To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay. The New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth in America eternally gives to old age. “America has produced great artists,” admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains that “that fact most certainly proves 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 schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.” This sweet and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr. Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the ongoing rush and progress of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr. James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid _diablerie_, was wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter is--Mark Twain!