270

THROUGH FRENCH OPTICS

A Critical View of the American People by Paul Bourget.

The Analytical Race Specialist Tells What He Thinks of Us After Twenty Days' Inspection

Some Criticisms of His View by Mrs. Peattie - We Are Children, but We Are Glad of It.

We have been viewed and reviewed - we Americans, by any number of foreign visitors. Some of them have been foolish, shallow and provincial, some have been honest, earnest, and even profound. A great many have babbled nothings and bored us to the verge of extinction. Some of them have been simply stupid, and have taken the bad manners of foreign immigrants, finding hospital in this country, as the standard of American manners.

But the other day a great observer of men came among us, and viewed us as he had viewed many other people, from the point of view of Race. Since "Cosmopolis" was written, Paul Bourget has stood identified with the question of Race -the great modern delineator and discriminator of [?] -the man who reads humans as the Egyptologist reads hieroglyphs. His facile and scholarly genius has become identified with this question, and it is, therefore, with profound interest that one reads what he has to say about the American race, that new, yet very individual thing, which yesterday was not, and which today embodies so large a part of the best energy and pride in the world.

For it is in fact that while other nations grown languid, sated and overcultivated, so that patriotism has degenerated in them into a vanity or disappeared altogether into a vague cosmopolitism, that in America the sentiment strengthens and grows, bracing itself as foes to its principles appear, growing defiant as philosophers threaten its overthrow, and asserting itself passionately with the vehemence of youth and of faith.

All this is a part of the involuntary and spontaneous effort of the American race to create, formulate and cement itself. Indeed, we have cast the mold, and given it free, strong lines. It is hardening now. and by and by we will take it out of the mold. It will be finished. Time will behold it, and will begin its work upon it. It will mellow it, beautify it, and, presently, begin to weaken it. The ravages will become apparent. And the disintegration will come - home many centuries from now?

But never mind.

That is altogether another, a different story.

M. Bourgel's first impressions of American, on leaving the steamer, appear to have been that we are rather terrible. He certainly considers us astonishing. We gave his nerves a tingle - even a shock. And it must be admitted that we are horribly noisy and brutal in our business life. To be sure, he enjoyed the harbor, it would be hard to forgive anyone who did not enjoy the harbor of New York.

"On the morning of the seventh day we come in sight of New York - a summer's morning, burning and veiled. We were not able to enter yesterday, and I am glad of it, before the inconceivable picture of this arrival. The steamer is mounting the mouth of Hudson, which forms the harbor for the great town, with a movement as gentle as it had been rapid twenty-four hours ago. This sensation would be worth the voyage alone, so unexpected and profound is it. The enormous estuary shivers and ripples, stirred by the last throbbings of the Atlantic, and, on these two banks, as far as the eye can reach, on the right where New York spreads itself our, on the left where Jersey City swarms, indefinitely, interminable, it is a series of short wooden jetties, broad and covered in. Names are written on them, here that of a railroad company, then of a shipping company, then of another railroad company, and of another shipping company, and continuously also from each of these jetties a ferryboat starts out or arrives in, carrying away or emitting passengers by the hundreds, dozens of carriages with horses harnessed to them, entire trains full of goods. I count five or six of those ferry-boats, then fifteen, then twenty. Enormous, overhanging the green water with their two decks painted in white and brown, they go beating the heavy waters with their iron wheels, and at their summit a gigantic swing beam regulates their uniform movement they go, encountering one another, pushing up against each other, without doing any harm, so steady is their speed, with their appearance of colossal, laborious animals, each performing its task with a conscientious safety."

As for the city itself, he paid that the tribute of being very much surprised at it.

"The two towns, on the right and on the left, continue to extend themselves beyond what you could dream of. Leaning out on the New York side, I can distinguish some very small houses, an ocean of low constructions whence emerge, like islands with abrupt cliffs, buildings of brick so boldly colossal that even from here their height is crushing to the eye. I count the stories above the line of roofs. One of them has ten, another twelve. Another is unfinished. A hollow framework of iron is outlined against the sky, a project of six such stories stop of eight others already built.

"Gigantic, colossal, immoderate, unbridled, words fall to equal that apparition, that landscape in which the enormous mouth of the river [?] as frame to a development of human energy greater than itself. Having reached this intensity of collective efforts that energy becomes an element of nature. History adds to that impression, in order to redouble it, the indisputable bluntness of figures. In 1624, not much more than 250 years ago, the Indians sold to a Westphalian the point of this island of Manhattan. He founded the town, which is there now. The poetry of democracy, and there is really one, lies in those rushes of popular vitality wherein the individual disappears, where the separate effort is but as a note of nothing in an immense concert. It is certainly not the Parthenon, that little temple on a little bill where the Greeks have fixed their ideal; only so much material as was indispensable and spiritual essence sufficient to animate the whole, even to the smallest atom, with measure and harmony; but it is the dark and violent poetry of the modern world which gives you a tragic shiver, so much voluntary and furious humanity holds in a horizon like that of this morning, and it is the same every day!"

Bourget's first mingling with Americans at Castle Garden undeniably gave him a shock. But it seems that his friends had led him to expect as much. Indeed, he tells of one young Frenchman who came here armed with letters of introduction, and all that would have made his visit entertaining. Yet, five days after landing, he took a steamer for home.

"I was not able to stand the blow," was the only reply he made his astonished parents.

Bourget says: "That blow in landing is certainly a severe one to a Frenchman accustomed to that administrative order, the slowness of which one abuses so much when obliged to submit to it, but which we regret when we find ourselves in an Angle-Saxon crowd, where the struggle for life has already its humble and painful symbol in the struggle for the baggage as soon as the boat arrives at the [?].

"An immense shed, crowded with people going and coming, shoving and knocking up against one; gigantic policemen, with huge stomachs protruding from under their belts, who hold themselves in that crowd as columns against which it shall break; custom house officers in unbuttoned uniforms, for it is warm, whose checks are swollen out with a quid, and who expectorate long jets of brown saliva over the floor where the boxes are to be placed; those boxes just arrived and thrown over with a jerk amind the expressmen who offer their checks; carpenters with chisels and hammers to undo and nail up the cases, the arms of employee in the open cases turning and turning over the linen and dresses with the roughness of people in a hurry; then those trunks no sooner closed and 'checked' than they are seized by porters and buried down at the risk of being broken along a sloping plank into the lower floor. A strong smell of human sweat permeates everything. There you have the entrance into the big American city. It was as brutal and as rapid as a boxing feint."

Of course Bourget permits himself to be entertained with all the paraphernalia of our civilization. He is almost irritated at the national genius for ingenuity, and considers the endless contrivances for the saving of time and energy as childish. He can, however, and does, understand a bath tub with hot and cold water, and looks upon that as a more reasonable refinement. He is distressed, also, as might have been expected, about our apparent lack of time.

"At what o'clock does one love?" he cries. "At what o'clock does one die? At what o'clock does one think? At what o'clock, in short, is one a man-- 'nothing but a man'--as old Faust cried--and not a work machine in motion?"

He is exercised for fear we will never even find time to grow roses. He thinks people look too self-centered. He complains because they appear to be engaged with inward thought, instead of being interested and amused by their neighbors. But in all this he finds, as well he may, a nervous and triumphant energy which belongs and only could belong to a race which is young and strong and independent.

So, to pass over all these observations of tricks of living and his comments upon the splendor of the surroundings of the rich, and the prodigality of all, and the rush, assertion, love of display, and candor, let us get at what he seems to consider the salient point.

He is writing of the set at Newport, our "coterie of millionaires," and says:
"As the wealthy classes in America have no kind of influence over the elections, the ambitious politician has nothing to do in society. There is no 'institut' here to give te vogue of a wordly coterie which can lead a writer or an artist. Neither is there a center whence literary reputations radiate and which is condensed in a few salons. The girls only exceptionally receive marriage portions, so that the fortune hunters chiefly consist in strangers ruined and with titles, who generally disappear after a season. They feel too soon that old Europe is still the surest ground for that kind of speculation, as on the other hand the morals of the country seem good in the main and that an acknowledged 'liaison' is here a phenomenon, this social life cannot either serve as a screen to the complications of passional life. Reduced in that way to its proper basis, it develops itself more and more exaggeratedly toward gorgeousness and public entertainments, and as everywhere some real food and a positive occupation are necessary to such vigorous activities, this society life ends here at least by turning entirely towards sport. So again, what logically should be a fault becomes a principle of health, so true is it that among the strong races everything develops into force, even frivolity and vanity, while among the people who are getting old even culture and delicacy only end in sickness and corruption.

"How do they amuse themselves?"

"I have amused myself in order to answer that question with a certain amount of precision by following almost hour by hour and for several days the use which some of those women make of their time who are called here 'leaders of society.' I transcribe one of the sketches thus obtained, taking it among twenty others. They are almost all similar by the physiological strength which the display, the taste for out of door life and for exercise, and this way of amusing themselves explains why the ladies of society, instead of being debilitated and having faded complexions and that 'old glove' look, as a cruel humorist put it, like their sisters in all the large cities of Europe, retain on the contrary the freshness of their skins, that suppleness of movement and their vital force. They are aware of it and they are proud of it.

"What pleases me," said one of them, "in considering that I am an American is to know that I belong to a fine and healthy race."

"They do not modify their criticism as regards the Parisiennes. I hear one deploring the change of one of her fellow countrywomen who has married a Frenchman: "She was so robust, with such a good complexion, and now she has become thin and worn, quite sallow," and they laugh in saying such things, and when the dentist has worked there he has put in gold, which shines with such new brilliancy that it no longer has the appearance of an infirmity!"

In another place, in describing a game of tennis, Bourget says:

"At a certain moment one of the young players who has just hit the ball calls one of the attendants to clean the India-rubber, sole of his shoe, which has become encrusted with mud. He contrives during this commonplace operation to assume an attitude so graceful that I can understand a young girl exclaiming, 'Oh! how I wish he would win! He is so nice looking!" a naive exclamation in which the profound admiration of the American woman for looks, for that physical beauty, considered after the pagan fashion. It goes so far, that admiration, that one of the most celebrated athletes in the United States gathers in his box, after the representation in which he has taken part, the women of the best society, and, with the torso naked, gives them a lecture about his body, a conference on musculature. The photograph of that torso, muscular, in fact, like that in the Vatican which old Michael Angelo's hands caressed, is sold in all the shops, and more than one amongst those fair spectators of the tennis [?] one in her little drawing room. 'There are people who consider that very indecent, said one of those women in showing me that singular document of her independence of ideas. I do not. It is a Greek thing, that is all.' "

It is certain that Americans will read this with some vanity. For there have been times when, taking the word of others for it, they have been led to think themselves an enervated race. They have consented to think this in spite of the fact that a larger proportion of their children live than the children of any other nation, in spite of the fact that a larger proportion of their children live than the children of any other nation, in spite of the fact that they are more temperate than the English or Irish, more pure of life than the French, less given to suicide than the Germans, less subject to madness than the Scandinavians, seldom afflicted with indolence like the Italians. All these troubles of brain and body, the result of national hysteria or national vice, appear here in the minimum. Our vices, like our virtues, come from an excess of energy. In very many cases it takes the form of greed. We are accumulators. We do to mean to be merciless, but there are times when some among us approach it. But the strength is there--it has always been there. It has been a torrent that flowed on, from state to state, subduing half a world, and civilizing it till it mocked the civilization of other countries. Nothing in the development of the world has been so tremendous. Nothing has involved such an outburst of intellectual daring and creativeness. Nothing has required such physical courage, such foregoing of sentiment, ease, love of home, caution, and personal indulgence. In another sense, this magnificent exploit of the Americans, which in 200 years has subjugated a wilderness of the mightiest sort, has been supremely selfish. But it has been a selfishness so colossal that it attained dignity, and even heroism.

Weak? No. We never have been. True, some, presuming on their restless ambition, have worn themselves out and fall under the curse of prostrated nerves. But these have served as object lessons, and the man of affairs knows where to put a period to his work now. He cultivates amusement with the same passionate interest that he cultivates business. He compares his son with the son of his neighbor, from physical standards as well as mental ones. He wants his daughters large and beautiful as well as his sons. And a part of the life of almost every home is in the interest in physical sports of some sort or other.

What M. Bourget has to say about our conversation is also interesting, and, though we may not like it, it is true.

"There is in the conversation of the American, and, above all, of the American woman, a second feature which saves from pedantry and stiffness. That feature is their vivacity. There is in their slightest remark a profound flavor of reality, and also in the movement as in the gesture. Never anything abstract or vague; always those words which point, those terms which betray experience. Also they have in no degree that notion of personal effacement which gives a more brilliant varnish to politeness, but which diminishes all the individuality of conversation. They never hesitate to speak of themselves and to recall their voyages, their adventures--what they call, to put it exactly, their experiences. They easily gain by it, having little wit of speech, what one might call the wit of things, a picturesqueness of delivery, which produces an original, novel humor when they mix it with gayety. Here again you may feel beneath the rich woman, like beneath the lavish man, the people quite near. You will also feel this in a certain general naivete of conversation.

"Equivocal insinuations are totally eliminated, and the gossip is rarely of a cruel kind. Mockery is constant, but a mockery which does not tear to pieces. It is carried on above all means of gay anecdotes. The individual features of a character are its main objects. Then follow the social errors, the [?] in taste in the pursuit of celebrities or titled people. These last generally come from Europe, and they prove that the passage from the new world to the old has the habitual result of drawing forth the defects of the Americans instead of correcting them.

"At home in his birthplace he is more simple, more cordial, and, all things considered, when you hear him speak you respect him, you find him good-natured, as they say, without much hatred, without much envy and so easily amused. Forain and to me, after having spent a few days at Newport:

" 'They are children.' "

There were never truer words spoken. It is difficult to prove that they are true. But any American who has known the feeling of intense entertainment upon talking with a cultivated foreigner will perceive what is meant. The flavor of foreign conversation is very sweet to most of us. We listen to it, fascinated. We perceive in it something that our best learning, our most honest efforts, our amiability, frankness and experience will not give us. We are, in fact, naive, simple direct--or, if subtle, it is with a transparent subtlety. The complex mental makeup of the foreigner therefore baffles and diverts us. And, by acknowledging this superior mental adeptness, we confess our own simplicity. It is nothing to be ashamed of. It is, in fact, one of the characteristics of the new race. It belongs to youth. It comes from the necessity of dealing with things directly. It is the result of seeing things themselves, as they are, and not in seeing the ideas about things. It shows personal contact with labor, with difficulties, with detail, with law-making, with school building. It stands for all that is the antithesis of idleness. It is the antipodes of aristocracy--that is, of decay. It is the heart and soul of a democracy.

M. Bourget is a genius. True, he might have health better with us if a good many of us who are not millionaires could have shown him our home life. But he has done exceedingly well as it is, and we are obliged to him.

All of which is another sign of our simplicity. For if we were a more developed nation we would be outraged at this scrutiny. We would rise up to cast out the man who approached us with a microscope in his hand to examine us as if we were disease-bearing [animaculm?]. But being what we are, a simple race, more or less spectacular, given to viewing ourselves from an objective point of view, we consent to be examined, and are almost as delighted as the scientist when a spot is discovered on back or belly different from that of any other of our tiny tribe. Yes we, the new race, are conscious of our newness. We make a boast of it. For man must make a boast of something. And since we are debarred of all legends of antiquity may we not have new tales of prowess--tales of lands and seas subdued? Of many races moulded into one? Of a passionate attempt at government which is so near the ideal that poor human nature only found its balance by abusing and debasing every principle of it? Have we not higher mountains, larger inconsistencies, bigger buildings, finer ships, more steam and electricity, more beauty and energy--yes, even more refinement and delicacy--than any other nation? Aye, verily, we have found a way to heap excess on everything. We are extremists. We gorge ourselves, whether it be with money, power, splendor or refinement.

We are children!

But it will be just so much longer for us to live!

So, here's to you, Paul Bourget! Perceiver! Genius! We drink your health with the assumption and the gaiety of youth. For it is wonderful to be young!
ELIA W. PEATTIE.

THE DIAMOND NECKLACE

Sunday

THROUGH FRENCH OPTICS

A Critical View of the American People by Paul Bourget.

The Analytical Race Specialist Tells What He Thinks of Us After Twenty Days' Inspection

Some Criticisms of His View by Mrs. Peattie - We Are Children, but We Are Glad of It.

We have been viewed and reviewed - we Americans, by any number of foreign visitors. Some of them have been foolish, shallow and provincial, some have been honest, earnest, and even profound. A great many have babbled nothings and bored us to the verge of extinction. Some of them have been simply stupid, and have taken the bad manners of foreign immigrants, finding hospital in this country, as the standard of American manners.

But the other day a great observer of men came among us, and viewed us as he had viewed many other people, from the point of view of Race. Since "Cosmopolis" was written, Paul Bourget has stood identified with the question of Race -the great modern delineator and discriminator of [?] -the man who reads humans as the Egyptologist reads hieroglyphs. His facile and scholarly genius has become identified with this question, and it is, therefore, with profound interest that one reads what he has to say about the American race, that new, yet very individual thing, which yesterday was not, and which today embodies so large a part of the best energy and pride in the world.

For it is in fact that while other nations grown languid, sated and overcultivated, so that patriotism has degenerated in them into a vanity or disappeared altogether into a vague cosmopolitism, that in America the sentiment strengthens and grows, bracing itself as foes to its principles appear, growing defiant as philosophers threaten its overthrow, and asserting itself passionately with the vehemence of youth and of faith.

All this is a part of the involuntary and spontaneous effort of the American race to create, formulate and cement itself. Indeed, we have cast the mold, and given it free, strong lines. It is hardening now. and by and by we will take it out of the mold. It will be finished. Time will behold it, and will begin its work upon it. It will mellow it, beautify it, and, presently, begin to weaken it. The ravages will become apparent. And the disintegration will come - home many centuries from now?

But never mind.

That is altogether another, a different story.

M. Bourgel's first impressions of American, on leaving the steamer, appear to have been that we are rather terrible. He certainly considers us astonishing. We gave his nerves a tingle - even a shock. And it must be admitted that we are horribly noisy and brutal in our business life. To be sure, he enjoyed the harbor, it would be hard to forgive anyone who did not enjoy the harbor of New York.

"On the morning of the seventh day we come in sight of New York - a summer's morning, burning and veiled. We were not able to enter yesterday, and I am glad of it, before the inconceivable picture of this arrival. The steamer is mounting the mouth of Hudson, which forms the harbor for the great town, with a movement as gentle as it had been rapid twenty-four hours ago. This sensation would be worth the voyage alone, so unexpected and profound is it. The enormous estuary shivers and ripples, stirred by the last throbbings of the Atlantic, and, on these two banks, as far as the eye can reach, on the right where New York spreads itself our, on the left where Jersey City swarms, indefinitely, interminable, it is a series of short wooden jetties, broad and covered in. Names are written on them, here that of a railroad company, then of a shipping company, then of another railroad company, and of another shipping company, and continuously also from each of these jetties a ferryboat starts out or arrives in, carrying away or emitting passengers by the hundreds, dozens of carriages with horses harnessed to them, entire trains full of goods. I count five or six of those ferry-boats, then fifteen, then twenty. Enormous, overhanging the green water with their two decks painted in white and brown, they go beating the heavy waters with their iron wheels, and at their summit a gigantic swing beam regulates their uniform movement they go, encountering one another, pushing up against each other, without doing any harm, so steady is their speed, with their appearance of colossal, laborious animals, each performing its task with a conscientious safety."

As for the city itself, he paid that the tribute of being very much surprised at it.

"The two towns, on the right and on the left, continue to extend themselves beyond what you could dream of. Leaning out on the New York side, I can distinguish some very small houses, an ocean of low constructions whence emerge, like islands with abrupt cliffs, buildings of brick so boldly colossal that even from here their height is crushing to the eye. I count the stories above the line of roofs. One of them has ten, another twelve. Another is unfinished. A hollow framework of iron is outlined against the sky, a project of six such stories stop of eight others already built.

"Gigantic, colossal, immoderate, unbridled, words fall to equal that apparition, that landscape in which the enormous mouth of the river [?] as frame to a development of human energy greater than itself. Having reached this intensity of collective efforts that energy becomes an element of nature. History adds to that impression, in order to redouble it, the indisputable bluntness of figures. In 1624, not much more than 250 years ago, the Indians sold to a Westphalian the point of this island of Manhattan. He founded the town, which is there now. The poetry of democracy, and there is really one, lies in those rushes of popular vitality wherein the individual disappears, where the separate effort is but as a note of nothing in an immense concert. It is certainly not the Parthenon, that little temple on a little bill where the Greeks have fixed their ideal; only so much material as was indispensable and spiritual essence sufficient to animate the whole, even to the smallest atom, with measure and harmony; but it is the dark and violent poetry of the modern world which gives you a tragic shiver, so much voluntary and furious humanity holds in a horizon like that of this morning, and it is the same every day!"

Bourget's first mingling with Americans at Castle Garden undeniably gave him a shock. But it seems that his friends had led him to expect as much. Indeed, he tells of one young Frenchman who came here armed with letters of introduction, and all that would have made his visit entertaining. Yet, five days after landing, he took a steamer for home.

"I was not able to stand the blow," was the only reply he made his astonished parents.

Bourget says: "That blow in landing is certainly a severe one to a Frenchman accustomed to that administrative order, the slowness of which one abuses so much when obliged to submit to it, but which we regret when we find ourselves in an Angle-Saxon crowd, where the struggle for life has already its humble and painful symbol in the struggle for the baggage as soon as the boat arrives at the [?].

"An immense shed, crowded with people going and coming, shoving and knocking up against one; gigantic policemen, with huge stomachs protruding from under their belts, who hold themselves in that crowd as columns against which it shall break; custom house officers in unbuttoned uniforms, for it is warm, whose checks are swollen out with a quid, and who expectorate long jets of brown saliva over the floor where the boxes are to be placed; those boxes just arrived and thrown over with a jerk amind the expressmen who offer their checks; carpenters with chisels and hammers to undo and nail up the cases, the arms of employee in the open cases turning and turning over the linen and dresses with the roughness of people in a hurry; then those trunks no sooner closed and 'checked' than they are seized by porters and buried down at the risk of being broken along a sloping plank into the lower floor. A strong smell of human sweat permeates everything. There you have the entrance into the big American city. It was as brutal and as rapid as a boxing feint."

Of course Bourget permits himself to be entertained with all the paraphernalia of our civilization. He is almost irritated at the national genius for ingenuity, and considers the endless contrivances for the saving of time and energy as childish. He can, however, and does, understand a bath tub with hot and cold water, and looks upon that as a more reasonable refinement. He is distressed, also, as might have been expected, about our apparent lack of time.

"At what o'clock does one love?" he cries. "At what o'clock does one die? At what o'clock does one think? At what o'clock, in short, is one a man-- 'nothing but a man'--as old Faust cried--and not a work machine in motion?"

He is exercised for fear we will never even find time to grow roses. He thinks people look too self-centered. He complains because they appear to be engaged with inward thought, instead of being interested and amused by their neighbors. But in all this he finds, as well he may, a nervous and triumphant energy which belongs and only could belong to a race which is young and strong and independent.

So, to pass over all these observations of tricks of living and his comments upon the splendor of the surroundings of the rich, and the prodigality of all, and the rush, assertion, love of display, and candor, let us get at what he seems to consider the salient point.

He is writing of the set at Newport, our "coterie of millionaires," and says:
"As the wealthy classes in America have no kind of influence over the elections, the ambitious politician has nothing to do in society. There is no 'institut' here to give te vogue of a wordly coterie which can lead a writer or an artist. Neither is there a center whence literary reputations radiate and which is condensed in a few salons. The girls only exceptionally receive marriage portions, so that the fortune hunters chiefly consist in strangers ruined and with titles, who generally disappear after a season. They feel too soon that old Europe is still the surest ground for that kind of speculation, as on the other hand the morals of the country seem good in the main and that an acknowledged 'liaison' is here a phenomenon, this social life cannot either serve as a screen to the complications of passional life. Reduced in that way to its proper basis, it develops itself more and more exaggeratedly toward gorgeousness and public entertainments, and as everywhere some real food and a positive occupation are necessary to such vigorous activities, this society life ends here at least by turning entirely towards sport. So again, what logically should be a fault becomes a principle of health, so true is it that among the strong races everything develops into force, even frivolity and vanity, while among the people who are getting old even culture and delicacy only end in sickness and corruption.

"How do they amuse themselves?"

"I have amused myself in order to answer that question with a certain amount of precision by following almost hour by hour and for several days the use which some of those women make of their time who are called here 'leaders of society.' I transcribe one of the sketches thus obtained, taking it among twenty others. They are almost all similar by the physiological strength which the display, the taste for out of door life and for exercise, and this way of amusing themselves explains why the ladies of society, instead of being debilitated and having faded complexions and that 'old glove' look, as a cruel humorist put it, like their sisters in all the large cities of Europe, retain on the contrary the freshness of their skins, that suppleness of movement and their vital force. They are aware of it and they are proud of it.

"What pleases me," said one of them, "in considering that I am an American is to know that I belong to a fine and healthy race."

"They do not modify their criticism as regards the Parisiennes. I hear one deploring the change of one of her fellow countrywomen who has married a Frenchman: "She was so robust, with such a good complexion, and now she has become thin and worn, quite sallow," and they laugh in saying such things, and when the dentist has worked there he has put in gold, which shines with such new brilliancy that it no longer has the appearance of an infirmity!"

In another place, in describing a game of tennis, Bourget says:

"At a certain moment one of the young players who has just hit the ball calls one of the attendants to clean the India-rubber, sole of his shoe, which has become encrusted with mud. He contrives during this commonplace operation to assume an attitude so graceful that I can understand a young girl exclaiming, 'Oh! how I wish he would win! He is so nice looking!" a naive exclamation in which the profound admiration of the American woman for looks, for that physical beauty, considered after the pagan fashion. It goes so far, that admiration, that one of the most celebrated athletes in the United States gathers in his box, after the representation in which he has taken part, the women of the best society, and, with the torso naked, gives them a lecture about his body, a conference on musculature. The photograph of that torso, muscular, in fact, like that in the Vatican which old Michael Angelo's hands caressed, is sold in all the shops, and more than one amongst those fair spectators of the tennis [?] one in her little drawing room. 'There are people who consider that very indecent, said one of those women in showing me that singular document of her independence of ideas. I do not. It is a Greek thing, that is all.' "

It is certain that Americans will read this with some vanity. For there have been times when, taking the word of others for it, they have been led to think themselves an enervated race. They have consented to think this in spite of the fact that a larger proportion of their children live than the children of any other nation, in spite of the fact that a larger proportion of their children live than the children of any other nation, in spite of the fact that they are more temperate than the English or Irish, more pure of life than the French, less given to suicide than the Germans, less subject to madness than the Scandinavians, seldom afflicted with indolence like the Italians. All these troubles of brain and body, the result of national hysteria or national vice, appear here in the minimum. Our vices, like our virtues, come from an excess of energy. In very many cases it takes the form of greed. We are accumulators. We do to mean to be merciless, but there are times when some among us approach it. But the strength is there--it has always been there. It has been a torrent that flowed on, from state to state, subduing half a world, and civilizing it till it mocked the civilization of other countries. Nothing in the development of the world has been so tremendous. Nothing has involved such an outburst of intellectual daring and creativeness. Nothing has required such physical courage, such foregoing of sentiment, ease, love of home, caution, and personal indulgence. In another sense, this magnificent exploit of the Americans, which in 200 years has subjugated a wilderness of the mightiest sort, has been supremely selfish. But it has been a selfishness so colossal that it attained dignity, and even heroism.

Weak? No. We never have been. True, some, presuming on their restless ambition, have worn themselves out and fall under the curse of prostrated nerves. But these have served as object lessons, and the man of affairs knows where to put a period to his work now. He cultivates amusement with the same passionate interest that he cultivates business. He compares his son with the son of his neighbor, from physical standards as well as mental ones. He wants his daughters large and beautiful as well as his sons. And a part of the life of almost every home is in the interest in physical sports of some sort or other.

What M. Bourget has to say about our conversation is also interesting, and, though we may not like it, it is true.

"There is in the conversation of the American, and, above all, of the American woman, a second feature which saves from pedantry and stiffness. That feature is their vivacity. There is in their slightest remark a profound flavor of reality, and also in the movement as in the gesture. Never anything abstract or vague; always those words which point, those terms which betray experience. Also they have in no degree that notion of personal effacement which gives a more brilliant varnish to politness, but which diminishes all the individuality of conversation. They never hesitate