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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Essays on Paul Bourget, by Mark Twain
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+Title: Essays on Paul Bourget
+
+Author: Mark Twain
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3173]
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+[The actual date this file first posted = 02/08/01]
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+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 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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