THOUGH

GEORGE SAND

HOUGH it is probably true that the influence once exerted by George Sand upon the youth of England, as commemorated in Matthew Arnold's appreciation of that remarkable woman, was as a matter of fact only temporary and exceptional, yet there was a certain justice and reason in it, while it lasted, not always discernible in literary enthusiasms. Little as George Sand was of the English way of thinking in other respects, she did, perhaps more than any other great French novelist, conceive of literary composition in the English way. It has always been more or less characteristic of the English that they should value writing for its spontaneity, for its natural and unexpected graces, rather than for perfection of workmanship and finish. To the Englishman writing is a gift, not an art, and he has never been tempted to confound the two. This is the reason that style and construction have counted for so relatively little in the English novel, that even so great a novelist as Thackeray has no composition to speak of, and that a person with so vicious a manner as George Meredith's should have received so high a rating as a writer.

And yet at its best, Mr. Meredith does not, as a matter of fact, suit much better with the English ideal than he does with the French, for the former does imply, for all its lapses, a preference at least for the natural.

The fact is, the English have formed their written upon the model of their spoken style. They seem, as it were, to assume that their literature is written offhand, and must be judged, even a little indulged, it may be, with this circumstance in mind; as though it were to be expected of an author, not that he should necessarily give long time and thought to his expression, but that he should write quickly and fluently, above all naturally-in short, as though his best possession were the pen of the ready writer. What he has accomplished, then, is to be criticised in accordance with these conditions, not as aiming at perfection, at the expense of unlimited pains and patience, at any cost! On the contrary, the main requirement made of himself by the French writer is that he attain this perfection, which the former has left as unattainable or inconvenient or impertinent a perfection absolute and final, which he has always before his eyes as the goal of his aspirations and towards which he strives relentlessly. Time and labour are no object; only that when the work leaves his pen-cramped hand it shall be the best that can

be made out of words, the very best without reserve or abatement. Ease, or at least the appearance of ease, may be desirable; not, however, because it is the main purpose of writing to write easily, but because it is a property of elegance that whatever is done, no matter with what difficulty, should be done too well to show the effort. But diffuseness, approximation, confusion, and the like unavoidable accompaniments of conversationalism and improvisation are forever unpardonable equally with the appearance of stress and strain. While the English write prose with something of the carelessness of talk, the French write prose with the same care that we give to poetry.

It is impossible to describe this state of mind better than Maupassant has done in speaking of an author who stands in every respect in the most striking contrast with George Sand, and who represents most characteristically the literary tendencies and ideals, if not the actual performance, of his countrymen-Gustave Flaubert.

Haunted by this absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing a thing, one word to name it, one adjective to qualify it, one verb to animate it, he [Flaubert] would devote himself to superhuman efforts to discover for every phrase that word, that epithet, that verb. In this way he believed in a mysterious harmony of expressions, and when a word otherwise

suitable seemed to him to lack euphony, he would go on searching for another with invincible patience, sure that he had not yet found the true, the unique word.

For him writing was a redoubtable undertaking, full of torment, peril, and weariness. He would seat himself at his table in fear and love of that dear distracting business.

Then he would begin to write slowly, stopping again and again, beginning over and over, erasing, interlining, filling the margins, criss-crossing, spoiling twenty pages for one he finished, and groaning with the effort of thought like a wood-sawyer.

Sometimes, tossing his pen into a great oriental pewter tray which he kept full of carefully cut goosequills, he would seize his sheet of paper, raise it to the level of his eyes, and, leaning on his elbow, begin to declaim in a loud, rasping voice, listening the while to the rhythm of his prose, pausing to catch a fugitive reverberation, combining the tones, separating the assonances, and disposing commas cunningly like resting-places on a long road.

A thousand preoccupations would beset him at once, but this desperate certainty always remained fixed in his mind: "Among all these phrases, forms, and turns of expression there is but one phrase, one form, one turn of expression to represent what I want to say.'

And, red in the face, with swollen cheeks and neck, his muscles tense like a straining athlete's, he would struggle frantically with idea and expression, coupling them in spite of themselves, holding them indissolubly together by the force of his will, grasping the thought and subjugating it little by little with superhuman effort and fatigue, and caging it up, like a captive beast, in a solid and exact form.

How excessive, but at the same time how indicative in its excess of the writer's scrupulousness. Nor is it only Flaubert; it is La Bruyère also who speaks to the same effect in almost identically the same words.

Among all the different expressions by which a single one of our thoughts may be rendered, there is only one which is right, though we do not always hit upon it in speaking or writing. It is true, however, that it exists; and everything else is feeble and unsatisfactory to a man of intelligence who wishes to be understood.

And while the passion for perfection may not be quite so virulent with every one of their countrymen as it was with these two, yet was there ever an Englishman, however exceptional, who conceived of writing quite like this? It is necessary only to compare these remarks with our traditions of Scott's indefatigable pen and Shakespeare's unblotted lines in order to recognise how different the spirit of French and English prose.

This difference of style as between the two nations may be referred, at least in effect, to a variety of causes, the most influential of which are probably these three.

In the first place the Englishman has never made so wide a divorce between thinking and writing as has the Frenchman. The former has temperamentally given thought such a decided pre-eminence over the presentation of thought