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 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 advice.  Yet she never encouraged eccentricity.  ‘Be correct,’ she writes to Eugene Pelletan, ’that is rarer than being eccentric, as the time goes.  It is much more common to please by bad taste than to receive the cross of honour.’