I seem
to hear a million voices of students and ex-students roaring out at me
with menaces that the game is perfect and the greatest of all games. A
national game always was and is perfect. This particular game was
perfect years ago. Nevertheless, I learned that it had recently been
improved, in deference to criticisms. Therefore, it is now pluperfect. I
was told on the field--and sharply--that experience of it was needed for
the proper appreciation of its finesse. Admitted! But just as devotees
of a favorite author will put sublime significances into his least
phrase, so will devotees of a game put marvels of finesse into its
clumsiest features. The process is psychological. I was new to this
particular game, but I had been following various footballs with my feet
or with my eyes for some thirty years, and I was not to be bullied out
of my opinion that the American university game, though goodish, lacked
certain virtues. Its characteristics tend ever to a too close formation,
and inevitably favor tedium and monotony. In some aspects an unemotional
critic might occasionally be tempted to call it naive and barbaric. But
I was not unemotional. I recognize, and in my own person I proved, that
as a vehicle for emotion the American university game will serve. What
else is such a game for? In the match I witnessed there were some really
great moments, and one or two masterly exhibitions of skill and force.
And as "my" side won, against all odds, I departed in a state of
felicity.

* * * * *

If the great cities of the East and Middle West are not strikingly
sportive, perhaps the reason is that they are impassioned theater-goers;
they could not well be both, at any rate without neglecting the
financial pursuits which are their chief real amusement and hobby. I
mention the theaters in connection with sports, rather than in
connection with the arts, because the American drama is more closely
related to sporting diversions than to dramatic art. If this seems a
hard saying, I will add that I am ready to apply it with similar force
to the English and French drama, and, indeed, to almost all modern drama
outside Germany. It was astonishing to me that America, unhampered by
English traditions, should take seriously, for instance, the fashionable
and utterly meretricious French dramatists, who receive nothing but a
chilly ridicule from people of genuine discrimination in Paris. Whatever
American drama