He has enriched the short story literature with a few pages of exquisite gray prose. And he has told the tragedy of a New York flat in the speech common on the East Side. Not satisfied with these accomplishments, rare as they are fantastic, he has become the high-priest of American Art. Critically he has carried the American art movement on his shoulders for the last fifteen years. Not that talented sculptors and painters are entirely absent in the land of Howells and Comstock, but they are deficient in red blood corpuscles.
Artists have a hard life of it over there, and their work shows it.
The trouble with American art is that it is hodden gray and anemic. Nothing more sad than a critic who is more virile and vital than the work he criticizes. With worthier subjects he might have dowered the world with more intellectual magnificence. Yet that is his affair. He for his part is sincere.