There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled
"American." 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 conversation, or preference for a
particular subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or
face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or
disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can
rationally be generalized as "American."
Whenever you have found what seems to be an "American" 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 "American." 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 coquette;
I have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our novels,
and seen her twin in foreign novels.
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