In our day and in our land the question of the audience is peculiarly acute, and it has been rendered more so by the intentional efforts of those who believe that literature should be contemporary. Even without those efforts we, who come from many countries, with different race memories and with the legacy of different cultures, should have had difficulty enough to achieve a common language adequately rich in the best things of the past and welded into some continuity with our American future. If we write in those terms which to an Italian would be emotional, we shall hardly stir the pulses of a Scotchman or a Slav, and if we waken the race-memories of the Spanish or the French, we may leave quite cold the Dutch in Pennsylvania or the Swede in Minnesota. Our first hope, to which some of us still desperately cling, is that we may lose no one of these racial inheritances, but that by a jealous conserving and study of each of them, and by teaching them all to our children, we may build up one of the richest cultures that the accidents of migration have ever permitted the race to compose. The literature of America in a thousand years would carry in its majestic overtones the essential beauty of all the civilizations that have made their entry through our ports, the essential beauty too of the wonderful Indian civilizations which our European coming dispossessed, and above these overtones, perhaps, the far-off suggestions of the Greek and Roman worlds and the immemorial East. But this hope, whether or not it could be realized, is so far as we can see at present a fantastic dream; our progress toward it has been slight—better, to be frank, we have made no progress, rather we have lost ground. There is less general culture of that sort in the United States now than there was fifty years ago. It has seemed wise to many of us, therefore, to moderate our hopes, and to aim at mastering, not all our heritages in common, but at least one tradition, and that the tradition of this country from the revolution till the present day. Such a program might be carried out in our schools—not in the colleges, since only a fraction of the country’s youth gets to college, but in those early school years through which all the boys and girls may reasonably be expected to pass; and there would be nothing illogical in burdening the schools with the task, for the training of a common consciousness, cultural or otherwise, in a land of immigrants is the chief problem of elementary education. We thought, then, that we might all absorb our own past and the few decades that preceded our coming, so that hereafter the spokesmen of the nation, poets, dramatists, preachers, statesmen, might at least touch some common chords in us all by naming those who built up the opportunities we enjoy. This program is still in force in other departments of study than literature, but the teachers of literature have been largely won over to the cult of the contemporary; so far from