The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII | Page 6

years before I gained the friendship of
Flaubert, by dint of telling me that a hundred lines--or less--if they are
without a flaw and contain the very essence of the talent and originality
of even a second-rate man, are enough to establish an artist's reputation,
made me understand that persistent toil and a thorough knowledge of
the craft, might, in some happy hour of lucidity, power, and enthusiasm,
by the fortunate occurrence of a subject in perfect concord with the
tendency of our mind, lead to the production of a single work, short but
as perfect as we can make it. Then I learned to see that the best-known
writers have hardly ever left us more than one such volume; and that
needful above all else is the good fortune which leads us to hit upon

and discern, amid the multifarious matter which offers itself for
selection, the subject which will absorb all our faculties, all that is of
worth in us, all our artistic powers.
At a later date, Flaubert, whom I had occasionally met, took a fancy to
me. I ventured to show him a few attempts. He read them kindly and
replied: "I cannot tell whether you will have any talent. What you have
brought me proves a certain intelligence; but never forget this, young
man: talent--as Chateaubriand[1] says--is nothing but long patience. Go
and work."
[Footnote 1: The idea did not originate with Chateaubriand.]
I worked; and I often went to see him, feeling that he liked me, for he
had taken to calling me, in jest, his disciple. For seven years I wrote
verses, I wrote tales, I even wrote a villainous play. Nothing of all this
remains. The master read it all; then, the next Sunday while we
breakfasted together, he would give me his criticisms, driving into me
by degrees two or three principles which sum up the drift of his long
and patient exhortations: "If you have any originality," said he, "you
must above all things bring it out; if you have not you must acquire it."
Talent is long patience.
Everything you want to express must be considered so long, and so
attentively, as to enable you to find some aspect of it which no one has
yet seen and expressed. There is an unexplored side to everything,
because we are wont never to use our eyes but with the memory of
what others before us have thought of the things we see. The smallest
thing has something unknown in it; we must find it. To describe a
blazing fire, a tree in a plain, we must stand face to face with that fire
or that tree, till to us they are wholly unlike any other fire or tree. Thus
we may become original.
Then, having established the truth that there are not in the whole world
two grains of sand, two flies, two hands, or two noses absolutely alike,
he would make me describe in a few sentences some person or object,
in such a way as to define it exactly, and distinguish it from every other

of the same race or species.
"When you pass a grocer sitting in his doorway," he would say, "a
porter smoking his pipe, or a cab stand, show me that grocer and that
porter, their attitude and their whole physical aspect, including, as
indicated by the skill of the portrait, their whole moral nature, in such a
way that I could never mistake them for any other grocer or porter; and
by a single word give me to understand wherein one cab horse differs
from fifty others before or behind it."
I have explained his notions of style at greater length in another place;
they bear a marked relation to the theory of observation I have just laid
down. Whatever the thing we wish to say, there is but one word to
express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to
qualify it. We must seek till we find this noun, this verb, and this
adjective, and never be content with getting very near it, never allow
ourselves to play tricks, even happy ones, or have recourse to sleights
of language to avoid a difficulty. The subtlest things may be rendered
and suggested by applying the hint conveyed in Boileau's line:
"D'un mot mis en sa place enseigna le pouvoir." "He taught the power
of a word put in the right place."
There is no need for an eccentric vocabulary to formulate every shade
of thought--the complicated, multifarious, and outlandish words which
are put upon us nowadays in the name of artistic writing; but every
modification of the value of a word by the place it fills must be
distinguished with extreme clearness. Give us fewer nouns, verbs, and
adjectives, with