Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/169

 WHAT BOURGET THINKS OF

the United States of America. We have been ac cused of being a nation addicted to inventing wild schemes. I trust that we shall be allowed to retire to second place now.

There isn t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled American.&quot; There isn t a single human ambition, or religious trend, or drift of thought, or peculiarity of education, or code of principles, or breed of folly, or style of conversa tion, or preference for a particular subject for dis cussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or man ners, or disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can rationally be generalized as &quot;American.&quot;

Whenever you have found what seems to be an &quot; American&quot; peculiarity, you have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in the social scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared. And you can cross the Atlantic and find it again. There may be a Newport religious drift, or sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of face, but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and west, where you could not find your duplicates. It is the same with everything else which one might propose to call &quot;American.&quot; M. Bourget thinks he has found the American Coquette. If he had really found her he would also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she exists in other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart and the same ways and impulses. I think this because I have seen our

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