did not excite his. Consider this:
“There is not in all the United States an entirely nude
statue.”
If an angel should come down and say such a thing about heaven, a
reasonably cautious observer would take that angel’s number and inquire a
little further before he added it to his catch. What does the present
observer do? Adds it. Adds it at once. Adds it, and labels it with
this innocent comment:
“This small fact is strangely significant.”
It does seem to me that this kind of observing is defective.
Here is another curiosity which some liberal person made him a present
of. I should think it ought to have disturbed the deep slumber of his
suspicion a little, but it didn’t. It was a note from a fog-horn for
strenuousness, it seems to me, but the doomed voyager did not catch it.
If he had but caught it, it would have saved him from several disasters:
“If the American knows that you are traveling to take notes, he
is interested in it, and at the same time rejoices in it, as in
a tribute.”
Again, this is defective observation. It is human to like to be praised;
one can even notice it in the French. But it is not human to like to be
ridiculed, even when it comes in the form of a “tribute.” I think a
little psychologizing ought to have come in there. Something like this:
A dog does not like to be ridiculed, a redskin does not like to be
ridiculed, a negro does not like to be ridiculed, a Chinaman does not
like to be ridiculed; let us deduce from these significant facts this
formula: the American’s grade being higher than these, and the chain-of
argument stretching unbroken all the way up to him, there is room for
suspicion that the person who said the American likes to be ridiculed,
and regards it as a tribute, is not a capable observer.
I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional is
too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that great
art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks. Every now and then, at half-
hour intervals, M. Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies and
dissolves them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the charge
into a mould and turns you out a compact principle which will explain an
American girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn for old
things, or any other impossible riddle which a person wants answered.
It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that can
be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the
name of the nation where they are found. I wonder what they are.
Perhaps one of them is temperament. One speaks of French vivacity and
German gravity and English stubbornness. There is no American
temperament. The nearest that one can come at it is to say there are two
–the composed Northern and the impetuous Southern; and both are found in
other countries. Morals? Purity of women may fairly be called universal
with us, but that is the case in some other countries. We have no
monopoly of it; it cannot be named American. I think that there is but a
single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide
name “American.” That is the national devotion to ice-water. All
Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither
of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation. I suppose we do stand
alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves. When we have
been a month in Europe we lose our craving for it, and we finally tell
the hotel folk that they needn’t provide it any more. Yet we hardly
touch our native shore again, winter or summer, before we are eager for
it. The reasons for this state of things have not been psychologized
yet. I drop the hint and say no more.
It is my belief that there are some “national” traits and things
scattered about the world that are mere superstitions, frauds that have