“What we want,” wrote Henry Adams in 1862 to his brother Charles, “is a _school_. We want a national set of young men like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the country--a national school of our own generation. And that is what America has no power to create.... It’s all random, insulated work, for special and temporary and personal purposes. And we have no means, power or hope of combined action for any unselfish end.” _That is what America has no power to create._ But can it be said that any nation has ever created a school? Here we have the perfect illustration of that mass fatalism of which I have spoken, and Henry Adams himself, in his passivity, is the type of it. Secure as he was, uniquely secure, why did he refuse to accept the responsibility of those novels in which he expressed the contempt of a powerful and cultivated mind for the meanness, the baseness, the vulgarity of the guiding element in American society? In the darkest and most chaotic hours of our spiritual history the individual has possessed a measure of free will only to renounce it: if Henry Adams had merely signed his work and accepted the consequences of it, he might by that very fact have become the founder, the centre, of the school that he desired. But it is true that in that generation the impulses of youth were, with an extraordinary unanimity, focused upon a single end, the exploitation of the continent; the material opportunities that American life offered were too great and too all-engrossing, and it is unlikely that any considerable minority could have been rallied for any non-utilitarian cause. Sixty years later this school remains, and quite particularly as regards our literature, the one thing necessary; the reforestation of our spiritual territory depends on it. And in more than one sense the times are favourable. The closing of the frontier seems to promise for this country an intenser life than it has known before; a large element of the younger generation, estranged from the present order, exists in a state of ferment that renders it highly susceptible to new ideas; the country literally swarms with half-artists, as one may call them, men and women, that is to say, who have ceased to conform to the law of the tribe but who have not accepted the discipline of their own individual spirits. “What I chiefly desire for you,” wrote Ibsen to Brandes at the outset of his career, “is a genuine, full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what concerns you yourself as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else as non-existent.... There is no way in which you can benefit society more than by coining the metal you have in yourself.” The second half of this rather blunt counsel of perfection is implied in the first, and it connotes a world of things merely to name which would be to throw into