But nowhere in America can we find, for contemporary poetry, any clear precursive signal. Little as it may comfort our fuglemen of the autochthonous, we must, I think, look to Europe for its origins. This is not, as some imagine, a disgrace--it would be a melancholy thing, of course, if we merely imitated the European, without alteration. But Browning would hardly recognize himself, even if he cared to, in the “Domesday Book” of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mallarmé and Rimbaud would find Mr. Fletcher a mirror with an odd trick of distortion, Laforgue would have to look twice at Mr. T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” (for all its Hamletism), M. Paul Fort would scarcely feel at home in Miss Amy Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle,” Mr. Thomas Hardy and the ghost of Tennyson would not quarrel much for the possession of Mr. Robinson’s work, nor Mr. Chesterton and the author of “The Ingoldsby Legends” for the lively sonorities of Mr. Vachel Lindsay. In such cases we have not so much “influence” as fertilization. It is something of Mr. Masters that “The Ring and the Book” reveals to Mr. Masters: something of Miss Lowell to which M. Paul Fort offers her the key. Was it a calamity for Baudelaire that he lived only by a transfusion of blood from an American? Is Becquer the less Becquer or Spanish for having fed upon the “Buch der Lieder”?... Culture is bartered, nowadays, at open frontiers, and if to-day a new theme, chord, or colour-scheme is French, German, or American, to-morrow it is international. If we differ in this respect from any other country it is only that we are freer to exploit, really exhaust, the new, because we hold, less than any other, to any classical traditions: for traditions our poets seldom look back further than the 19th century. We have the courage, often indistinguishable from folly, of our lack of convictions. Thus it comes about that as America is the melting-pot for races, so she is in a fair way to become a melting-pot for cultures: we have the energy, the curiosity, the intelligence, above all the lack of affiliations with the past, which admirably adapt us to a task--so precisely demanding complete self-surrender--of æsthetic experiment. Ignorance has some compensations--I mean, of course, a partial ignorance. If Mr. Lindsay had been brought up exclusively on Aristotle, Plato, Æschylus, and Euripides, and had been taken out of the shadow of the church by Voltaire and Darwin, perhaps he would not have been so “free” to experiment with the “higher vaudeville.” It will be observed that this is an odd kind of “freedom,” for it amounts in some ways to little more than the “freedom” of the prison. For if too severe a training in the classics unfits one somewhat for bold experiment, too little of it is as likely, on the other hand, to leave one with an æsthetic perceptiveness, a sensibility, in short, relatively rudimentary.