The large towns of America, even New York, are provincial in this sense: everyone is interested in what the others do. It is not Paris, still less London. Thanks to that indefatigable meddler, the American reporter, who thrusts his nose everywhere, the slightest incidents of private life are made public, and commented upon right and left immediately. You need only live a couple of months in one of the large American cities, no matter which, in order to know everyone, and all their doings.
The mind of the Americans is always on the alert. They enter into everything, everything interests them, and there is always some fresh subject for conversation. If it is not a social event, or a literary or political one, it is a little scandal, a new religious sect, a new spiritualistic imposture—faith-healing, mind-cure;[6] conversation never dies for want of subjects. Exclaim that it is eccentricity if you like, and you will not be far wrong; but add that it is life, and you will be right. It is an existence more interesting than French life in the provinces, as the French poet has described it:—
"You waken, rise, and dress, go out to see the town;
Come home to dine or sup, and then to sleep lie down."
The Americans, and that in every station of life, have almost always three names: one Christian name and two family ones: George Washington Smith, Benjamin Franklin Jones, William Tell Brown. I should not have been astonished to make the acquaintance of a Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte Robinson. The celebrities do not escape it any more than the rest: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Richard Watson Gilder, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, etc., etc. Can one not see in these double names a title which the father thinks he confers on his child at the baptismal font?
All new societies have the same weaknesses. On the morrow of the Great Revolution, did we not call our children Epaminondas, Leonidas, Darius, Napoleon, etc.?
Every American, with the least self-respect, is colonel or judge. Few escape it, as Mark Twain once remarked of the decoration of the Legion of Honour. We are quits, Mark. America has a hundred times as many colonels as we have knights of the Legion of Honour.
When you are presented to a gentleman in an American drawing-room, and you have unfortunately not caught his name, there is no need to try and repair the evil; call him "Colonel," nine times out of ten it is safe; if luck should be against you, call him "Judge," and you are pretty sure to be right.
If, however, pursued by the Fates, you should discover that your interlocutor is neither colonel nor judge, you have yet another resource—call him "Professor," and you are out of your difficulty: an American always professes something, an art, a religion, a science, and you are risking nothing.