This large explanation may not account for the summer restlessness that overtakes nearly everybody.  We are the annual victims of the delusion that there exists somewhere the ideal spot where manners are simple, and milk is pure, and lodging is cheap, where we shall fall at once into content.  We never do.  For content consists not in having all we want, nor, in not wanting everything, nor in being unable to get what we want, but in not wanting that we can get.  In our summer flittings we carry our wants with us to places where they cannot be gratified.  A few people have discovered that repose can be had at home, but this discovery is too unfashionable to find favor; we have no rest except in moving about.  Looked at superficially, it seems curious that the American is, as a rule, the only person who does not emigrate.  The fact is that he can go nowhere else where life is so uneasy, and where, consequently, he would have so little of his sort of repose.  To put him in another country would be like putting a nineteenth-century man back into the eighteenth century.  The American wants to be at the head of the procession (as he fancies he is), where he can hear the band play, and be the first to see the fireworks of the new era.  He thinks that he occupies an advanced station of observation, from which his telescope can sweep the horizon for anything new.  And with some reason he thinks so; for not seldom he takes up a foreign idea and tires of it before it is current elsewhere.  More than one great writer of England had his first popular recognition in America.  Even this season the Saturday Review is struggling with Ibsen, while Boston, having had that disease, has probably gone on to some other fad.

Far be it from us to praise the American for his lack of repose; it is enough to attempt to account for it.  But from the social, or rather society, point of view, the subject has a disquieting aspect.  If the American young man and young woman get it into their heads that repose, especially of manner, is the correct thing, they will go in for it in a way to astonish the world.  The late cultivation of idiocy by the American dude was unique.  He carried it to an extreme impossible to the youth of any nation less “gifted.”  And if the American girl goes in seriously for “repose,” she will be able to give odds to any modern languidity or to any ancient marble.  If what is wanted in society is cold hauteur and languid superciliousness or lofty immobility, we are confident that with a little practice she can sit stiller, and look more impassive, and move with less motion, than any other created woman.  We have that confidence in her ability and adaptability.  It is a question whether it is worth while to do this; to sacrifice the vivacity and charm native to her, and the natural impulsiveness and generous gift of herself which belong to a new race in a new land, which is walking always towards the sunrise.

In fine, although so much is said of the American lack of repose, is it not best for the American to be content to be himself, and let the critics adapt themselves or not, as they choose, to a new phenomenon?