10 Prosscr Hall Frye 



was his conception of form, a complete organic whole, a creation 

 in all its parts fatally answerable to the thought of its creator. 

 In the words of Stevenson, who suffered under much the same 

 infliction of literary conscience as Flaubert:^ 



"For the welter of impression, all forcible but all discreet, 

 which life presents, it [art] substitutes a certain artificial series 

 of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming 

 at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming to- 

 gether like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints 

 in a good picture. From all its chapters, from all its pages, 

 from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and reechoes 

 its one creative and controlling thought ; to this must every inci- 

 dent and character contribute; the style must have been pitched 

 in unison with this ; and if there is anywhere a word that looks 

 another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had 

 almost said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogi- 

 cal, abrupt, and poignant ; a work of art in comparison is neat, 

 finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate." 



It is hardly surprising that of form in this consummate inter- 

 pretation, as the deliberate artist understands it, George Sand 

 should show small sense. With her quick, sensitive, and rather 

 shallow nature she was by no means so likely to distinguish her- 

 self through the manifestation of intellect and will in literature 

 as through the manifestation of sentiment and emotion — not so 

 much in composition as in style. For these, as nearly as they 

 can be discriminated, would seem to be the particular powers of 

 the two.^ A Greek tragedy imposed, not by its emotional and 

 sentimental surface-play, but by its deep purposefulness, its se- 

 vere determinism ; and so to a lesser degree the drama of Racine, 

 and to some extent all genuinely characteristic French work as 

 compared with English ; while a poem of Shelley's or Tenny- 

 son's, on the contrary, pleases by the prismatic shimmer of senti- 

 ment with which it is overlaid. The one is typically the affair 

 of composition, the other of style. And toward the latter ex- 

 treme George Sand's writing naturally gravitates in spite of the 



^A Humble Renionstraiice. 

 'Compare Pater's Essay on Style. 



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