e thing;
we approve knowledge for its own sake; we appreciate irony and wit.
But all this is unknown in America. The most intelligent people in the
world, they severely limit their intelligence to the adaptation of
means to ends. About the ends themselves they never permit themselves
to speculate; and for this reason, though they calculate, they never
think, though they invent, they never discover, and though they talk,
they never converse. For thought implies speculation; discovery,
reflection; conversation, leisure; and all alike imply a
disinterestedness which has no place in the American system. For the
same reason they do not play; they have converted games into battles;
and battles in which every weapon is legitimate so long as it is
victorious. An American football match exhibits in a type the American
spirit, short, sharp, scientific, intense, no loitering by the road, no
enjoyment of the process, no favour, no quarter, but a fight to the
death with victory as the end, and anything and everything as the means.

"A nation so severely practical could hardly be expected to attach the
same importance to the emotions as has been attributed to them by
Europeans. Feeling, like Intellect, is not regarded, in the West, as
an end in itself. And it is not uninteresting to note that the
Americans are the only great nation that have not produced a single
lyric of love worth recording. Physically, as well as spiritually,
they are a people of cold temperament. Their women, so much and, I do
not doubt, so legitimately admired, are as hard as they are brilliant;
their glitter is the glitter of ice. Thus happily constituted,
Americans are able to avoid the immense waste of time and energy
involved in the formation and maintenance of subtle personal relations.
They marry, of course, they produce children, they propagate the race;
but, I would venture to say, they do not love, as Europeans have loved;
they do not exploit the emotion, analyse and enjoy it, still less
express it in manners, in gesture, in epigram, in verse. And hence the
kind of shudder produced in a cultivated European by the treatment of
emotion in American fiction. The authors are trying to express
something they have never experienced, and to graft the European
tradition on to a civilization which has none of the elements necessary
to nourish and support it.

"From this brief analysis of the attitude of Americans towards life,
the point with which I