Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/350

336 audience by a Southern-born man. And answer another question, please. Is a profound belief in the rights of man as man likely to dominate a generation proud of a newly acquired imperial sway, reared on the precepts of the gospel of strenuosity, and naively exhilarated by its comparatively easily acquired wealth and power? Would there be any reason to be surprised if some one were to remark that he considered Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to have been far truer cosmopolitans than any American statesman of this modern epoch, which has seen the United States definitively enrolled among the so-called great powers of the world? And do not fancy for a moment that I am talking about politics, not Literature. The spirit that determines a people's political ideals cannot be separated, much as a certain type of critics would like to perform the feat, from the spirit that determines its literary and artistic ideals. Mere international exchange of books, mere contemporaneous evolution, in the several nations, of similar schools of art and thought, mere exploitation throughout the world of more or less identical literary forms applied to varying material, may be signs of the approach of a truly Cosmopolitan Literature; but they afford no proof that we possess such a Literature now or that we shall soon possess it. A truly Cosmopolitan Literature, in my judgment, will come into existence only in that nation or those nations wherein a majority, or a dominant minority, of true citizens of the world, that is, of professed servants of humanity, live and move and have their being.

I wondered a moment ago whether one does not find among cultivated Europeans more of that liberality and poise of thought, and more of that humanitarian idealism which ought to be the fruits of a truly cosmopolitan spirit, than one finds among Americans of the present generation. The comparison here implied is rendered less offensive by the reflection that the peoples of Europe have been welded into a