George Sand and Her French Style 15 



Much, however, of her defective construction must be charged 

 to another cause. A certain indefiniteness of conception, a failure 

 to decide the end from the beginning and write up to it — in 

 short, a powerlessness to fix and reaHze the idea of a book, is 

 equally a condition of her structural frailty. "Descriptions and 

 paintings are no proof that one laiows how to write; they prove 

 only that one has strong sensations. What is expected of the 

 writer is the expression of general ideas, and by that he is 

 judged."^ For after all our talk about concreteness and what 

 not, does not every great novel rest finally upon an idea, which 

 the story serves as a specific instance to illustrate? It is difficult 

 perhaps to determine but it is surely legitimate to ask whether 

 the masters have not invariably seen in their fables something 

 wider than the single incident recorded, something standing to 

 that incident in the relation of a general principle to a particular 

 case. "It is not enough to have seen, to have observed; it is 

 essential besides that something general in the case of science, 

 something universally human in the case of art, should be, as it 

 were, engaged in our very observation.''- Certain it is, at all 

 events, that we can not think of a novel in any sense great which 

 does not result for us in some conclusion, much more compre- 

 hensive than the case in point, in regard to human life and con- 

 duct. It may not be expressible in other terms than those par- 

 ticular ones in which the author has rendered it ; it may not lend 

 itself to intellectual formularization at all ; but there it is in the 

 reader's mind as the residuum of his reading — the book simple, 

 concrete, and special ; the idea complex, abstract, and universal. 

 And it is hardly reasonable to suppose that the writer could 

 have got it thither unless he wrote with it constantly before his 

 eyes. So true is this that the idea a book leaves with us becomes 

 its criterion. "When such a philosophical theme," so Taine in- 

 sists, "meets a person capable of carrying it to the end and ex- 

 pressing it completely, the novel is of the first order." ^ While 

 Lessing makes a similar distinction from the complementary 



^Brunetiere: Le Romayi experimental. 

 ^Brunetidre: La Raporiage dans le rovian, 

 ^ Essay on George Sand. 



213 



