It is obvious that the training, such as it is, which is to produce this finer taste is a training not in art at all, but in Americanization, if you choose to call it so, in sociology or in politics. These purposes are good in their place, but if they usurp the classroom where literature as an art should be taught, we need expect no aid from the schools in training us to a common culture, not at least so far as the word applies to poetry, to romance, to the drama, to the novel. We might Americanize ourselves in literature by reading our older poets—three of them, Whitman, Poe and Emerson, of influence in the whole world today; we might read our elder novelists, two of whom, Cooper and Hawthorne, at their best were among the prose-poets of the nineteenth century; or we might read Parkman, an historian not likely to be surpassed for the beauty of his spirit, for the solidity of his method, and for the romantic charm of his subject, by any who will hereafter write about this land. We might read Lincoln, about whom we talk so much, and we might profitably read Jefferson and Hamilton. We might even discover the charm of the colonial records, north and south, and the heroic poetry of our frontier, as it pushed through wilderness and across plain and canyon, to face at last the Orient again and our inscrutable future. This kind of Americanization would produce class discussion of some dignity, even though it had nothing to do immediately with the art of literature, for it would give us, not only a sense of our common destiny, but an escape from our own circumstances into other days and other minds, and it would cultivate the sympathy and the imagination once thought to be the fruit of literary study. But to discuss always and exclusively only what is under our own noses, to study a life of Mr. Roosevelt not because it is a great biography but because it is about Mr. Roosevelt, and to study novels not because they are good novels, but because they are about us, is to find ourselves in the end just where we were in the beginning, with our prejudices more firmly rooted and our skin a bit thicker to any joy or sorrow in the world not our own. As for the ability to understand great writing when it comes to us, we have learned only this, that since Mr. Roosevelt lived nearer our day than Dr. Johnson, the biography of him is a better biography and a more interesting one than Boswell could write, and we need not read Boswell; and since Main Street is nearer to us than Salem, Mr. Lewis is a greater novelist than Hawthorne, and we need not read Hawthorne. Enough to know that the whole contains the part. IV