I learn from him
that there is 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 upon 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 one and which is the other; they are
inextricably mingled. I prefer the talk of the French _homunculus_; it
is at least more amusing.
It is interesting in this manner to perceive, so largely developed, the
germs of extinction in the so-called powerful Anglo-Saxon family.
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