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Another test of education is the feeling for art, and the creation of an
environment which encourages the increase of artistic talent. (And be it
noted in passing that the intellectually honest races, the Latin, have
been the most artistic, for the mere reason that intellectual dishonesty
is just sentimentality, and sentimentality is the destroying poison of
art.) Now the most exacerbating experience that fell to me in
America--and it fell more than once--was to hear in discreetly lighted
and luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various mural proofs of trained taste,
and usually from the lips of an elegantly Europeanized American woman
with a sad, agreeable smile: "There is no art in the United States.... I
feel like an exile." A number of these exiles, each believing himself or
herself to be a solitary lamp in the awful darkness, are dotted up and
down the great cities, and it is a curious fact that they bitterly
despise one another. In so doing they are not very wrong. For, in the
first place, these people, like nearly all dilettanti of art, are
extremely unreliable judges of racial characteristics. Their mentality
is allied to that of the praisers of time past, who, having read _Tom
Jones_ and _Clarissa_, are incapable of comprehending that the immense
majority of novels produced in the eighteenth century were nevertheless
terrible rubbish. They go to a foreign land, deliberately confine their
attention to the artistic manifestations of that country, and then
exclaim in ecstasy: "What an artistic country this is! How different
from my own!" To the same class belong certain artistic visitors to the
United States who, having in their own country deliberately cut
themselves off from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visit
America, and, meeting there the average man and woman in bulk, frown
superiorly and exclaim: "This Philistine race thinks of nothing but