-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 beh