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 of Holies, as you call literature, is only secondary to me in life.  I have always loved some one better than it, and my family better than that some one.”

This, then, was the keynote of the argument.  George Sand considered that life is not only a pretext for literature, but that literature should always refer to life and should be regulated by life, as by a model which takes the precedence of it and goes far beyond it.  This, too, is our opinion.