language or a new art; and it
was inevitable that American music should for long be only a more or
less successful employment of European methods. And there was little
possibility, according to all precedents in art history, that any
striking individuality should rise suddenly to found a school based
upon his own mannerism.

Especially was this improbable, since we are in a large sense of
English lineage. As the co-heirs, with those who remain in the British
Isles, of the magnificent prose and poetry of England, it was possible
for us to produce early in our own history a Hawthorne and a Poe and
an Emerson and a Whitman. But we have had more hindrance than help
from our heritage of English music, in which there has never been a
master of the first rank, Purcell and the rest being, after all,
brilliants of the lesser magnitude (with the permission of that
electric Englishman, Mr. John F. Runciman).

A further hindrance was the creed of the Puritan fathers of our
civili