Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/166

 MARK TWAIN

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 ex amine 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 compe tent 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 &quot;observa tion&quot;? 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 accumula tion of wnconscious observation absorption. The

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