, 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