And even if we did concede to Greek literature this august supremacy, I cannot believe that our best intellect ought to be practised in the awestruck submissiveness of mind that too often results from our classical education.  That is why I admire the American spirit in literature.  The Americans seem to have little of the reverent, exclusive attitude which we value so highly.  They are preoccupied in their own native inspiration.  They will speak, without any sense of absurdity, of Shakespeare and E.A.  Poe, of Walter Scott and Hawthorne, as comparable influences.  They are like children, entirely absorbed in the interest and delight of intent creation.  But though their productions are at present, with certain notable exceptions, lacking in vitality and quality, this spirit is, I believe, the spirit in which new ideas and new literatures are produced.  I do not desire to see the Americans more critical of the present or more deferential to the past.  I do not desire to see them turn with a hopeless wonder to the study of the great English masterpieces.  Indeed, I think that our own tendency in England to reverence, our constant appeal to classical standards, is an obstacle to our intellectual and artistic progress.  We are like elderly writers who tend to repeat their own beloved mannerisms, and who contemn and decry the work of younger men, despairing of the future.  A nation may reach a point, like an ancient and noble dynasty of princes, where it is overshadowed and overweighted by its own past glories, and where it learns to depend upon prestige rather than upon vigour, to wrap itself in its own dignity.  What I would rather see is an elasticity, a recklessness, a prodigal trying of experiments, a discontented underrating of past traditions, than a meek acquiescence in their supremacy.  What is our present condition?  We have few poets of the first rank, few essayists or reflective writers, few dramatists, few biographers.  I do not at all wish to underrate the immense vitality of our imaginative faculties, which shows itself in our vast output of fiction; but even here we have few masters, and our critics know and care little for style; they are entirely preoccupied with plot and incident and situation.  What we lack is true originality, tranquil force; we are all occupied in trying to startle and surprise, to make a sensation.  How little the Greeks cared for that!  It was beauty and charm, delicate colour, fine subtlety of which they were, in search; they held all things holy, yet nothing solemn.  Their dignity was not a pompous dignity, but the dignity of high tragedy, of unconquerable courage and ruthless fate; not the dignity of the well-appointed house and the tradition of excellent manners.

Of course our love of wealth and comfort is to a certain extent responsible for this.  We have been thrown off our balance by the vast and rapid development of the resources of the earth, the binding of natural forces to do our bidding; it is the most complicated thing in the world nowadays to live the simple life; and not until we can gain a rich simplicity, not until we can recover an interest in ideas rather than an appetite for comforts, will our force and vitality return to us.