In the Daily Mail I saw once an interview with an inferior American black-and-white draughtsman at Berlin.  He was asked his opinion about a splendid exhibition of old English pictures being held there, and took occasion to say ’what the pictures demonstrate is not that the English women of the eighteenth century were conspicuously lovely, but the artists who painted them possessed secrets of reproduction which posterity has failed to inherit.’  I would like to reply ‘Rot, rot, rot;’ but that would imply a belief in decay.  I suggest to the same critic that he should visit one of the ‘International Exhibitions,’ where he will see the pictures of Mr. Charles Hazelwood Shannon.  Such a stupid view from an American is particularly amazing, because in Mr. John Singer Sargent, we (by we I mean America and ourselves) possess an artist who is certainly the peer of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and personally I should say a much greater painter than Reynolds.  A hundred years hence, perhaps people at Berlin (the most critical and cultivated capital in the world) will be bending before the ‘Three Daughters of Percy Wyndham,’ the ‘Duchess of Sutherland,’ the ‘Marlborough Family,’ and many another masterpiece of Mr. Sargent and Mr. Charles Shannon.  The same American critic says that our era of mediocrity will continue; so I am full of hope.  Even the existence of America does not depress me:  nor do I see in it a symptom of decay; if it produces much that is distasteful in the way of tinned meat, it gave us Mr. John Sargent and Mr. Henry James, and it took away from England Mr. Richard Le Gallienne.

I should be the last to invite you not to discriminate about the present.  We must be cautious in estimating the very popular writers or painters of our time; but we must not dismiss them because they are popular.  We should be tall enough to worship in a crowd.  Let our criticism be aristocratic, our taste fastidious, and let our sympathies be democratic and catholic.  Dickens, I suppose, is one of the most popular writers who ever lived, and yet he is part of the structure of our literature; but as Dickens is dead, I prefer to mention the names of three living writers, who are also popular, and have become corner-stones of the same building—­Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. H. G. Wells.  ’There are at all times,’ says Schopenhauer, ’two literatures in progress running side by side, but little known to each other; the one real, the other only apparent.  The former grows into permanent literature:  it is pursued by those who live for science or poetry.  The other is pursued by those who live on science or poetry; but after a few years one asks where are they? where is the glory that came so soon and made so much clamour?’ We are happy if we can discriminate between those two literatures.