George Siuid and Her French Style 19 



tion of them was confused and uncertain. And the result is 

 much the same with otlier novels of hers of this and other periods, 

 which are not strictly Tcndenz perhaps but may be fairly classed 

 together with the preceding- as extra-literary, since they were 

 not written under purely literary inspiration nor with purely 

 literary motives, and since — the most important test — who reads 

 them reads them primarily for something over and above their 

 literary interest — for the side-light generally which they throw 

 upon the life, character, or thought of their author or of her 

 time. "I have found," says Coleridge, and the remark is as true 

 of the novel as it is of poetry, "that where the subject is taken 

 immediately from the author's personal sensations and experi- 

 ences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal 

 mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power." ^ 

 Woman as she was, her feelings when aroused were ever of a 

 vehemence to overbalance her critical judgment; and in writing 

 for the gratification of these feelings rather than from the in- 

 stinct of letters she was likely, no matter at what time of life, 

 to reproduce the emotional confusion of her earliest period. A 

 remark that she herself makes in her memoirs concerning le 

 Piccinino is significant in this connection, and justifies in closing 

 as well as illustrates my use of the word extra-literary as a gen- 

 eral designation for all this kind of work. "Ce que je pense de 

 la noblesse de race, jc V ai ecrit da?is le Piccinino,^'' she says, 'V/ 

 je iC ai peut-Hre fait ce rornan que pour f aire les trois chapitres 

 oil f ai developpe mon sentiment sur la noblesse."'^ It is often 

 so, too often, in fact, that the purpose of her novels early and 

 late, as she confesses here, is to be sought and found outside of 

 character, situation, and plot. 



De Musset himself, whatever else he may or may not have 

 stood for, was one of the few exclusively literary ascendencies 

 to which she ever submitted. He it was who awoke her to the 

 existence of such a thing as form and taught her all she ever 

 learned except of herself about style. It is impossible to esti- 

 mate how great was the detriment to her genius that she should 

 have been so long under influences that, while intellectual, were 



^Biographia Literaria, 

 ^Histoire de nia vie. 



217 



