The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII | Page 5

the mysterious pleadings of his instincts--which are not
the same as ours; all the mingled promptings of his nature--in which the
organs, nerves, blood, and flesh are different from ours.
However great the genius of a gentle, delicate man, guileless of
passions and devoted to science and work, he never can so completely
transfuse himself into the body of a dashing, sensual, and violent man,
of exuberant vitality, torn by every desire or even by every vice, as to
understand and delineate the inmost impulses and sensations of a being
so unlike himself, even though he may very adequately foresee and
relate all the actions of his life.
In short, the man who writes pure psychology can do no more than put
himself in the place of all his puppets in the various situations in which

he places them. It is impossible that he should change his organs, which
are the sole intermediary between external life and ourselves, which
constrain us by their perceptions, circumscribe our sensibilities, and
create in each of us a soul essentially dissimilar to all those about us.
Our purview and knowledge of the world, and our ideas of life, are
acquired by the aid of our senses, and we cannot help transferring them,
in some degree, to all the personages whose secret and unknown nature
we propose to reveal. Thus, it is always ourselves that we disclose in
the body of a king or an assassin, a robber or an honest man, a
courtesan, a nun, a young girl, or a coarse market woman; for we are
compelled to put the problem in this personal form: "If I were a king, a
murderer, a prostitute, a nun, or a market woman, what should I do,
what should I think, how should I act?" We can only vary our
characters by altering the age, the sex, the social position, and all the
circumstances of life, of that ego which nature has in fact inclosed in an
insurmountable barrier of organs of sense. Skill consists in not
betraying this ego to the reader, under the various masks which we
employ to cover it.
Still, though on the point of absolute exactitude, pure psychological
analysis is impregnable, it can nevertheless produce works of art as fine
as any other method of work.
Here, for instance we have the Symbolists. And why not? Their artistic
dream is a worthy one; and they have this especially interesting feature:
that they know and proclaim the extreme difficulty of art.
And, indeed, a man must be very daring or foolish to write at all
nowadays. And so many and such various masters of the craft, of such
multifarious genius, what remains to be done that has not been done, or
what to say that has not been said? Which of us all can boast of having
written a page, a phrase, which is not to be found--or something very
like it--in some other book? When we read, we who are so soaked in
(French) literature that our whole body seems as it were a mere
compound of words, do we ever light on a line, a thought, which is not
familiar to us, or of which we have not had at least some vague
forecast?

The man who only tries to amuse his public by familiar methods, writes
confidently, in his candid mediocrity, works intended only for the
ignorant and idle crowd. But those who are conscious of the weight of
centuries of past literature, whom nothing satisfies, whom everything
disgusts because they dream of something better, to whom the bloom is
off everything, and who always are impressed with the uselessness, the
commonness of their own achievements--these come to regard literary
art as a thing unattainable and mysterious, scarcely to be detected save
in a few pages by the greatest masters.
A score of phrases suddenly discovered thrill us to the heart like a
startling revelation; but the lines which follow are just like all other
verse, the further flow of prose is like all other prose.
Men of genius, no doubt, escape this anguish and torment because they
bear within themselves an irresistible creative power. They do not sit in
judgment on themselves. The rest of us, who are no more than
persevering and conscientious workers, can only contend against
invincible discouragement by unremitting effort.
Two men by their simple and lucid teaching gave me the strength to try
again and again: Louis Bouilhet and Gustave Flaubert.
If I here speak of myself in connection with them, it is because their
counsels, as summed up in a few lines, may prove useful to some
young writers who may be less self-confident than most are when they
make their début in print. Bouilhet, whom I first came to know
somewhat intimately about two