Now and again, in the
course of the past year or so, it had occurred to me that I might be a
writer. But I had not felt the impulse to sit down and write
something. I did feel that impulse now. It would indeed have been an
irresistible impulse if I had known just what to write.
I felt I might know at any moment, and had but to give my mind to it.
Maupassant was an impeccable artist, but I think the secret of the
hold he had on the young men of my day was not so much that we
discerned his cunning as that we delighted in the simplicity which his
cunning achieved. I had read a great number of his short stories, but
none that had made me feel as though I, if I were a writer, mightn't
have written it myself. Maupassant had an European reputation. It was
pleasing, it was soothing and gratifying, to feel that one could at
any time win an equal fame if one chose to set pen to paper. And now,
suddenly, the spring had been touched in me, the time was come. I was
grateful for the fluke by which I had witnessed on the terrace that
evocative scene. I looked forward to reading the MS. of `The Fan'--to-
morrow, at latest. I was not wildly ambitious. I was not inordinately
vain. I knew I couldn't ever, with the best will in the world, write
like Mr. George Meredith. Those wondrous works of his, seething with
wit, with poetry and philosophy and what not, never had beguiled me
with the sense that I might do something similar.
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