As we see, then, the creative will in this country is a very weak and sickly plant. Of the innumerable talents that are always emerging about us there are few that come to any sort of fruition: the rest wither early; they are transformed into those neuroses that flourish on our soil as orchids flourish in the green jungle. The sense of this failure is written all over our literature. Do we not know what depths of disappointment underlay the cynicism of Mark Twain and Henry Adams and Ambrose Bierce? Have we failed to recognize, in the surly contempt with which the author of “The Story of a Country Town” habitually speaks of writers and writing, the unconscious cry of sour grapes of a man whose creative life was arrested in youth? Are we unaware of the bitterness with which, in certain letters of his later years, Jack London regretted the miscarriage of his gift? There is no denying that for half a century the American writer as a type has gone down in defeat. Now why is this so? Why does the American writer, relatively speaking, show less resistance than the European writer? Plainly, as I have just said, because he has been insufficiently equipped, stimulated, nourished by the society into which he has been born. If our creative spirits are unable to grow and mature, it is a sign that there is something wanting in the soil from which they spring and in the conditions that surround them. Is it not, for that matter, a sign of some more general failure in our life? “At the present moment,” wrote Mr. Chesterton in one of his early essays (“The Fallacy of the Young Nation”), struck by the curious anæmia of those few artists of ours who have succeeded in developing themselves, usually by escaping from the American environment; “at the present moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to its end.... The English colonies have produced no great artists, and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent possibilities and reserve force. But America has produced great artists and that fact most certainly means that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a school-boy? No, the colonies have not spoken, and they are safe. Their silence may be the silence of the unborn. But out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.” That there is truth behind this, that the soil of our society is at least arid and impoverished, is indicated by the testimony of our own poets; one has only to consider what George Cabot Lodge wrote in 1904, in one of his letters: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third-rate”; one has only to consider the writings