confine their attention to the artistic manifestations of that country, and then exclaim in ecstasy:  “What an artistic country this is!  How different from my own!” To the same class belong certain artistic visitors to the United States who, having in their own country deliberately cut themselves off from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visit America, and, meeting there the average man and woman in bulk, frown superiorly and exclaim:  “This Philistine race thinks of nothing but dollars!” They cannot see the yet quite evident truth that the rank and file of every land is about equally inartistic.  Modern Italy may in the mass be more lyrical than America, but in either architecture or painting Italy is simply not to be named with America.

[Illustration:  MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS—­UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO]

Further, and in the second place, these people never did and never will look in the right quarters for vital art.  A really original artist struggling under their very noses has small chance of being recognized by them, the reason being that they are imitative, with no real opinion of their own.  They associate art with Florentine frames, matinee hats, distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead.  It would not occur to them to search for American art in the architecture of railway stations and the draftsmanship and sketch-writing of newspapers and magazines, because they have not the wit to learn that genuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine popular demand.

Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that they should not see and take pride in the spectacular historical facts which prove their country to be less negligible in art than they would assert.  I do not mean the existence in America of huge and glorious collections of European masters.  I have visited some of these collections, and have taken keen pleasure therein.  But I perceive in them no national significance—­no more national significance than I perceive in the endowment of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under foreign conductors, or in the fashionable crowding of classical concerts.  Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy experience to spend hours in a private palace crammed with artistic loveliness that was apparently beloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing the slightest interest in modern American art.  No, as a working artist myself, I was more impressed and reassured by such a sight as the Innes room at the colossal Art Institute of Chicago than by all the collections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as a very distinguished artist.  The aforesaid dilettanti would naturally condescend to the Innes room at Chicago’s institute, as to the long-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school of Chicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago.  But the dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness