Humanists are said to be academic. If this means that they are all university teachers, it is obviously not true. If it means that they are not interested in the present, it is obviously not true. If it means that they are interested in theory and not in practical affairs, it is not true, for what specially concerns them is the relation of theory and practice. They can scarcely be convicted of displaying what Stuart P. Sherman, who knew American academic life from the inside, termed “the professorial vices of pedantry, indolence, timidity, and intellectual quietism, which is a euphemism for the sluggish tolerance of men without philosophic conviction or intellectual purpose.” If it means that our humanists have been more interested than the workaday journalist critics in concrete knowledge and in general ideas, then indeed they may be termed academic. They perceive that when a new movement of thought and life is to be got under way, the first stage is naturally one of acquiring and organising knowledge--particularly neglected knowledge. This was clear to Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell in our little New England renaissance; it was clear to Lessing, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers in Germany; it was clear to the humanists of the Renaissance throughout Europe. Let us remember that the first of all universities was Plato’s “Academy,” the object of which was to attain a wisdom deeper than that of the market-place. Let us remember that “mere” theories are often high explosives, destructive of the prevailing practical life of the market-place, as witness Locke and Rousseau and the German thinkers from Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche. Humanists are said to be un-American. According to those who cultivate the nationalist conception, a valid new criticism, new literature, new culture must spring from our American experience, not from imported ideas. They forget the lesson of the past that cultural movements have two sexes, so to speak, one native and one foreign, and that the native expresses itself in the main unconsciously under the incitement of the foreign. The native for the most part takes care of itself, the foreign must be sedulously cultivated. In the Renaissance a humanism imported from Italy fructified the native genius of most of Europe. Later, England, for example, drew upon France and then Germany; Germany upon France and England; France upon Spain and England; the United States upon England and Germany. Unlike some of his followers our Walt Whitman himself finally perceived the need of America’s assimilation of foreign culture--even from “all former lands” beginning with ancient India and Greece. It is doubtful whether a _real_ American culture could ever spring from our own experience; it is certain that it could be _caused_ to spring from our own experience by a happy use of foreign culture.