these things are supported
by sufficient strength of character, plot, incident, "thought," and the
rest; whether that strange narrative power, so hard to define and so
impossible to mistake or to fail to distinguish from these other
elements, is present--these are great questions and not easy to answer.
I am, as will have been seen throughout, rather inclined to answer them
in the unfavourable way.

In fact--impertinent, insolent, anything else as it may seem--I venture
to ask the question, "Was George Sand a very great craftswoman in the
novel?" and, what is more, to answer it in the negative. I understand
that an ingenious critic of her own sex has recently described her
method as "rolling through the book, locked in the embraces of her
subject," as distinguished from the aloofness and elaboration of a more
recent school. So far, perhaps, so good; but I could wish to find "the
intricacies of Diego and Julia" more interesting to me than as a rule
they are. And it must be remembered that she is constantly detaching
herself from the forlorn "subject," leaving it _un_embraced and
shivering, in order to sermonise it and her readers. I do not make the
very facile and somewhat futile criticism that she would have written
better if she had written half or a quarter as much as she did. She
could not have written little; it is as natural and suitable for Tweed
to "rin wi' speed" as for Till to "rin slaw," though perhaps the
result--parallel to but more cheerful than that recorded in the old
rhyme--may be that Till has the power not of drowning but of
intoxicating two men, where Tweed can only manage one. But this
engrained fecundity and facundity of hers inevitably make her work
novel-journalism rather than novel-literature in all points but in that
of style, which has been discussed already.[197]

FOOTNOTES:

[174] It is attested by the well-known story, more excusable in a man
than creditable to a gentleman, of her earliest or earliest known lover,
Jules Sandeau (_v. inf._), seeing a photograph of her in later days,
turning to a companion and saying, "Et je l'ai connue _belle_!"

[175] It is possible that some readers may not know the delightfully
unexpected, and not improbably "more-expressive-than-volumes" _third_
line--

"Not like the woman who lies under the next stone."

But tradition has, I believe, mercifully omitted to identify this
neighbouring antipode.

[176] Details of personal scandal seldom claim n