4 Prosser Hall Frye 



human efifort and fatigue, and caging it up, like a captive beast^ 

 in a solid and exact form."^ 



How excessive, but at the same time how indicative in its 

 excess of the writer's scrupulousness ! And while the passion 

 of perfection may not be so virulent with every one of his nation 

 as it was with Flaubert, yet was there ever Englishman, how- 

 ever exceptional, who wrote like this? It is necessary only to 

 compare these remarks with our traditions of Scott's unfaltering 

 pen and Shakespeare's unblotted page in order to recognize how 

 different the spirit of French and English prose. 



This difference of style as between the two nations may be 

 referred, at least in effect, to a variety of causes, the most influ- 

 ential of which are probably these three. 



In the first place the Englishman has never made so wide a 

 divorce between thinking and writing as has the Frenchman. 

 The former has temperamentally given thought such a decided 

 preeminence over the presentation of thought that he has hardly 

 considered the two as separate at all; but when he has had any- 

 thing to write, has been content simply to think it out in words, 

 and let it go at that. He has always managed to say what he 

 wanted to say, if he has talked long enough ; and writing is a 

 sort of soliloquy in which no one can interrupt him. Consider 

 how Browning conducts a poem, like a monologue upon which 

 his readers are licensed for the nonce to eavesdrop, quite wel- 

 come to whatever, if anything, they can manage to pick up. 

 One can, to be sure, put down his book, or throw it away ; but 

 his attitude under such circumstances is one of haughty indif- 

 ference — he writes no better. The Frenchman, on the contrary, 

 while thinking, considers that he is in privacy and may be as 

 informal as he likes. In expressing himself, however, he remem- 

 bers that he is in the presence of others, whom he is eager to 

 please and impress — he feels that he must strike and maintain 

 his pose. It is now an affair of manners, and manners maketh 

 the Frenchman. He looks upon his thought as one thing, the 

 presentation of his thought as quite another. And so when he 



^Maupassant, Introduction to Letttes de Gustave Flaubert d George 

 Sand. Compare also his introduction to Pierre ct Jean. 



202 



