PARTISAN REVIEW
allow them any of the human attributes with which his countrymen so
confounded him at home, and since his vaunted grasp of their history
reveals itself as the merest academic platitude, involving his imagination
not at all, the extent of his immersion in French life impresses one
finally as the height of artificiality, and, even, of presumption. The most
curious thing about the passion with which he has embraced the Con–
tinent is that it seems to be nothing more or less than a means of safe–
guarding his American simplicity. He has placed himself in a kind of
strongbox of custom, and refuses to see anything in Paris which can't
be
seen through a golden haze. He is thus protected against reality, or
experience, or change, and has succeeded in placing beyond the reach
of corruption values he prefers not to examine. Even his multitudinous
French friends help him to do this, for it is impossible, after all, to be
friends with a mob: they are simply a cloud of faces, bearing witness
to romance.
Between these two extremes, the student who embraces Home, and
the student who embraces The Continent-both embraces, as we have
tried to indicate, being singularly devoid of contact, to say nothing of
love-there are far more gradations than can be suggested here. The
American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of his
identity, and this may be taken as the key to all the contradictions one
encounters when attempting to discuss him. Certainly, for the student
colony one finds no other common denominator-this is all, really,
that they have in common, and they are distinguished from each other
by the ways in which they come to terms, or fail to come to terms with
their confusion. This prodigious question, at home so little recognized,
seems, germ-like, to be vivified in the European air, and to grow dis–
proportionately, displacing previous assurances, and producing tensions
and bewilderments entirely unlooked for. It is not, moreover, a question
which limits itself to those who are, so to speak, in traffic with ideas.
It confronts everyone, finding everyone unprepared; it is a question
with implications not easily escaped, and the attempt to escape can
precipitate disaster. Our perfectly adapted student, for example, should
his strongbox of custom break, may find himself hurled into that
coterie of gold-bricks who form such a spectacular element of the
Paris scene that they are often what the Parisian has in the fore–
ground of his mind when he wonderingly mutters,
CJest vraiment les
Americains.
The great majority of this group, having attempted, on
more or less personal levels, to lose, or disguise their antecedents, are
reduced to a kind of rubble of compulsion. Having cast off all previous
disciplines, they have also lost the shape which these disciplines made
