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 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,