ure. Are you
right? Does not your opposition proceed rather from a want of conviction
than from a principle of aesthetics? If we have any philosophy in our
brain it must needs break forth in our writings. But you, as soon as you
handle literature, you seem anxious, I know not why, to be another man,
the one who must disappear, who annihilates himself and is no more. What
a singular mania! What a deficient taste! The worth of our productions
depends entirely on our own. Besides, if we withhold our own opinions
respecting the personages we create, we naturally leave the reader in
uncertainty as to the opinion he should himself form of them. That
amounts to wishing not to be understood, and the result of this is that
the reader gets weary of us and leaves us.'

She herself, however, may be said to have suffered from too dominant a
personality, and this was the reason of the failure of most of her plays.

Of the drama in the sense of disinterested presentation she had no idea,
and what is the strength and life-blood of her novels is the weakness of
her dramatic works. But in the main she was right. Art without
personality is impossible. And yet the aim of art is not to reveal
personality, but to please. This she hardly recognized in her
aesthetics, though she realized it in her work. On literary style she
has some excellent remarks. She dislikes the extravagances of the
romantic school and sees the beauty of simplicity. 'Simplicity,' she
writes, 'is the most difficult thing to secure in this world: it is the
last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.' She hated the
slang and _argot_ of Paris life, and loved the words used by the peasants
in the provinces. 'The provinces,' she remarks, 'preserve the tradition
of the original tongue and create but few new words. I feel much respect
for the language of the peasantry; in my estimation it is the more
correct.'

She thought Flaubert too much preoccupied with the sense of form, and
makes these excellent observations to him--perhaps her best piece of
literary criticism. 'You consider the form as the aim, whereas it is but
the effect. Happy expressions are only the outcome of emotion and
emotion itself proceeds from a conviction. We are only moved by that
which we ardently believe in.' Literary schools she distrusted.
Individualism was to her the keystone of art as well as of life. 'Do not
belong to any school: do not imitate any model,' is her