or his country, which is curiosity at its finest.  He will divide things into pleasant and unpleasant, and his curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of the latter—­an Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in your mind!  He likes to know what others think of him and his country, but he is not very keen on knowing what he really thinks on these subjects himself.  The highest form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes. (And yet who that has practised it would give it up?) It also demands intellectual honesty—­a quality which has been denied by Heaven to all Anglo-Saxon races, but which nevertheless a proper education ought in the end to achieve.  Were I asked whether I saw in America any improvement upon Britain in the supreme matter of intellectual honesty, I should reply, No.  I seemed to see in America precisely the same tendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that things are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike of the whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious and universal phenomena, the same delusion that a refusal to look at these phenomena is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena, the same flaccid sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art.  And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking is not mistaken for cynicism.

* * * * *

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