12 Prosscr Hall Frye 



of its defects.^ And it is sadder still to find for oneself a book 

 of such fair promise, which might have been completed fault- 

 lessly within the limit of three hundred pages, running on into 

 a wreck of diminishing climaxes and crises and feeble after- 

 thoughts, until it expires tardily of sheer exhaustion, without 

 the needed apology for being so long a-dying, at more than 

 twice its natural age, — spoiled for no other apparent reason than 

 that the writer wrote too easily to stop when she had finished. 

 Of her might be said what Dryden says of Fletcher : "He is a 

 true Englishman — he knows not when to give over." It is hardly 

 exaggeration to advise one wishing to read George Sand's best 

 work to read only the first halves of her novels. 



And yet the difificulty were not to be so escaped. This fault 

 of saying too much, this plethora of words occurs again and 

 again over smaller areas than an entire book. With the inveter- 

 acy of disease it infects the whole system. The author is not 

 willing to make the reader a suggestion, to drop him a hint, to 

 risk herself to his perspicacity. She must needs explain — often 

 more for her own sake than for his, it would appear — until there 

 is left over event and motive hardly a single shadow for him to 

 penetrate, but everything lies exposed in an even glare of reve- 

 lation, like the monotonous landscape of our great western prai- 

 rie, without concealment or mystery. There are no skeletons 

 in George Sand's closet ; she has got them all out into the middle 

 of the floor. And her dialogue is as prolix as her analyses. Her 

 characters seem possessed with her own fondness for explica- 

 tion, and invariably talk matters out to a finish, however trivial, 

 so that the reader is constantly outrunning the writer with a 

 sense at the end of disillusion and disappointment. This cir- 

 cumstance is partly accountable for the feeling of commonplace- 

 ness which frequently torments one in his George Sand, even in 

 what he is conscious on reflection are the rarest apergtis. The 

 development of ber thought is so slow, so gradual, so far fore- 

 seen that her utterances are stamped with none of that surprise 

 which we have come to consider as the hallmark of a profound 

 saying. One is so long prepared that, when the announcement 



'^Etude sur le XIX" siicle. 



2IO 



