when that is expurgated there is nothing left of the book.
I wish I could think what he is going to teach us. Can it be Deportment?
But he experimented in that at Newport and failed to give satisfaction,
except to a few. Those few are pleased. They are enjoying their joy as
well as they can. They confess their happiness to the interviewer. They
feel pretty striped, but they remember with reverent recognition that
they had sugar between the cuts. True, sugar with sand in it, but sugar.
And true, they had some trouble to tell which was sugar and which was
sand, because the sugar itself looked just like the sand, and also had a
gravelly taste; still, they knew that the sugar was there, and would have
been very good sugar indeed if it had been screened. Yes, they are
pleased; not noisily so, but pleased; invaded, or streaked, as one may
say, with little recurrent shivers of joy–subdued joy, so to speak, not
the overdone kind. And they commune together, these, and massage each
other with comforting sayings, in a sweet spirit of resignation and
thankfulness, mixing these elements in the same proportions as the sugar
and the sand, as a memorial, and saying, the one to the other, and to the
interviewer: “It was severe–yes, it was bitterly severe; but oh, how
true it was; and it will do us so much good!”
If it isn’t Deportment, what is left? It was at this point that I seemed
to get on the right track at last. M. Bourget would teach us to know
ourselves; that was it: he would reveal us to ourselves. That would be
an education. He would explain us to ourselves. Then we should
understand ourselves; and after that be able to go on more intelligently.
It seemed a doubtful scheme. He could explain us to himself–that would
be easy. That would be the same as the naturalist explaining the bug to
himself. But to explain the bug to the bug–that is quite a different
matter. The bug may not know himself perfectly, but he knows himself
better than the naturalist can know him, at any rate.
A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think that
that is as far as he can get. I think that no foreigner can report its
interior–its soul, its life, its speech, its thought. I think that a
knowledge of these things is acquirable in only one way; not two or four
or six–absorption; years and years of unconscious absorption; years and
years of intercourse with the life concerned; of living it, indeed;
sharing personally in its shames and prides, its joys and griefs, its
loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and
shabbinesses, its deep patriotisms, its whirlwinds of political passion,
its adorations–of flag, and heroic dead, and the glory of the national
name. Observation? Of what real value is it? One learns peoples
through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.
There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the
life of a people and make a valuable report–the native novelist. This
expert is so rare that the most populous country can never have fifteen
conspicuously and confessedly competent ones in stock at one time. This
native specialist is not qualified to begin work until he has been
absorbing during twenty-five years. How much of his competency is
derived from conscious “observation”? The amount is so slight that it
counts for next to nothing in the equipment. Almost the whole capital of
the novelist is the slow accumulation of unconscious observation–
absorption. The native expert’s intentional observation of manners,
speech, character, and ways of life can have value, for the native knows
what they mean without having to cipher out the meaning. But I should be
astonished to see a foreigner get at the right meanings, catch the
elusive shades of these subtle things. Even the native novelist becomes
a foreigner, with a foreigner’s limitations, when he steps from the State
whose life is familiar to him into a State whose life he has not lived.
Bret Harte got his California and his Californians by unconscious