gy is not a soulless machine; for
it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is a very small
box for so big a thing; but it is not an empty box. But the point is
that he is not only proud of his energy, he is proud of his excitement.
He is not ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in his
manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel of his machine breaks
four billion butterflies an hour.

That is the point about American sport; that it is not in the least
sportive. It is because it is not very sportive that we sometimes say it
is not very sporting. It has the vices of a religion. It has all the
paradox of original sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It is
sometimes untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treacherous
because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they lied for their
lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for their chieftains in a
Highland feud. We may say that the vassal readily committed treason; but
it is equally true that he readily endured torture. So does the American
athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacrifice but the solemnity of
the American athlete is like that of the American Indian. The athletes
in the States have the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the
great historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer an
ascetic regime not to be matched in any monasticism and hardly in any
militarism. If any tradition of these things remains in a saner age,
they will probably be remembered as a mysterious religious order of
fakirs or dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted in honour
of Hercules or Castor and Pollux. And that is really the spiritual
atmosphere though the gods have vanished; and the religion is
subconscious and therefore irrational. For the problem of the modern
world is that it has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be
rational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa-nut shy. They
would fast or bleed to win a race of paper boats on a pond. They would
rise from a sick-bed to listen to Mrs. Asquith.

But it is the real reason that interests me here. It is certainly not
that Americans are so stupid as not to know that cocoa-nuts are only
cocoa-nuts and paper boats only made of paper. Americans are, on an
average, rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are well
aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith is something of a
mythologist. It is not that they do not kn