, 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 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.

To return to novel-building. Does the native novelist try to generalize
the nation? No, he lays plainly before you the ways and speech and life
of a few people grouped in a certain place--his own place--and that is
one book. In time he and his brethren will report to you the life and
the people of the whole nation--the life of a group in a New England
village; in a New York village; in a Texan village; in an Oregon
village; in villages in fifty States and Territories; then the farm-life
in fifty States and Territories; a hundred patches of life and groups
of people in a dozen widely separated cities. And the Indians will be
attended to; and the cowboys; and the gold and silver miners; and the
negroes; and the Idiots and Congressmen; and the Irish, the G