It will be urged that successive "crazes" for individual artists or authors, for particular productions or even isolated schools, are no evidence of any general culture. Conceding this, it remains impossible to avoid the question: supposing a nation or an individual to spend each successive six months in a new enthusiasm--six months on Plato and Aristotelianism,--six months, taking the _Light of Asia_, Mr. Sinnett, and _Kim_ as a starting point, on Buddhism and esoteric philosophy,--six months, inspired by Fitzgerald, on Omar, Persian literature and history and the various ramifications thereof,--six months on M. Rodin, his relation to the art of sculpture in general and particularly to the sculpture of the Greeks,--a similar six months devoted to Mr. Watt with like excursions into his environment, proximate and remote,--six months to Millet, Barbizon, and the history of French painting,--six months of Russian art with Verestschagin and six with Russian literature and politics working outwards from Count Tolstoi,--six months of philosophic speculation radiating from Haeckel,--six months absorbed in Japanese art,--six months burrowing in Egyptian excavations and Egyptian history--the question is, I say, supposing a nation or an individual to have passed through twenty such spasms (of which I have suggested ten, every one of which ten is a subject which I have in my own experience known to become the rage in America more or less wide-spread and for a greater or lesser period) and supposing that nation or that individual to be possessed of extraordinary earnestness and power of concentration, with a great desire to learn, how far will that nation or that individual have travelled on the road toward something approaching culture? Let it be granted that the individual or the nation starts with something less of the aesthetic temperament, less well grounded in, or disposed towards, artistic or literary study than the average Englishman who has made decent use of his opportunities at school, at the university, and in the surroundings of his every-day life; the intellectual condition of that individual or nation will not at the end of the ten years of successive _furores_ be the same intellectual condition as that of the Englishman who, after leaving college, has spent ten years in the ordinary educated society of England, but it is probable that, besides the accumulation of a great quantity of information, some not entirely inadequate or incorrect general standards of taste and criticism will have been arrived at. It is worth remembering that at least one eminently competent English critic has declared that while there may be less erudition in America, there is conspicuously more culture.