If the clamor for originality is strong in the United States, it is, perhaps, because here are many arrivals, and the newcomer not infrequently desires us to change our ways in the interest of his comfort. We have so much good will toward him, and we are so conscious of the fine things the various races may bring to our commonwealth, that we usually hesitate to speak frankly of his qualifications as writer or critic. He often brings a rare aptitude for art, and frequently he desires to write, but writing is the one art where his ignorance of life will handicap him. In painting an eye for color, in music an ear for tone and harmony, may carry him through, but in literature he will write in an acquired language, and even if it were his native tongue, in literature his attitude toward the art will be conditioned by his knowledge of life. He will perhaps assert rather vigorously that his knowledge is superior; has he not borne hardships and risen above them? Those who have not suffered, he will say, know nothing of life. He will think you cold-blooded if you tell him the better way to say it—that those who have not suffered, know nothing of suffering. If he desires to write the literature of suffering, he is probably competent, but since he is usually a person of strong energy, with a constructive temperament, he does not wish to write merely the literature of suffering, nor does he usually wish his children to repeat his hardship, though he may have said that only by such discipline comes knowledge. He usually desires to write about the world in general, as every one would write, and for this task he usually has had experience too meagre or too special. It is only in the United States, after his arrival, that he most often makes his first contact with the older literature—not of America but of his own land; if he has had the experience necessary for understanding it, he absorbs it eagerly, but if his hardships in his fatherland deprived him of the necessary equipment, he will announce that the old literature is played out and meaningless. He is like the native students in South African schools, who may read the skating episode in Wordsworth’s _Prelude_, but cannot get the shiver of the ice or the scratch of the steel runners. Those who have been with us for several generations and who through economic or other causes have missed that rich acquaintance with life which would explain what the great writers talk about, are likely to join the most recent comer in a plea for originality. Their fortunes are to be pitied, but their advice in art is hardly to be followed. No amount of sympathy or admiration for them as human beings will accredit them as critics, for art is long, as we have heard, and the approaches to it are long also; though we may teach democracy fast enough to win our vote after five years, we must know at first-hand youth and maturity, and have a suspicion of what old age is like, in the world the poet writes of,