Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/68

58 of ''Mdlle. de la Seiglière, are mostly conspicuous by their absence in Rose et Blanche, or La Comédienne et la Réligieuse,'' an imitative attempt, and not a happy one, in the style of fiction then in vogue.

Madame Dudevant had stepped into the literary world at the moment of the most ardent activity of the Romantic movement. The new school was on the point of achieving its earliest signal triumphs. Victor Hugo's first poems had just been followed by the dramas Hernani and Marion Delorme. Dumas' Antony was drawing crowded and enthusiastic houses. A few months before the publication of Rose et Blanche appeared Notre Dame de Paris. The passion for innovation which had seized on all the younger school of writers was leading many astray. The strange freaks of Hugo's genius had, to quote Madame Dudevant's own expression, excited a "ferocious appetite" for whatever was most outrageous, and set taste, precedent, and probability most flatly at defiance. From those aberrations into which the great master's imitators had been betrayed Madame Dudevant's fine art-instincts were calculated to preserve her; but she had not yet learnt to trust to them implicitly.

Rose et Blanche, though containing many clever passages—waifs and strays of shrewd observation, description and character analysis,—is in the main ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and unreal. The two authors have sacrificed their individualities in a mistaken effort to