This dull self-importance insidiously saps in our country the respect for thoroughness and application characteristic of Germany; insidiously blunts in American penetrative powers the English faculty of being "keen" on a subject, recently presented to us with such grace in the young hero's eager pursuits in Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street; and disparages lightly but often completely the growth of the fresh and varied spirit of production described in the passage of de Maupassant to which Mr. Galsworthy refers. This passage expresses the clear fire of attention our American habits lack, with a sympathy it is a pleasure to quote here in its entirety. De Maupassant says in the preface of Pierre et Jean:
For seven years I wrote verses, I wrote stories, I wrote novels. I even wrote a detestable play. Of these nothing survives. The master (Flaubert) read them all, and on the following Sunday at luncheon he would give me his criticism, and inculcate little by little two or three principles that sum up his long and patient lesson. "If one has any originality, the first thing requisite is to bring it out: if one has none, the first thing to be done is to acquire it."
Talent is long patience. Everything which one desires to express must be considered with sufficient attention and during a sufficiently long time to discover in it some aspect which no one has yet seen or described. In everything there is still some spot unexplored, because we are accustomed to look at things only with the recollection of what others before us have thought of the subject we are contemplating. The smallest object contains something unknown. Let us find it. In order to describe a fire that flames and a tree on the plain, we must keep looking at that flame and that tree until to our eyes they no longer resemble any other tree, or any other fire.
Having besides laid down this truth that there are not in the whole world two grains of sand, two specks, two hands, or two noses alike, Flaubert compelled me to describe in a few phrases a being or an object in such a manner as to clearly particularize it, and distinguish it from all the other beings or all the other objects of the same race, or the same species. "When you pass," he would say, "a grocer seated at his shop door, a janitor smoking his pipe, a stand of hackney coaches, show me that grocer and that janitor, their attitude, their whole physical appearance, including also by a skilful description their whole moral nature so that I cannot confound them with any other grocer or any other janitor: make me see, in one word, that a certain cab-horse does not resemble the fifty others that follow or precede it."