ermans, the
Italians, the Swedes, the French, the Chinamen, the Greasers; and the
Catholics, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists,
the Baptists, the Spiritualists, the Mormons, the Shakers, the Quakers,
the Jews, the Campbellites, the infidels, the Christian Scientists, the
Mind-Curists, the Faith-Curists, the train-robbers, the White Caps, the
Moonshiners. And when a thousand able novels have been written, there
you have the soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of
the people; and not anywhere else can these be had. And the shadings of
character, manners, feelings, ambitions, will be infinite.

"'The nature of a people' is always of a similar shade in its
vices and its virtues, in its frivolities and in its labor.
'It is this physiognomy which it is necessary to discover',
and every document is good, from the hall of a casino to the
church, from the foibles of a fashionable woman to the
suggestions of a revolutionary leader. I am therefore quite
sure that this 'American soul', the principal interest and the
great object of my voyage, appears behind the records of
Newport for those who choose to see it."--M. Paul Bourget.

[The italics ('') are mine.] It is a large contract which he has
undertaken. "Records" is a pretty poor word there, but I think the use
of it is due to hasty translation. In the original the word is 'fastes'.
I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he expected to find the great
"American soul" secreted behind the ostentatious of Newport; and that
he was going to get it out and examine it, and generalize it, and
psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its hidden vast mystery:
"the nature of the people" of the United States of America. We have been
accused 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." 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
generalize