Bret Harte got his California and his Californians by unconscious
absorption, and put both of them into his tales alive. But when he came
from the Pacific to the Atlantic and tried to do Newport life from study-
conscious observation--his failure was absolutely monumental. Newport is
a disastrous place for the unacclimated observer, evidently.
It is my belief that there are some "national" traits and things
scattered about the world that are mere superstitions, frauds that have
lived so long that they have the solid look of facts. One of them is the
dogma that the French are the only chaste people in the world. Ever
since I arrived in France this last time I have been accumulating doubts
about that.
It would be too immodest. Also too gratuitously generous. And a shade
too self-sufficient. No, he could not venture it. It would look too
much like anxiety to get in at a feast where no plate had been provided
for him.
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 [years]--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.
One may say the type of practical joker, for these people are exactly
alike all over the world. Their equipment is always the same: a vulgar
mind, a puerile wit, a cruel disposition as a rule, and always the spirit
of treachery.