The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII | Page 4

and
events are sometimes hurried on, sometimes left to linger indefinitely.
Art, on the contrary, consists in the employment of foresight, and
elaboration in arranging skillful and ingenious transitions, in setting
essential events in a strong light, simply by the craft of composition,
and giving all else the degree of relief, in proportion to their importance,
requisite to produce a convincing sense of the special truth to be
conveyed.
"Truth" in such work consists in producing a complete illusion by
following the common logic of facts and not by transcribing them
pell-mell, as they succeed each other.
Whence I conclude that the higher order of Realists should rather call
themselves Illusionists.
How childish it is, indeed, to believe in this reality, since to each of us
the truth is in his own mind, his own organs. Our own eyes and ears,
taste and smell, create as many different truths as there are human
beings on earth. And our brains, duly and differently informed by those
organs, apprehend, analyze, and decide as differently as if each of us

were a being of an alien race. Each of us, then, has simply his own
illusion of the world--poetical, sentimental, cheerful, melancholy, foul,
or gloomy, according to his nature. And the writer has no other mission
than faithfully to reproduce this illusion, with all the elaborations of art
which he may have learnt and have at his command. The illusion of
beauty--which is merely a conventional term invented by man! The
illusion of ugliness--which is a matter of varying opinion! The illusion
of truth--never immutable! The illusion of depravity--which fascinates
so many minds! All the great artists are those who can make other men
see their own particular illusion.
Then we must not be wroth with any theory, since each is simply the
outcome, in generalizations, of a special temperament analyzing itself.
Two of these theories have more particularly been the subject of
discussion, and set up in opposition to each other instead of being
admitted on an equal footing: that of the purely analytical novel, and
that of the objective novel.
The partisans of analysis require the writer to devote himself to
indicating the smallest evolutions of a soul, and all the most secret
motives of our every action, giving but a quite secondary importance to
the act and fact in itself. It is but the goal, a simple milestone, the
excuse for the book. According to them, these works, at once exact and
visionary, in which imagination merges into observation, are to be
written after the fashion in which a philosopher composes a treatise on
psychology, seeking out causes in their remotest origin, telling the why
and wherefore of every impulse, and detecting every reaction of the
soul's movements under the promptings of interest, passion, or instinct.
The partisans of objectivity--odious word--aiming, on the contrary, at
giving us an exact presentment of all that happens in life, carefully
avoid all complicated explanations, all disquisitions on motive, and
confine themselves to let persons and events pass before our eyes. In
their opinion, psychology should be concealed in the book, as it is in
reality, under the facts of existence.
The novel as conceived of on these lines gains in interest; there is more

movement in the narrative, more color, more of the stir of life.
Hence, instead of giving long explanations of the state of mind of an
actor in the tale, the objective writer tries to discover the action or
gesture which that state of mind must inevitably lead to in that
personage, under certain given circumstances. And he makes him so
demean himself from one end of the volume to the other, that all his
actions, all his movements shall be the expression of his inmost nature,
of all his thoughts, and all his impulses or hesitancies. Thus they
conceal psychology instead of flaunting it; they use it as the skeleton of
the work, just as the invisible bony framework is the skeleton of the
human body. The artist who paints our portrait does not display our
bones.
To me it seems that the novel executed on this principle gains also in
sincerity. It is, in the first place, more probable, for the persons we see
moving about us do not divulge to us the motives from which they act.
We must also take into account the fact that, even if by close
observation of men and women we can so exactly ascertain their
characters as to predict their behavior under almost any circumstances,
if we can say decisively: "Such a man, of such a temperament, in such a
case, will do this or that"; yet it does not follow that we could lay a
finger, one by one, on all the secret evolutions of his mind--which is
not our own; all