the like.

The Fallacy of "Documents."

Now you may observe a man until you are tired, and then you may begin
and observe him over again: you may photograph him and his
surroundings: you may spend years in studying what he eats and drinks:
you may search out what his uncles died of, and the price he pays for
his hats, and--know nothing at all about him. At least, you may know
enough to insure his life or assess him for Income Tax: but you are
not even half-way towards writing a novel about him. You are still
groping among externals. His unspoken ambitions; the stories he tells
himself silently, at midnight, in his bed; the pain he masks with a
dull face and the ridiculous fancies he hugs in secret--these are the
Essentials, and you cannot get them by Observation. If you can
discover these, you are a Novelist born: if not, you may as well shut
up your note-book and turn to some more remunerative trade. You will
never surprise the secret of a soul by accumulating notes upon
Externals.

Local Color.

Then, again, we have Local Color, an article inordinately bepraised
just now; and yet an External. For human nature, when every possible
allowance has been made for geographical conditions, undergoes
surprisingly little change as we pass from one degree of latitude or
longitude to another. The Story of Ruth is as intelligible to an
Englishman as though Ruth had gleaned in the stubble behind Tess
Durbeyfield. Levine toiling with the mowers, Achilles sulking in his
tent, Iphigeneia at the altar, Gil Blas before the Archbishop of
Granada have as close a claim on our sympathy as if they lived but a
few doors from us. Let me be understood. I hold it best that a
novelist should be intimately acquainted with the country in which he
lays his scene. But, none the less, the study of local color is not of
the first importance. And the critic who lavishes praise upon a writer
for "introducing us to an entirely new atmosphere," for "breaking new
ground," and "wafting us to scenes with which the jaded novel-reader
is scarcely acquainted," and for "giving us work which bears every
trace of minute local research," is praising that which is of
secondary importance. The works of Richard Jefferies form a
considerable museum of externals of one particular kind; and this is
possibly the reason why the Cockney novelist waxes eloquent over
Richard Jefferies. He can now import the breath of the hay-field into
his works at no greater expense