Book: Americans and Others

Overview
Agnes Repplier's Americans and Others is a lively collection of essays that examines American manners, tastes, and character through comparison with European habits and older cultural traditions. Written with urbane wit and a skeptical moral intelligence, the essays move easily between social observation, literary criticism, and anecdote. Repplier often adopts a gently corrective tone, admiring American vitality while pointing out what she sees as its shortcomings.
The book reflects the ways a cosmopolitan intellectual of the early twentieth century read her own nation: attentive to detail, resistant to facile enthusiasm, and fond of paradox. Rather than mounting an angry polemic, Repplier prefers sharp, compact sketches and epigrams that illuminate habits, pretensions, and virtues with equal parts irony and affection.

Major themes
A chief concern is national character. Repplier probes the practical, forward-looking bent of Americans and contrasts it with what she portrays as Europe's habit of conserving tradition and cultivating manners. She treats American energy and inventiveness as real strengths, but also identifies tendencies, impatience with refinement, a preference for utility over beauty, and an eagerness to democratize every field, that erode a certain cultivated repose she values.
Another recurrent theme is taste and culture. Repplier discusses literary fashions, the state of education, and the social rituals that shape public life. She is interested in how manners and moral habits grow out of institutions: the press, the pulpit, clubs, and schools. Her critiques are not merely negative; they often recommend a tempering of American haste with restraint, a cultivation of memory, and a respect for the subtler claims of art and tradition.

Style and tone
The essays are compact, epigrammatic, and conversational, drawing on anecdote, classical allusion, and an agile vocabulary. Repplier's sentences can be pointedly aphoristic, and she often concludes a paragraph with a wry twist that reframes what came before. Humor is central, dry, urbane, and punctuated by a moral sensibility that rarely lapses into rancor.
Her tone balances condescension and charity: she will gently satirize provincial pretension or mercantile brashness, then acknowledge the deep democratic sympathies and civic virtues that animate American life. The prose rewards careful reading; small observations accumulate into a larger, nuanced portrait.

Notable essays and examples
Several essays stand out for their memorable turns of phrase and persuasive snapshots. Repplier often opens with a specific scene, a social gathering, a lecture, a newspaper episode, and widens the view to cultural and historical implications. Her reflections on travel and the difficulty Americans have in acquiring foreign manners are typical: she admires the willingness to roam while diagnosing a superficiality that stops short of genuine acculturation.
Her literary comments combine shrewdness with classical benchmarks. She admires clear writing and balanced judgment, and she reserves particular scorn for exaggerated sentimentality and the cult of novelty that she sees afflicting both popular journalism and certain modern literary fashions.

Assessment and legacy
Americans and Others offers a portrait of an observer who loves her country enough to chastise it. The book's enduring appeal lies less in specific judgments than in Repplier's method: attentive description, comparative perspective, and an ethic of cultivated criticism. Readers encounter a voice that is both skeptical and humane, one that believes refinement and good sense can coexist with democratic energy.
As a historical document, the essays illuminate early twentieth-century debates about culture, taste, and national identity. As a piece of literary criticism and social commentary, the collection remains instructive for anyone interested in how manners, institutions, and national temperament shape one another.