Instead of devising an adventure and unfolding it in a manner suited to render it interesting to the end, he (the author) will take his character of characters at a certain period of their existence and conduct them, by natural transitions, to the period following. In this fashion he will show how minds are modified under the influence of surrounding circumstances; how the sentiments and the passions develop; how we love one another, how we hate one another, how we struggle in all social conditions; how the interests of the landlord, the interest of finance, the interest of family, the interests of politics all struggle.

The acceptability of his plan will not consist, then, in emotion or in charm, in an attractive beginning or in a moving catastrophe, but in the skillful grouping of little significant facts from which the definitive meaning of the work will stand forth. If he sets forth in three hundred pages ten years of a life to show what is has been, in the midst of all the beings which have surrounded it, and reveals its proper and characteristic signification, he should know how to eliminate among the innumerable little daily events all those which are inconsequential to him, and how to put in sharp light all those which would have remained unnoticed by observers less penetrating, and which give to the book its power, its total effect.

It is easy to see that such a method of composing, so different from the old, naïve procedure, often throws the critics off the track, and that they do not discover all the fine, secret, almost invisible threads employed by the modern artist in place of the single larger thread that was called the Plot.

Next Issue: de Maupassant on Illusion and Realism in The Novel