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