ong
our poetic geniuses. She regarded the novel as still within the domain
of poetry. Her heroes are not dead photographs; they are great
possibilities. Modern novels are dissections; hers are dreams. 'I make
popular types,' she writes, 'such as I do no longer see, but such as they
should and might be.' For realism, in M. Zola's acceptation of the word,
she had no admiration. Art to her was a mirror that transfigured truths
but did not represent realities. Hence she could not understand art
without personality. 'I am aware,' she writes to Flaubert, 'that you are
opposed to the exposition of personal doctrine in literature. 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 recognised in her aesthetics,
though she realised 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 r