Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/234

224 rich and active but healthy nature, not the deliberate obliquity of a corrupt fancy or perverted mind. Such unreserve, unfortunately, has too commonly been the transgression of writers of superabundant energy. But her sins are against outward decorum rather than against the principles upon which the rules of decorum are based. No one was better capable of appreciating and indicating with fine touches, delicacy and niceties of taste and feeling in others. Her sympathy with such sensitiveness is a corrective that should render harmless what might vitiate taste if that qualification were absent. And her stories, though including a very few instances where the subject chosen seems to most English minds too repulsive to admit of possible redemption, and the frequent incidental introduction of situations and frank discussion of topics inadmissible in English fiction of that period—an honourable distinction it seems in some danger of losing in the present—can hardly be censured from the French standpoint, as fair critics now admit. It is inconceivable that a public could be demoralised by Indiana and Valentine, at a time when no subject seemed wicked and morbid enough to satisfy popular taste. The art of George Sand in the main was sound and healthy, and in flat opposition to the excesses both of the ultra-romantic and ultra-realist schools.

Clearer-sighted critics, perceiving that the impression produced by her works is not one to induce men