Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/232

222, she is utterly without the aggressiveness of spirit, the petty flippancy that often betray the intellectual bigot under the banner of free thought. She was too large-minded to incline to ridicule the serious convictions of earnest seekers for truths and she respected all sincerity of belief—all faith that produced beneficence in action.

The alleged hostility of her romances to marriage resumes itself into a declared hostility to the conventional French system of match-making. Much that she was condemned for venturing to put forward we should simply take for granted in England, where—whichever system work the best in practice—to the strictest Philistine's ideas of propriety there is nothing unbecoming in a love match. The aim and end of true love in her stories is always marriage, whether it be the simple attachment of Germain the field-labourer for the rustic maiden of his choice, the romantic predilection of the rich young widow in Pierre qui roule for the handsome actor Laurence, or the worship of Count Albert for the cantatrice Consuelo. Her ideal of marriage was, no doubt, a high one, "the indissoluble attachment of two hearts fired with a like love," a love "great, noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal." Among French novelists, she should rather be noted for the extremely small proportion of her numerous romances that have domestic infelicity for a theme.

Her remark that their real offence was that they