The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII | Page 3

world, facts, men, and things
in a way peculiar to himself, which is the outcome of the sum total of
his studious observation. It is this personal view of the world which he
strives to communicate to us by reproducing it in a book. To make the
spectacle of life as moving to us as it has been to him, he must bring it
before our eyes with scrupulous exactitude. Hence he must construct
his work with such skill, it must be so artful under so simple a guise,
that it is impossible to detect and sketch the plan, or discern the writer's
purpose.
Instead of manipulating an adventure and working it out in such a way
as to make it interesting to the last, he will take his actor or actors at a
certain period of their lives, and lead them by natural stages to the next.
In this way he will show either how men's minds are modified by the
influence of their environment, or how their passions and sentiments
are evolved; how they love or hate, how they struggle in every sphere
of society, and how their interests clash--social interests, pecuniary
interests, family interests, political interests. The skill of his plan will
not consist in emotional power or charm, in an attractive opening or a
stirring catastrophe, but in the happy grouping of small but constant
facts from which the final purpose of the work may be discerned. If
within three hundred pages he depicts ten years of a life so as to show

what its individual and characteristic significance may have been in the
midst of all the other human beings which surrounded it, he ought to
know how to eliminate from among the numberless trivial incidents of
daily life all which do not serve his end, and how to set in a special
light all those which might have remained invisible to less clear-sighted
observers, and which give his book caliber and value as a whole.
It is intelligible that this method of construction, so unlike the old
manner which was patent to all, must often mislead the critics, and that
they will not all detect the subtle and secret wires--almost invisibly
fine--which certain modern artists use instead of the one string formerly
known as the "plot."
In a word, while the novelist of yesterday preferred to relate the crises
of life, the acute phases of the mind and heart, the novelist of to-day
writes the history of the heart, soul, and intellect in their normal
condition. To achieve the effects he aims at--that is to say, the sense of
simple reality, and to point the artistic lesson he endeavors to draw
from it--that is to say, a revelation of what his contemporary man is
before his very eyes, he must bring forward no facts that are not
irrefragible and invariable.
But even when we place ourselves at the same point of view as these
realistic artists, we may discuss and dispute their theory, which seems
to be comprehensively stated in these words: "The whole Truth and
nothing but the Truth." Since the end they have in view is to bring out
the philosophy of certain constant and current facts, they must often
correct events in favor of probability and to the detriment of truth; for
"Le vrai peut quelquefois, n'être pas le vraisemblable." (Truth may
sometimes not seem probable.)
The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavor not to show us a
commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it
which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality
itself. To tell everything is out of the question; it would require at least
a volume for each day to enumerate the endless, insignificant incidents
which crowd our existence. A choice must be made--and this is the first

blow to the theory of "the whole truth."
Life, moreover, is composed of the most dissimilar things, the most
unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is
merciless, without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable,
illogical, and contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as
miscellaneous facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject,
can only select such characteristic details as are of use to it, from this
life overladen with chances and trifles, and reject everything else,
everything by the way.
To give an instance from among a thousand. The number of persons
who, every day, meet with an accidental death, all over the world, is
very considerable. But how can we bring a tile onto the head of an
important character, or fling him under the wheels of a vehicle in the
middle of a story, under the pretext that accident must have its due?
Again, in life there is no difference of foreground and distance,