Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/18

Rh adviser, used to remind him, an output of a hundred lines is enough to stamp a man as an artist, if they are the hundred which express his essence of originality. But if no rules exist, is there no preferable plan of writing? Yes, Maupassant replies, there is. The "objective" method on the whole gives the happiest results, when the writer, having formed his private conception of a character, decides what action is the inevitable result, in a given situation, of that character's state of mind. On the other hand, the analytical writer pure and simple, who sets himself to explain why his character acts as he does, is brought up short, so to speak, by his ego, which forbids him to do more than guess at the working of a mind alien to his own. Thus, by the exercise of intense and untiring observation it is possible to conclude how a man of well-defined general type, such as a strong sensualist, a weak amourist, an ascetic, will probably act in the situation created for him. But since no writer can himself be all these three men, his analysis will often be at fault when he attempts to trace the mental processes of his opposite.

Nevertheless Maupassant admitted that admirable work might be done on these lines—as indeed on many others; and though most of his writing was based on objectivity (a dreadful word, as he