22 Prosser Hall Frye 



ten with equal facility ; but no one has written so easily and at 

 the same time so well. Dumas and Hugo in his prose are the 

 only ones who have approached her in point of spontaneity and 

 excellence. That the former is still greatly her inferior is gener- 

 ally recognized, so that it needs here no discussion to prove 

 that his style is of a lower order and that his matter is such that 

 it can impart no imperishable value to his work. With Hugo 

 the case is rather different. He had transcendently the trick of 

 the phrase ; but catch-words do not make literature. And I think 

 that as time goes on, whatever his fate as a poet, his fame as a 

 novelist will lower tO' George Sand's, if it has npt actually done 

 so already ; because he lacks, at least in prose, the sincerity that 

 alone gives the writer's utterance weight and authority, while 

 the trace of charlatanry in his novels, as must be the case where 

 the thought waits upon the word, will, when they are farther 

 removed from a fashion to which they have catered, be felt more 

 and more to vitiate his work in this kind. I say nothing of the 

 relative volume of these two authors' productions, just as it would 

 be to consider such a matter in a -question of their comparative 

 spontaneity. And I say nothing of their relative importance to 

 the historical development of fiction, nor urge that his contri- 

 bution to the growth of the novel was inferior to hers, notwith- 

 standing his place poetically in romanticism. I am trying merely 

 to estimate their value for present readers and not their places 

 in the evolution of fiction. And I am even willing to let Hugo 

 pass as an exception to my remark ; for whatever may be the 

 Aveight of the two in technical literary performance, George Sand 

 has, I think, a message for the present day to which Hugo can 

 not pretend. To none of George Sand's serenity can Victor 

 Hugo, or any other modern French writer that I know of, lay 

 claim. In spite of the spiritual turmoil of her period, in . spite 

 of her personal difficulties, her work at its best is eminently 

 serene. It possesses in a high degree t4ie twin characters of all 

 work that is great and sane. — simplicity and serenity. And this 

 is assuredly the wisest lesson that can be read to our own two 

 vices of extreme at this moment, — to our impateince and our 

 intemperance. To the vague trouble, the haunting disquietude 



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