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.
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