In America, beneath the fevered surface, the jazz, the wild rush hither and thither, the absence of contemplation, the divorce-fed looseness of the married relation, there is, I think, a monotony, a dull-eyed prosiness, against which all those surface things are perhaps but a reaction. People do not read poetry (as all do in Italy); which is not an indication of poor literary taste (since in Italy, as elsewhere, the mass of people prefer bad poetry to good), but of either an inability or a disinclination to feel vividly. The undergraduates of our great universities are not, as in France or Italy, uncritical rebels against all accepted conventions of life and letters, but for the most part as conservative as their parents, caring little about politics save to accept indifferently the Republican Party, caring nothing at all about either old currents or new among the arts. Would students at our universities ever riot because of the execution of a Francisco Ferrer? Inconceivable! They become violently excited about sports, as do students abroad; but that, again, is a surface excitement which does not affect beliefs about life. Defeat in the annual football game would hardly impel undergraduates at Harvard or Yale to risk their lives in passionate protest. This greyness follows Americans throughout their life and is due, I think, to our over-complication of and concentration upon the surface facts of existence. No matter what one does with existence, it remains a dull thing. Radios, motor cars, telephones, vacuum cleaners--they are all infinitely dull because they are all surface things that do not trouble the heart or the brain. Existence is dull, but life, underneath it, is a wild and thrilling adventure. What one does is nothing; what one believes and feels is everything. ‘After all,’ said William James, ‘the most important thing about a man is what he thinks about the universe.’ But if he does not think about it ...? For all its feverish activity, America does not seem to me to have the fever of living. I know of nothing more desolate than the exceedingly well done stories in the most widely read of our magazines, which, to judge from its immense circulation, must almost literally be ‘in every home.’ They are virtually all about the facile success in business of handsome young men with Arrow Collar souls. This tawdry shirking of life is, I believe (and I wish I did not believe it), the mental attitude of most Americans. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has revealed it with a clear, terrible perfection, Mr. Sinclair Lewis has satirized it tumultuously in terms of itself (and has thereby, ironically, become popular), and numerous others have revolted against it with futile bitterness. But there it is. And there, perhaps, it must remain till some great national disaster sweeps away at one stroke the glittering surface rubbish and the worship of it, and turns men’s thoughts inward upon the emotions and desperately evolved