es, especially in her early books, ornate to
gorgeousness, and even to gaudiness. And it was a curious mistake of the
late Mr. Pater, in a quite honorific reference to me, to imply that I
preferred the plain style--a mistake all the more curious that he knew
and acknowledged (and was almost unduly grateful for) my admiration of
his own. I like both forms: but for style--putting meaning out of the
question--I would rather read Browne than Swift, and Lamennais than
Fenelon.

George Sand has both the plain and the ornate styles (and various shades
of "middle" between them) at command. But it seems to me that she has
them--to use a financial phrase recently familiar--too much "on tap."
You see that the current of agreeable and, so to speak, faultless
language is running, and might run volubly for any period of life that
might be allotted to her. In fact it did so. Now no doubt there was
something of Edmond de Goncourt's bad-blooded fatuity in his claim that
his and his brother's epithets were "personal," while Flaubert's were
not. Research for more personal "out-of-the-wayness" in style will
rarely result in anything but jargon. But, on the other hand, Gautier's
great injunction:

Sculpte, lime, cisele!

is sound. You cannot reach the first class in any art by turning a tap
and letting it run.

[Sidenote: Conversation and description.]

The one point of what we may call the "furniture" of novels, in which
she seems to me to have, occasionally at least, touched supremacy, is
conversation. It has been observed by those capable of making the
induction that, close as drama and novel are in some ways, the
distinction between dramatic and non-dramatic talk is, though narrow,
deeper than the very deepest Alpine crevasse from Dauphine to Carinthia.
Such specimens as those already more than once dwelt on--Consuelo's and
Anzoleto's debate about her looks, and that of Germain and Marie in the
midnight wood by the Devil's Mere--are first-rate, and there is no more
to say. Some of her descriptions, again, such as the opening of the book
last quoted (the wide, treeless, communal plain with its various
labouring teams), or as some of the Lake touches in _Lucrezia Floriani_,
or as the relieving patches in the otherwise monotonous grumble of _Un
Hiver a Majorque_, are unsurpassable. Nor is this gift limited to mere
_paysage_. The famous account of Chopin's playing already mentioned for
praise is only first among many. But whether