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 dramatists have to learn, they will not learn it in Paris; and I was charmed once to hear a popular New York playwright, one who sincerely and frankly wrote for money alone, assert boldly that the notoriously successful French plays were bad, and clumsily bad.  It was a proof of taste.  As a rule, one finds the popular playwright taking off his hat to contemporaries who at best are no better than his equals.

A few minor cases apart, the drama is artistically negligible throughout the world; but if there is a large hope for it in any special country, that country is the United States.  The extraordinary prevalence of big theaters, the quickly increasing number of native dramatists, the enormous profits of the successful ones—­it is simply inconceivable in the face of the phenomena, and of the educational process so rapidly going on, that serious and first-class creative artists shall not arise in America.  Nothing is more likely to foster the production of first-class artists than the existence of a vast machinery for winning money and glory.  When I reflect that there are nearly twice as many first-class theaters in New York as in London, and that a very successful play in New York plays to eighteen thousand dollars