beloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing the
slightest interest in modern American art. No, as a working artist
myself, I was more impressed and reassured by such a sight as the Innes
room at the colossal Art Institute of Chicago than by all the
collections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as a
very distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti would naturally
condescend to the Innes room at Chicago's institute, as to the
long-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school of
Chicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago. But the
dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness in
forgetting that their poor, inartistic Philistine country did provide,
_inter alia_, the great writer who has influenced French imaginative
writers more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron--Edgar
Allan Poe; did produce one of the world's supreme poets--Whitman; did
produce the greatest pure humorist of modern times; did produce the
miraculous Henry James; did produce Stanford White and the incomparable
McKim; and did produce the only two Anglo-Saxon personalities who in
graphic art have been able to impose themselves on modern
Europe--Whistler and John Sargent.

* * * * *

In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many American painters in
Paris that I was particularly anxious to see what American painting was
like at home. My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudged
through enormous exhibitions, and they filled me with just the same
feeling of desolation and misery that I experienced at the Royal
Academy, London, or the Société des Artistes Français, Paris. In miles
of slippery exercise I saw almost nothing that could interest an
intelligent amateur who had passed a notable portion of his life in