“The Summing Up” by W. Somerset Maugham: “The point of the writer is that he is not one man but many. It is because he is many that he can create many”

“Other men have been outraged on discovering, as they so often have, the discrepancy between the artist’s life and his work…

“But the point of the writer is that he is not one man but many. It is because he is many that he can create many, and the measure of his greatness is the number of selves that he comprises. When he fashions a character that does not carry conviction it is because there is in himself nothing of that person; he has had to fall back on observation, and so has only described, not begotten. The writer does not feel with; he feels in. It is not sympathy that he has, that too often results in sentimentality; he has what the psychologists call empathy. It is because Shakespeare had this to so great a degree that he was at once the most living and the least sentimental of authors. I think Goethe was the first writer to grow conscious of this multiple personality, and it troubled him all his life” (1, pp. 151-152).

1. W. Somerset Maugham. The Summing Up [1938]. New York, Penguin Books, 1963.