Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/347

 XVII THE COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK

title of this lecture is "The Cosmopolitan Outlook," undoubtedly a very high-sounding phrase, but, like most such phrases, exceedingly vague. I suppose it gives me a license to talk briefly about the general status of Literature, present and future, and to endeavor to discover what part Cosmopolitanism plays and may be expected to play in determining that status. Such a license plainly carries with it one advantage. It is not safe to contradict a man, however much one may dislike his utterances, when it is obvious that he is discussing a subject about which neither he nor any one else knows anything definite. On the other hand, I have a shrewd conviction that this apparent immunity from successful contradiction differs little from an opportunity to display my rashness as a generalizer, and that I am about to essay what has come to be in America a presidential rather than a professorial function. It is our presidents who fill our sails of thought with the winds of generalization. When Ulysses carried the bags of Æolus, it was his crew that let loose, while he slept, the angry and adverse blasts. But in our superior modern wisdom we have changed all that. It is our leaders themselves that let loose our gusty winds. It is our presidents, actual and potential, who tell us things about finance that are in very truth beyond the dreams of avarice, and the wits of political economists. It is our presidents who, in their philanthropical zeal, are ready to 333