“It’s as high as that of some magazines,” said my friend, “though I could sometimes wish it were higher.  It’s like the matter in the Sunday papers—­about that average.  Some of it’s good, and most of it isn’t.  Some of it could hardly be worse.  But there is a great deal of it, and you get it consecutively and not simultaneously.  That constitutes its advantage over the circus.”

My friend stopped, with a vague smile, and I asked: 

“Then, do I understand that you would advise me to recommend the dime museums, the circus, and the perpetual-motion varieties in the place of the theatres?”

“You have recommended books instead, and that notion doesn’t seem to have met with much favor, though you urged their comparative cheapness.  Now, why not suggest something that is really level with the popular taste?”

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE

A recently lecturing Englishman is reported to have noted the unenviable primacy of the United States among countries where the struggle for material prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature.  He said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful in attributing to a public man the thoughts that may be really due to an imaginative frame in the reporter), that among us, “the old race of writers of distinction, such as Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, and Washington Irving, have (sic) died out, and the Americans who are most prominent in cultivated European opinion in art or literature, like Sargent, Henry James, or Marion Crawford, live habitually out of America, and draw their inspiration from England, France, and Italy.”

I.

If this were true, I confess that I am so indifferent to what many Americans glory in that it would not distress me, or wound me in the sort of self-love which calls itself patriotism.  If it would at all help to put an end to that struggle for material prosperity which has eventuated with us in so many millionaires and so many tramps, I should be glad to believe that it was driving our literary men out of the country.  This would be a tremendous object-lesson, and might be a warning to the millionaires and the tramps.  But I am afraid it would not have this effect, for neither our very rich nor our very poor care at all for the state of polite learning among us; though for the matter of that, I believe that economic conditions have little to do with it; and that if a general mediocrity of fortune prevailed and there were no haste to be rich and to get poor, the state of polite learning would not be considerably affected.  As matters stand, I think we may reasonably ask whether the Americans “most prominent in cultivated European opinion,” the Americans who “live habitually out of America,” are not less exiles than advance agents of the expansion now advertising itself to the world.  They may be the vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined to overrun the earth from these shores, and exploit all foreign countries to our advantage.  They probably themselves do not know it, but in the act of “drawing their inspiration” from alien scenes, or taking their own where they find it, are not they simply transporting to Europe “the struggle for material prosperity,” which Sir Lepel supposes to be fatal to them here?