aphorisms.

So from 1850 her letters are more distinctly literary. She discusses
modern realism with Flaubert, and play-writing with Dumas fils; and
protests with passionate vehemence against the doctrine of L'art pour
l'art. 'Art for the sake of itself is an idle sentence,' she writes;
'art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good,
that is the creed I seek.' And in a delightful letter to M. Charles
Poncy she repeats the same idea very charmingly. 'People say that birds
sing for the sake of singing, but I doubt it. They sing their loves and
happiness, and in that they are in keeping with nature. But man must do
something more, and poets only sing in order to move people and to make
them think.' She wanted M. Poncy to be the poet of the people and, if
good advice were all that had been needed, he would certainly have been
the Burns of the workshop. She drew out a delightful scheme for a volume
to be called Songs of all Trades and saw the possibilities of making
handicrafts poetic. Perhaps she valued good intentions in art a little
too much, and she hardly understood that art for art's sake is not meant
to express the final cause of art but is merely a formula of creation;
but, as she herself had scaled Parnassus, we must not quarrel at her
bringing Proletarianism with her. For George Sand must be ranked among
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