xperimented 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