nd answers:

"I do not understand at all, then. Oh no, it is all incomprehensible to
me."

With what was an author to write his books, if not with his own
sentiments and emotions? Was he to write them with the hearts of other
people? Flaubert maintained that an author should only write for about
twenty persons, unless he simply wrote for himself, "like a _bourgeois_
turning his serviette-rings round in his attic." George Sand was of
opinion that an author should write "for all those who can profit by
good reading." Flaubert confesses that if attention be paid to the
old distinction between matter and form, he should give the greater
importance to form, in which he had a religious belief. He considered
that in the correctness of the putting together, in the rarity of the
elements, the polish of the surface and the perfect harmony of the whole
there was an intrinsic virtue, a kind of divine force. In conclusion, he
adds:

"I endeavour to think well always, _in order to_ write well, but I do
not conceal the fact that my object is to write well."

This, then, was the secret of that working up of the style, until it
became a mania with him and developed into a torture. We all know of
the days of anguish which Flaubert spent in searching for a word that
escaped him, and the weeks that he devoted to rounding off one of his
periods. He would never write these down until he had said them to
himself, or, as he put it himself, until "they had gone through his
jaw." He would not allow two complements in the same phrase, and we are
told that he was ill after reading in one of his own books the following
words: "Une couronne _de_ fleurs _d_'oranger."

"You do not know what it is," he wrote, "to spend a whole day holding
one's head and squeezing one's brains to find a word. Ideas flow with
you freely and continually, like a stream. With me they come like
trickling water, and it is only by a huge work of art that I can get
a waterfall. Ah, I have had some experience of the terrible torture of
style!" No, George Sand certainly had no experience of this kind, and
she could not even conceive of such torture. It amazed her to hear of
such painful labour, for, personally, she let the wind play on her "old
harp" just as it listed.

Briefly, she considered that her friend was the victim of a hopeless
error. He took literature for the essential thing, but there was
something before all literature, and that something was life. "The Holy