of Messrs. Frost, Robinson, and Masters, in whose presentation of our life, in the West as well as in the East, the individual as a spiritual unit invariably suffers defeat. Fifty years ago J. A. Froude, on a visit to this country, wrote to one of his friends: “From what I see of the Eastern states I do not anticipate any very great things as likely to come out of the Americans.... They are generous with their money, have much tenderness and quiet good humour; but the Anglo-Saxon power is running to seed and I don’t think will revive.” When we consider the general colourlessness and insipidity of our latter-day life (faithfully reflected in the novels of Howells and his successors), the absence from it of profound passions and intense convictions, of any representative individuals who can be compared in spiritual force with Emerson, Thoreau, and so many of their contemporaries, its uniformity and its uniform tepidity, then the familiar saying, “Our age has been an age of management, not of ideas or of men,” assumes indeed a very sinister import. I go back to the poet Lodge’s letters. “Was there ever,” he writes, “such an anomaly as the American man? In practical affairs his cynicism, energy, and capacity are simply stupefying, and in every other respect he is a sentimental idiot possessing neither the interest, the capacity, nor the desire for even the most elementary processes of independent thought.... His wife finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear him children and so drivelling in every way except as a money-getter that she compels him to expend his energies solely in that direction while she leads a discontented, sterile, stunted life....” Is this to be denied? And does it not in part explain that extraordinary lovelessness of the American scene which has bred the note of a universal resentment in so much of our contemporary fiction? As well expect figs from thistles as any considerable number of men from such a soil who are robust enough to prefer spiritual to material victories and who are capable of achieving them. It is unnecessary to go back to Taine in order to realize that here we have a matrix as unpropitious as possible for literature and art. If our writers wither early, if they are too generally pliant, passive, acquiescent, anæmic, how much is this not due to the heritage of pioneering, with its burden of isolation, nervous strain, excessive work and all the racial habits that these have engendered?