Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/451

Rh in America, of American parents. And have I not heard say that if one in three of the seventeen or eighteen hundred thousand inhabitants of Chicago were born on American soil—not merely in Chicago, nor in Illinois, nor in the Western States, but in America—it would be a great deal? Talk after that of the characters of races! Not to mention that all, or nearly all, of them have traveled, have run over the world; they know France and they know Paris; they have spent months or years there; they know Rome and Florence! No, evidently "race" has not the importance here that is given it, any more than it has in Europe; or, rather,—and from the moment that one is neither Chinese, negro, nor redskin,—it is habitudes, civilization, history that make "races;" and in our modern world, on both sides of the Atlantic, if the economists can say that the universal movement tends toward the "equalization of fortunes," it is still more true that it tends toward the effacement of all peculiarities which are not individual. An Englishman or an American does not greatly differ, as such, from a Frenchman or a German, and he differs only by having inherited a different civilization; and thanks to the facility of communications and exchanges, the development of industry, the internationalism of science and the solidarity of interests, these very differences may be reduced to differences of time and moment. The Americans are younger than we are, and that is evident first of all in their curiosity to know what we think about them.

They are also less "complicated," and by that I mean that they show what they are more naïvely, more frankly, more courageously than we do. Here one is what he is, and as he is so by decision or by choice he shows it. . ..

Nor is any astonishment felt because women, like men, have their clubs, where they meet to lunch, to talk about things that interest them—chiffons, housekeeping, cooking—to exchange ideas, and, at a pinch, when they are philosophers, "to comment on the Book of Job considered as an example of the miseries of humanity." Here all this appears natural. A woman belongs to herself in the first place, and, moreover, it is not required of her, as it is among us, that she should keep, so to say, four or five personages together. She is not compelled by prejudices to conceal her aptitudes or disguise her tastes. She has the right to herself, and she makes use of it.

No doubt there is some relation between this liberty to be oneself and certain independence in reference to "airs, waters, and places," and to habitudes which in Europe we convert into so many fetters, generally with regard to physical and moral surroundings. Omnia mecum porto, said the sage of antiquity: the American resembles this sage. Baltimore, as I have noted, is a city of residences, a city where the people are less mobilizable. They do not camp out here, they dwell; the very houses look as if they were bedded more deeply in the ground. And yet, were it necessary, one feels absolutely certain that the inhabitant would transport, ought I to say his home? but in any case his domicile, his habitudes, and his life to St. Louis or Chicago more easily than we Frenchmen would go from Paris to St. Germain. And the reason is not a need of change, an impatience of remaining in the same place, an inquietude, an agitation which is unable to settle down, but, in my opinion, the confidence which an American feels of being himself wherever he goes. The personality of a true American is interior. He is at home everywhere because he is everywhere himself. The displacement, the removal, which helps us to escape ourselves, gives him the sensation of his identity. Again a proof of youth and force! He will grow older; I hope he may, since he desires it; and already I can easily understand that if I should penetrate into the West, every turn of the wheels would carry me from an older to a newer world. But meanwhile, and even here where there is a little history in the atmosphere, it is certainly that which distinguishes them from us. They are younger; and is not that precisely what certain observers dislike in them?

I would not push the metaphor too far, and I do not care to report all my impressions concerning this youthfulness of the American people. It would be too easy, and, like everything which is so easy, more specious than correct. An Irishman, a German, brings to America the temperament due to long heredity. But the very circumstances into which he is plunged are such that he is obliged to adapt himself to them promptly, and a somewhat brutal selection quickly eliminates those whom it must "Americanize." One comprehends that this is because they have a good deal of pride and very little vanity. It is because they are what they are. A