So in our country as in Britain, the Scottish and the Irish and the Welsh strains in the blood key up the English-speaking peoples in their arts of vision and expression. Yet when all such things are said, (and much more might be said, with unmannerly talk of “creeping Saxons” and the like) the fact remains that the future art of the United States is even less easy to foreknow than that of the British Isles; and this because of what we call our “melting-pot” population, with all its benefits and drawbacks, its clamorous and conflicting ideals in art and in morality. The great American alembic is still seething. Newer forces than any that have come from Britain and France and Italy are now stirring here. What of these? Mr. Sloane, in his address on the sculptor Ward, reminded us of the slow evolution of sculpture, of the long journey between the Memnon and the Hermes, of the swifter travel between Greek art and our own, and of our recent return, not only to the classic, but to the oriental. That inquiring look toward the Orient, a corner of the earth always revered in occidental art, was never so general as at present. Some time ago, the studies of our sculptors at the American Academy at Rome led them to the eastern borders of that richly intricate rim of the Mediterranean basin; a rim from which we are still plucking jewels of hitherto unimagined splendor, such as those of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb. But before pressing still farther eastward, let us glance a moment at the familiar influences of recent formative years. II We differentiate too rudely if we say offhand that American sculpture has learned its _art_ from France, its _craft_ from Italy. The truth cannot be told so simply as that. For instance, the Piccirillis, American artists and craftsmen of Italian ancestry, are but a few out of many talented American sculptors of Italian birth. Again, we went to France for lessons in casting bronze, as well as in making our weekly “bonhomme” at the _école_. Yet for the whole Western world of sculpture during the past forty years, the strongest general influence has been that of the French school, and the strongest single influence that of a Frenchman aloof from the school, Auguste Rodin. No thinking sensitive person who uses clay to shape his visions and earn his living has failed to feel Rodin’s influence; it is already so deeply imbedded in consciousness that many of those who most imitate this master are least aware of so doing. It would be a mistake to suppose, because the shouting is over, that this powerful influence has wholly waned.