In the large sense, of course, he has
had but small influence. After twenty years of earnest labour, he finds
himself almost as alone as a Methodist in Bavaria. The body of native
criticism remains as I have described it; an endless piling up of
platitudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and jejune conclusions,
an insane madness to reduce beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic
morality. One might throw a thousand bricks in any American city without
striking a single man who could give an intelligible account of either
Hauptmann or Cezanne, or of the reasons for holding Schumann to have
been a better composer than Mendelssohn. The boys in our colleges are
still taught that Whittier was a great poet and Fennimore Cooper a great
novelist. Nine-tenths of our people--perhaps ninety-nine hundredths of
our native-born--have yet to see their first good picture, or to hear
their first symphony. Our Chamberses and Richard Harding Davises are
national figures; our Norrises and Dreisers are scarcely tolerated. Of
the two undoubted world figures that we have contributed to letters, one
was allowed to die like a stray cat up an alley and the other was
mistaken for a cheap buffoon.
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