I resume my hasty notes, of which I sent you the first instalment some
weeks ago. I mentioned that I intended to leave my hotel, not finding in
it real matter. It was kept by a Pomeranian and the waiters without
exception were from the Fatherland. I might as well have sat down with
my note-book Unter den Linden, and I felt that, having come here for
documentation, or to put my finger straight upon the social pulse, I
should project myself as much as possible into the circumstances which
are in part the consequence and in part the cause of its activities and
intermittences. I saw there could be no well-grounded knowledge without
this preliminary operation of my getting a near view, as slightly as
possible modified by elements proceeding from a different combination of
forces, of the spontaneous home-life of the nation.
I accordingly engaged a room in the house of a lady of pure French
extraction and education, who supplements the shortcomings of an income
insufficient to the ever-growing demands of the Parisian system of
sense-gratification by providing food and lodging for a limited number of
distinguished strangers. I should have preferred to have my room here
only, and to take my meals in a brewery, of very good appearance, which I
speedily discovered in the same street; but this arrangement, though very
clearly set out by myself, was not acceptable to the mistress of the
establishment—a woman with a mathematical head—and I have consoled myself
for the extra expense by fixing my thoughts upon the great chance that
conformity to the customs of the house gives me of studying the
table-manners of my companions, and of observing the French nature at a
peculiarly physiological moment, the moment when the satisfaction of the
_taste_, which is the governing quality in its composition, produces a
kind of exhalation, an intellectual transpiration, which, though light
and perhaps invisible to a superficial spectator, is nevertheless
appreciable by a properly adjusted instrument. I’ve adjusted my
instrument very satisfactorily—I mean the one I carry in my good square
German head—and I’m not afraid of losing a single drop of this valuable
fluid as it condenses itself upon the plate of my observation. A
prepared surface is what I need, and I’ve prepared my surface.
Unfortunately here also I find the individual native in the minority.
There are only four French persons in the house—the individuals concerned
in its management, three of whom are women, and one a man. Such a
preponderance of the Weibliche is, however, in itself characteristic, as
I needn’t remind you what an abnormally-developed part this sex has
played in French history. The remaining figure is ostensibly that of a
biped, and apparently that of a man, but I hesitate to allow him the
whole benefit of the higher classification. He strikes me as less human
than simian, and whenever I hear him talk I seem to myself to have paused
in the street to listen to the shrill clatter of a hand-organ, to which
the gambols of a hairy _homunculus_ form an accompaniment.
I mentioned to you before that my expectation of rough usage in
consequence of my unattenuated, even if not frivolously aggressive,
Teutonism was to prove completely unfounded. No one seems either unduly
conscious or affectedly unperceiving of my so rich Berlin background; I’m
treated on the contrary with the positive civility which is the portion
of every traveller who pays the bill without scanning the items too
narrowly. This, I confess, has been something of a surprise to me, and
I’ve not yet made up my mind as to the fundamental cause of the anomaly.
My determination to take up my abode in a French interior was largely
dictated by the supposition that I should be substantially disagreeable
to its inmates. I wished to catch in the fact the different forms taken
by the irritation I should naturally produce; for it is under the
influence of irritation that the French character most completely
expresses itself. My presence, however, operates, as I say, less than
could have been hoped as a stimulus, and in this respect I’m materially
disappointed. They treat me as they treat every one else; whereas, in
order to be treated differently, I was resigned in advance to being
treated worse. A further proof, if any were needed, of that vast and, as
it were, fluid _waste_ (I have so often dwelt on to you) which attends
the process of philosophic secretion. I’ve not, I repeat, fully
explained to myself this logical contradiction; but this is the
explanation to which I tend. The French are so exclusively occupied with
the idea of themselves that in spite of the very definite image the
German personality presented to them by the war of 1870 they have at
present no distinct apprehension of its existence. They are not very
sure that there _are_, concretely, any Germans; they have already
forgotten the convincing proofs presented to them nine years ago. A
German was something disagreeable and disconcerting, an irreducible mass,
which they determined to keep out of their conception of things. I
therefore hold we’re wrong to govern ourselves upon the hypothesis of the
_revanche_; the French nature is too shallow for that large and powerful
plant to bloom in it.
The English-speaking specimens, too, I’ve not been willing to neglect the
opportunity to examine; and among these I’ve paid special attention to
the American varieties, of which I find here several singular examples.
The two most remarkable are a young man who presents all the
characteristics of a period of national decadence; reminding me strongly
of some diminutive Hellenised Roman of the third century. He’s an
illustration of the period of culture in which the faculty of
appreciation has obtained such a preponderance over that of production
that the latter sinks into a kind of rank sterility, and the mental
condition becomes analogous to that of a malarious bog. I hear from him
of the existence of an immense number of Americans exactly resembling
him, and that the city of Boston indeed is almost exclusively composed of
them. (He communicated this fact very proudly, as if it were greatly to
the credit of his native country; little perceiving the truly sinister
impression it made on me.)
What strikes one in it is that it is a phenomenon to the best of my
knowledge—and you know what my knowledge is—unprecedented and unique in
the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of
evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of
the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the
interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness. With the
Americans indeed the crudity and the rottenness are identical and
simultaneous; it is impossible to say, as in the conversation of this
deplorable young man, which is the one and which the other: they’re
inextricably confused. Homunculus for homunculus I prefer that of the
Frenchman; he’s at least more amusing.
It’s interesting in this manner to perceive, so largely developed, the
germs of extinction in the so-called powerful Anglo-Saxon family. I find
them in almost as recognisable a form in a young woman from the State of
Maine, in the province of New England, with whom I have had a good deal
of conversation. She differs somewhat from the young man I just
mentioned in that the state of affirmation, faculty of production and
capacity for action are things, in her, less inanimate; she has more of
the freshness and vigour that we suppose to belong to a young
civilisation. But unfortunately she produces nothing but evil, and her
tastes and habits are similarly those of a Roman lady of the lower
Empire. She makes no secret of them and has in fact worked out a
complete scheme of experimental adventure, that is of personal licence,
which she is now engaged in carrying out. As the opportunities she finds
in her own country fail to satisfy her she has come to Europe “to try,”
as she says, “for herself.” It’s the doctrine of universal
“unprejudiced” experience professed with a cynicism that is really most
extraordinary, and which, presenting itself in a young woman of
considerable education, appears to me to be the judgement of a society.
Another observation which pushes me to the same induction—that of the
premature vitiation of the American population—is the attitude of the
Americans whom I have before me with regard to each other. I have before
me a second flower of the same huge so-called democratic garden, who is
less abnormally developed than the one I have just described, but who yet
bears the stamp of this peculiar combination of the barbarous and, to
apply to them one of their own favourite terms, the _ausgespielt_, the
“played-out.” These three little persons look with the greatest mistrust
and aversion upon each other; and each has repeatedly taken me apart and
assured me secretly, that he or she only is the real, the genuine, the
typical American. A type that has lost itself before it has been
fixed—what can you look for from this?
Add to this that there are two young Englanders in the house who hate all
the Americans in a lump, making between them none of the distinctions and
favourable comparisons which they insist upon, and for which, as
involving the recognition of shades and a certain play of the critical
sense, the still quite primitive insular understanding is wholly inapt,
and you will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that, between
precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family
is destined to consume itself, and that with its decline the prospect of
successfully-organised conquest and unarrested incalculable expansion, to
which I alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the
Fatherland!
IX
MIRANDA HOPE TO HER MOTHER
_October_ 22.