8 Prosser Hall Frye 



mining his form, in finding what he can or can not put into 

 language without spHtting it, the artist does at least determine 

 what his idea shall be. To this general effect George Sand 

 writes to Flaubert:^ "It seems to me that your school doesn't 

 pay enough attention to the inwardness of things and is too 

 much inclined to rest satisfied with their superficies. As a con- 

 sequence of searching for form you neglect the profundities and 

 address yourself only to the litterati." Ay; but he knew that he 

 could not render the profundities without doing violence to the 

 shape and figure of his work, and that he would not do. As 

 Mr. Henry James says, "He had no faith in the power of the 

 moral to offer a surface."^ 



For these causes, principal among others, English literature 

 is distinguished from French by its preference, at least in effect, 

 for improvisation and inspiration. And it is for this reason, 

 because these are so exactly the characteristics of her writing, 

 that George Sand deserves the attention of the English reader. 

 "No writer," asserts Mr. James, "has produced such great 

 effects with an equal absence of premeditation."^ Her sponta- 

 neity, ease, and fluency ; her individuality, sensibility, and in- 

 ventiveness are the positive virtues which most please the En- 

 glish sense; while the vices of their reverse — her diffuseness, 

 confusion, and haziness, her irregularity, extravagance, and wil- 

 fulness, in fine, her lack of discipline — are all defects which the 

 English least notice or most readily excuse. She had no art in 

 the strict sense; but she had inspiration, its virtues and vices, 

 its qualities and defects. 



The essential truth of this judgment of George Sand has 

 never been disputed by her countrymen or indeed by herself. 

 "She knows," writes Balzac,* "and said of herself just what T 

 think, without saying it to her, namely, that she has neither 

 force of conception, nor gift of constructing plots, nor faculty 

 of reaching the true, nor the art of pathos, but — without know- 

 ing the French language — she has style; and that is true." But 



^Correspoudajice, Lettre CVXLIX. 

 "^Essays in London and Elsewhere: Gustave Flaubert. 

 ^French Poets and Novelists: George Sand. 

 ^Correspondance, March 2, 1838. 



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