George Sand has both the plain and the ornate styles (and various shades of "middle" between them) at command. But it seems to me that she has them--to use a financial phrase recently familiar--too much "on tap." You see that the current of agreeable and, so to speak, faultless language is running, and might run volubly for any period of life that might be allotted to her. In fact it did so. Now no doubt there was something of Edmond de Goncourt's bad-blooded fatuity in his claim that his and his brother's epithets were "personal," while Flaubert's were not. Research for more personal "out-of-the-wayness" in style will rarely result in anything but jargon. But, on the other hand, Gautier's great injunction: Sculpte, lime, cisele! is sound. You cannot reach the first class in any art by turning a tap and letting it run. [Sidenote: Conversation and description.] The one point of what we may call the "furniture" of novels, in which she seems to me to have, occasionally at least, touched supremacy, is conversation. It has been observed by those capable of making the induction that, close as drama and novel are in some ways, the distinction between dramatic and non-dramatic talk is, though narrow, deeper than the very deepest Alpine crevasse from Dauphine to Carinthia. Such specimens as those already more than once dwelt on--Consuelo's and Anzoleto's debate about her looks, and that of Germain and Marie in the midnight wood by the Devil's Mere--are first-rate, and there is no more to say. Some of her descriptions, again, such as the opening of the book last quoted (the wide, treeless, communal plain with its various labouring teams), or as some of the Lake touches in _Lucrezia Floriani_, or as the relieving patches in the otherwise monotonous grumble of _Un Hiver a Majorque_, are unsurpassable. Nor is this gift limited to mere _paysage_. The famous account of Chopin's playing already mentioned for praise is only first among many. But whether these things are supported by sufficient strength of character, plot, incident, "thought," and the rest; whether that strange narrative power, so hard to define and so impossible to mistake or to fail to distinguish from these other elements, is present--these are great questions and not easy to answer. I am, as will have been seen throughout, rather inclined to answer them in the unfavourable way.