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+Project Gutenberg's Essays on Paul Bourget, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays on Paul Bourget
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #3173]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+     WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
+
+     A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
+
+
+
+
+WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
+
+He reports the American joke correctly. In Boston they ask, How much
+does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Who
+were his parents? And when an alien observer turns his telescope upon
+us--advertisedly in our own special interest--a natural apprehension
+moves us to ask, What is the diameter of his reflector?
+
+I take a great interest in M. Bourget's chapters, for I know by the
+newspapers that there are several Americans who are expecting to get
+a whole education out of them; several who foresaw, and also foretold,
+that our long night was over, and a light almost divine about to break
+upon the land.
+
+          “His utterances concerning us are bound to be weighty and well
+          timed.”
+
+          “He gives us an object-lesson which should be thoughtfully and
+          profitably studied.”
+
+These well-considered and important verdicts were of a nature to restore
+public confidence, which had been disquieted by questionings as to
+whether so young a teacher would be qualified to take so large a class
+as 70,000,000, distributed over so extensive a schoolhouse as America,
+and pull it through without assistance.
+
+I was even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament,
+and not easily disturbed. I feared for my country. And I was not wholly
+tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above. It seemed to me that
+there was still room for doubt. In fact, in looking the ground over I
+became more disturbed than I was before. Many worrying questions came
+up in my mind. Two were prominent. Where had the teacher gotten his
+equipment? What was his method?
+
+He had gotten his equipment in France.
+
+Then as to his method! I saw by his own intimations that he was
+an Observer, and had a System that used by naturalists and other
+scientists. The naturalist collects many bugs and reptiles and
+butterflies and studies their ways a long time patiently. By this
+means he is presently able to group these creatures into families and
+subdivisions of families by nice shadings of differences observable in
+their characters. Then he labels all those shaded bugs and things with
+nicely descriptive group names, and is now happy, for his great work is
+completed, and as a result he intimately knows every bug and shade of
+a bug there, inside and out. It may be true, but a person who was not a
+naturalist would feel safer about it if he had the opinion of the bug. I
+think it is a pleasant System, but subject to error.
+
+The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a
+Generalizer, a Psychologizer; and, first and last, a Thinker. He has
+to be all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is
+often able to prove competency. But history has shown that when he is
+abroad observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against
+him. He is then a naturalist observing a bug, with no more than a
+naturalist's chance of being able to tell the bug anything new about
+itself, and no more than a naturalist's chance of being able to teach it
+any new ways which it will prefer to its own.
+
+To return to that first question. M. Bourget, as teacher, would simply
+be France teaching America. It seemed to me that the outlook was
+dark--almost Egyptian, in fact. What would the new teacher, representing
+France, teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about
+railroading. Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in
+that matter. Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of
+Fulton's date--1809. Postal service? No. France is a back number
+there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No.
+Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty,
+Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too
+variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for
+our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves.
+Novel-writing? No. M. Bourget and the others know only one plan, and
+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 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 Germans, the
+Italians, the Swedes, the French, the Chinamen, the Greasers; and the
+Catholics, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists,
+the Baptists, the Spiritualists, the Mormons, the Shakers, the Quakers,
+the Jews, the Campbellites, the infidels, the Christian Scientists, the
+Mind-Curists, the Faith-Curists, the train-robbers, the White Caps, the
+Moonshiners. And when a thousand able novels have been written, there
+you have the soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of
+the people; and not anywhere else can these be had. And the shadings of
+character, manners, feelings, ambitions, will be infinite.
+
+          “'The nature of a people' is always of a similar shade in its
+          vices and its virtues, in its frivolities and in its labor.
+          'It is this physiognomy which it is necessary to discover',
+          and every document is good, from the hall of a casino to the
+          church, from the foibles of a fashionable woman to the
+          suggestions of a revolutionary leader.  I am therefore quite
+          sure that this 'American soul', the principal interest and the
+          great object of my voyage, appears behind the records of
+          Newport for those who choose to see it.”--M. Paul Bourget.
+
+[The italics ['') are mine.] It is a large contract which he has
+undertaken. “Records” is a pretty poor word there, but I think the use
+of it is due to hasty translation. In the original the word is 'fastes'.
+I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he expected to find the great
+“American soul” secreted behind the ostentations of Newport; and that
+he was going to get it out and examine it, and generalize it, and
+psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its hidden vast mystery:
+“the nature of the people” of the United States of America. We have been
+accused of being a nation addicted to inventing wild schemes. I trust
+that we shall be allowed to retire to second place now.
+
+There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled
+“American.” There isn't a single human ambition, or religious trend, or
+drift of thought, or peculiarity of education, or code of principles, or
+breed of folly, or style of conversation, or preference for a particular
+subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or face or
+expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or disposition,
+or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can rationally be
+generalized as “American.”
+
+Whenever you have found what seems to be an “American” peculiarity, you
+have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in the social
+scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared. And you can cross the
+Atlantic and find it again. There may be a Newport religious drift, or
+sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of face,
+but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and west,
+where you could not find your duplicates. It is the same with everything
+else which one might propose to call “American.” M. Bourget thinks he
+has found the American Coquette. If he had really found her he would
+also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she exists in
+other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart and the
+same ways and impulses. I think this because I have seen our coquette; I
+have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our novels, and
+seen her twin in foreign novels. I wish M. Bourget had seen ours. He
+thought he saw her. And so he applied his System to her. She was a
+Species. So he gathered a number of samples of what seemed to be her,
+and put them under his glass, and divided them into groups which
+he calls “types,” and labeled them in his usual scientific way with
+“formulas”--brief sharp descriptive flashes that make a person blink,
+sometimes, they are so sudden and vivid. As a rule they are pretty
+far-fetched, but that is not an important matter; they surprise, they
+compel admiration, and I notice by some of the comments which his
+efforts have called forth that they deceive the unwary. Here are a few
+of the coquette variants which he has grouped and labeled:
+
+     THE COLLECTOR.
+     THE EQUILIBREE.
+     THE PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.
+     THE BLUFFER.
+     THE GIRL-BOY.
+
+If he had stopped with describing these characters we should have been
+obliged to believe that they exist; that they exist, and that he has
+seen them and spoken with them. But he did not stop there; he went
+further and furnished to us light-throwing samples of their behavior,
+and also light-throwing samples of their speeches. He entered those
+things in his note-book without suspicion, he takes them out and
+delivers them to the world with a candor and simplicity which show that
+he believed them genuine. They throw altogether too much light. They
+reveal to the native the origin of his find. I suppose he knows how he
+came to make that novel and captivating discovery, by this time. If he
+does not, any American can tell him--any American to whom he will show
+his anecdotes. It was “put up” on him, as we say. It was a jest--to be
+plain, it was a series of frauds. To my mind it was a poor sort of jest,
+witless and contemptible. The players of it have their reward, such as
+it is; they have exhibited the fact that whatever they may be they are
+not ladies. M. Bourget did not discover a type of coquette; he merely
+discovered a type of practical joker. 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.
+
+In his Chapter IV. M. Bourget has two or three columns gravely devoted
+to the collating and examining and psychologizing of these sorry
+little frauds. One is not moved to laugh. There is nothing funny in
+the situation; it is only pathetic. The stranger gave those people his
+confidence, and they dishonorably treated him in return.
+
+But one must be allowed to suspect that M. Bourget was a little to blame
+himself. Even a practical joker has some little judgment. He has to
+exercise some degree of sagacity in selecting his prey if he would save
+himself from getting into trouble. In my time I have seldom seen such
+daring things marketed at any price as these conscienceless folk have
+worked off at par on this confiding observer. It compels the conviction
+that there was something about him that bred in those speculators a
+quite unusual sense of safety, and encouraged them to strain their
+powers in his behalf. They seem to have satisfied themselves that all
+he wanted was “significant” facts, and that he was not accustomed to
+examine the source whence they proceeded. It is plain that there was a
+sort of conspiracy against him almost from the start--a conspiracy to
+freight him up with all the strange extravagances those people's decayed
+brains could invent.
+
+The lengths to which they went are next to incredible. They told him
+things which surely would have excited any one else's suspicion, but
+they did not excite his. Consider this:
+
+          “There is not in all the United States an entirely nude
+          statue.”
+
+If an angel should come down and say such a thing about heaven, a
+reasonably cautious observer would take that angel's number and inquire
+a little further before he added it to his catch. What does the present
+observer do? Adds it. Adds it at once. Adds it, and labels it with this
+innocent comment:
+
+          “This small fact is strangely significant.”
+
+It does seem to me that this kind of observing is defective.
+
+Here is another curiosity which some liberal person made him a present
+of. I should think it ought to have disturbed the deep slumber of his
+suspicion a little, but it didn't. It was a note from a fog-horn for
+strenuousness, it seems to me, but the doomed voyager did not catch it.
+If he had but caught it, it would have saved him from several disasters:
+
+          “If the American knows that you are traveling to take notes, he
+          is interested in it, and at the same time rejoices in it, as in
+          a tribute.”
+
+Again, this is defective observation. It is human to like to be praised;
+one can even notice it in the French. But it is not human to like to
+be ridiculed, even when it comes in the form of a “tribute.” I think a
+little psychologizing ought to have come in there. Something like this:
+A dog does not like to be ridiculed, a redskin does not like to be
+ridiculed, a negro does not like to be ridiculed, a Chinaman does not
+like to be ridiculed; let us deduce from these significant facts this
+formula: the American's grade being higher than these, and the chain-of
+argument stretching unbroken all the way up to him, there is room for
+suspicion that the person who said the American likes to be ridiculed,
+and regards it as a tribute, is not a capable observer.
+
+I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional
+is too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that
+great art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks. Every now and then, at
+half-hour intervals, M. Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies
+and dissolves them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the
+charge into a mould and turns you out a compact principle which will
+explain an American girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn
+for old things, or any other impossible riddle which a person wants
+answered.
+
+It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that
+can be generalized and located here and there in the world and named
+by the name of the nation where they are found. I wonder what they are.
+Perhaps one of them is temperament. One speaks of French vivacity
+and German gravity and English stubbornness. There is no American
+temperament. The nearest that one can come at it is to say there are
+two--the composed Northern and the impetuous Southern; and both are
+found in other countries. Morals? Purity of women may fairly be called
+universal with us, but that is the case in some other countries. We have
+no monopoly of it; it cannot be named American. I think that there is
+but a single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the
+wide name “American.” That is the national devotion to ice-water. All
+Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither
+of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation. I suppose we do stand
+alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves. When we have
+been a month in Europe we lose our craving for it, and we finally tell
+the hotel folk that they needn't provide it any more. Yet we hardly
+touch our native shore again, winter or summer, before we are eager for
+it. The reasons for this state of things have not been psychologized
+yet. I drop the hint and say no more.
+
+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; and before I leave this sunny land again I will gather in a
+few random statistics and psychologize the plausibilities out of it. If
+people are to come over to America and find fault with our girls and
+our women, and psychologize every little thing they do, and try to teach
+them how to behave, and how to cultivate themselves up to where one
+cannot tell them from the French model, I intend to find out whether
+those missionaries are qualified or not. A nation ought always to
+examine into this detail before engaging the teacher for good. This last
+one has let fall a remark which renewed those doubts of mine when I read
+it:
+
+          “In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied
+          to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all
+          the weaknesses of the French soul.”
+
+You see, it amounts to a trade with the French soul; a profession; a
+science; the serious business of life, so to speak, in our high Parisian
+existence. I do not quite like the look of it. I question if it can be
+taught with profit in our country, except, of course, to those pathetic,
+neglected minds that are waiting there so yearningly for the education
+which M. Bourget is going to furnish them from the serene summits of our
+high Parisian life.
+
+I spoke a moment ago of the existence of some superstitions that have
+been parading the world as facts this long time. For instance,
+consider the Dollar. The world seems to think that the love of money is
+“American”; and that the mad desire to get suddenly rich is “American.”
+ I believe that both of these things are merely and broadly human, not
+American monopolies at all. The love of money is natural to all nations,
+for money is a good and strong friend. I think that this love has
+existed everywhere, ever since the Bible called it the root of all evil.
+
+I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to
+trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make
+promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a
+frequency out of all proportion to the European experience. For eighty
+years this opportunity has been offering itself in one new town or
+region after another straight westward, step by step, all the way from
+the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. When a mechanic could buy ten town
+lots on tolerably long credit for ten months' savings out of his wages,
+and reasonably expect to sell them in a couple of years for ten times
+what he gave for them, it was human for him to try the venture, and
+he did it no matter what his nationality was. He would have done it in
+Europe or China if he had had the same chance.
+
+In the flush times in the silver regions a cook or any other humble
+worker stood a very good chance to get rich out of a trifle of money
+risked in a stock deal; and that person promptly took that risk, no
+matter what his or her nationality might be. I was there, and saw it.
+
+But these opportunities have not been plenty in our Southern States; so
+there you have a prodigious region where the rush for sudden wealth is
+almost an unknown thing--and has been, from the beginning.
+
+Europe has offered few opportunities for poor Tom, Dick, and Harry;
+but when she has offered one, there has been no noticeable difference
+between European eagerness and American. England saw this in the wild
+days of the Railroad King; France saw it in 1720--time of Law and the
+Mississippi Bubble. I am sure I have never seen in the gold and silver
+mines any madness, fury, frenzy to get suddenly rich which was even
+remotely comparable to that which raged in France in the Bubble day.
+If I had a cyclopaedia here I could turn to that memorable case, and
+satisfy nearly anybody that the hunger for the sudden dollar is no
+more “American” than it is French. And if I could furnish an American
+opportunity to staid Germany, I think I could wake her up like a house
+afire.
+
+But I must return to the Generalizations, Psychologizings, Deductions.
+When M. Bourget is exploiting these arts, it is then that he is
+peculiarly and particularly himself. His ways are wholly original when
+he encounters a trait or a custom which is new to him. Another person
+would merely examine the find, verify it, estimate its value, and let it
+go; but that is not sufficient for M. Bourget: he always wants to know
+why that thing exists, he wants to know how it came to happen; and he
+will not let go of it until he has found out. And in every instance he
+will find that reason where no one but himself would have thought
+of looking for it. He does not seem to care for a reason that is not
+picturesquely located; one might almost say picturesquely and impossibly
+located.
+
+He found out that in America men do not try to hunt down young married
+women. At once, as usual, he wanted to know why. Any one could have told
+him. He could have divined it by the lights thrown by the novels of
+the country. But no, he preferred to find out for himself. He has a
+trustfulness as regards men and facts which is fine and unusual; he is
+not particular about the source of a fact, he is not particular about
+the character and standing of the fact itself; but when it comes to
+pounding out the reason for the existence of the fact, he will trust no
+one but himself.
+
+In the present instance here was his fact: American young married women
+are not pursued by the corruptor; and here was the question: What is it
+that protects her?
+
+It seems quite unlikely that that problem could have offered
+difficulties to any but a trained philosopher. Nearly any person would
+have said to M. Bourget: “Oh, that is very simple. It is very seldom in
+America that a marriage is made on a commercial basis; our marriages,
+from the beginning, have been made for love; and where love is there is
+no room for the corruptor.”
+
+Now, it is interesting to see the formidable way in which M.
+Bourget went at that poor, humble little thing. He moved upon it in
+column--three columns--and with artillery.
+
+“Two reasons of a very different kind explain”--that fact.
+
+And now that I have got so far, I am almost afraid to say what his
+two reasons are, lest I be charged with inventing them. But I will not
+retreat now; I will condense them and print them, giving my word that I
+am honest and not trying to deceive any one.
+
+1. Young married women are protected from the approaches of the seducer
+in New England and vicinity by the diluted remains of a prudence created
+by a Puritan law of two hundred years ago, which for a while punished
+adultery with death.
+
+2. And young married women of the other forty or fifty States are
+protected by laws which afford extraordinary facilities for divorce.
+
+If I have not lost my mind I have accurately conveyed those two Vesuvian
+irruptions of philosophy. But the reader can consult Chapter IV. of
+'Outre-Mer', and decide for himself. Let us examine this paralyzing
+Deduction or Explanation by the light of a few sane facts.
+
+1. This universality of “protection” has existed in our country from the
+beginning; before the death penalty existed in New England, and during
+all the generations that have dragged by since it was annulled.
+
+2. Extraordinary facilities for divorce are of such recent creation that
+any middle-aged American can remember a time when such things had not
+yet been thought of.
+
+Let us suppose that the first easy divorce law went into effect
+forty years ago, and got noised around and fairly started in business
+thirty-five years ago, when we had, say, 25,000,000 of white population.
+Let us suppose that among 5,000,000 of them the young married women were
+“protected” by the surviving shudder of that ancient Puritan scare--what
+is M. Bourget going to do about those who lived among the 20,000,000?
+They were clean in their morals, they were pure, yet there was no easy
+divorce law to protect them.
+
+Awhile ago I said that M. Bourget's method of truth-seeking--hunting for
+it in out-of-the-way places--was new; but that was an error. I
+remember that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other
+astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion
+which M. Bourget employs in his reasonings about American social facts
+and their origin. Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky
+Way was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of
+Waterloo, which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their
+own specific gravity, became luminous through the development and
+exposure--by the natural processes of animal decay--of the phosphorus
+contained in them.
+
+This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much
+thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His
+own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs;
+and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that
+the locusts do like that in Egypt.
+
+Giordano Bruno also was outspoken in his praises of Leverrier's
+important contribution to astronomical science, and was at first
+inclined to regard it as conclusive; but later, conceiving it to be
+erroneous, he pronounced against it, and advanced the hypothesis that
+the Milky Way was a detachment or corps of stars which became arrested
+and held in 'suspenso suspensorum' by refraction of gravitation while on
+the march to join their several constellations; a proposition for which
+he was afterwards burned at the stake in Jacksonville, Illinois.
+
+These were all brilliant and picturesque theories, and each was received
+with enthusiasm by the scientific world; but when a New England farmer,
+who was not a thinker, but only a plain sort of person who tried to
+account for large facts in simple ways, came out with the opinion that
+the Milky Way was just common, ordinary stars, and was put where it was
+because God “wanted to hev it so,” the admirable idea fell perfectly
+flat.
+
+As a literary artist, M. Bourget is as fresh and striking as he is as
+a scientific one. He says, “Above all, I do not believe much in
+anecdotes.”
+
+Why? “In history they are all false”--a sufficiently broad
+statement--“in literature all libelous”--also a sufficiently sweeping
+statement, coming from a critic who notes that we are “a people who are
+peculiarly extravagant in our language--” and when it is a matter of
+social life, “almost all biased.” It seems to amount to stultification,
+almost. He has built two or three breeds of American coquettes out
+of anecdotes--mainly “biased” ones, I suppose; and, as they occur “in
+literature,” furnished by his pen, they must be “all libelous.” Or did
+he mean not in literature or anecdotes about literature or literary
+people? I am not able to answer that. Perhaps the original would be
+clearer, but I have only the translation of this installment by me. I
+think the remark had an intention; also that this intention was booked
+for the trip; but that either in the hurry of the remark's departure
+it got left, or in the confusion of changing cars at the translator's
+frontier it got side-tracked.
+
+“But on the other hand I believe in statistics; and those on divorces
+appear to me to be most conclusive.” And he sets himself the task of
+explaining--in a couple of columns--the process by which Easy-Divorce
+conceived, invented, originated, developed, and perfected an
+empire-embracing condition of sexual purity in the States. IN 40 YEARS.
+No, he doesn't state the interval. With all his passion for statistics
+he forgot to ask how long it took to produce this gigantic miracle.
+
+I have followed his pleasant but devious trail through those columns,
+but I was not able to get hold of his argument and find out what it
+was. I was not even able to find out where it left off. It seemed to
+gradually dissolve and flow off into other matters. I followed it
+with interest, for I was anxious to learn how easy-divorce eradicated
+adultery in America, but I was disappointed; I have no idea yet how
+it did it. I only know it didn't. But that is not valuable; I knew it
+before.
+
+Well, humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all. The
+minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and
+resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. And so,
+when M. Bourget said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke
+all up. I remember exploding its American countermine once, under
+that grand hero, Napoleon. He was only First Consul then, and I was
+Consul-General--for the United States, of course; but we were very
+intimate, notwithstanding the difference in rank, for I waived that. One
+day something offered the opening, and he said:
+
+“Well, General, I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an
+American, because whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in
+his time he can always get away with a few years trying to find out who
+his grandfather was!”
+
+I fairly shouted, for I had never heard it sound better; and then I was
+back at him as quick as a flash--“Right, your Excellency! But I reckon
+a Frenchman's got his little stand-by for a dull time, too; because when
+all other interests fail he can turn in and see if he can't find out who
+his father was!”
+
+Well, you should have heard him just whoop, and cackle, and carry on! He
+reached up and hit me one on the shoulder, and says:
+
+“Land, but it's good! It's im-mensely good! I'George, I never heard it
+said so good in my life before! Say it again.”
+
+So I said it again, and he said his again, and I said mine again, and
+then he did, and then I did, and then he did, and we kept on doing it,
+and doing it, and I never had such a good time, and he said the same. In
+my opinion there isn't anything that is as killing as one of those dear
+old ripe pensioners if you know how to snatch it out in a kind of a
+fresh sort of original way.
+
+But I wish M. Bourget had read more of our novels before he came. It
+is the only way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found I was
+coming to Paris, I read 'La Terre'.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
+
+          [The preceding squib was assailed in the North American Review
+          in an article entitled “Mark Twain and Paul Bourget,” by Max
+          O'Rell.  The following little note is a Rejoinder to that
+          article.  It is possible that the position assumed here--that
+          M. Bourget dictated the O'Rell article himself--is untenable.]
+
+You have every right, my dear M. Bourget, to retort upon me by
+dictation, if you prefer that method to writing at me with your pen; but
+if I may say it without hurt--and certainly I mean no offence--I believe
+you would have acquitted yourself better with the pen. With the pen
+you are at home; it is your natural weapon; you use it with grace,
+eloquence, charm, persuasiveness, when men are to be convinced, and with
+formidable effect when they have earned a castigation. But I am sure
+I see signs in the above article that you are either unaccustomed
+to dictating or are out of practice. If you will re-read it you will
+notice, yourself, that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose;
+that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it
+is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that it loses itself early
+and does not find itself any more. There are some other defects, as you
+will notice, but I think I have named the main ones. I feel sure that
+they are all due to your lack of practice in dictating.
+
+Inasmuch as you had not signed it I had the impression at first that
+you had not dictated it. But only for a moment. Certain quite simple and
+definite facts reminded me that the article had to come from you, for
+the reason that it could not come from any one else without a specific
+invitation from you or from me. I mean, it could not except as an
+intrusion, a transgression of the law which forbids strangers to mix
+into a private dispute between friends, unasked.
+
+Those simple and definite facts were these: I had published an article
+in this magazine, with you for my subject; just you yourself; I stuck
+strictly to that one subject, and did not interlard any other. No one,
+of course, could call me to account but you alone, or your authorized
+representative. I asked some questions--asked them of myself. I answered
+them myself. My article was thirteen pages long, and all devoted to you;
+devoted to you, and divided up in this way: one page of guesses as to
+what subjects you would instruct us in, as teacher; one page of doubts
+as to the effectiveness of your method of examining us and our ways; two
+or three pages of criticism of your method, and of certain results which
+it furnished you; two or three pages of attempts to show the justness
+of these same criticisms; half a dozen pages made up of slight
+fault-findings with certain minor details of your literary workmanship,
+of extracts from your 'Outre-Mer' and comments upon them; then I closed
+with an anecdote. I repeat--for certain reasons--that I closed with an
+anecdote.
+
+When I was asked by this magazine if I wished to “answer” a “reply”
+ to that article of mine, I said “yes,” and waited in Paris for the
+proof-sheets of the “reply” to come. I already knew, by the cablegram,
+that the “reply” would not be signed by you, but upon reflection I knew
+it would be dictated by you, because no volunteer would feel himself at
+liberty to assume your championship in a private dispute, unasked,
+in view of the fact that you are quite well able to take care of your
+matters of that sort yourself and are not in need of any one's help.
+No, a volunteer could not make such a venture. 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. In fact he could not get
+in at all, except by the back way, and with a false key; that is to say,
+a pretext--a pretext invented for the occasion by putting into my mouth
+words which I did not use, and by wresting sayings of mine from their
+plain and true meaning. Would he resort to methods like those to get
+in? No; there are no people of that kind. So then I knew for a certainty
+that you dictated the Reply yourself. I knew you did it to save yourself
+manual labor.
+
+And you had the right, as I have already said and I am
+content--perfectly content.
+
+Yet it would have been little trouble to you, and a great kindness to
+me, if you had written your Reply all out with your own capable hand.
+
+Because then it would have replied--and that is really what a Reply is
+for. Broadly speaking, its function is to refute--as you will easily
+concede. That leaves something for the other person to take hold of:
+he has a chance to reply to the Reply, he has a chance to refute the
+refutation. This would have happened if you had written it out instead
+of dictating. Dictating is nearly sure to unconcentrate the dictator's
+mind, when he is out of practice, confuse him, and betray him into using
+one set of literary rules when he ought to use a quite different set.
+Often it betrays him into employing the RULES FOR CONVERSATION BETWEEN
+A SHOUTER AND A DEAF PERSON--as in the present case--when he ought to
+employ the RULES FOR CONDUCTING DISCUSSION WITH A FAULT-FINDER.
+The great foundation-rule and basic principle of discussion with a
+fault-finder is relevancy and concentration upon the subject; whereas
+the great foundation-rule and basic principle governing conversation
+between a shouter and a deaf person is irrelevancy and persistent
+desertion of the topic in hand. If I may be allowed to illustrate by
+quoting example IV., section 7 from chapter ix. of “Revised Rules for
+Conducting Conversation between a Shouter and a Deaf Person,” it will
+assist us in getting a clear idea of the difference between the two sets
+of rules:
+
+Shouter. Did you say his name is WETHERBY?
+
+Deaf Person. Change? Yes, I think it will. Though if it should clear off
+I--
+
+Shouter. It's his NAME I want--his NAME.
+
+Deaf Person. Maybe so, maybe so; but it will only be a shower, I think.
+
+Shouter. No, no, no!--you have quite misunderSTOOD me. If--
+
+Deaf Person. Ah! GOOD morning; I am sorry you must go. But call again,
+and let me continue to be of assistance to you in every way I can.
+
+
+You see it is a perfect kodak of the article you have dictated. It is
+really curious and interesting when you come to compare it with yours;
+in detail, with my former article to which it is a Reply in your hand.
+I talk twelve pages about your American instruction projects, and your
+doubtful scientific system, and your painstaking classification of
+nonexistent things, and your diligence and zeal and sincerity, and your
+disloyal attitude towards anecdotes, and your undue reverence for unsafe
+statistics and for facts that lack a pedigree; and you turn around and
+come back at me with eight pages of weather.
+
+I do not see how a person can act so. It is good of you to repeat, with
+change of language, in the bulk of your rejoinder, so much of my own
+article, and adopt my sentiments, and make them over, and put new
+buttons on; and I like the compliment, and am frank to say so; but
+agreeing with a person cripples controversy and ought not to be allowed.
+It is weather; and of almost the worst sort. It pleases me greatly to
+hear you discourse with such approval and expansiveness upon my text:
+
+“A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think
+that is as far as he can get. I think that no foreigner can report its
+interior;”--[And you say: “A man of average intelligence, who has
+passed six months among a people, cannot express opinions that are worth
+jotting down, but he can form impressions that are worth repeating. For
+my part, I think that foreigners' impressions are more interesting
+than native opinions. After all, such impressions merely mean 'how the
+country struck the foreigner.'”]--which is a quite clear way of saying
+that a foreigner's report is only valuable when it restricts itself to
+impressions. It pleases me to have you follow my lead in that glowing
+way, but it leaves me nothing to combat. You should give me something to
+deny and refute; I would do as much for you.
+
+It pleases me to have you playfully warn the public against taking one
+of your books seriously.--[When I published Jonathan and his Continent,
+I wrote in a preface addressed to Jonathan: “If ever you should insist
+in seeing in this little volume a serious study of your country and of
+your countrymen, I warn you that your world-wide fame for humor will be
+exploded.”]--Because I used to do that cunning thing myself in earlier
+days. I did it in a prefatory note to a book of mine called Tom Sawyer.
+
+
+                         NOTICE.
+
+          Persons attempting to find a motive in
+          this narrative will be prosecuted;
+          persons attempting to find a moral in it
+          will be banished; persons attempting to
+          find a plot in it will be shot.
+                              BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
+                              PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
+
+
+The kernel is the same in both prefaces, you see--the public must
+not take us too seriously. If we remove that kernel we remove the
+life-principle, and the preface is a corpse. Yes, it pleases me to have
+you use that idea, for it is a high compliment. But it leaves me nothing
+to combat; and that is damage to me.
+
+Am I seeming to say that your Reply is not a reply at all, M. Bourget?
+If so, I must modify that; it is too sweeping. For you have furnished
+a general answer to my inquiry as to what France through you--can teach
+us.--[“What could France teach America!” exclaims Mark Twain. France
+can teach America all the higher pursuits of life, and there is more
+artistic feeling and refinement in a street of French workingmen than in
+many avenues inhabited by American millionaires. She can teach her, not
+perhaps how to work, but how to rest, how to live, how to be happy.
+She can teach her that the aim of life is not money-making, but that
+money-making is only a means to obtain an end. She can teach her
+that wives are not expensive toys, but useful partners, friends, and
+confidants, who should always keep men under their wholesome
+influence by their diplomacy, their tact, their common-sense, without
+bumptiousness. These qualities, added to the highest standard of
+morality (not angular and morose, but cheerful morality), are conceded
+to Frenchwomen by whoever knows something of French life outside of the
+Paris boulevards, and Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot even so much
+as stain them.
+
+I might tell Mark Twain that in France a man who was seen tipsy in his
+club would immediately see his name canceled from membership. A man who
+had settled his fortune on his wife to avoid meeting his creditors would
+be refused admission into any decent society. Many a Frenchman has blown
+his brains out rather than declare himself a bankrupt. Now would Mark
+Twain remark to this: 'An American is not such a fool: when a creditor
+stands in his way he closes his doors, and reopens them the following
+day. When he has been a bankrupt three times he can retire from
+business?']--It is a good answer.
+
+It relates to manners, customs, and morals--three things concerning
+which we can never have exhaustive and determinate statistics, and so
+the verdicts delivered upon them must always lack conclusiveness and be
+subject to revision; but you have stated the truth, possibly, as nearly
+as any one could do it, in the circumstances. But why did you choose a
+detail of my question which could be answered only with vague hearsay
+evidence, and go right by one which could have been answered with deadly
+facts?--facts in everybody's reach, facts which none can dispute. I
+asked what France could teach us about government. I laid myself pretty
+wide open, there; and I thought I was handsomely generous, too, when
+I did it. France can teach us how to levy village and city taxes which
+distribute the burden with a nearer approach to perfect fairness than is
+the case in any other land; and she can teach us the wisest and surest
+system of collecting them that exists. She can teach us how to elect
+a President in a sane way; and also how to do it without throwing the
+country into earthquakes and convulsions that cripple and embarrass
+business, stir up party hatred in the hearts of men, and make peaceful
+people wish the term extended to thirty years. France can teach us--but
+enough of that part of the question. And what else can France teach
+us? She can teach us all the fine arts--and does. She throws open her
+hospitable art academies, and says to us, “Come”--and we come, troops
+and troops of our young and gifted; and she sets over us the ablest
+masters in the world and bearing the greatest names; and she, teaches us
+all that we are capable of learning, and persuades us and encourages us
+with prizes and honors, much as if we were somehow children of her own;
+and when this noble education is finished and we are ready to carry it
+home and spread its gracious ministries abroad over our nation, and we
+come with homage and gratitude and ask France for the bill--there is
+nothing to pay. And in return for this imperial generosity, what does
+America do? She charges a duty on French works of art!
+
+I wish I had your end of this dispute; I should have something worth
+talking about. If you would only furnish me something to argue,
+something to refute--but you persistently won't. You leave good
+chances unutilized and spend your strength in proving and establishing
+unimportant things. For instance, you have proven and established these
+eight facts here following--a good score as to number, but not worth
+while:
+
+Mark Twain is--
+
+1. “Insulting.”
+
+2. (Sarcastically speaking) “This refined humorist.”
+
+3. Prefers the manure-pile to the violets.
+
+4. Has uttered “an ill-natured sneer.”
+
+5. Is “nasty.”
+
+6. Needs a “lesson in politeness and good manners.”
+
+7. Has published a “nasty article.”
+
+8. Has made remarks “unworthy of a gentleman.”--[“It is more funny than
+his” (Mark Twain's) “anecdote, and would have been less insulting.”]
+
+A quoted remark of mine “is a gross insult to a nation friendly to
+America.”
+
+“He has read La Terre, this refined humorist.”
+
+“When Mark Twain visits a garden... he goes in the far-away corner where
+the soil is prepared.”
+
+“Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot so much as stain them” (the
+Frenchwomen).
+
+“When he” (Mark Twain) “takes his revenge he is unkind, unfair, bitter,
+nasty.”
+
+“But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark,” etc.
+
+“Mark might certainly have derived from it” (M. Bourget's book) “a
+lesson in politeness and good manners.”
+
+A quoted remark of mine is “unworthy of a gentleman.”--
+
+These are all true, but really they are not valuable; no one cares much
+for such finds. In our American magazines we recognize this and suppress
+them. We avoid naming them. American writers never allow themselves to
+name them. It would look as if they were in a temper, and we hold that
+exhibitions of temper in public are not good form except in the very
+young and inexperienced. And even if we had the disposition to name
+them, in order to fill up a gap when we were short of ideas and
+arguments, our magazines would not allow us to do it, because they think
+that such words sully their pages. This present magazine is particularly
+strenuous about it. Its note to me announcing the forwarding of your
+proof-sheets to France closed thus--for your protection:
+
+“It is needless to ask you to avoid anything that he might consider as
+personal.”
+
+It was well enough, as a measure of precaution, but really it was not
+needed. You can trust me implicitly, M. Bourget; I shall never call
+you any names in print which I should be ashamed to call you with your
+unoffending and dearest ones present.
+
+Indeed, we are reserved, and particular in America to a degree which you
+would consider exaggerated. For instance, we should not write notes like
+that one of yours to a lady for a small fault--or a large one.--[When
+M. Paul Bourget indulges in a little chaffing at the expense of the
+Americans, “who can always get away with a few years' trying to find
+out who their grandfathers were,”] he merely makes an allusion to an
+American foible; but, forsooth, what a kind man, what a humorist Mark
+Twain is when he retorts by calling France a nation of bastards! How the
+Americans of culture and refinement will admire him for thus speaking in
+their name!
+
+Snobbery.... I could give Mark Twain an example of the American
+specimen. It is a piquant story. I never published it because I feared
+my readers might think that I was giving them a typical illustration of
+American character instead of a rare exception.
+
+I was once booked by my manager to give a causerie in the drawing-room
+of a New York millionaire. I accepted with reluctance. I do not like
+private engagements. At five o'clock on the day the causerie was to be
+given, the lady sent to my manager to say that she would expect me to
+arrive at nine o'clock and to speak for about an hour. Then she wrote
+a postscript. Many women are unfortunate there. Their minds are full
+of after-thoughts, and the most important part of their letters is
+generally to be found after their signature. This lady's P. S. ran thus:
+“I suppose he will not expect to be entertained after the lecture.”
+
+I fairly shouted, as Mark Twain would say, and then, indulging myself in
+a bit of snobbishness, I was back at her as quick as a flash:
+
+“Dear Madam: As a literary man of some reputation, I have many times had
+the pleasure of being entertained by the members of the old aristocracy
+of France. I have also many times had the pleasure of being entertained
+by the members of the old aristocracy of England. If it may interest
+you, I can even tell you that I have several times had the honor of
+being entertained by royalty; but my ambition has never been so wild as
+to expect that one day I might be entertained by the aristocracy of New
+York. No, I do not expect to be entertained by you, nor do I want you to
+expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night, for I decline to
+keep the engagement.”
+
+Now, I could fill a book on America with reminiscences of this sort,
+adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers, on New York 'chronique
+scandaleuse', on the tenement houses of the large cities, on the
+gambling-hells of Denver, and the dens of San Francisco, and what not!
+[But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark, will make me do
+it.]--We should not think it kind. No matter how much we might have
+associated with kings and nobilities, we should not think it right to
+crush her with it and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life; for
+we have a saying, “Who humiliates my mother includes his own.”
+
+Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter,
+M. Bourget? Indeed I do not. I believe it to have been surreptitiously
+inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned. I think he did
+it with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your
+article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve
+you when you see it. I also think he interlarded many other things which
+you will disapprove of when you see them. I am certain that all the
+harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you. No doubt you could
+have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost
+him to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a
+higher quality.
+
+Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent
+information about Balzac and those others.--[“Now the style of M.
+Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to
+Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,
+Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read
+Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave
+for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre
+Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he read Victor Hugo's
+'Les Miserables' and 'Notre Dame de Paris'? Has he read or heard the
+plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans
+of modern literature, whose names will be household words all over
+the world for hundreds of years to come? He has read La Terre--this
+kind-hearted, refined humorist! When Mark Twain visits a garden does he
+smell the violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle? No, he
+goes in the far-away corner where the soil is prepared. Hear what he
+says: 'I wish M. Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he
+came. It is the only way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found
+I was coming to Paris I read La Terre.'”]--All this in simple justice
+to you--and to me; for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours
+would be to wrong your head and heart, and at the same time convict
+myself of being equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be
+lodged.
+
+And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from
+which the Reply grew--the anecdote which closed my recent article--and
+consider how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous
+dimensions. If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would
+know that that anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified
+some hundreds of times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to
+creep in the back way. But I accuse you of nothing--nothing but error.
+When you say that I “retort by calling France a nation of bastards,”
+ it is an error. And not a small one, but a large one. I made no such
+remark, nor anything resembling it. Moreover, the magazine would not
+have allowed me to use so gross a word as that.
+
+You told an anecdote. A funny one--I admit that. It hit a foible of
+our American aristocracy, and it stung me--I admit that; it stung me
+sharply. It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French
+kings in the gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:
+
+“He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his
+grandfather?” That is, the American aristocrat's grandfather.
+
+Now that hits only a few of us, I grant--just the upper crust only--but
+it hits exceedingly hard.
+
+I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you. In one of your
+chapters I found this chance:
+
+“In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts
+and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of
+the French soul.”
+
+You see? Your “higher Parisian” class--not everybody, not the nation,
+but only the top crust of the Nation--applies to debauchery all the
+powers of its soul.
+
+I argued to myself that that energy must produce results. So I built
+an anecdote out of your remark. In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say
+to me--but see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped and
+curtailed) in paragraph eleven of your Reply.--[So, I repeat, Mark Twain
+does not like M. Paul Bourget's book. So long as he makes light fun
+of the great French writer he is at home, he is pleasant, he is the
+American humorist we know. When he takes his revenge (and where is the
+reason for taking a revenge?) he is unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty.]
+
+For example: See his answer to a Frenchman who jokingly remarks to him:
+
+“I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because
+whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his time, he can
+always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grandfather
+was.”
+
+Hear the answer:
+
+“I reckon a Frenchman's got his little standby for a dull time, too;
+because when all other interests fail, he can turn in and see if he
+can't find out who his father was.”
+
+The first remark is a good-humored bit of chaffing on American snobbery.
+I may be utterly destitute of humor, but I call the second remark a
+gratuitous charge of immorality hurled at the French women--a remark
+unworthy of a man who has the ear of the public, unworthy of a
+gentleman, a gross insult to a nation friendly to America, a nation that
+helped Mark Twain's ancestors in their struggle for liberty, a nation
+where to-day it is enough to say that you are American to see every door
+open wide to you.
+
+If Mark Twain was hard up in search of, a French “chestnut,” I might
+have told him the following little anecdote. It is more funny than his,
+and would have been less insulting: Two little street boys are abusing
+each other. “Ah, hold your tongue,” says one, “you ain't got no father.”
+
+“Ain't got no father!” replies the other; “I've got more fathers than
+you.”
+
+Now, then, your anecdote about the grandfathers hurt me. Why? Because
+it had a point. It wouldn't have hurt me if it hadn't had point. You
+wouldn't have wasted space on it if it hadn't had point.
+
+My anecdote has hurt you. Why? Because it had point, I suppose. It
+wouldn't have hurt you if it hadn't had point. I judged from your remark
+about the diligence and industry of the high Parisian upper crust that
+it would have some point, but really I had no idea what a gold-mine I
+had struck. I never suspected that the point was going to stick into the
+entire nation; but of course you know your nation better than I do, and
+if you think it punctures them all, I have to yield to your judgment.
+But you are to blame, your own self. Your remark misled me. I supposed
+the industry was confined to that little unnumerous upper layer.
+
+Well, now that the unfortunate thing has been done, let us do what we
+can to undo it. There must be a way, M. Bourget, and I am willing to do
+anything that will help; for I am as sorry as you can be yourself.
+
+I will tell you what I think will be the very thing.
+
+We will swap anecdotes. I will take your anecdote and you take mine. I
+will say to the dukes and counts and princes of the ancient nobility of
+France:
+
+“Ha, ha! You must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your
+grandfathers were?”
+
+They will merely smile indifferently and not feel hurt, because they can
+trace their lineage back through centuries.
+
+And you will hurl mine at every individual in the American nation,
+saying:
+
+“And you must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your
+fathers were.” They will merely smile indifferently, and not feel hurt,
+because they haven't any difficulty in finding their fathers.
+
+Do you get the idea? The whole harm in the anecdotes is in the point,
+you see; and when we swap them around that way, they haven't any.
+
+That settles it perfectly and beautifully, and I am glad I thought of
+it. I am very glad indeed, M. Bourget; for it was just that little wee
+thing that caused the whole difficulty and made you dictate the Reply,
+and your amanuensis call me all those hard names which the magazines
+dislike so. And I did it all in fun, too, trying to cap your funny
+anecdote with another one--on the give-and-take principle, you
+know--which is American. I didn't know that with the French it was
+all give and no take, and you didn't tell me. But now that I have made
+everything comfortable again, and fixed both anecdotes so they can never
+have any point any more, I know you will forgive me.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on Paul Bourget
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET ***
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Essays on Paul Bourget, by Mark Twain
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 5%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+Project Gutenberg's Essays on Paul Bourget, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Essays on Paul Bourget
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #3173]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <h1>
+      ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by Mark Twain
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="&rdquo; style=" cellpadding="4&rdquo; border=">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He reports the American joke correctly. In Boston they ask, How much does
+      he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Who were his
+      parents? And when an alien observer turns his telescope upon us&mdash;advertisedly
+      in our own special interest&mdash;a natural apprehension moves us to ask,
+      What is the diameter of his reflector?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I take a great interest in M. Bourget's chapters, for I know by the
+      newspapers that there are several Americans who are expecting to get a
+      whole education out of them; several who foresaw, and also foretold, that
+      our long night was over, and a light almost divine about to break upon the
+      land.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;His utterances concerning us are bound to be weighty and well
+          timed.&rdquo;
+
+          &ldquo;He gives us an object-lesson which should be thoughtfully and
+          profitably studied.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      These well-considered and important verdicts were of a nature to restore
+      public confidence, which had been disquieted by questionings as to whether
+      so young a teacher would be qualified to take so large a class as
+      70,000,000, distributed over so extensive a schoolhouse as America, and
+      pull it through without assistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament,
+      and not easily disturbed. I feared for my country. And I was not wholly
+      tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above. It seemed to me that there
+      was still room for doubt. In fact, in looking the ground over I became
+      more disturbed than I was before. Many worrying questions came up in my
+      mind. Two were prominent. Where had the teacher gotten his equipment? What
+      was his method?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had gotten his equipment in France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then as to his method! I saw by his own intimations that he was an
+      Observer, and had a System that used by naturalists and other scientists.
+      The naturalist collects many bugs and reptiles and butterflies and studies
+      their ways a long time patiently. By this means he is presently able to
+      group these creatures into families and subdivisions of families by nice
+      shadings of differences observable in their characters. Then he labels all
+      those shaded bugs and things with nicely descriptive group names, and is
+      now happy, for his great work is completed, and as a result he intimately
+      knows every bug and shade of a bug there, inside and out. It may be true,
+      but a person who was not a naturalist would feel safer about it if he had
+      the opinion of the bug. I think it is a pleasant System, but subject to
+      error.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a
+      Generalizer, a Psychologizer; and, first and last, a Thinker. He has to be
+      all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is often
+      able to prove competency. But history has shown that when he is abroad
+      observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against him. He is
+      then a naturalist observing a bug, with no more than a naturalist's
+      chance of being able to tell the bug anything new about itself, and no
+      more than a naturalist's chance of being able to teach it any new
+      ways which it will prefer to its own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return to that first question. M. Bourget, as teacher, would simply be
+      France teaching America. It seemed to me that the outlook was dark&mdash;almost
+      Egyptian, in fact. What would the new teacher, representing France, teach
+      us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading.
+      Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in that matter.
+      Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date&mdash;1809.
+      Postal service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we
+      taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own
+      specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility,
+      Democracy, Adultery the system is too variegated for our climate.
+      Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot
+      rob the poor to enrich ourselves. Novel-writing? No. M. Bourget and the
+      others know only one plan, and when that is expurgated there is nothing
+      left of the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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: &ldquo;It was severe&mdash;yes, it was bitterly severe; but
+      oh, how true it was; and it will do us so much good!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed a doubtful scheme. He could explain us to himself&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the
+      life of a people and make a valuable report&mdash;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 &ldquo;observation&rdquo;? 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&mdash;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&mdash;his
+      failure was absolutely monumental. Newport is a disastrous place for the
+      unacclimated observer, evidently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;his own place&mdash;and that
+      is one book. In time he and his brethren will report to you the life and
+      the people of the whole nation&mdash;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 Germans, the Italians, the
+      Swedes, the French, the Chinamen, the Greasers; and the Catholics, the
+      Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the
+      Spiritualists, the Mormons, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Jews, the
+      Campbellites, the infidels, the Christian Scientists, the Mind-Curists,
+      the Faith-Curists, the train-robbers, the White Caps, the Moonshiners. And
+      when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of
+      the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people; and not
+      anywhere else can these be had. And the shadings of character, manners,
+      feelings, ambitions, will be infinite.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;'The nature of a people' is always of a similar shade in its
+          vices and its virtues, in its frivolities and in its labor.
+          'It is this physiognomy which it is necessary to discover',
+          and every document is good, from the hall of a casino to the
+          church, from the foibles of a fashionable woman to the
+          suggestions of a revolutionary leader.  I am therefore quite
+          sure that this 'American soul', the principal interest and the
+          great object of my voyage, appears behind the records of
+          Newport for those who choose to see it.&rdquo;&mdash;M. Paul Bourget.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      [The italics ('') are mine.] It is a large contract which he
+      has undertaken. &ldquo;Records&rdquo; is a pretty poor word there, but I
+      think the use of it is due to hasty translation. In the original the word
+      is 'fastes'. I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he
+      expected to find the great &ldquo;American soul&rdquo; secreted behind the
+      ostentations of Newport; and that he was going to get it out and examine
+      it, and generalize it, and psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its
+      hidden vast mystery: &ldquo;the nature of the people&rdquo; of the United
+      States of America. We have been accused of being a nation addicted to
+      inventing wild schemes. I trust that we shall be allowed to retire to
+      second place now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled
+      &ldquo;American.&rdquo; There isn't a single human ambition, or
+      religious trend, or drift of thought, or peculiarity of education, or code
+      of principles, or breed of folly, or style of conversation, or preference
+      for a particular subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head
+      or face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or
+      disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can
+      rationally be generalized as &ldquo;American.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whenever you have found what seems to be an &ldquo;American&rdquo;
+      peculiarity, you have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in
+      the social scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared. And you can
+      cross the Atlantic and find it again. There may be a Newport religious
+      drift, or sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of
+      face, but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and
+      west, where you could not find your duplicates. It is the same with
+      everything else which one might propose to call &ldquo;American.&rdquo; M.
+      Bourget thinks he has found the American Coquette. If he had really found
+      her he would also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she
+      exists in other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart
+      and the same ways and impulses. I think this because I have seen our
+      coquette; I have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our
+      novels, and seen her twin in foreign novels. I wish M. Bourget had seen
+      ours. He thought he saw her. And so he applied his System to her. She was
+      a Species. So he gathered a number of samples of what seemed to be her,
+      and put them under his glass, and divided them into groups which he calls
+      &ldquo;types,&rdquo; and labeled them in his usual scientific way with
+      &ldquo;formulas&rdquo;&mdash;brief sharp descriptive flashes that make a
+      person blink, sometimes, they are so sudden and vivid. As a rule they are
+      pretty far-fetched, but that is not an important matter; they surprise,
+      they compel admiration, and I notice by some of the comments which his
+      efforts have called forth that they deceive the unwary. Here are a few of
+      the coquette variants which he has grouped and labeled:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     THE COLLECTOR.
+     THE EQUILIBREE.
+     THE PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.
+     THE BLUFFER.
+     THE GIRL-BOY.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      If he had stopped with describing these characters we should have been
+      obliged to believe that they exist; that they exist, and that he has seen
+      them and spoken with them. But he did not stop there; he went further and
+      furnished to us light-throwing samples of their behavior, and also
+      light-throwing samples of their speeches. He entered those things in his
+      note-book without suspicion, he takes them out and delivers them to the
+      world with a candor and simplicity which show that he believed them
+      genuine. They throw altogether too much light. They reveal to the native
+      the origin of his find. I suppose he knows how he came to make that novel
+      and captivating discovery, by this time. If he does not, any American can
+      tell him&mdash;any American to whom he will show his anecdotes. It was
+      &ldquo;put up&rdquo; on him, as we say. It was a jest&mdash;to be plain,
+      it was a series of frauds. To my mind it was a poor sort of jest, witless
+      and contemptible. The players of it have their reward, such as it is; they
+      have exhibited the fact that whatever they may be they are not ladies. M.
+      Bourget did not discover a type of coquette; he merely discovered a type
+      of practical joker. 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his Chapter IV. M. Bourget has two or three columns gravely devoted to
+      the collating and examining and psychologizing of these sorry little
+      frauds. One is not moved to laugh. There is nothing funny in the
+      situation; it is only pathetic. The stranger gave those people his
+      confidence, and they dishonorably treated him in return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But one must be allowed to suspect that M. Bourget was a little to blame
+      himself. Even a practical joker has some little judgment. He has to
+      exercise some degree of sagacity in selecting his prey if he would save
+      himself from getting into trouble. In my time I have seldom seen such
+      daring things marketed at any price as these conscienceless folk have
+      worked off at par on this confiding observer. It compels the conviction
+      that there was something about him that bred in those speculators a quite
+      unusual sense of safety, and encouraged them to strain their powers in his
+      behalf. They seem to have satisfied themselves that all he wanted was
+      &ldquo;significant&rdquo; facts, and that he was not accustomed to examine
+      the source whence they proceeded. It is plain that there was a sort of
+      conspiracy against him almost from the start&mdash;a conspiracy to freight
+      him up with all the strange extravagances those people's decayed
+      brains could invent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lengths to which they went are next to incredible. They told him
+      things which surely would have excited any one else's suspicion, but
+      they did not excite his. Consider this:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;There is not in all the United States an entirely nude
+          statue.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      If an angel should come down and say such a thing about heaven, a
+      reasonably cautious observer would take that angel's number and
+      inquire a little further before he added it to his catch. What does the
+      present observer do? Adds it. Adds it at once. Adds it, and labels it with
+      this innocent comment:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;This small fact is strangely significant.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It does seem to me that this kind of observing is defective.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is another curiosity which some liberal person made him a present of.
+      I should think it ought to have disturbed the deep slumber of his
+      suspicion a little, but it didn't. It was a note from a fog-horn for
+      strenuousness, it seems to me, but the doomed voyager did not catch it. If
+      he had but caught it, it would have saved him from several disasters:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;If the American knows that you are traveling to take notes, he
+          is interested in it, and at the same time rejoices in it, as in
+          a tribute.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Again, this is defective observation. It is human to like to be praised;
+      one can even notice it in the French. But it is not human to like to be
+      ridiculed, even when it comes in the form of a &ldquo;tribute.&rdquo; I
+      think a little psychologizing ought to have come in there. Something like
+      this: A dog does not like to be ridiculed, a redskin does not like to be
+      ridiculed, a negro does not like to be ridiculed, a Chinaman does not like
+      to be ridiculed; let us deduce from these significant facts this formula:
+      the American's grade being higher than these, and the chain-of
+      argument stretching unbroken all the way up to him, there is room for
+      suspicion that the person who said the American likes to be ridiculed, and
+      regards it as a tribute, is not a capable observer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional is
+      too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that great
+      art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks. Every now and then, at half-hour
+      intervals, M. Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies and dissolves
+      them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the charge into a
+      mould and turns you out a compact principle which will explain an American
+      girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn for old things, or any
+      other impossible riddle which a person wants answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that can
+      be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the
+      name of the nation where they are found. I wonder what they are. Perhaps
+      one of them is temperament. One speaks of French vivacity and German
+      gravity and English stubbornness. There is no American temperament. The
+      nearest that one can come at it is to say there are two&mdash;the composed
+      Northern and the impetuous Southern; and both are found in other
+      countries. Morals? Purity of women may fairly be called universal with us,
+      but that is the case in some other countries. We have no monopoly of it;
+      it cannot be named American. I think that there is but a single specialty
+      with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide name &ldquo;American.&rdquo;
+      That is the national devotion to ice-water. All Germans drink beer, but
+      the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither of those peoples is the
+      beer-drinking nation. I suppose we do stand alone in having a drink that
+      nobody likes but ourselves. When we have been a month in Europe we lose
+      our craving for it, and we finally tell the hotel folk that they needn't
+      provide it any more. Yet we hardly touch our native shore again, winter or
+      summer, before we are eager for it. The reasons for this state of things
+      have not been psychologized yet. I drop the hint and say no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is my belief that there are some &ldquo;national&rdquo; 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; and before I leave this sunny land again I will gather in a
+      few random statistics and psychologize the plausibilities out of it. If
+      people are to come over to America and find fault with our girls and our
+      women, and psychologize every little thing they do, and try to teach them
+      how to behave, and how to cultivate themselves up to where one cannot tell
+      them from the French model, I intend to find out whether those
+      missionaries are qualified or not. A nation ought always to examine into
+      this detail before engaging the teacher for good. This last one has let
+      fall a remark which renewed those doubts of mine when I read it:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied
+          to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all
+          the weaknesses of the French soul.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      You see, it amounts to a trade with the French soul; a profession; a
+      science; the serious business of life, so to speak, in our high Parisian
+      existence. I do not quite like the look of it. I question if it can be
+      taught with profit in our country, except, of course, to those pathetic,
+      neglected minds that are waiting there so yearningly for the education
+      which M. Bourget is going to furnish them from the serene summits of our
+      high Parisian life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I spoke a moment ago of the existence of some superstitions that have been
+      parading the world as facts this long time. For instance, consider the
+      Dollar. The world seems to think that the love of money is &ldquo;American&rdquo;;
+      and that the mad desire to get suddenly rich is &ldquo;American.&rdquo; I
+      believe that both of these things are merely and broadly human, not
+      American monopolies at all. The love of money is natural to all nations,
+      for money is a good and strong friend. I think that this love has existed
+      everywhere, ever since the Bible called it the root of all evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying
+      to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising
+      efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of
+      all proportion to the European experience. For eighty years this
+      opportunity has been offering itself in one new town or region after
+      another straight westward, step by step, all the way from the Atlantic
+      coast to the Pacific. When a mechanic could buy ten town lots on tolerably
+      long credit for ten months' savings out of his wages, and reasonably
+      expect to sell them in a couple of years for ten times what he gave for
+      them, it was human for him to try the venture, and he did it no matter
+      what his nationality was. He would have done it in Europe or China if he
+      had had the same chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the flush times in the silver regions a cook or any other humble worker
+      stood a very good chance to get rich out of a trifle of money risked in a
+      stock deal; and that person promptly took that risk, no matter what his or
+      her nationality might be. I was there, and saw it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But these opportunities have not been plenty in our Southern States; so
+      there you have a prodigious region where the rush for sudden wealth is
+      almost an unknown thing&mdash;and has been, from the beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Europe has offered few opportunities for poor Tom, Dick, and Harry; but
+      when she has offered one, there has been no noticeable difference between
+      European eagerness and American. England saw this in the wild days of the
+      Railroad King; France saw it in 1720&mdash;time of Law and the Mississippi
+      Bubble. I am sure I have never seen in the gold and silver mines any
+      madness, fury, frenzy to get suddenly rich which was even remotely
+      comparable to that which raged in France in the Bubble day. If I had a
+      cyclopaedia here I could turn to that memorable case, and satisfy nearly
+      anybody that the hunger for the sudden dollar is no more &ldquo;American&rdquo;
+      than it is French. And if I could furnish an American opportunity to staid
+      Germany, I think I could wake her up like a house afire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I must return to the Generalizations, Psychologizings, Deductions.
+      When M. Bourget is exploiting these arts, it is then that he is peculiarly
+      and particularly himself. His ways are wholly original when he encounters
+      a trait or a custom which is new to him. Another person would merely
+      examine the find, verify it, estimate its value, and let it go; but that
+      is not sufficient for M. Bourget: he always wants to know why that thing
+      exists, he wants to know how it came to happen; and he will not let go of
+      it until he has found out. And in every instance he will find that reason
+      where no one but himself would have thought of looking for it. He does not
+      seem to care for a reason that is not picturesquely located; one might
+      almost say picturesquely and impossibly located.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found out that in America men do not try to hunt down young married
+      women. At once, as usual, he wanted to know why. Any one could have told
+      him. He could have divined it by the lights thrown by the novels of the
+      country. But no, he preferred to find out for himself. He has a
+      trustfulness as regards men and facts which is fine and unusual; he is not
+      particular about the source of a fact, he is not particular about the
+      character and standing of the fact itself; but when it comes to pounding
+      out the reason for the existence of the fact, he will trust no one but
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the present instance here was his fact: American young married women
+      are not pursued by the corruptor; and here was the question: What is it
+      that protects her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems quite unlikely that that problem could have offered difficulties
+      to any but a trained philosopher. Nearly any person would have said to M.
+      Bourget: &ldquo;Oh, that is very simple. It is very seldom in America that
+      a marriage is made on a commercial basis; our marriages, from the
+      beginning, have been made for love; and where love is there is no room for
+      the corruptor.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, it is interesting to see the formidable way in which M. Bourget went
+      at that poor, humble little thing. He moved upon it in column&mdash;three
+      columns&mdash;and with artillery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two reasons of a very different kind explain&rdquo;&mdash;that
+      fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now that I have got so far, I am almost afraid to say what his two
+      reasons are, lest I be charged with inventing them. But I will not retreat
+      now; I will condense them and print them, giving my word that I am honest
+      and not trying to deceive any one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. Young married women are protected from the approaches of the seducer in
+      New England and vicinity by the diluted remains of a prudence created by a
+      Puritan law of two hundred years ago, which for a while punished adultery
+      with death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. And young married women of the other forty or fifty States are
+      protected by laws which afford extraordinary facilities for divorce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I have not lost my mind I have accurately conveyed those two Vesuvian
+      irruptions of philosophy. But the reader can consult Chapter IV. of
+      'Outre-Mer', and decide for himself. Let us examine this
+      paralyzing Deduction or Explanation by the light of a few sane facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. This universality of &ldquo;protection&rdquo; has existed in our
+      country from the beginning; before the death penalty existed in New
+      England, and during all the generations that have dragged by since it was
+      annulled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. Extraordinary facilities for divorce are of such recent creation that
+      any middle-aged American can remember a time when such things had not yet
+      been thought of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us suppose that the first easy divorce law went into effect forty
+      years ago, and got noised around and fairly started in business
+      thirty-five years ago, when we had, say, 25,000,000 of white population.
+      Let us suppose that among 5,000,000 of them the young married women were
+      &ldquo;protected&rdquo; by the surviving shudder of that ancient Puritan
+      scare&mdash;what is M. Bourget going to do about those who lived among the
+      20,000,000? They were clean in their morals, they were pure, yet there was
+      no easy divorce law to protect them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Awhile ago I said that M. Bourget's method of truth-seeking&mdash;hunting
+      for it in out-of-the-way places&mdash;was new; but that was an error. I
+      remember that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other
+      astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion
+      which M. Bourget employs in his reasonings about American social facts and
+      their origin. Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was
+      caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo,
+      which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific
+      gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure&mdash;by the
+      natural processes of animal decay&mdash;of the phosphorus contained in
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much
+      thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His
+      own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs; and
+      he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that the
+      locusts do like that in Egypt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Giordano Bruno also was outspoken in his praises of Leverrier's
+      important contribution to astronomical science, and was at first inclined
+      to regard it as conclusive; but later, conceiving it to be erroneous, he
+      pronounced against it, and advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was
+      a detachment or corps of stars which became arrested and held in 'suspenso
+      suspensorum' by refraction of gravitation while on the march to join
+      their several constellations; a proposition for which he was afterwards
+      burned at the stake in Jacksonville, Illinois.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These were all brilliant and picturesque theories, and each was received
+      with enthusiasm by the scientific world; but when a New England farmer,
+      who was not a thinker, but only a plain sort of person who tried to
+      account for large facts in simple ways, came out with the opinion that the
+      Milky Way was just common, ordinary stars, and was put where it was
+      because God &ldquo;wanted to hev it so,&rdquo; the admirable idea fell
+      perfectly flat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a literary artist, M. Bourget is as fresh and striking as he is as a
+      scientific one. He says, &ldquo;Above all, I do not believe much in
+      anecdotes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why? &ldquo;In history they are all false&rdquo;&mdash;a sufficiently
+      broad statement&mdash;&ldquo;in literature all libelous&rdquo;&mdash;also
+      a sufficiently sweeping statement, coming from a critic who notes that we
+      are &ldquo;a people who are peculiarly extravagant in our language&mdash;&rdquo;
+      and when it is a matter of social life, &ldquo;almost all biased.&rdquo;
+      It seems to amount to stultification, almost. He has built two or three
+      breeds of American coquettes out of anecdotes&mdash;mainly &ldquo;biased&rdquo;
+      ones, I suppose; and, as they occur &ldquo;in literature,&rdquo; furnished
+      by his pen, they must be &ldquo;all libelous.&rdquo; Or did he mean not in
+      literature or anecdotes about literature or literary people? I am not able
+      to answer that. Perhaps the original would be clearer, but I have only the
+      translation of this installment by me. I think the remark had an
+      intention; also that this intention was booked for the trip; but that
+      either in the hurry of the remark's departure it got left, or in the
+      confusion of changing cars at the translator's frontier it got
+      side-tracked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But on the other hand I believe in statistics; and those on
+      divorces appear to me to be most conclusive.&rdquo; And he sets himself
+      the task of explaining&mdash;in a couple of columns&mdash;the process by
+      which Easy-Divorce conceived, invented, originated, developed, and
+      perfected an empire-embracing condition of sexual purity in the States. IN
+      40 YEARS. No, he doesn't state the interval. With all his passion
+      for statistics he forgot to ask how long it took to produce this gigantic
+      miracle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have followed his pleasant but devious trail through those columns, but
+      I was not able to get hold of his argument and find out what it was. I was
+      not even able to find out where it left off. It seemed to gradually
+      dissolve and flow off into other matters. I followed it with interest, for
+      I was anxious to learn how easy-divorce eradicated adultery in America,
+      but I was disappointed; I have no idea yet how it did it. I only know it
+      didn't. But that is not valuable; I knew it before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all. The minute it
+      crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments
+      flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place. And so, when M. Bourget
+      said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke all up. I remember
+      exploding its American countermine once, under that grand hero, Napoleon.
+      He was only First Consul then, and I was Consul-General&mdash;for the
+      United States, of course; but we were very intimate, notwithstanding the
+      difference in rank, for I waived that. One day something offered the
+      opening, and he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, General, I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an
+      American, because whenever he can't strike up any other way to put
+      in his time he can always get away with a few years trying to find out who
+      his grandfather was!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fairly shouted, for I had never heard it sound better; and then I was
+      back at him as quick as a flash&mdash;&ldquo;Right, your Excellency! But I
+      reckon a Frenchman's got his little stand-by for a dull time, too;
+      because when all other interests fail he can turn in and see if he can't
+      find out who his father was!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, you should have heard him just whoop, and cackle, and carry on! He
+      reached up and hit me one on the shoulder, and says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Land, but it's good! It's im-mensely good! I'George,
+      I never heard it said so good in my life before! Say it again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I said it again, and he said his again, and I said mine again, and then
+      he did, and then I did, and then he did, and we kept on doing it, and
+      doing it, and I never had such a good time, and he said the same. In my
+      opinion there isn't anything that is as killing as one of those dear
+      old ripe pensioners if you know how to snatch it out in a kind of a fresh
+      sort of original way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I wish M. Bourget had read more of our novels before he came. It is
+      the only way to thoroughly understand a people. When I found I was coming
+      to Paris, I read 'La Terre'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          [The preceding squib was assailed in the North American Review
+          in an article entitled &ldquo;Mark Twain and Paul Bourget,&rdquo; by Max
+          O'Rell.  The following little note is a Rejoinder to that
+          article.  It is possible that the position assumed here&mdash;that
+          M. Bourget dictated the O'Rell article himself&mdash;is untenable.]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      You have every right, my dear M. Bourget, to retort upon me by dictation,
+      if you prefer that method to writing at me with your pen; but if I may say
+      it without hurt&mdash;and certainly I mean no offence&mdash;I believe you
+      would have acquitted yourself better with the pen. With the pen you are at
+      home; it is your natural weapon; you use it with grace, eloquence, charm,
+      persuasiveness, when men are to be convinced, and with formidable effect
+      when they have earned a castigation. But I am sure I see signs in the
+      above article that you are either unaccustomed to dictating or are out of
+      practice. If you will re-read it you will notice, yourself, that it lacks
+      definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it
+      lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it
+      wanders around; that it loses itself early and does not find itself any
+      more. There are some other defects, as you will notice, but I think I have
+      named the main ones. I feel sure that they are all due to your lack of
+      practice in dictating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Inasmuch as you had not signed it I had the impression at first that you
+      had not dictated it. But only for a moment. Certain quite simple and
+      definite facts reminded me that the article had to come from you, for the
+      reason that it could not come from any one else without a specific
+      invitation from you or from me. I mean, it could not except as an
+      intrusion, a transgression of the law which forbids strangers to mix into
+      a private dispute between friends, unasked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those simple and definite facts were these: I had published an article in
+      this magazine, with you for my subject; just you yourself; I stuck
+      strictly to that one subject, and did not interlard any other. No one, of
+      course, could call me to account but you alone, or your authorized
+      representative. I asked some questions&mdash;asked them of myself. I
+      answered them myself. My article was thirteen pages long, and all devoted
+      to you; devoted to you, and divided up in this way: one page of guesses as
+      to what subjects you would instruct us in, as teacher; one page of doubts
+      as to the effectiveness of your method of examining us and our ways; two
+      or three pages of criticism of your method, and of certain results which
+      it furnished you; two or three pages of attempts to show the justness of
+      these same criticisms; half a dozen pages made up of slight fault-findings
+      with certain minor details of your literary workmanship, of extracts from
+      your 'Outre-Mer' and comments upon them; then I closed with an
+      anecdote. I repeat&mdash;for certain reasons&mdash;that I closed with an
+      anecdote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I was asked by this magazine if I wished to &ldquo;answer&rdquo; a
+      &ldquo;reply&rdquo; to that article of mine, I said &ldquo;yes,&rdquo; and
+      waited in Paris for the proof-sheets of the &ldquo;reply&rdquo; to come. I
+      already knew, by the cablegram, that the &ldquo;reply&rdquo; would not be
+      signed by you, but upon reflection I knew it would be dictated by you,
+      because no volunteer would feel himself at liberty to assume your
+      championship in a private dispute, unasked, in view of the fact that you
+      are quite well able to take care of your matters of that sort yourself and
+      are not in need of any one's help. No, a volunteer could not make
+      such a venture. 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. In fact he could not get in at all, except by the back
+      way, and with a false key; that is to say, a pretext&mdash;a pretext
+      invented for the occasion by putting into my mouth words which I did not
+      use, and by wresting sayings of mine from their plain and true meaning.
+      Would he resort to methods like those to get in? No; there are no people
+      of that kind. So then I knew for a certainty that you dictated the Reply
+      yourself. I knew you did it to save yourself manual labor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And you had the right, as I have already said and I am content&mdash;perfectly
+      content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it would have been little trouble to you, and a great kindness to me,
+      if you had written your Reply all out with your own capable hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because then it would have replied&mdash;and that is really what a Reply
+      is for. Broadly speaking, its function is to refute&mdash;as you will
+      easily concede. That leaves something for the other person to take hold
+      of: he has a chance to reply to the Reply, he has a chance to refute the
+      refutation. This would have happened if you had written it out instead of
+      dictating. Dictating is nearly sure to unconcentrate the dictator's
+      mind, when he is out of practice, confuse him, and betray him into using
+      one set of literary rules when he ought to use a quite different set.
+      Often it betrays him into employing the RULES FOR CONVERSATION BETWEEN A
+      SHOUTER AND A DEAF PERSON&mdash;as in the present case&mdash;when he ought
+      to employ the RULES FOR CONDUCTING DISCUSSION WITH A FAULT-FINDER. The
+      great foundation-rule and basic principle of discussion with a
+      fault-finder is relevancy and concentration upon the subject; whereas the
+      great foundation-rule and basic principle governing conversation between a
+      shouter and a deaf person is irrelevancy and persistent desertion of the
+      topic in hand. If I may be allowed to illustrate by quoting example IV.,
+      section 7 from chapter ix. of &ldquo;Revised Rules for Conducting
+      Conversation between a Shouter and a Deaf Person,&rdquo; it will assist us
+      in getting a clear idea of the difference between the two sets of rules:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shouter. Did you say his name is WETHERBY?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deaf Person. Change? Yes, I think it will. Though if it should clear off I&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shouter. It's his NAME I want&mdash;his NAME.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deaf Person. Maybe so, maybe so; but it will only be a shower, I think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shouter. No, no, no!&mdash;you have quite misunderSTOOD me. If&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Deaf Person. Ah! GOOD morning; I am sorry you must go. But call again, and
+      let me continue to be of assistance to you in every way I can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You see it is a perfect kodak of the article you have dictated. It is
+      really curious and interesting when you come to compare it with yours; in
+      detail, with my former article to which it is a Reply in your hand. I talk
+      twelve pages about your American instruction projects, and your doubtful
+      scientific system, and your painstaking classification of nonexistent
+      things, and your diligence and zeal and sincerity, and your disloyal
+      attitude towards anecdotes, and your undue reverence for unsafe statistics
+      and for facts that lack a pedigree; and you turn around and come back at
+      me with eight pages of weather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not see how a person can act so. It is good of you to repeat, with
+      change of language, in the bulk of your rejoinder, so much of my own
+      article, and adopt my sentiments, and make them over, and put new buttons
+      on; and I like the compliment, and am frank to say so; but agreeing with a
+      person cripples controversy and ought not to be allowed. It is weather;
+      and of almost the worst sort. It pleases me greatly to hear you discourse
+      with such approval and expansiveness upon my text:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think
+      that is as far as he can get. I think that no foreigner can report its
+      interior;&rdquo;&mdash;[And you say: &ldquo;A man of average intelligence,
+      who has passed six months among a people, cannot express opinions that are
+      worth jotting down, but he can form impressions that are worth repeating.
+      For my part, I think that foreigners' impressions are more
+      interesting than native opinions. After all, such impressions merely mean
+      'how the country struck the foreigner.'&rdquo;]&mdash;which is
+      a quite clear way of saying that a foreigner's report is only
+      valuable when it restricts itself to impressions. It pleases me to have
+      you follow my lead in that glowing way, but it leaves me nothing to
+      combat. You should give me something to deny and refute; I would do as
+      much for you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It pleases me to have you playfully warn the public against taking one of
+      your books seriously.&mdash;[When I published Jonathan and his Continent,
+      I wrote in a preface addressed to Jonathan: &ldquo;If ever you should
+      insist in seeing in this little volume a serious study of your country and
+      of your countrymen, I warn you that your world-wide fame for humor will be
+      exploded.&rdquo;]&mdash;Because I used to do that cunning thing myself in
+      earlier days. I did it in a prefatory note to a book of mine called Tom
+      Sawyer.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                         NOTICE.
+
+          Persons attempting to find a motive in
+          this narrative will be prosecuted;
+          persons attempting to find a moral in it
+          will be banished; persons attempting to
+          find a plot in it will be shot.
+                              BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
+                              PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The kernel is the same in both prefaces, you see&mdash;the public must not
+      take us too seriously. If we remove that kernel we remove the
+      life-principle, and the preface is a corpse. Yes, it pleases me to have
+      you use that idea, for it is a high compliment. But it leaves me nothing
+      to combat; and that is damage to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Am I seeming to say that your Reply is not a reply at all, M. Bourget? If
+      so, I must modify that; it is too sweeping. For you have furnished a
+      general answer to my inquiry as to what France through you&mdash;can teach
+      us.&mdash;[&ldquo;What could France teach America!&rdquo; exclaims Mark
+      Twain. France can teach America all the higher pursuits of life, and there
+      is more artistic feeling and refinement in a street of French workingmen
+      than in many avenues inhabited by American millionaires. She can teach
+      her, not perhaps how to work, but how to rest, how to live, how to be
+      happy. She can teach her that the aim of life is not money-making, but
+      that money-making is only a means to obtain an end. She can teach her that
+      wives are not expensive toys, but useful partners, friends, and
+      confidants, who should always keep men under their wholesome influence by
+      their diplomacy, their tact, their common-sense, without bumptiousness.
+      These qualities, added to the highest standard of morality (not angular
+      and morose, but cheerful morality), are conceded to Frenchwomen by whoever
+      knows something of French life outside of the Paris boulevards, and Mark
+      Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot even so much as stain them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I might tell Mark Twain that in France a man who was seen tipsy in his
+      club would immediately see his name canceled from membership. A man who
+      had settled his fortune on his wife to avoid meeting his creditors would
+      be refused admission into any decent society. Many a Frenchman has blown
+      his brains out rather than declare himself a bankrupt. Now would Mark
+      Twain remark to this: 'An American is not such a fool: when a
+      creditor stands in his way he closes his doors, and reopens them the
+      following day. When he has been a bankrupt three times he can retire from
+      business?']&mdash;It is a good answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It relates to manners, customs, and morals&mdash;three things concerning
+      which we can never have exhaustive and determinate statistics, and so the
+      verdicts delivered upon them must always lack conclusiveness and be
+      subject to revision; but you have stated the truth, possibly, as nearly as
+      any one could do it, in the circumstances. But why did you choose a detail
+      of my question which could be answered only with vague hearsay evidence,
+      and go right by one which could have been answered with deadly facts?&mdash;facts
+      in everybody's reach, facts which none can dispute. I asked what
+      France could teach us about government. I laid myself pretty wide open,
+      there; and I thought I was handsomely generous, too, when I did it. France
+      can teach us how to levy village and city taxes which distribute the
+      burden with a nearer approach to perfect fairness than is the case in any
+      other land; and she can teach us the wisest and surest system of
+      collecting them that exists. She can teach us how to elect a President in
+      a sane way; and also how to do it without throwing the country into
+      earthquakes and convulsions that cripple and embarrass business, stir up
+      party hatred in the hearts of men, and make peaceful people wish the term
+      extended to thirty years. France can teach us&mdash;but enough of that
+      part of the question. And what else can France teach us? She can teach us
+      all the fine arts&mdash;and does. She throws open her hospitable art
+      academies, and says to us, &ldquo;Come&rdquo;&mdash;and we come, troops
+      and troops of our young and gifted; and she sets over us the ablest
+      masters in the world and bearing the greatest names; and she, teaches us
+      all that we are capable of learning, and persuades us and encourages us
+      with prizes and honors, much as if we were somehow children of her own;
+      and when this noble education is finished and we are ready to carry it
+      home and spread its gracious ministries abroad over our nation, and we
+      come with homage and gratitude and ask France for the bill&mdash;there is
+      nothing to pay. And in return for this imperial generosity, what does
+      America do? She charges a duty on French works of art!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I had your end of this dispute; I should have something worth
+      talking about. If you would only furnish me something to argue, something
+      to refute&mdash;but you persistently won't. You leave good chances
+      unutilized and spend your strength in proving and establishing unimportant
+      things. For instance, you have proven and established these eight facts
+      here following&mdash;a good score as to number, but not worth while:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mark Twain is&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. &ldquo;Insulting.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. (Sarcastically speaking) &ldquo;This refined humorist.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. Prefers the manure-pile to the violets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4. Has uttered &ldquo;an ill-natured sneer.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5. Is &ldquo;nasty.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6. Needs a &ldquo;lesson in politeness and good manners.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7. Has published a &ldquo;nasty article.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8. Has made remarks &ldquo;unworthy of a gentleman.&rdquo;&mdash;[&ldquo;It
+      is more funny than his&rdquo; (Mark Twain's) &ldquo;anecdote, and
+      would have been less insulting.&rdquo;]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quoted remark of mine &ldquo;is a gross insult to a nation friendly to
+      America.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has read La Terre, this refined humorist.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When Mark Twain visits a garden... he goes in the far-away corner
+      where the soil is prepared.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot so much as stain them&rdquo;
+      (the Frenchwomen).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When he&rdquo; (Mark Twain) &ldquo;takes his revenge he is unkind,
+      unfair, bitter, nasty.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark,&rdquo; etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mark might certainly have derived from it&rdquo; (M. Bourget's
+      book) &ldquo;a lesson in politeness and good manners.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A quoted remark of mine is &ldquo;unworthy of a gentleman.&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are all true, but really they are not valuable; no one cares much
+      for such finds. In our American magazines we recognize this and suppress
+      them. We avoid naming them. American writers never allow themselves to
+      name them. It would look as if they were in a temper, and we hold that
+      exhibitions of temper in public are not good form except in the very young
+      and inexperienced. And even if we had the disposition to name them, in
+      order to fill up a gap when we were short of ideas and arguments, our
+      magazines would not allow us to do it, because they think that such words
+      sully their pages. This present magazine is particularly strenuous about
+      it. Its note to me announcing the forwarding of your proof-sheets to
+      France closed thus&mdash;for your protection:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is needless to ask you to avoid anything that he might consider
+      as personal.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was well enough, as a measure of precaution, but really it was not
+      needed. You can trust me implicitly, M. Bourget; I shall never call you
+      any names in print which I should be ashamed to call you with your
+      unoffending and dearest ones present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, we are reserved, and particular in America to a degree which you
+      would consider exaggerated. For instance, we should not write notes like
+      that one of yours to a lady for a small fault&mdash;or a large one.&mdash;[When
+      M. Paul Bourget indulges in a little chaffing at the expense of the
+      Americans, &ldquo;who can always get away with a few years' trying
+      to find out who their grandfathers were,&rdquo;] he merely makes an
+      allusion to an American foible; but, forsooth, what a kind man, what a
+      humorist Mark Twain is when he retorts by calling France a nation of
+      bastards! How the Americans of culture and refinement will admire him for
+      thus speaking in their name!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Snobbery.... I could give Mark Twain an example of the American specimen.
+      It is a piquant story. I never published it because I feared my readers
+      might think that I was giving them a typical illustration of American
+      character instead of a rare exception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was once booked by my manager to give a causerie in the drawing-room of
+      a New York millionaire. I accepted with reluctance. I do not like private
+      engagements. At five o'clock on the day the causerie was to be
+      given, the lady sent to my manager to say that she would expect me to
+      arrive at nine o'clock and to speak for about an hour. Then she
+      wrote a postscript. Many women are unfortunate there. Their minds are full
+      of after-thoughts, and the most important part of their letters is
+      generally to be found after their signature. This lady's P. S. ran
+      thus: &ldquo;I suppose he will not expect to be entertained after the
+      lecture.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fairly shouted, as Mark Twain would say, and then, indulging myself in a
+      bit of snobbishness, I was back at her as quick as a flash:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Madam: As a literary man of some reputation, I have many times
+      had the pleasure of being entertained by the members of the old
+      aristocracy of France. I have also many times had the pleasure of being
+      entertained by the members of the old aristocracy of England. If it may
+      interest you, I can even tell you that I have several times had the honor
+      of being entertained by royalty; but my ambition has never been so wild as
+      to expect that one day I might be entertained by the aristocracy of New
+      York. No, I do not expect to be entertained by you, nor do I want you to
+      expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night, for I decline to
+      keep the engagement.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, I could fill a book on America with reminiscences of this sort,
+      adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers, on New York 'chronique
+      scandaleuse', on the tenement houses of the large cities, on the
+      gambling-hells of Denver, and the dens of San Francisco, and what not!
+      [But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark, will make me do it.]&mdash;We
+      should not think it kind. No matter how much we might have associated with
+      kings and nobilities, we should not think it right to crush her with it
+      and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life; for we have a saying,
+      &ldquo;Who humiliates my mother includes his own.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter, M.
+      Bourget? Indeed I do not. I believe it to have been surreptitiously
+      inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned. I think he did it
+      with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your
+      article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve
+      you when you see it. I also think he interlarded many other things which
+      you will disapprove of when you see them. I am certain that all the harsh
+      names discharged at me come from him, not you. No doubt you could have
+      proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him to do
+      it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a higher
+      quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent
+      information about Balzac and those others.&mdash;[&ldquo;Now the style of
+      M. Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to
+      Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone. Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,
+      Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan? Has he read
+      Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those
+      books which leave for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the
+      novels of Alexandre Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he
+      read Victor Hugo's 'Les Miserables' and 'Notre
+      Dame de Paris'? Has he read or heard the plays of Sandeau, Augier,
+      Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of modern literature, whose
+      names will be household words all over the world for hundreds of years to
+      come? He has read La Terre&mdash;this kind-hearted, refined humorist! When
+      Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the violets, the roses, the
+      jasmine, or the honeysuckle? No, he goes in the far-away corner where the
+      soil is prepared. Hear what he says: 'I wish M. Paul Bourget had
+      read more of our novels before he came. It is the only way to thoroughly
+      understand a people. When I found I was coming to Paris I read La Terre.'&rdquo;]&mdash;All
+      this in simple justice to you&mdash;and to me; for, to gravely accept
+      those interlardings as yours would be to wrong your head and heart, and at
+      the same time convict myself of being equipped with a vacancy where my
+      penetration ought to be lodged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which
+      the Reply grew&mdash;the anecdote which closed my recent article&mdash;and
+      consider how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous
+      dimensions. If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would
+      know that that anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified
+      some hundreds of times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to
+      creep in the back way. But I accuse you of nothing&mdash;nothing but
+      error. When you say that I &ldquo;retort by calling France a nation of
+      bastards,&rdquo; it is an error. And not a small one, but a large one. I
+      made no such remark, nor anything resembling it. Moreover, the magazine
+      would not have allowed me to use so gross a word as that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You told an anecdote. A funny one&mdash;I admit that. It hit a foible of
+      our American aristocracy, and it stung me&mdash;I admit that; it stung me
+      sharply. It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French
+      kings in the gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his
+      grandfather?&rdquo; That is, the American aristocrat's grandfather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that hits only a few of us, I grant&mdash;just the upper crust only&mdash;but
+      it hits exceedingly hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you. In one of your
+      chapters I found this chance:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to
+      arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses
+      of the French soul.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You see? Your &ldquo;higher Parisian&rdquo; class&mdash;not everybody, not
+      the nation, but only the top crust of the Nation&mdash;applies to
+      debauchery all the powers of its soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I argued to myself that that energy must produce results. So I built an
+      anecdote out of your remark. In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say to me&mdash;but
+      see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped and curtailed) in
+      paragraph eleven of your Reply.&mdash;[So, I repeat, Mark Twain does not
+      like M. Paul Bourget's book. So long as he makes light fun of the
+      great French writer he is at home, he is pleasant, he is the American
+      humorist we know. When he takes his revenge (and where is the reason for
+      taking a revenge?) he is unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For example: See his answer to a Frenchman who jokingly remarks to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because
+      whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his time, he can
+      always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grandfather
+      was.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hear the answer:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I reckon a Frenchman's got his little standby for a dull
+      time, too; because when all other interests fail, he can turn in and see
+      if he can't find out who his father was.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first remark is a good-humored bit of chaffing on American snobbery. I
+      may be utterly destitute of humor, but I call the second remark a
+      gratuitous charge of immorality hurled at the French women&mdash;a remark
+      unworthy of a man who has the ear of the public, unworthy of a gentleman,
+      a gross insult to a nation friendly to America, a nation that helped Mark
+      Twain's ancestors in their struggle for liberty, a nation where
+      to-day it is enough to say that you are American to see every door open
+      wide to you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Mark Twain was hard up in search of, a French &ldquo;chestnut,&rdquo; I
+      might have told him the following little anecdote. It is more funny than
+      his, and would have been less insulting: Two little street boys are
+      abusing each other. &ldquo;Ah, hold your tongue,&rdquo; says one, &ldquo;you
+      ain't got no father.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ain't got no father!&rdquo; replies the other; &ldquo;I've
+      got more fathers than you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, then, your anecdote about the grandfathers hurt me. Why? Because it
+      had a point. It wouldn't have hurt me if it hadn't had point.
+      You wouldn't have wasted space on it if it hadn't had point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My anecdote has hurt you. Why? Because it had point, I suppose. It wouldn't
+      have hurt you if it hadn't had point. I judged from your remark
+      about the diligence and industry of the high Parisian upper crust that it
+      would have some point, but really I had no idea what a gold-mine I had
+      struck. I never suspected that the point was going to stick into the
+      entire nation; but of course you know your nation better than I do, and if
+      you think it punctures them all, I have to yield to your judgment. But you
+      are to blame, your own self. Your remark misled me. I supposed the
+      industry was confined to that little unnumerous upper layer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, now that the unfortunate thing has been done, let us do what we can
+      to undo it. There must be a way, M. Bourget, and I am willing to do
+      anything that will help; for I am as sorry as you can be yourself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will tell you what I think will be the very thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We will swap anecdotes. I will take your anecdote and you take mine. I
+      will say to the dukes and counts and princes of the ancient nobility of
+      France:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, ha! You must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who
+      your grandfathers were?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They will merely smile indifferently and not feel hurt, because they can
+      trace their lineage back through centuries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And you will hurl mine at every individual in the American nation, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your
+      fathers were.&rdquo; They will merely smile indifferently, and not feel
+      hurt, because they haven't any difficulty in finding their fathers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do you get the idea? The whole harm in the anecdotes is in the point, you
+      see; and when we swap them around that way, they haven't any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That settles it perfectly and beautifully, and I am glad I thought of it.
+      I am very glad indeed, M. Bourget; for it was just that little wee thing
+      that caused the whole difficulty and made you dictate the Reply, and your
+      amanuensis call me all those hard names which the magazines dislike so.
+      And I did it all in fun, too, trying to cap your funny anecdote with
+      another one&mdash;on the give-and-take principle, you know&mdash;which is
+      American. I didn't know that with the French it was all give and no
+      take, and you didn't tell me. But now that I have made everything
+      comfortable again, and fixed both anecdotes so they can never have any
+      point any more, I know you will forgive me.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+Title: Essays on Paul Bourget
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+
+Essays on Paul Bourget
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+     WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
+     A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
+
+
+
+
+WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
+
+He reports the American joke correctly.  In Boston they ask, How much
+does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Who
+were his parents?  And when an alien observer turns his telescope upon
+us--advertisedly in our own special interest--a natural apprehension
+moves us to ask, What is the diameter of his reflector?
+
+I take a great interest in M. Bourget's chapters, for I know by the
+newspapers that there are several Americans who are expecting to get a
+whole education out of them; several who foresaw, and also foretold, that
+our long night was over, and a light almost divine about to break upon
+the land.
+
+          "His utterances concerning us are bound to be weighty and well
+          timed."
+
+          "He gives us an object-lesson which should be thoughtfully and
+          profitably studied."
+
+These well-considered and important verdicts were of a nature to restore
+public confidence, which had been disquieted by questionings as to
+whether so young a teacher would be qualified to take so large a class as
+70,000,000, distributed over so extensive a schoolhouse as America, and
+pull it through without assistance.
+
+I was even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament,
+and not easily disturbed.  I feared for my country.  And I was not wholly
+tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above.  It seemed to me that
+there was still room for doubt.  In fact, in looking the ground over I
+became more disturbed than I was before.  Many worrying questions came up
+in my mind.  Two were prominent.  Where had the teacher gotten his
+equipment?  What was his method?
+
+He had gotten his equipment in France.
+
+Then as to his method!  I saw by his own intimations that he was an
+Observer, and had a System that used by naturalists and other scientists.
+The naturalist collects many bugs and reptiles and butterflies and
+studies their ways a long time patiently.  By this means he is presently
+able to group these creatures into families and subdivisions of families
+by nice shadings of differences observable in their characters.  Then he
+labels all those shaded bugs and things with nicely descriptive group
+names, and is now happy, for his great work is completed, and as a result
+he intimately knows every bug and shade of a bug there, inside and out.
+It may be true, but a person who was not a naturalist would feel safer
+about it if he had the opinion of the bug.  I think it is a pleasant
+System, but subject to error.
+
+The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a
+Generalizer, a Psychologizer; and, first and last, a Thinker.  He has to
+be all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is often
+able to prove competency.  But history has shown that when he is abroad
+observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against him.  He is
+then a naturalist observing a bug, with no more than a naturalist's
+chance of being able to tell the bug anything new about itself, and no
+more than a naturalist's chance of being able to teach it any new ways
+which it will prefer to its own.
+
+To return to that first question.  M. Bourget, as teacher, would simply
+be France teaching America.  It seemed to me that the outlook was dark--
+almost Egyptian, in fact.  What would the new teacher, representing
+France, teach us?  Railroading?  No.  France knows nothing valuable about
+railroading.  Steamshipping?  No.  France has no superiorities over us in
+that matter.  Steamboating?  No.  French steamboating is still of
+Fulton's date--1809.  Postal service?  No.  France is a back number
+there.  Telegraphy?  No, we taught her that ourselves.  Journalism?  No.
+Magazining?  No, that is our own specialty.  Government?  No; Liberty,
+Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too
+variegated for our climate.  Religion?  No, not variegated enough for our
+climate.  Morals?  No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves.
+Novel-writing?  No.  M. Bourget and the others know only one plan, and
+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
+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 Germans, the Italians, the
+Swedes, the French, the Chinamen, the Greasers; and the Catholics, the
+Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the
+Spiritualists, the Mormons, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Jews, the
+Campbellites, the infidels, the Christian Scientists, the Mind-Curists,
+the Faith-Curists, the train-robbers, the White Caps, the Moonshiners.
+And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the
+soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people; and
+not anywhere else can these be had.  And the shadings of character,
+manners, feelings, ambitions, will be infinite.
+
+          "'The nature of a people' is always of a similar shade in its
+          vices and its virtues, in its frivolities and in its labor.
+          'It is this physiognomy which it is necessary to discover',
+          and every document is good, from the hall of a casino to the
+          church, from the foibles of a fashionable woman to the
+          suggestions of a revolutionary leader.  I am therefore quite
+          sure that this 'American soul', the principal interest and the
+          great object of my voyage, appears behind the records of
+          Newport for those who choose to see it."--M. Paul Bourget.
+
+[The italics ('') are mine.  It is a large contract which he has
+undertaken.  "Records" is a pretty poor word there, but I think the use
+of it is due to hasty translation.  In the original the word is 'fastes'.
+I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he expected to find the great
+"American soul" secreted behind the ostentatious of Newport; and that he
+was going to get it out and examine it, and generalize it, and
+psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its hidden vast mystery: "the
+nature of the people" of the United States of America.  We have been
+accused of being a nation addicted to inventing wild schemes.  I trust
+that we shall be allowed to retire to second place now.
+
+There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled
+"American."  There isn't a single human ambition, or religious trend,
+or drift of thought, or peculiarity of education, or code of principles,
+or breed of folly, or style of conversation, or preference for a
+particular subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or
+face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or
+disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can
+rationally be generalized as "American."
+
+Whenever you have found what seems to be an "American" peculiarity, you
+have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in the social
+scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared.  And you can cross the
+Atlantic and find it again.  There may be a Newport religious drift, or
+sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of face,
+but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and west,
+where you could not find your duplicates.  It is the same with everything
+else which one might propose to call "American."  M. Bourget thinks he
+has found the American Coquette.  If he had really found her he would
+also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she exists in
+other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart and the
+same ways and impulses.  I think this because I have seen our coquette;
+I have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our novels,
+and seen her twin in foreign novels.  I wish M. Bourget had seen ours.
+He thought he saw her.  And so he applied his System to her.  She was a
+Species.  So he gathered a number of samples of what seemed to be her,
+and put them under his glass, and divided them into groups which he calls
+"types," and labeled them in his usual scientific way with "formulas"--
+brief sharp descriptive flashes that make a person blink, sometimes, they
+are so sudden and vivid.  As a rule they are pretty far-fetched, but that
+is not an important matter; they surprise, they compel admiration, and I
+notice by some of the comments which his efforts have called forth that
+they deceive the unwary.  Here are a few of the coquette variants which
+he has grouped and labeled:
+
+     THE COLLECTOR.
+     THE EQUILIBREE.
+     THE PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.
+     THE BLUFFER.
+     THE GIRL-BOY.
+
+If he had stopped with describing these characters we should have been
+obliged to believe that they exist; that they exist, and that he has seen
+them and spoken with them.  But he did not stop there; he went further
+and furnished to us light-throwing samples of their behavior, and also
+light-throwing samples of their speeches.  He entered those things in his
+note-book without suspicion, he takes them out and delivers them to the
+world with a candor and simplicity which show that he believed them
+genuine.  They throw altogether too much light.  They reveal to the
+native the origin of his find.  I suppose he knows how he came to make
+that novel and captivating discovery, by this time.  If he does not, any
+American can tell him--any American to whom he will show his anecdotes.
+It was "put up" on him, as we say.  It was a jest--to be plain, it was a
+series of frauds.  To my mind it was a poor sort of jest, witless and
+contemptible.  The players of it have their reward, such as it is; they
+have exhibited the fact that whatever they may be they are not ladies.
+M. Bourget did not discover a type of coquette; he merely discovered a
+type of practical joker.  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.
+
+In his Chapter IV.  M. Bourget has two or three columns gravely devoted
+to the collating and examining and psychologizing of these sorry little
+frauds.  One is not moved to laugh.  There is nothing funny in the
+situation; it is only pathetic.  The stranger gave those people his
+confidence, and they dishonorably treated him in return.
+
+But one must be allowed to suspect that M. Bourget was a little to blame
+himself.  Even a practical joker has some little judgment.  He has to
+exercise some degree of sagacity in selecting his prey if he would save
+himself from getting into trouble.  In my time I have seldom seen such
+daring things marketed at any price as these conscienceless folk have
+worked off at par on this confiding observer.  It compels the conviction
+that there was something about him that bred in those speculators a quite
+unusual sense of safety, and encouraged them to strain their powers in
+his behalf.  They seem to have satisfied themselves that all he wanted
+was "significant" facts, and that he was not accustomed to examine the
+source whence they proceeded.  It is plain that there was a sort of
+conspiracy against him almost from the start--a conspiracy to freight him
+up with all the strange extravagances those people's decayed brains could
+invent.
+
+The lengths to which they went are next to incredible.  They told him
+things which surely would have excited any one else's suspicion, but they
+did not excite his.  Consider this:
+
+          "There is not in all the United States an entirely nude
+          statue."
+
+If an angel should come down and say such a thing about heaven, a
+reasonably cautious observer would take that angel's number and inquire a
+little further before he added it to his catch.  What does the present
+observer do?  Adds it.  Adds it at once.  Adds it, and labels it with
+this innocent comment:
+
+          "This small fact is strangely significant."
+
+It does seem to me that this kind of observing is defective.
+
+Here is another curiosity which some liberal person made him a present
+of.  I should think it ought to have disturbed the deep slumber of his
+suspicion a little, but it didn't.  It was a note from a fog-horn for
+strenuousness, it seems to me, but the doomed voyager did not catch it.
+If he had but caught it, it would have saved him from several disasters:
+
+          "If the American knows that you are traveling to take notes, he
+          is interested in it, and at the same time rejoices in it, as in
+          a tribute."
+
+Again, this is defective observation.  It is human to like to be praised;
+one can even notice it in the French.  But it is not human to like to be
+ridiculed, even when it comes in the form of a "tribute."  I think a
+little psychologizing ought to have come in there.  Something like this:
+A dog does not like to be ridiculed, a redskin does not like to be
+ridiculed, a negro does not like to be ridiculed, a Chinaman does not
+like to be ridiculed; let us deduce from these significant facts this
+formula: the American's grade being higher than these, and the chain-of
+argument stretching unbroken all the way up to him, there is room for
+suspicion that the person who said the American likes to be ridiculed,
+and regards it as a tribute, is not a capable observer.
+
+I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional is
+too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that great
+art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks.  Every now and then, at half-
+hour intervals, M.  Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies and
+dissolves them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the charge
+into a mould and turns you out a compact principle which will explain an
+American girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn for old
+things, or any other impossible riddle which a person wants answered.
+
+It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that can
+be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the
+name of the nation where they are found.  I wonder what they are.
+Perhaps one of them is temperament.  One speaks of French vivacity and
+German gravity and English stubbornness.  There is no American
+temperament.  The nearest that one can come at it is to say there are two
+--the composed Northern and the impetuous Southern; and both are found in
+other countries.  Morals?  Purity of women may fairly be called universal
+with us, but that is the case in some other countries.  We have no
+monopoly of it; it cannot be named American.  I think that there is but a
+single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide
+name "American."  That is the national devotion to ice-water.  All
+Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither
+of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation.  I suppose we do stand
+alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves.  When we have
+been a month in Europe we lose our craving for it, and we finally tell
+the hotel folk that they needn't provide it any more.  Yet we hardly
+touch our native shore again, winter or summer, before we are eager for
+it.  The reasons for this state of things have not been psychologized
+yet.  I drop the hint and say no more.
+
+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; and before I leave this sunny land again I will gather in a
+few random statistics and psychologize the plausibilities out of it.  If
+people are to come over to America and find fault with our girls and our
+women, and psychologize every little thing they do, and try to teach them
+how to behave, and how to cultivate themselves up to where one cannot
+tell them from the French model, I intend to find out whether those
+missionaries are qualified or not.  A nation ought always to examine into
+this detail before engaging the teacher for good.  This last one has let
+fall a remark which renewed those doubts of mine when I read it:
+
+          "In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied
+          to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all
+          the weaknesses of the French soul."
+
+You see, it amounts to a trade with the French soul; a profession;
+a science; the serious business of life, so to speak, in our high
+Parisian existence.  I do not quite like the look of it.  I question if
+it can be taught with profit in our country, except, of course, to those
+pathetic, neglected minds that are waiting there so yearningly for the
+education which M.  Bourget is going to furnish them from the serene
+summits of our high Parisian life.
+
+I spoke a moment ago of the existence of some superstitions that have
+been parading the world as facts this long time.  For instance, consider
+the Dollar.  The world seems to think that the love of money is
+"American"; and that the mad desire to get suddenly rich is "American."
+I believe that both of these things are merely and broadly human, not
+American monopolies at all.  The love of money is natural to all nations,
+for money is a good and strong friend.  I think that this love has
+existed everywhere, ever since the Bible called it the root of all evil.
+
+I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying
+to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising
+efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out
+of all proportion to the European experience.  For eighty years this
+opportunity has been offering itself in one new town or region after
+another straight westward, step by step, all the way from the Atlantic
+coast to the Pacific.  When a mechanic could buy ten town lots on
+tolerably long credit for ten months' savings out of his wages, and
+reasonably expect to sell them in a couple of years for ten times what he
+gave for them, it was human for him to try the venture, and he did it no
+matter what his nationality was.  He would have done it in Europe or
+China if he had had the same chance.
+
+In the flush times in the silver regions a cook or any other humble
+worker stood a very good chance to get rich out of a trifle of money
+risked in a stock deal; and that person promptly took that risk, no
+matter what his or her nationality might be.  I was there, and saw it.
+
+But these opportunities have not been plenty in our Southern States; so
+there you have a prodigious region where the rush for sudden wealth is
+almost an unknown thing--and has been, from the beginning.
+
+Europe has offered few opportunities for poor Tom, Dick, and Harry; but
+when she has offered one, there has been no noticeable difference between
+European eagerness and American.  England saw this in the wild days of
+the Railroad King; France saw it in 1720--time of Law and the Mississippi
+Bubble.  I am sure I have never seen in the gold and silver mines any
+madness, fury, frenzy to get suddenly rich which was even remotely
+comparable to that which raged in France in the Bubble day.  If I had a
+cyclopaedia here I could turn to that memorable case, and satisfy nearly
+anybody that the hunger for the sudden dollar is no more "American" than
+it is French.  And if I could furnish an American opportunity to staid
+Germany, I think I could wake her up like a house afire.
+
+But I must return to the Generalizations, Psychologizings, Deductions.
+When M. Bourget is exploiting these arts, it is then that he is
+peculiarly and particularly himself.  His ways are wholly original when
+he encounters a trait or a custom which is new to him.  Another person
+would merely examine the find, verify it, estimate its value, and let it
+go; but that is not sufficient for M. Bourget: he always wants to know
+why that thing exists, he wants to know how it came to happen; and he
+will not let go of it until he has found out.  And in every instance he
+will find that reason where no one but himself would have thought of
+looking for it.  He does not seem to care for a reason that is not
+picturesquely located; one might almost say picturesquely and impossibly
+located.
+
+He found out that in America men do not try to hunt down young married
+women.  At once, as usual, he wanted to know why.  Any one could have
+told him.  He could have divined it by the lights thrown by the novels of
+the country.  But no, he preferred to find out for himself.  He has a
+trustfulness as regards men and facts which is fine and unusual; he is
+not particular about the source of a fact, he is not particular about the
+character and standing of the fact itself; but when it comes to pounding
+out the reason for the existence of the fact, he will trust no one but
+himself.
+
+In the present instance here was his fact: American young married women
+are not pursued by the corruptor; and here was the question:  What is it
+that protects her?
+
+It seems quite unlikely that that problem could have offered difficulties
+to any but a trained philosopher.  Nearly any person would have said to
+M. Bourget: "Oh, that is very simple.  It is very seldom in America that
+a marriage is made on a commercial basis; our marriages, from the
+beginning, have been made for love; and where love is there is no room
+for the corruptor."
+
+Now, it is interesting to see the formidable way in which M. Bourget went
+at that poor, humble little thing.  He moved upon it in column--three
+columns--and with artillery.
+
+"Two reasons of a very different kind explain"--that fact.
+
+And now that I have got so far, I am almost afraid to say what his two
+reasons are, lest I be charged with inventing them.  But I will not
+retreat now; I will condense them and print them, giving my word that I
+am honest and not trying to deceive any one.
+
+1.  Young married women are protected from the approaches of the seducer
+in New England and vicinity by the diluted remains of a prudence created
+by a Puritan law of two hundred years ago, which for a while punished
+adultery with death.
+
+2.  And young married women of the other forty or fifty States are
+protected by laws which afford extraordinary facilities for divorce.
+
+If I have not lost my mind I have accurately conveyed those two Vesuvian
+irruptions of philosophy.  But the reader can consult Chapter IV. of
+'Outre-Mer', and decide for himself.  Let us examine this paralyzing
+Deduction or Explanation by the light of a few sane facts.
+
+1.  This universality of "protection" has existed in our country from the
+beginning; before the death penalty existed in New England, and during
+all the generations that have dragged by since it was annulled.
+
+2.  Extraordinary facilities for divorce are of such recent creation that
+any middle-aged American can remember a time when such things had not yet
+been thought of.
+
+Let us suppose that the first easy divorce law went into effect forty
+years ago, and got noised around and fairly started in business thirty-
+five years ago, when we had, say, 25,000,000 of white population.  Let us
+suppose that among 5,000,000 of them the young married women were
+"protected" by the surviving shudder of that ancient Puritan scare--what
+is M. Bourget going to do about those who lived among the 20,000,000?
+They were clean in their morals, they were pure, yet there was no easy
+divorce law to protect them.
+
+Awhile ago I said that M.  Bourget's method of truth-seeking--hunting for
+it in out-of-the-way places--was new; but that was an error.  I remember
+that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other
+astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion
+which M. Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts
+and their origin.  Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way
+was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo,
+which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific
+gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure--by the
+natural processes of animal decay--of the phosphorus contained in them.
+
+This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much
+thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final.  His
+own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs;
+and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that
+the locusts do like that in Egypt.
+
+Giordano Bruno also was outspoken in his praises of Leverrier's important
+contribution to astronomical science, and was at first inclined to regard
+it as conclusive; but later, conceiving it to be erroneous, he pronounced
+against it, and advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was a
+detachment or corps of stars which became arrested and held in 'suspenso
+suspensorum' by refraction of gravitation while on the march to join
+their several constellations; a proposition for which he was afterwards
+burned at the stake in Jacksonville, Illinois.
+
+These were all brilliant and picturesque theories, and each was received
+with enthusiasm by the scientific world; but when a New England farmer,
+who was not a thinker, but only a plain sort of person who tried to
+account for large facts in simple ways, came out with the opinion that
+the Milky Way was just common, ordinary stars, and was put where it was
+because God "wanted to hev it so," the admirable idea fell perfectly
+flat.
+
+As a literary artist, M. Bourget is as fresh and striking as he is as a
+scientific one.  He says, "Above all, I do not believe much in
+anecdotes."
+
+Why?  "In history they are all false"--a sufficiently broad statement--
+"in literature all libelous"--also a sufficiently sweeping statement,
+coming from a critic who notes that we are a people who are peculiarly
+extravagant in our language--" and when it is a matter of social life,
+almost all biased."  It seems to amount to stultification, almost.  He
+has built two or three breeds of American coquettes out of anecdotes--
+mainly "biased" ones, I suppose; and, as they occur "in literature,"
+furnished by his pen, they must be "all libelous."  Or did he mean not in
+literature or anecdotes about literature or literary people?  I am not
+able to answer that.  Perhaps the original would be clearer, but I have
+only the translation of this installment by me.  I think the remark had
+an intention; also that this intention was booked for the trip; but that
+either in the hurry of the remark's departure it got left, or in the
+confusion of changing cars at the translator's frontier it got side-
+tracked.
+
+"But on the other hand I believe in statistics; and those on divorces
+appear to me to be most conclusive."  And he sets himself the task of
+explaining--in a couple of columns--the process by which Easy-Divorce
+conceived, invented, originated, developed, and perfected an empire-
+embracing condition of sexual purity in the States.  IN 40 YEARS.  No, he
+doesn't state the interval.  With all his passion for statistics he
+forgot to ask how long it took to produce this gigantic miracle.
+
+I have followed his pleasant but devious trail through those columns,
+but I was not able to get hold of his argument and find out what it was.
+I was not even able to find out where it left off.  It seemed to
+gradually dissolve and flow off into other matters.  I followed it with
+interest, for I was anxious to learn how easy-divorce eradicated adultery
+in America, but I was disappointed; I have no idea yet how it did it.
+I only know it didn't.  But that is not valuable; I knew it before.
+
+Well, humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all.  The minute
+it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and
+resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.  And so,
+when M. Bourget said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke
+all up.  I remember exploding its American countermine once, under that
+grand hero, Napoleon.  He was only First Consul then, and I was Consul-
+General--for the United States, of course; but we were very intimate,
+notwithstanding the difference in rank, for I waived that.  One day
+something offered the opening, and he said:
+
+"Well, General, I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an
+American, because whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his
+time he can always get away with a few years trying to find out who his
+grandfather was!"
+
+I fairly shouted, for I had never heard it sound better; and then I was
+back at him as quick as a flash--"Right, your Excellency!  But I reckon
+a Frenchman's got his little stand-by for a dull time, too; because when
+all other interests fail he can turn in and see if he can't find out who
+his father was!"
+
+Well, you should have heard him just whoop, and cackle, and carry on!
+He reached up and hit me one on the shoulder, and says:
+
+"Land, but it's good!  It's im-mensely good!  I'George, I never heard it
+said so good in my life before!  Say it again."
+
+So I said it again, and he said his again, and I said mine again, and
+then he did, and then I did, and then he did, and we kept on doing it,
+and doing it, and I never had such a good time, and he said the same.
+In my opinion there isn't anything that is as killing as one of those
+dear old ripe pensioners if you know how to snatch it out in a kind of
+a fresh sort of original way.
+
+But I wish M. Bourget had read more of our novels before he came.  It is
+the only way to thoroughly understand a people.  When I found I was
+coming to Paris, I read 'La Terre'.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
+
+          [The preceding squib was assailed in the North American Review
+          in an article entitled " Mark Twain and Paul Bourget," by Max
+          O'Rell.  The following little note is a Rejoinder to that
+          article.  It is possible that the position assumed here--that
+          M. Bourget dictated the O'Rell article himself--is untenable.]
+
+You have every right, my dear M. Bourget, to retort upon me by dictation,
+if you prefer that method to writing at me with your pen; but if I may
+say it without hurt--and certainly I mean no offence--I believe you would
+have acquitted yourself better with the pen.  With the pen you are at
+home; it is your natural weapon; you use it with grace, eloquence, charm,
+persuasiveness, when men are to be convinced, and with formidable effect
+when they have earned a castigation.  But I am sure I see signs in the
+above article that you are either unaccustomed to dictating or are out of
+practice.  If you will re-read it you will notice, yourself, that it
+lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that
+it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it
+wanders around; that it loses itself early and does not find itself any
+more.  There are some other defects, as you will notice, but I think I
+have named the main ones.  I feel sure that they are all due to your lack
+of practice in dictating.
+
+Inasmuch as you had not signed it I had the impression at first that you
+had not dictated it.  But only for a moment.  Certain quite simple and
+definite facts reminded me that the article had to come from you, for the
+reason that it could not come from any one else without a specific
+invitation from you or from me.  I mean, it could not except as an
+intrusion, a transgression of the law which forbids strangers to mix into
+a private dispute between friends, unasked.
+
+Those simple and definite facts were these: I had published an article in
+this magazine, with you for my subject; just you yourself; I stuck
+strictly to that one subject, and did not interlard any other.  No one,
+of course, could call me to account but you alone, or your authorized
+representative.  I asked some questions--asked them of myself.
+I answered them myself.  My article was thirteen pages long, and all
+devoted to you; devoted to you, and divided up in this way: one page of
+guesses as to what subjects you would instruct us in, as teacher; one
+page of doubts as to the effectiveness of your method of examining us and
+our ways; two or three pages of criticism of your method, and of certain
+results which it furnished you; two or three pages of attempts to show
+the justness of these same criticisms; half a dozen pages made up of
+slight fault-findings with certain minor details of your literary
+workmanship, of extracts from your 'Outre-Mer' and comments upon them;
+then I closed with an anecdote.  I repeat--for certain reasons--that I
+closed with an anecdote.
+
+When I was asked by this magazine if I wished to "answer" a "reply" to
+that article of mine, I said "yes," and waited in Paris for the proof-
+sheets of the "reply" to come.  I already knew, by the cablegram, that
+the "reply" would not be signed by you, but upon reflection I knew it
+would be dictated by you, because no volunteer would feel himself at
+liberty to assume your championship in a private dispute, unasked, in
+view of the fact that you are quite well able to take care of your
+matters of that sort yourself and are not in need of any one's help.
+No, a volunteer could not make such a venture.  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.  In fact he could
+not get in at all, except by the back way, and with a false key; that is
+to say, a pretext--a pretext invented for the occasion by putting into my
+mouth words which I did not use, and by wresting sayings of mine from
+their plain and true meaning.  Would he resort to methods like those to
+get in?  No; there are no people of that kind.  So then I knew for a
+certainty that you dictated the Reply yourself.  I knew you did it to
+save yourself manual labor.
+
+And you had the right, as I have already said and I am content--perfectly
+content.
+
+Yet it would have been little trouble to you, and a great kindness to me,
+if you had written your Reply all out with your own capable hand.
+
+Because then it would have replied--and that is really what a Reply is
+for.  Broadly speaking, its function is to refute--as you will easily
+concede.  That leaves something for the other person to take hold of:
+he has a chance to reply to the Reply, he has a chance to refute the
+refutation.  This would have happened if you had written it out instead
+of dictating.  Dictating is nearly sure to unconcentrate the dictator's
+mind, when he is out of practice, confuse him, and betray him into using
+one set of literary rules when he ought to use a quite different set.
+Often it betrays him into employing the RULES FOR CONVERSATION BETWEEN A
+SHOUTER AND A DEAF PERSON--as in the present case--when he ought to
+employ the RULES FOR CONDUCTING DISCUSSION WITH A FAULT-FINDER.  The
+great foundation-rule and basic principle of discussion with a fault-
+finder is relevancy and concentration upon the subject; whereas the great
+foundation-rule and basic principle governing conversation between a
+shouter and a deaf person is irrelevancy and persistent desertion of the
+topic in hand.  If I may be allowed to illustrate by quoting example IV.,
+section from chapter ix. of "Revised Rules for Conducting Conversation
+between a Shouter and a Deaf Person," it will assist us in getting a
+clear idea of the difference between the two sets of rules:
+
+Shouter.  Did you say his name is WETHERBY?
+
+Deaf Person.  Change?  Yes, I think it will.  Though if it should clear
+off I--
+
+Shouter.  It's his NAME I want--his NAME.
+
+Deaf Person.  Maybe so, maybe so; but it will only be a shower, I think.
+
+Shouter.  No, no, no!--you have quite misunderSTOOD me.  If--
+
+Deaf Person.  Ah!  GOOD morning; I am sorry you must go.  But call again,
+and let me continue to be of assistance to you in every way I can.
+
+
+You see it is a perfect kodak of the article you have dictated.  It is
+really curious and interesting when you come to compare it with yours;
+in detail, with my former article to which it is a Reply in your hand.
+I talk twelve pages about your American instruction projects, and your
+doubtful scientific system, and your painstaking classification of
+nonexistent things, and your diligence and zeal and sincerity, and your
+disloyal attitude towards anecdotes, and your undue reverence for unsafe
+statistics and far facts that lack a pedigree; and you turn around and
+come back at me with eight pages of weather.
+
+I do not see how a person can act so.  It is good of you to repeat, with
+change of language, in the bulk of your rejoinder, so much of my own
+article, and adopt my sentiments, and make them over, and put new buttons
+on; and I like the compliment, and am frank to say so; but agreeing with
+a person cripples controversy and ought not to be allowed.  It is
+weather; and of almost the worst sort.  It pleases me greatly to hear you
+discourse with such approval and expansiveness upon my text:
+
+"A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think that
+is as far as he can get.  I think that no foreigner can report its
+interior;"--[And you say: "A man of average intelligence, who has passed
+six months among a people, cannot express opinions that are worth jotting
+down, but he can form impressions that are worth repeating.  For my part,
+I think that foreigners' impressions are more interesting than native
+opinions.  After all, such impressions merely mean 'how the country
+struck the foreigner.'"]-- which is a quite clear way of saying that a
+foreigner's report is only valuable when it restricts itself to
+impressions.  It pleases me to have you follow my lead in that glowing
+way, but it leaves me nothing to combat.  You should give me something to
+deny and refute; I would do as much for you.
+
+It pleases me to have you playfully warn the public against taking one of
+your books seriously. --[When I published Jonathan and his Continent, I
+wrote in a preface addressed to Jonathan: "If ever you should insist in
+seeing in this little volume a serious study of your country and of your
+countrymen, I warn you that your world-wide fame for humor will be
+exploded."]-- Because I used to do that cunning thing myself in earlier
+days.  I did it in a prefatory note to a book of mine called Tom Sawyer.
+
+
+                                 NOTICE.
+
+Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;
+persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons
+attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
+                              BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
+                              PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
+
+
+The kernel is the same in both prefaces, you see--the public must not
+take us too seriously.  If we remove that kernel we remove the life-
+principle, and the preface is a corpse.  Yes, it pleases me to have you
+use that idea, for it is a high compliment.  But is leaves me nothing to
+combat; and that is damage to me.
+
+Am I seeming to say that your Reply is not a reply at all, M. Bourget?
+If so, I must modify that; it is too sweeping.  For you have furnished a
+general answer to my inquiry as to what France through you--can teach us.
+--["What could France teach America!" exclaims Mark Twain.  France can
+teach America all the higher pursuits of life, and there is more artistic
+feeling and refinement in a street of French workingmen than in many
+avenues inhabited by American millionaires.  She can teach her, not
+perhaps how to work, but how to rest, how to live, how to be happy.
+She can teach her that the aim of life is not money-making, but that
+money-making is only a means to obtain an end.  She can teach her that
+wives are not expensive toys, but useful partners, friends, and
+confidants, who should always keep men under their wholesome influence by
+their diplomacy, their tact, their common-sense, without bumptiousness.
+These qualities, added to the highest standard of morality (not angular
+and morose, but cheerful morality), are conceded to Frenchwomen by
+whoever knows something of French life outside of the Paris boulevards,
+and Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot even so much as stain them.
+
+I might tell Mark Twain that in France a man who was seen tipsy in his
+club would immediately see his name canceled from membership.  A man who
+had settled his fortune on his wife to avoid meeting his creditors would
+be refused admission into any decent society.  Many a Frenchman has blown
+his brains out rather than declare himself a bankrupt.  Now would Mark
+Twain remark to this: 'An American is not such a fool: when a creditor
+stands in his way he closes his doors, and reopens them the following
+day.  When he has been a bankrupt three times he can retire from
+business?"]-- It is a good answer.
+
+It relates to manners, customs, and morals--three things concerning which
+we can never have exhaustive and determinate statistics, and so the
+verdicts delivered upon them must always lack conclusiveness and be
+subject to revision; but you have stated the truth, possibly, as nearly
+as any one could do it, in the circumstances.  But why did you choose a
+detail of my question which could be answered only with vague hearsay
+evidence, and go right by one which could have been answered with deadly
+facts? --facts in everybody's reach, facts which none can dispute.
+I asked what France could teach us about government.  I laid myself
+pretty wide open, there; and I thought I was handsomely generous, too,
+when I did it.  France can teach us how to levy village and city taxes
+which distribute the burden with a nearer approach to perfect fairness
+than is the case in any other land; and she can teach us the wisest and
+surest system of collecting them that exists.  She can teach us how to
+elect a President in a sane way; and also how to do it without throwing
+the country into earthquakes and convulsions that cripple and embarrass
+business, stir up party hatred in the hearts of men, and make peaceful
+people wish the term extended to thirty years.  France can teach us--but
+enough of that part of the question.  And what else can France teach us?
+She can teach us all the fine arts--and does.  She throws open her
+hospitable art academies, and says to us, "Come"--and we come, troops and
+troops of our young and gifted; and she sets over us the ablest masters
+in the world and bearing the greatest names; and she, teaches us all that
+we are capable of learning, and persuades us and encourages us with
+prizes and honors, much as if we were somehow children of her own; and
+when this noble education is finished and we are ready to carry it home
+and spread its gracious ministries abroad over our nation, and we come
+with homage and gratitude and ask France for the bill--there is nothing
+to pay.  And in return for this imperial generosity, what does America
+do?  She charges a duty on French works of art!
+
+I wish I had your end of this dispute; I should have something worth
+talking about.  If you would only furnish me something to argue,
+something to refute--but you persistently won't.  You leave good chances
+unutilized and spend your strength in proving and establishing
+unimportant things.  For instance, you have proven and established these
+eight facts here following--a good score as to number, but not worth
+while:
+
+Mark Twain is--
+
+1.  "Insulting."
+
+2.  (Sarcastically speaking) "This refined humor, 1st."
+
+3.  Prefers the manure-pile to the violets.
+
+4.  Has uttered "an ill-natured sneer."
+
+5.  Is "nasty."
+
+6.  Needs a "lesson in politeness and good manners."
+
+7.  Has published a "nasty article."
+
+8.  Has made remarks "unworthy of a gentleman." --["It is more funny than
+his" (Mark Twain's) "anecdote, and would have been less insulting."
+
+A quoted remark of mine "is a gross insult to a nation friendly to
+America."
+
+"He has read La Terre, this refined humorist."
+
+"When Mark Twain visits a garden .  .  .  he goes in the far-away comer
+where the soil is prepared."
+
+"Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot so much as stain them" (the
+Frenchwomen).
+
+"When he" (Mark Twain) "takes his revenge he is unkind, unfair, bitter,
+nasty."
+
+"But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark," etc.
+
+"Mark might certainly have derived from it "(M. Bourget's book)" a lesson
+in politeness and good manners."
+
+A quoted remark of mine is "unworthy of a gentleman."]--
+
+These are all true, but really they are not valuable; no one cares much
+for such finds.  In our American magazines we recognize this and suppress
+them.  We avoid naming them.  American writers never allow themselves to
+name them.  It would look as if they were in a temper, and we hold that
+exhibitions of temper in public are not good form except in the very
+young and inexperienced.  And even if we had the disposition to name
+them, in order to fill up a gap when we were short of ideas and
+arguments, our magazines would not allow us to do it, because they think
+that such words sully their pages.  This present magazine is particularly
+strenuous about it.  Its note to me announcing the forwarding of your
+proof-sheets to France closed thus--for your protection:
+
+"It is needless to ask you to avoid anything that he might consider as
+personal."
+
+It was well enough, as a measure of precaution, but really it was not
+needed.  You can trust me implicitly, M. Bourget; I shall never call you
+any names in print which I should be ashamed to call you with your
+unoffending and dearest ones present.
+
+Indeed, we are reserved, and particular in America to a degree which you
+would consider exaggerated.  For instance, we should not write notes like
+that one of yours to a lady for a small fault--or a large one. --[When M.
+Paul Bourget indulges in a little chaffing at the expense of the
+Americans, "who can always get away with a few years' trying to find out
+who their grandfathers were," he merely makes an allusion to an American
+foible; but, forsooth, what a kind man, what a humorist Mark Twain is
+when he retorts by calling France a nation of bastards!  How the
+Americans of culture and refinement will admire him for thus speaking in
+their name!
+
+Snobbery .  .  .  .  I could give Mark Twain an example of the American
+specimen.  It is a piquant story.  I never published it because I feared
+my readers might think that I was giving them a typical illustration of
+American character instead of a rare exception.
+
+I was once booked by my manager to give a causerie in the drawing-room of
+a New York millionaire.  I accepted with reluctance.  I do not like
+private engagements.  At five o'clock on the day the causerie was to be
+given, the lady sent to my manager to say that she would expect me to
+arrive at nine o'clock and to speak for about an hour.  Then she wrote a
+postscript.  Many women are unfortunate there.  Their minds are full of
+after-thoughts, and the most important part of their letters is generally
+to be found after their signature.  This lady's P. S. ran thus: "I
+suppose be will not expect to be entertained after the lecture."
+
+I fairly shorted, as Mark Twain would say, and then, indulging myself in
+a bit of snobbishness, I was back at her as quick as a flash:
+
+"Dear Madam: As a literary man of some reputation, I have many times had
+the pleasure of being entertained by the members of the old aristocracy
+of France.  I have also many times had the pleasure of being entertained
+by the members of the old aristocracy of England.  If it may interest
+you, I can even tell you that I have several times had the honor of being
+entertained by royalty; but my ambition has never been so wild as to
+expect that one day I might be entertained by the aristocracy of New
+York.  No, I do not expect to be entertained by you, nor do I want you to
+expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night, for I decline to
+keep the engagement."
+
+Now, I could fill a book on America with reminiscences of this sort,
+adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers, on New York 'chronique
+scandaleuse', on the tenement houses of the large cities, on the
+gambling-hells of Denver, and the dens of San Francisco, and what not!
+But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark, will make me do
+it.]--  We should not think it kind.  No matter how much we might have
+associated with kings and nobilities, we should not think it right to
+crush her with it and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life; for
+we have a saying, " Who humiliates my mother includes his own."
+
+Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter,
+M. Bourget?  Indeed I do not.  I believe it to have been surreptitiously
+inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned.  I think he did it
+with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your
+article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve
+you when you see it.  I also think he interlarded many other things which
+you will disapprove of when you see them.  I am certain that all the
+harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you.  No doubt you could
+have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him
+to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a
+higher quality.
+
+Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent
+information about Balzac and those others. --["Now the style of M.
+Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to
+Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone.  Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,
+Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan?  Has he read
+Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave
+for a long time a perfume about you?  Has he read the novels of Alexandre
+Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac?  Has be read Victor Hugo's
+'Les Miserables' and 'Notre Dame de Paris'?  Has he read or heard the
+plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of
+modern literature, whose names will be household words all over the world
+for hundreds of years to come?  He has read La Terre--this kind-hearted,
+refined humorist!  When Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the
+violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle?  No, he goes in the
+far-away comer where the soil is prepared.  Hear what he says: "I wish M.
+Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he came.  It is the only
+way to thoroughly understand a people.  When I found I was coming to
+Paris I read La Terre."]-- All this in simple justice to you--and to me;
+for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong
+your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being
+equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.
+
+And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which
+the Reply grew--the anecdote which closed my recent article--and consider
+how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous dimensions.
+If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that
+anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of
+times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back
+way.  But I accuse you of nothing--nothing but error.  When you say that
+I "retort by calling France a nation of bastards," it is an error.  And
+not a small one, but a large one.  I made no such remark, nor anything
+resembling it.  Moreover, the magazine would not have allowed me to use
+so gross a word as that.
+
+You told an anecdote.  A funny one--I admit that.  It hit a foible of our
+American aristocracy, and it stung me--I admit that; it stung me sharply.
+It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French kings in the
+gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:
+
+"He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his grandfather?"
+That is, the American aristocrat's grandfather.
+
+Now that hits only a few of us, I grant--just the upper crust only--but
+it hits exceedingly hard.
+
+I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you.  In one of your
+chapters I found this chance:
+
+"In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts
+and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of
+the French soul."
+
+You see?  Your "higher Parisian" class--not everybody, not the nation,
+but only the top crust of the Ovation--applies to debauchery all the
+powers of its soul.
+
+I argued to myself that that energy must produce results.  So I built an
+anecdote out of your remark.  In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say to me--
+but see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped and curtailed) in
+paragraph eleven of your Reply.--[So, I repeat, Mark Twain does not like
+M. Paul Bourget's book.  So long as he makes light fun of the great
+French writer he is at home, he is pleasant, he is the American humorist
+we know.  When he takes his revenge (and where is the reason for taking a
+revenge?) he is unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty.
+
+For example:
+See his answer to a Frenchman who jokingly remarks to him:
+
+"I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because
+whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his time, he can
+always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grandfather
+was."
+
+Hear the answer:
+
+"I reckon a Frenchman's got his little standby for a dull time, too;
+because when all other interests fail, he can turn in and see if he can't
+find out who his father was."
+
+The first remark is a good-humored bit of chaffing on American snobbery.
+I may be utterly destitute of humor, but I call the second remark a
+gratuitous charge of immorality hurled at the French women--a remark
+unworthy of a man who has the ear of the public, unworthy of a gentleman,
+a gross insult to a nation friendly to America, a nation that helped Mark
+Twain's ancestors in their struggle for liberty, a nation where to-day it
+is enough to say that you are American to see every door open wide to
+you.
+
+If Mark Twain was hard up in search of, a French "chestnut," I might have
+told him the following little anecdote.  It is more funny than his, and
+would have been less insulting: Two little street boys are abusing each
+other.  "Ah, hold your tongue," says one, "you ain't got no father."
+
+"Ain't got no father!" replies the other; "I've got more fathers than
+you."]
+
+Now, then, your anecdote about the grandfathers hurt me.  Why?  Because
+it had a point.  It wouldn't have hurt me if it hadn't had point.  You
+wouldn't have wasted space on it if it hadn't had point.
+
+My anecdote has hurt you.  Why?  Because it had point, I suppose.  It
+wouldn't have hurt you if it hadn't had point.  I judged from your remark
+about the diligence and industry of the high Parisian upper crust that it
+would have some point, but really I had no idea what a gold-mine I had
+struck.  I never suspected that the point was going to stick into the
+entire nation; but of course you know your nation better than I do, and
+if you think it punctures them all, I have to yield to your judgment.
+But you are to blame, your own self.  Your remark misled me.  I supposed
+the industry was confined to that little unnumerous upper layer.
+
+Well, now that the unfortunate thing has been done, let us do what we can
+to undo it.  There must be a way, M.  Bourget, and I am willing to do
+anything that will help; for I am as sorry as you can be yourself.
+
+I will tell you what I think will be the very thing.
+
+We will swap anecdotes.  I will take your anecdote and you take mine.  I
+will say to the dukes and counts and princes of the ancient nobility of
+France:
+
+"Ha, ha! You must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your
+grandfathers were?"
+
+They will merely smile indifferently and not feel hurt, because they can
+trace their lineage back through centuries.
+
+And you will hurl mine at every individual in the American nation,
+saying:
+
+"And you must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your fathers
+were."  They will merely smile indifferently, and not feel hurt, because
+they haven't any difficulty in finding their fathers.
+
+Do you get the idea?  The whole harm in the anecdotes is in the point,
+you see; and when we swap them around that way, they haven't any.
+
+That settles it perfectly and beautifully, and I am glad I thought of it.
+I am very glad indeed, M. Bourget; for it was just that little wee thing
+that caused the whole difficulty and made you dictate the Reply, and your
+amanuensis call me all those hard names which the magazines dislike so.
+And I did it all in fun, too, trying to cap your funny anecdote with
+another one--on the give-and-take principle, you know--which is American.
+I didn't know that with the French it was all give and no take, and you
+didn't tell me.  But now that I have made everything comfortable again,
+and fixed both anecdotes so they can never have any point any more, I
+know you will forgive me.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays on Paul Bourget, by Mark Twain
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays on Paul Bourget, by Mark Twain
+#34 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
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+Title: Essays on Paul Bourget
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3173]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 8, 2001]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays on Paul Bourget, by Mark Twain
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+
+ESSAYS ON PAUL BOURGET
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+     WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
+     A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
+
+
+
+
+WHAT PAUL BOURGET THINKS OF US
+
+He reports the American joke correctly.  In Boston they ask, How much
+does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Who
+were his parents?  And when an alien observer turns his telescope upon
+us--advertisedly in our own special interest--a natural apprehension
+moves us to ask, What is the diameter of his reflector?
+
+I take a great interest in M. Bourget's chapters, for I know by the
+newspapers that there are several Americans who are expecting to get a
+whole education out of them; several who foresaw, and also foretold, that
+our long night was over, and a light almost divine about to break upon
+the land.
+
+          "His utterances concerning us are bound to be weighty and well
+          timed."
+
+          "He gives us an object-lesson which should be thoughtfully and
+          profitably studied."
+
+These well-considered and important verdicts were of a nature to restore
+public confidence, which had been disquieted by questionings as to
+whether so young a teacher would be qualified to take so large a class as
+70,000,000, distributed over so extensive a schoolhouse as America, and
+pull it through without assistance.
+
+I was even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament,
+and not easily disturbed.  I feared for my country.  And I was not wholly
+tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above.  It seemed to me that
+there was still room for doubt.  In fact, in looking the ground over I
+became more disturbed than I was before.  Many worrying questions came up
+in my mind.  Two were prominent.  Where had the teacher gotten his
+equipment?  What was his method?
+
+He had gotten his equipment in France.
+
+Then as to his method!  I saw by his own intimations that he was an
+Observer, and had a System that used by naturalists and other scientists.
+The naturalist collects many bugs and reptiles and butterflies and
+studies their ways a long time patiently.  By this means he is presently
+able to group these creatures into families and subdivisions of families
+by nice shadings of differences observable in their characters.  Then he
+labels all those shaded bugs and things with nicely descriptive group
+names, and is now happy, for his great work is completed, and as a result
+he intimately knows every bug and shade of a bug there, inside and out.
+It may be true, but a person who was not a naturalist would feel safer
+about it if he had the opinion of the bug.  I think it is a pleasant
+System, but subject to error.
+
+The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a
+Generalizer, a Psychologizer; and, first and last, a Thinker.  He has to
+be all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is often
+able to prove competency.  But history has shown that when he is abroad
+observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against him.  He is
+then a naturalist observing a bug, with no more than a naturalist's
+chance of being able to tell the bug anything new about itself, and no
+more than a naturalist's chance of being able to teach it any new ways
+which it will prefer to its own.
+
+To return to that first question.  M. Bourget, as teacher, would simply
+be France teaching America.  It seemed to me that the outlook was dark--
+almost Egyptian, in fact.  What would the new teacher, representing
+France, teach us?  Railroading?  No.  France knows nothing valuable about
+railroading.  Steamshipping?  No.  France has no superiorities over us in
+that matter.  Steamboating?  No.  French steamboating is still of
+Fulton's date--1809.  Postal service?  No.  France is a back number
+there.  Telegraphy?  No, we taught her that ourselves.  Journalism?  No.
+Magazining?  No, that is our own specialty.  Government?  No; Liberty,
+Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too
+variegated for our climate.  Religion?  No, not variegated enough for our
+climate.  Morals?  No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves.
+Novel-writing?  No.  M. Bourget and the others know only one plan, and
+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
+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 Germans, the Italians, the
+Swedes, the French, the Chinamen, the Greasers; and the Catholics, the
+Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the
+Spiritualists, the Mormons, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Jews, the
+Campbellites, the infidels, the Christian Scientists, the Mind-Curists,
+the Faith-Curists, the train-robbers, the White Caps, the Moonshiners.
+And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the
+soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people; and
+not anywhere else can these be had.  And the shadings of character,
+manners, feelings, ambitions, will be infinite.
+
+          "'The nature of a people' is always of a similar shade in its
+          vices and its virtues, in its frivolities and in its labor.
+          'It is this physiognomy which it is necessary to discover',
+          and every document is good, from the hall of a casino to the
+          church, from the foibles of a fashionable woman to the
+          suggestions of a revolutionary leader.  I am therefore quite
+          sure that this 'American soul', the principal interest and the
+          great object of my voyage, appears behind the records of
+          Newport for those who choose to see it."--M. Paul Bourget.
+
+[The italics ('') are mine.]  It is a large contract which he has
+undertaken.  "Records" is a pretty poor word there, but I think the use
+of it is due to hasty translation.  In the original the word is 'fastes'.
+I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he expected to find the great
+"American soul" secreted behind the ostentatious of Newport; and that he
+was going to get it out and examine it, and generalize it, and
+psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its hidden vast mystery: "the
+nature of the people" of the United States of America.  We have been
+accused of being a nation addicted to inventing wild schemes.  I trust
+that we shall be allowed to retire to second place now.
+
+There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled
+"American."  There isn't a single human ambition, or religious trend,
+or drift of thought, or peculiarity of education, or code of principles,
+or breed of folly, or style of conversation, or preference for a
+particular subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or
+face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or
+disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can
+rationally be generalized as "American."
+
+Whenever you have found what seems to be an "American" peculiarity, you
+have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in the social
+scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared.  And you can cross the
+Atlantic and find it again.  There may be a Newport religious drift, or
+sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of face,
+but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and west,
+where you could not find your duplicates.  It is the same with everything
+else which one might propose to call "American."  M. Bourget thinks he
+has found the American Coquette.  If he had really found her he would
+also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she exists in
+other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart and the
+same ways and impulses.  I think this because I have seen our coquette;
+I have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our novels,
+and seen her twin in foreign novels.  I wish M. Bourget had seen ours.
+He thought he saw her.  And so he applied his System to her.  She was a
+Species.  So he gathered a number of samples of what seemed to be her,
+and put them under his glass, and divided them into groups which he calls
+"types," and labeled them in his usual scientific way with "formulas"--
+brief sharp descriptive flashes that make a person blink, sometimes, they
+are so sudden and vivid.  As a rule they are pretty far-fetched, but that
+is not an important matter; they surprise, they compel admiration, and I
+notice by some of the comments which his efforts have called forth that
+they deceive the unwary.  Here are a few of the coquette variants which
+he has grouped and labeled:
+
+     THE COLLECTOR.
+     THE EQUILIBREE.
+     THE PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.
+     THE BLUFFER.
+     THE GIRL-BOY.
+
+If he had stopped with describing these characters we should have been
+obliged to believe that they exist; that they exist, and that he has seen
+them and spoken with them.  But he did not stop there; he went further
+and furnished to us light-throwing samples of their behavior, and also
+light-throwing samples of their speeches.  He entered those things in his
+note-book without suspicion, he takes them out and delivers them to the
+world with a candor and simplicity which show that he believed them
+genuine.  They throw altogether too much light.  They reveal to the
+native the origin of his find.  I suppose he knows how he came to make
+that novel and captivating discovery, by this time.  If he does not, any
+American can tell him--any American to whom he will show his anecdotes.
+It was "put up" on him, as we say.  It was a jest--to be plain, it was a
+series of frauds.  To my mind it was a poor sort of jest, witless and
+contemptible.  The players of it have their reward, such as it is; they
+have exhibited the fact that whatever they may be they are not ladies.
+M. Bourget did not discover a type of coquette; he merely discovered a
+type of practical joker.  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.
+
+In his Chapter IV.  M. Bourget has two or three columns gravely devoted
+to the collating and examining and psychologizing of these sorry little
+frauds.  One is not moved to laugh.  There is nothing funny in the
+situation; it is only pathetic.  The stranger gave those people his
+confidence, and they dishonorably treated him in return.
+
+But one must be allowed to suspect that M. Bourget was a little to blame
+himself.  Even a practical joker has some little judgment.  He has to
+exercise some degree of sagacity in selecting his prey if he would save
+himself from getting into trouble.  In my time I have seldom seen such
+daring things marketed at any price as these conscienceless folk have
+worked off at par on this confiding observer.  It compels the conviction
+that there was something about him that bred in those speculators a quite
+unusual sense of safety, and encouraged them to strain their powers in
+his behalf.  They seem to have satisfied themselves that all he wanted
+was "significant" facts, and that he was not accustomed to examine the
+source whence they proceeded.  It is plain that there was a sort of
+conspiracy against him almost from the start--a conspiracy to freight him
+up with all the strange extravagances those people's decayed brains could
+invent.
+
+The lengths to which they went are next to incredible.  They told him
+things which surely would have excited any one else's suspicion, but they
+did not excite his.  Consider this:
+
+          "There is not in all the United States an entirely nude
+          statue."
+
+If an angel should come down and say such a thing about heaven, a
+reasonably cautious observer would take that angel's number and inquire a
+little further before he added it to his catch.  What does the present
+observer do?  Adds it.  Adds it at once.  Adds it, and labels it with
+this innocent comment:
+
+          "This small fact is strangely significant."
+
+It does seem to me that this kind of observing is defective.
+
+Here is another curiosity which some liberal person made him a present
+of.  I should think it ought to have disturbed the deep slumber of his
+suspicion a little, but it didn't.  It was a note from a fog-horn for
+strenuousness, it seems to me, but the doomed voyager did not catch it.
+If he had but caught it, it would have saved him from several disasters:
+
+          "If the American knows that you are traveling to take notes, he
+          is interested in it, and at the same time rejoices in it, as in
+          a tribute."
+
+Again, this is defective observation.  It is human to like to be praised;
+one can even notice it in the French.  But it is not human to like to be
+ridiculed, even when it comes in the form of a "tribute."  I think a
+little psychologizing ought to have come in there.  Something like this:
+A dog does not like to be ridiculed, a redskin does not like to be
+ridiculed, a negro does not like to be ridiculed, a Chinaman does not
+like to be ridiculed; let us deduce from these significant facts this
+formula: the American's grade being higher than these, and the chain-of
+argument stretching unbroken all the way up to him, there is room for
+suspicion that the person who said the American likes to be ridiculed,
+and regards it as a tribute, is not a capable observer.
+
+I feel persuaded that in the matter of psychologizing, a professional is
+too apt to yield to the fascinations of the loftier regions of that great
+art, to the neglect of its lowlier walks.  Every now and then, at half-
+hour intervals, M.  Bourget collects a hatful of airy inaccuracies and
+dissolves them in a panful of assorted abstractions, and runs the charge
+into a mould and turns you out a compact principle which will explain an
+American girl, or an American woman, or why new people yearn for old
+things, or any other impossible riddle which a person wants answered.
+
+It seems to be conceded that there are a few human peculiarities that can
+be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the
+name of the nation where they are found.  I wonder what they are.
+Perhaps one of them is temperament.  One speaks of French vivacity and
+German gravity and English stubbornness.  There is no American
+temperament.  The nearest that one can come at it is to say there are two
+--the composed Northern and the impetuous Southern; and both are found in
+other countries.  Morals?  Purity of women may fairly be called universal
+with us, but that is the case in some other countries.  We have no
+monopoly of it; it cannot be named American.  I think that there is but a
+single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide
+name "American."  That is the national devotion to ice-water.  All
+Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither
+of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation.  I suppose we do stand
+alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves.  When we have
+been a month in Europe we lose our craving for it, and we finally tell
+the hotel folk that they needn't provide it any more.  Yet we hardly
+touch our native shore again, winter or summer, before we are eager for
+it.  The reasons for this state of things have not been psychologized
+yet.  I drop the hint and say no more.
+
+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; and before I leave this sunny land again I will gather in a
+few random statistics and psychologize the plausibilities out of it.  If
+people are to come over to America and find fault with our girls and our
+women, and psychologize every little thing they do, and try to teach them
+how to behave, and how to cultivate themselves up to where one cannot
+tell them from the French model, I intend to find out whether those
+missionaries are qualified or not.  A nation ought always to examine into
+this detail before engaging the teacher for good.  This last one has let
+fall a remark which renewed those doubts of mine when I read it:
+
+          "In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied
+          to arts and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all
+          the weaknesses of the French soul."
+
+You see, it amounts to a trade with the French soul; a profession;
+a science; the serious business of life, so to speak, in our high
+Parisian existence.  I do not quite like the look of it.  I question if
+it can be taught with profit in our country, except, of course, to those
+pathetic, neglected minds that are waiting there so yearningly for the
+education which M.  Bourget is going to furnish them from the serene
+summits of our high Parisian life.
+
+I spoke a moment ago of the existence of some superstitions that have
+been parading the world as facts this long time.  For instance, consider
+the Dollar.  The world seems to think that the love of money is
+"American"; and that the mad desire to get suddenly rich is "American."
+I believe that both of these things are merely and broadly human, not
+American monopolies at all.  The love of money is natural to all nations,
+for money is a good and strong friend.  I think that this love has
+existed everywhere, ever since the Bible called it the root of all evil.
+
+I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying
+to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising
+efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out
+of all proportion to the European experience.  For eighty years this
+opportunity has been offering itself in one new town or region after
+another straight westward, step by step, all the way from the Atlantic
+coast to the Pacific.  When a mechanic could buy ten town lots on
+tolerably long credit for ten months' savings out of his wages, and
+reasonably expect to sell them in a couple of years for ten times what he
+gave for them, it was human for him to try the venture, and he did it no
+matter what his nationality was.  He would have done it in Europe or
+China if he had had the same chance.
+
+In the flush times in the silver regions a cook or any other humble
+worker stood a very good chance to get rich out of a trifle of money
+risked in a stock deal; and that person promptly took that risk, no
+matter what his or her nationality might be.  I was there, and saw it.
+
+But these opportunities have not been plenty in our Southern States; so
+there you have a prodigious region where the rush for sudden wealth is
+almost an unknown thing--and has been, from the beginning.
+
+Europe has offered few opportunities for poor Tom, Dick, and Harry; but
+when she has offered one, there has been no noticeable difference between
+European eagerness and American.  England saw this in the wild days of
+the Railroad King; France saw it in 1720--time of Law and the Mississippi
+Bubble.  I am sure I have never seen in the gold and silver mines any
+madness, fury, frenzy to get suddenly rich which was even remotely
+comparable to that which raged in France in the Bubble day.  If I had a
+cyclopaedia here I could turn to that memorable case, and satisfy nearly
+anybody that the hunger for the sudden dollar is no more "American" than
+it is French.  And if I could furnish an American opportunity to staid
+Germany, I think I could wake her up like a house afire.
+
+But I must return to the Generalizations, Psychologizings, Deductions.
+When M. Bourget is exploiting these arts, it is then that he is
+peculiarly and particularly himself.  His ways are wholly original when
+he encounters a trait or a custom which is new to him.  Another person
+would merely examine the find, verify it, estimate its value, and let it
+go; but that is not sufficient for M. Bourget: he always wants to know
+why that thing exists, he wants to know how it came to happen; and he
+will not let go of it until he has found out.  And in every instance he
+will find that reason where no one but himself would have thought of
+looking for it.  He does not seem to care for a reason that is not
+picturesquely located; one might almost say picturesquely and impossibly
+located.
+
+He found out that in America men do not try to hunt down young married
+women.  At once, as usual, he wanted to know why.  Any one could have
+told him.  He could have divined it by the lights thrown by the novels of
+the country.  But no, he preferred to find out for himself.  He has a
+trustfulness as regards men and facts which is fine and unusual; he is
+not particular about the source of a fact, he is not particular about the
+character and standing of the fact itself; but when it comes to pounding
+out the reason for the existence of the fact, he will trust no one but
+himself.
+
+In the present instance here was his fact: American young married women
+are not pursued by the corruptor; and here was the question:  What is it
+that protects her?
+
+It seems quite unlikely that that problem could have offered difficulties
+to any but a trained philosopher.  Nearly any person would have said to
+M. Bourget: "Oh, that is very simple.  It is very seldom in America that
+a marriage is made on a commercial basis; our marriages, from the
+beginning, have been made for love; and where love is there is no room
+for the corruptor."
+
+Now, it is interesting to see the formidable way in which M. Bourget went
+at that poor, humble little thing.  He moved upon it in column--three
+columns--and with artillery.
+
+"Two reasons of a very different kind explain"--that fact.
+
+And now that I have got so far, I am almost afraid to say what his two
+reasons are, lest I be charged with inventing them.  But I will not
+retreat now; I will condense them and print them, giving my word that I
+am honest and not trying to deceive any one.
+
+1.  Young married women are protected from the approaches of the seducer
+in New England and vicinity by the diluted remains of a prudence created
+by a Puritan law of two hundred years ago, which for a while punished
+adultery with death.
+
+2.  And young married women of the other forty or fifty States are
+protected by laws which afford extraordinary facilities for divorce.
+
+If I have not lost my mind I have accurately conveyed those two Vesuvian
+irruptions of philosophy.  But the reader can consult Chapter IV. of
+'Outre-Mer', and decide for himself.  Let us examine this paralyzing
+Deduction or Explanation by the light of a few sane facts.
+
+1.  This universality of "protection" has existed in our country from the
+beginning; before the death penalty existed in New England, and during
+all the generations that have dragged by since it was annulled.
+
+2.  Extraordinary facilities for divorce are of such recent creation that
+any middle-aged American can remember a time when such things had not yet
+been thought of.
+
+Let us suppose that the first easy divorce law went into effect forty
+years ago, and got noised around and fairly started in business thirty-
+five years ago, when we had, say, 25,000,000 of white population.  Let us
+suppose that among 5,000,000 of them the young married women were
+"protected" by the surviving shudder of that ancient Puritan scare--what
+is M. Bourget going to do about those who lived among the 20,000,000?
+They were clean in their morals, they were pure, yet there was no easy
+divorce law to protect them.
+
+Awhile ago I said that M.  Bourget's method of truth-seeking--hunting for
+it in out-of-the-way places--was new; but that was an error.  I remember
+that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other
+astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion
+which M. Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts
+and their origin.  Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way
+was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo,
+which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific
+gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure--by the
+natural processes of animal decay--of the phosphorus contained in them.
+
+This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much
+thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final.  His
+own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs;
+and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that
+the locusts do like that in Egypt.
+
+Giordano Bruno also was outspoken in his praises of Leverrier's important
+contribution to astronomical science, and was at first inclined to regard
+it as conclusive; but later, conceiving it to be erroneous, he pronounced
+against it, and advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was a
+detachment or corps of stars which became arrested and held in 'suspenso
+suspensorum' by refraction of gravitation while on the march to join
+their several constellations; a proposition for which he was afterwards
+burned at the stake in Jacksonville, Illinois.
+
+These were all brilliant and picturesque theories, and each was received
+with enthusiasm by the scientific world; but when a New England farmer,
+who was not a thinker, but only a plain sort of person who tried to
+account for large facts in simple ways, came out with the opinion that
+the Milky Way was just common, ordinary stars, and was put where it was
+because God "wanted to hev it so," the admirable idea fell perfectly
+flat.
+
+As a literary artist, M. Bourget is as fresh and striking as he is as a
+scientific one.  He says, "Above all, I do not believe much in
+anecdotes."
+
+Why?  "In history they are all false"--a sufficiently broad statement--
+"in literature all libelous"--also a sufficiently sweeping statement,
+coming from a critic who notes that we are a people who are peculiarly
+extravagant in our language--" and when it is a matter of social life,
+almost all biased."  It seems to amount to stultification, almost.  He
+has built two or three breeds of American coquettes out of anecdotes--
+mainly "biased" ones, I suppose; and, as they occur "in literature,"
+furnished by his pen, they must be "all libelous."  Or did he mean not in
+literature or anecdotes about literature or literary people?  I am not
+able to answer that.  Perhaps the original would be clearer, but I have
+only the translation of this installment by me.  I think the remark had
+an intention; also that this intention was booked for the trip; but that
+either in the hurry of the remark's departure it got left, or in the
+confusion of changing cars at the translator's frontier it got side-
+tracked.
+
+"But on the other hand I believe in statistics; and those on divorces
+appear to me to be most conclusive."  And he sets himself the task of
+explaining--in a couple of columns--the process by which Easy-Divorce
+conceived, invented, originated, developed, and perfected an empire-
+embracing condition of sexual purity in the States.  IN 40 YEARS.  No, he
+doesn't state the interval.  With all his passion for statistics he
+forgot to ask how long it took to produce this gigantic miracle.
+
+I have followed his pleasant but devious trail through those columns,
+but I was not able to get hold of his argument and find out what it was.
+I was not even able to find out where it left off.  It seemed to
+gradually dissolve and flow off into other matters.  I followed it with
+interest, for I was anxious to learn how easy-divorce eradicated adultery
+in America, but I was disappointed; I have no idea yet how it did it.
+I only know it didn't.  But that is not valuable; I knew it before.
+
+Well, humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all.  The minute
+it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and
+resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.  And so,
+when M. Bourget said that bright thing about our grandfathers, I broke
+all up.  I remember exploding its American countermine once, under that
+grand hero, Napoleon.  He was only First Consul then, and I was Consul-
+General--for the United States, of course; but we were very intimate,
+notwithstanding the difference in rank, for I waived that.  One day
+something offered the opening, and he said:
+
+"Well, General, I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an
+American, because whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his
+time he can always get away with a few years trying to find out who his
+grandfather was!"
+
+I fairly shouted, for I had never heard it sound better; and then I was
+back at him as quick as a flash--"Right, your Excellency!  But I reckon
+a Frenchman's got his little stand-by for a dull time, too; because when
+all other interests fail he can turn in and see if he can't find out who
+his father was!"
+
+Well, you should have heard him just whoop, and cackle, and carry on!
+He reached up and hit me one on the shoulder, and says:
+
+"Land, but it's good!  It's im-mensely good!  I'George, I never heard it
+said so good in my life before!  Say it again."
+
+So I said it again, and he said his again, and I said mine again, and
+then he did, and then I did, and then he did, and we kept on doing it,
+and doing it, and I never had such a good time, and he said the same.
+In my opinion there isn't anything that is as killing as one of those
+dear old ripe pensioners if you know how to snatch it out in a kind of
+a fresh sort of original way.
+
+But I wish M. Bourget had read more of our novels before he came.  It is
+the only way to thoroughly understand a people.  When I found I was
+coming to Paris, I read 'La Terre'.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A LITTLE NOTE TO M. PAUL BOURGET
+
+          [The preceding squib was assailed in the North American Review
+          in an article entitled "Mark Twain and Paul Bourget," by Max
+          O'Rell.  The following little note is a Rejoinder to that
+          article.  It is possible that the position assumed here--that
+          M. Bourget dictated the O'Rell article himself--is untenable.]
+
+You have every right, my dear M. Bourget, to retort upon me by dictation,
+if you prefer that method to writing at me with your pen; but if I may
+say it without hurt--and certainly I mean no offence--I believe you would
+have acquitted yourself better with the pen.  With the pen you are at
+home; it is your natural weapon; you use it with grace, eloquence, charm,
+persuasiveness, when men are to be convinced, and with formidable effect
+when they have earned a castigation.  But I am sure I see signs in the
+above article that you are either unaccustomed to dictating or are out of
+practice.  If you will re-read it you will notice, yourself, that it
+lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that
+it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it
+wanders around; that it loses itself early and does not find itself any
+more.  There are some other defects, as you will notice, but I think I
+have named the main ones.  I feel sure that they are all due to your lack
+of practice in dictating.
+
+Inasmuch as you had not signed it I had the impression at first that you
+had not dictated it.  But only for a moment.  Certain quite simple and
+definite facts reminded me that the article had to come from you, for the
+reason that it could not come from any one else without a specific
+invitation from you or from me.  I mean, it could not except as an
+intrusion, a transgression of the law which forbids strangers to mix into
+a private dispute between friends, unasked.
+
+Those simple and definite facts were these: I had published an article in
+this magazine, with you for my subject; just you yourself; I stuck
+strictly to that one subject, and did not interlard any other.  No one,
+of course, could call me to account but you alone, or your authorized
+representative.  I asked some questions--asked them of myself.
+I answered them myself.  My article was thirteen pages long, and all
+devoted to you; devoted to you, and divided up in this way: one page of
+guesses as to what subjects you would instruct us in, as teacher; one
+page of doubts as to the effectiveness of your method of examining us and
+our ways; two or three pages of criticism of your method, and of certain
+results which it furnished you; two or three pages of attempts to show
+the justness of these same criticisms; half a dozen pages made up of
+slight fault-findings with certain minor details of your literary
+workmanship, of extracts from your 'Outre-Mer' and comments upon them;
+then I closed with an anecdote.  I repeat--for certain reasons--that I
+closed with an anecdote.
+
+When I was asked by this magazine if I wished to "answer" a "reply" to
+that article of mine, I said "yes," and waited in Paris for the proof-
+sheets of the "reply" to come.  I already knew, by the cablegram, that
+the "reply" would not be signed by you, but upon reflection I knew it
+would be dictated by you, because no volunteer would feel himself at
+liberty to assume your championship in a private dispute, unasked, in
+view of the fact that you are quite well able to take care of your
+matters of that sort yourself and are not in need of any one's help.
+No, a volunteer could not make such a venture.  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.  In fact he could
+not get in at all, except by the back way, and with a false key; that is
+to say, a pretext--a pretext invented for the occasion by putting into my
+mouth words which I did not use, and by wresting sayings of mine from
+their plain and true meaning.  Would he resort to methods like those to
+get in?  No; there are no people of that kind.  So then I knew for a
+certainty that you dictated the Reply yourself.  I knew you did it to
+save yourself manual labor.
+
+And you had the right, as I have already said and I am content--perfectly
+content.
+
+Yet it would have been little trouble to you, and a great kindness to me,
+if you had written your Reply all out with your own capable hand.
+
+Because then it would have replied--and that is really what a Reply is
+for.  Broadly speaking, its function is to refute--as you will easily
+concede.  That leaves something for the other person to take hold of:
+he has a chance to reply to the Reply, he has a chance to refute the
+refutation.  This would have happened if you had written it out instead
+of dictating.  Dictating is nearly sure to unconcentrate the dictator's
+mind, when he is out of practice, confuse him, and betray him into using
+one set of literary rules when he ought to use a quite different set.
+Often it betrays him into employing the RULES FOR CONVERSATION BETWEEN A
+SHOUTER AND A DEAF PERSON--as in the present case--when he ought to
+employ the RULES FOR CONDUCTING DISCUSSION WITH A FAULT-FINDER.  The
+great foundation-rule and basic principle of discussion with a fault-
+finder is relevancy and concentration upon the subject; whereas the great
+foundation-rule and basic principle governing conversation between a
+shouter and a deaf person is irrelevancy and persistent desertion of the
+topic in hand.  If I may be allowed to illustrate by quoting example IV.,
+section from chapter ix. of "Revised Rules for Conducting Conversation
+between a Shouter and a Deaf Person," it will assist us in getting a
+clear idea of the difference between the two sets of rules:
+
+Shouter.  Did you say his name is WETHERBY?
+
+Deaf Person.  Change?  Yes, I think it will.  Though if it should clear
+off I--
+
+Shouter.  It's his NAME I want--his NAME.
+
+Deaf Person.  Maybe so, maybe so; but it will only be a shower, I think.
+
+Shouter.  No, no, no!--you have quite misunderSTOOD me.  If--
+
+Deaf Person.  Ah!  GOOD morning; I am sorry you must go.  But call again,
+and let me continue to be of assistance to you in every way I can.
+
+
+You see it is a perfect kodak of the article you have dictated.  It is
+really curious and interesting when you come to compare it with yours;
+in detail, with my former article to which it is a Reply in your hand.
+I talk twelve pages about your American instruction projects, and your
+doubtful scientific system, and your painstaking classification of
+nonexistent things, and your diligence and zeal and sincerity, and your
+disloyal attitude towards anecdotes, and your undue reverence for unsafe
+statistics and far facts that lack a pedigree; and you turn around and
+come back at me with eight pages of weather.
+
+I do not see how a person can act so.  It is good of you to repeat, with
+change of language, in the bulk of your rejoinder, so much of my own
+article, and adopt my sentiments, and make them over, and put new buttons
+on; and I like the compliment, and am frank to say so; but agreeing with
+a person cripples controversy and ought not to be allowed.  It is
+weather; and of almost the worst sort.  It pleases me greatly to hear you
+discourse with such approval and expansiveness upon my text:
+
+"A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think that
+is as far as he can get.  I think that no foreigner can report its
+interior;"--[And you say: "A man of average intelligence, who has passed
+six months among a people, cannot express opinions that are worth jotting
+down, but he can form impressions that are worth repeating.  For my part,
+I think that foreigners' impressions are more interesting than native
+opinions.  After all, such impressions merely mean 'how the country
+struck the foreigner.'"]--which is a quite clear way of saying that a
+foreigner's report is only valuable when it restricts itself to
+impressions.  It pleases me to have you follow my lead in that glowing
+way, but it leaves me nothing to combat.  You should give me something to
+deny and refute; I would do as much for you.
+
+It pleases me to have you playfully warn the public against taking one of
+your books seriously.--[When I published Jonathan and his Continent, I
+wrote in a preface addressed to Jonathan: "If ever you should insist in
+seeing in this little volume a serious study of your country and of your
+countrymen, I warn you that your world-wide fame for humor will be
+exploded."]--Because I used to do that cunning thing myself in earlier
+days.  I did it in a prefatory note to a book of mine called Tom Sawyer.
+
+
+                                 NOTICE.
+
+Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;
+persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons
+attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
+                              BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
+                              PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
+
+
+The kernel is the same in both prefaces, you see--the public must not
+take us too seriously.  If we remove that kernel we remove the life-
+principle, and the preface is a corpse.  Yes, it pleases me to have you
+use that idea, for it is a high compliment.  But is leaves me nothing to
+combat; and that is damage to me.
+
+Am I seeming to say that your Reply is not a reply at all, M. Bourget?
+If so, I must modify that; it is too sweeping.  For you have furnished a
+general answer to my inquiry as to what France through you--can teach us.
+--["What could France teach America!" exclaims Mark Twain.  France can
+teach America all the higher pursuits of life, and there is more artistic
+feeling and refinement in a street of French workingmen than in many
+avenues inhabited by American millionaires.  She can teach her, not
+perhaps how to work, but how to rest, how to live, how to be happy.
+She can teach her that the aim of life is not money-making, but that
+money-making is only a means to obtain an end.  She can teach her that
+wives are not expensive toys, but useful partners, friends, and
+confidants, who should always keep men under their wholesome influence by
+their diplomacy, their tact, their common-sense, without bumptiousness.
+These qualities, added to the highest standard of morality (not angular
+and morose, but cheerful morality), are conceded to Frenchwomen by
+whoever knows something of French life outside of the Paris boulevards,
+and Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot even so much as stain them.
+
+I might tell Mark Twain that in France a man who was seen tipsy in his
+club would immediately see his name canceled from membership.  A man who
+had settled his fortune on his wife to avoid meeting his creditors would
+be refused admission into any decent society.  Many a Frenchman has blown
+his brains out rather than declare himself a bankrupt.  Now would Mark
+Twain remark to this: 'An American is not such a fool: when a creditor
+stands in his way he closes his doors, and reopens them the following
+day.  When he has been a bankrupt three times he can retire from
+business?']--It is a good answer.
+
+It relates to manners, customs, and morals--three things concerning which
+we can never have exhaustive and determinate statistics, and so the
+verdicts delivered upon them must always lack conclusiveness and be
+subject to revision; but you have stated the truth, possibly, as nearly
+as any one could do it, in the circumstances.  But why did you choose a
+detail of my question which could be answered only with vague hearsay
+evidence, and go right by one which could have been answered with deadly
+facts?--facts in everybody's reach, facts which none can dispute.
+I asked what France could teach us about government.  I laid myself
+pretty wide open, there; and I thought I was handsomely generous, too,
+when I did it.  France can teach us how to levy village and city taxes
+which distribute the burden with a nearer approach to perfect fairness
+than is the case in any other land; and she can teach us the wisest and
+surest system of collecting them that exists.  She can teach us how to
+elect a President in a sane way; and also how to do it without throwing
+the country into earthquakes and convulsions that cripple and embarrass
+business, stir up party hatred in the hearts of men, and make peaceful
+people wish the term extended to thirty years.  France can teach us--but
+enough of that part of the question.  And what else can France teach us?
+She can teach us all the fine arts--and does.  She throws open her
+hospitable art academies, and says to us, "Come"--and we come, troops and
+troops of our young and gifted; and she sets over us the ablest masters
+in the world and bearing the greatest names; and she, teaches us all that
+we are capable of learning, and persuades us and encourages us with
+prizes and honors, much as if we were somehow children of her own; and
+when this noble education is finished and we are ready to carry it home
+and spread its gracious ministries abroad over our nation, and we come
+with homage and gratitude and ask France for the bill--there is nothing
+to pay.  And in return for this imperial generosity, what does America
+do?  She charges a duty on French works of art!
+
+I wish I had your end of this dispute; I should have something worth
+talking about.  If you would only furnish me something to argue,
+something to refute--but you persistently won't.  You leave good chances
+unutilized and spend your strength in proving and establishing
+unimportant things.  For instance, you have proven and established these
+eight facts here following--a good score as to number, but not worth
+while:
+
+Mark Twain is--
+
+1.  "Insulting."
+
+2.  (Sarcastically speaking) "This refined humor, 1st."
+
+3.  Prefers the manure-pile to the violets.
+
+4.  Has uttered "an ill-natured sneer."
+
+5.  Is "nasty."
+
+6.  Needs a "lesson in politeness and good manners."
+
+7.  Has published a "nasty article."
+
+8.  Has made remarks "unworthy of a gentleman."--["It is more funny than
+his" (Mark Twain's) "anecdote, and would have been less insulting."
+
+A quoted remark of mine "is a gross insult to a nation friendly to
+America."
+
+"He has read La Terre, this refined humorist."
+
+"When Mark Twain visits a garden .  .  .  he goes in the far-away comer
+where the soil is prepared."
+
+"Mark Twain's ill-natured sneer cannot so much as stain them" (the
+Frenchwomen).
+
+"When he" (Mark Twain) "takes his revenge he is unkind, unfair, bitter,
+nasty."
+
+"But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark," etc.
+
+"Mark might certainly have derived from it "(M. Bourget's book)" a lesson
+in politeness and good manners."
+
+A quoted remark of mine is "unworthy of a gentleman."]--
+
+These are all true, but really they are not valuable; no one cares much
+for such finds.  In our American magazines we recognize this and suppress
+them.  We avoid naming them.  American writers never allow themselves to
+name them.  It would look as if they were in a temper, and we hold that
+exhibitions of temper in public are not good form except in the very
+young and inexperienced.  And even if we had the disposition to name
+them, in order to fill up a gap when we were short of ideas and
+arguments, our magazines would not allow us to do it, because they think
+that such words sully their pages.  This present magazine is particularly
+strenuous about it.  Its note to me announcing the forwarding of your
+proof-sheets to France closed thus--for your protection:
+
+"It is needless to ask you to avoid anything that he might consider as
+personal."
+
+It was well enough, as a measure of precaution, but really it was not
+needed.  You can trust me implicitly, M. Bourget; I shall never call you
+any names in print which I should be ashamed to call you with your
+unoffending and dearest ones present.
+
+Indeed, we are reserved, and particular in America to a degree which you
+would consider exaggerated.  For instance, we should not write notes like
+that one of yours to a lady for a small fault--or a large one.--[When M.
+Paul Bourget indulges in a little chaffing at the expense of the
+Americans, "who can always get away with a few years' trying to find out
+who their grandfathers were,"] he merely makes an allusion to an American
+foible; but, forsooth, what a kind man, what a humorist Mark Twain is
+when he retorts by calling France a nation of bastards!  How the
+Americans of culture and refinement will admire him for thus speaking in
+their name!
+
+Snobbery .  .  .  .  I could give Mark Twain an example of the American
+specimen.  It is a piquant story.  I never published it because I feared
+my readers might think that I was giving them a typical illustration of
+American character instead of a rare exception.
+
+I was once booked by my manager to give a causerie in the drawing-room of
+a New York millionaire.  I accepted with reluctance.  I do not like
+private engagements.  At five o'clock on the day the causerie was to be
+given, the lady sent to my manager to say that she would expect me to
+arrive at nine o'clock and to speak for about an hour.  Then she wrote a
+postscript.  Many women are unfortunate there.  Their minds are full of
+after-thoughts, and the most important part of their letters is generally
+to be found after their signature.  This lady's P. S. ran thus: "I
+suppose be will not expect to be entertained after the lecture."
+
+I fairly shorted, as Mark Twain would say, and then, indulging myself in
+a bit of snobbishness, I was back at her as quick as a flash:
+
+"Dear Madam: As a literary man of some reputation, I have many times had
+the pleasure of being entertained by the members of the old aristocracy
+of France.  I have also many times had the pleasure of being entertained
+by the members of the old aristocracy of England.  If it may interest
+you, I can even tell you that I have several times had the honor of being
+entertained by royalty; but my ambition has never been so wild as to
+expect that one day I might be entertained by the aristocracy of New
+York.  No, I do not expect to be entertained by you, nor do I want you to
+expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night, for I decline to
+keep the engagement."
+
+Now, I could fill a book on America with reminiscences of this sort,
+adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers, on New York 'chronique
+scandaleuse', on the tenement houses of the large cities, on the
+gambling-hells of Denver, and the dens of San Francisco, and what not!
+But not even your nasty article on my country, Mark, will make me do
+it.]--We should not think it kind.  No matter how much we might have
+associated with kings and nobilities, we should not think it right to
+crush her with it and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life; for
+we have a saying, "Who humiliates my mother includes his own."
+
+Do I seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter,
+M. Bourget?  Indeed I do not.  I believe it to have been surreptitiously
+inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned.  I think he did it
+with a good motive, expecting it to add force and piquancy to your
+article, but it does not reflect your nature, and I know it will grieve
+you when you see it.  I also think he interlarded many other things which
+you will disapprove of when you see them.  I am certain that all the
+harsh names discharged at me come from him, not you.  No doubt you could
+have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him
+to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a
+higher quality.
+
+Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent
+information about Balzac and those others.--["Now the style of M.
+Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to
+Mark Twain; but let us leave that alone.  Has he read Erckmann-Chatrian,
+Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbuliez, Renan?  Has he read
+Gustave Droz's 'Monsieur, Madame, et Bebe', and those books which leave
+for a long time a perfume about you?  Has he read the novels of Alexandre
+Dumas, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Balzac?  Has be read Victor Hugo's
+'Les Miserables' and 'Notre Dame de Paris'?  Has he read or heard the
+plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those Titans of
+modern literature, whose names will be household words all over the world
+for hundreds of years to come?  He has read La Terre--this kind-hearted,
+refined humorist!  When Mark Twain visits a garden does he smell the
+violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle?  No, he goes in the
+far-away comer where the soil is prepared.  Hear what he says: 'I wish M.
+Paul Bourget had read more of our novels before he came.  It is the only
+way to thoroughly understand a people.  When I found I was coming to
+Paris I read La Terre.'"]--All this in simple justice to you--and to me;
+for, to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong
+your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being
+equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.
+
+And now finally I must uncover the secret pain, the wee sore from which
+the Reply grew--the anecdote which closed my recent article--and consider
+how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous dimensions.
+If any but you had dictated the Reply, M. Bourget, I would know that that
+anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of
+times, in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back
+way.  But I accuse you of nothing--nothing but error.  When you say that
+I "retort by calling France a nation of bastards," it is an error.  And
+not a small one, but a large one.  I made no such remark, nor anything
+resembling it.  Moreover, the magazine would not have allowed me to use
+so gross a word as that.
+
+You told an anecdote.  A funny one--I admit that.  It hit a foible of our
+American aristocracy, and it stung me--I admit that; it stung me sharply.
+It was like this: You found some ancient portraits of French kings in the
+gallery of one of our aristocracy, and you said:
+
+"He has the Grand Monarch, but where is the portrait of his grandfather?"
+That is, the American aristocrat's grandfather.
+
+Now that hits only a few of us, I grant--just the upper crust only--but
+it hits exceedingly hard.
+
+I wondered if there was any way of getting back at you.  In one of your
+chapters I found this chance:
+
+"In our high Parisian existence, for instance, we find applied to arts
+and luxury, and to debauchery, all the powers and all the weaknesses of
+the French soul."
+
+You see?  Your "higher Parisian" class--not everybody, not the nation,
+but only the top crust of the Ovation--applies to debauchery all the
+powers of its soul.
+
+I argued to myself that that energy must produce results.  So I built an
+anecdote out of your remark.  In it I make Napoleon Bonaparte say to me--
+but see for yourself the anecdote (ingeniously clipped and curtailed) in
+paragraph eleven of your Reply.--[So, I repeat, Mark Twain does not like
+M. Paul Bourget's book.  So long as he makes light fun of the great
+French writer he is at home, he is pleasant, he is the American humorist
+we know.  When he takes his revenge (and where is the reason for taking a
+revenge?) he is unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty.
+
+For example:
+See his answer to a Frenchman who jokingly remarks to him:
+
+"I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because
+whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his time, he can
+always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grandfather
+was."
+
+Hear the answer:
+
+"I reckon a Frenchman's got his little standby for a dull time, too;
+because when all other interests fail, he can turn in and see if he can't
+find out who his father was."
+
+The first remark is a good-humored bit of chaffing on American snobbery.
+I may be utterly destitute of humor, but I call the second remark a
+gratuitous charge of immorality hurled at the French women--a remark
+unworthy of a man who has the ear of the public, unworthy of a gentleman,
+a gross insult to a nation friendly to America, a nation that helped Mark
+Twain's ancestors in their struggle for liberty, a nation where to-day it
+is enough to say that you are American to see every door open wide to
+you.
+
+If Mark Twain was hard up in search of, a French "chestnut," I might have
+told him the following little anecdote.  It is more funny than his, and
+would have been less insulting: Two little street boys are abusing each
+other.  "Ah, hold your tongue," says one, "you ain't got no father."
+
+"Ain't got no father!" replies the other; "I've got more fathers than
+you."]
+
+Now, then, your anecdote about the grandfathers hurt me.  Why?  Because
+it had a point.  It wouldn't have hurt me if it hadn't had point.  You
+wouldn't have wasted space on it if it hadn't had point.
+
+My anecdote has hurt you.  Why?  Because it had point, I suppose.  It
+wouldn't have hurt you if it hadn't had point.  I judged from your remark
+about the diligence and industry of the high Parisian upper crust that it
+would have some point, but really I had no idea what a gold-mine I had
+struck.  I never suspected that the point was going to stick into the
+entire nation; but of course you know your nation better than I do, and
+if you think it punctures them all, I have to yield to your judgment.
+But you are to blame, your own self.  Your remark misled me.  I supposed
+the industry was confined to that little unnumerous upper layer.
+
+Well, now that the unfortunate thing has been done, let us do what we can
+to undo it.  There must be a way, M.  Bourget, and I am willing to do
+anything that will help; for I am as sorry as you can be yourself.
+
+I will tell you what I think will be the very thing.
+
+We will swap anecdotes.  I will take your anecdote and you take mine.  I
+will say to the dukes and counts and princes of the ancient nobility of
+France:
+
+"Ha, ha! You must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your
+grandfathers were?"
+
+They will merely smile indifferently and not feel hurt, because they can
+trace their lineage back through centuries.
+
+And you will hurl mine at every individual in the American nation,
+saying:
+
+"And you must have a pretty hard time trying to find out who your fathers
+were."  They will merely smile indifferently, and not feel hurt, because
+they haven't any difficulty in finding their fathers.
+
+Do you get the idea?  The whole harm in the anecdotes is in the point,
+you see; and when we swap them around that way, they haven't any.
+
+That settles it perfectly and beautifully, and I am glad I thought of it.
+I am very glad indeed, M. Bourget; for it was just that little wee thing
+that caused the whole difficulty and made you dictate the Reply, and your
+amanuensis call me all those hard names which the magazines dislike so.
+And I did it all in fun, too, trying to cap your funny anecdote with
+another one--on the give-and-take principle, you know--which is American.
+I didn't know that with the French it was all give and no take, and you
+didn't tell me.  But now that I have made everything comfortable again,
+and fixed both anecdotes so they can never have any point any more, I
+know you will forgive me.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays on Paul Bourget
+by Mark Twain
+
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