the burning pastille, the gauze tea-gown, or the depressed
pink light. Rhetoric it may be, but it is the rhetoric of the sea and
the wheat field. It can be spoken in the open air and read by the light
of day.

George Sand never confined herself to any especial manner in her
literary work. Her spontaneity of feeling and the actual fecundity, as
it were, of her imaginative gift, could not be restrained, concentrated,
and formally arranged as it was in the case of the two first masters of
modern French novel-writing. Her work in this respect may be compared to
a gold mine, while theirs is rather the goldsmith's craft. It must not
be supposed, however, that she was a writer without very strong views
with regard to the construction of a plot and the development of
character. Her literary essays and reviews show a knowledge of technique
which could be accepted at any time as a text-book for the critics and
the criticised. She knew exactly how artistic effects were obtained, how
and why certain things were done, why realism, so-called, could never be
anything but caricature, and why over-elaboration of small matters can
never be otherwise than disproportionate. Nothing could be more just
than her saying about Balzac that he was such a logician that he
invented things more truthful than the truth itself. No one knew better
than she that the truth, as it is commonly understood, does not exist;
that it cannot be logical because of its mystery; and that it is
the knowledge of its contradictions which shows the real expert in
psychology.

Three of her stories--_La Petite Fadette_, _La Mare au Diable_, and
_Les Maitres Mosaistes_--are as neat in their workmanship as a Dutch
painting. Her brilliant powers of analysis, the intellectual atmosphere
with which she surrounds the more complex characters in her longer
romances, are entirely put aside, and we are given instead a series
of pictures and dialogues in what has been called the purely objective
style; so pure in its objectivity and detachment that it would be hard
for any one to decide from internal evidence that they were in reality
her own composition.

To those who seek for proportion and form there is, without doubt, much
that is unsymmetrical in her designs. Interesting she always is, but to
the trained eye scenes of minor importance are, strictly speaking, too
long: descriptions in musical language sometimes distract the reader
from the progress of the story. But this ar