all these things, in themselves, are very
ugly." In other words, Flaubert was concerned with the rhetoric of the
written word, and he had no relish for the rhythm of spoken dialog.

These French novelists refused to perceive that the drama is, of
necessity, the most democratic of the arts, since it depends, and has
always depended, and must ever depend, absolutely upon the public as a
whole. The strength of the drama, its immense advantage over other forms
of literature, lies in this, that it must appeal to the mass of men,
not to the intelligent more than to the unintelligent, not to the
educated more than to the uneducated, not to any sect or clique, or
cotery, but to men as men. The laws of the drama may be deduced, all of
them, from this principle, that in the theater the play-maker has to
interest a gathering of his own contemporaries, all sorts and conditions
of men. If he cannot hold their attention, move them, sway them, control
them, then he has failed frankly to do what he set out to do. And he can
do this, he can make them laugh, and make them weep, make them feel, and
make them think, only by accepting the conditions of the theater itself.
Daudet and Zola had more of the needful understanding of their fellow
creatures than Flaubert and Goncourt, more of the necessary sympathy;
but they had all of them not a little of the conceit of the self-made
man and they assumed the egotistic attitude of the cultivated
aristocrat. It would have been well if they could have taken to heart
what George Sand once wrote to Flaubert: "It seems to me that your
school does not consider enough the substance of things, and that it
lingers too much on the surface. By dint of seeking for form, it lets go
of the fact. It addresses itself to men of cultivation. But there are,
strictly speaking, no men of cultivation, for we are, first of all,
men."

Because the drama was popular, these artistic aristocrats despised it.
Altho they pined to succeed as play-makers, they scorned the trouble of
mastering the methods of the theater. Because the drama, at its highest,
attained to the loftier levels of literature, they assumed that a man of
letters had no need to spy out the secrets of the stage. If they could
not apply in the play the methods they had been applying skilfully and
successfully in the novel, so much the worse for the play. Evidently,
the drama was not literature, and the theater was no place for a
literary man. The fault was n