We are all cocksure but bewildered children in a world we cannot understand. We are all parvenus--parvenus on a new continent, on the fringes of which some have lived a little longer than others, but the whole of which has been encompassed by none of us for more than two or three generations; parvenus in a new world of steam and electricity, wireless and aeroplane, machinery and industry, which none of us has yet been able to subdue to a mould that satisfies our deepest cravings; parvenus in our culture, which still seems like a borrowed garment instead of flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. What is the good of all the instruments that our hands have moulded if we have neither the will nor the imagination to wield them for the uses of the soul? Not in this fashion shall we justify our old dream of an America that is the hope of the world. Here are hundreds of colleges and universities; why not fill these empty barracks with scholars and thinkers? Here are a hundred races; why not say to them: “America can give you generous opportunity and the most superb instruments that the undisciplined energy of practical life has ever created, but in the spiritual fields of art, poetry, religion, culture, it has little or nothing to give you; let us all work together, learning and creating these high things side by side”? Here are more hearts empty and unfulfilled and more restless minds than the world has ever before gathered together; why not lead them out of their corrals, and find a fitting pasture for their brains and souls? J. E. SPINGARN _GLOSSARY_ The English language, extraordinarily rich and expressive in everything that concerns the practical or the imaginative life, suffers from the poverty and lack of precision of English æsthetic thought. It may therefore be useful to indicate briefly the special sense in which certain terms are used in this essay. “_Spectator_: I should say that you have advanced a subtlety that is little more than a play on words. “_Friend_: And I maintain that when we are speaking of the operations of the soul, no words can be delicate and subtle enough.”--GOETHE. _Art_--Any creation of the imagination, whether in the form of imaginative literature or of painting, sculpture, music, etc. _Artist_--The creator of a work of art in any of its forms; not used in this essay in the narrower sense of painter or sculptor. _Taste_--The faculty of imaginative sympathy by which the reader or spectator is able to re-live the vision of the artist, and therefore the essential pre-requisite to all criticism. _Criticism_--Any expression of taste guided by knowledge and thought. (The critic’s training in knowledge is scholarship, and his special field of thought æsthetics.)