Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/229

Rh Such little fantasy pieces in Hoffmann's manner as Le Château des Désertes, Teverino, and others, making no pretence to be exact studies of nature cannot fairly be censured on this head. Like fairy tales they have a place of their own in art. One of the prettiest of these is Les Dames Vertes, in which the fable seems to lead us over the borders of the supernatural; but the secret of the mystification, well kept till the last, is itself so pleasing and original that the reader has no disappointing sense as of having had a hoax played upon his imagination.

In character-drawing no one can, on occasion, be a more uncompromising realist than George Sand. André, Horace, Laurent in Elle et Lui, Pauline, Corilla, Alida in Valvèdre, might be cited as examples. But her theory was unquestionably not the theory which guides the modern school of novel writers. She wrote, she states explicitly, for those "who desire to find in a novel a sort of ideal of life." She made this her aim, but without depreciation of the widely different aims of other authors. "You paint mankind as they are," she said to Balzac; "I, as they ought to be, or might become. You write the comedy of humanity. I should like to write the eclogue, the poem, the romance of humanity." She has been taxed with flattering nature and human nature because her love of beauty—defined by her as the highest expression of truth—dictated her choice of subjects. An artist who paints