Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/86

76 taste for which has so completely waned that Lélia will find comparatively few readers in the present day, fewer who will not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps whose morality, however weak, will be seriously shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering on the perilous confines of the sublime and the ludicrous.

Lélia, a female Faust or Manfred, a mysterious muse-like heroine, who one night sleeps on the heathery mountain side, the next displays the splendour of a queen in palaces and fairy-like villas; her sorely tried and hapless lover Sténio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his own accompaniment on the harp, and lingers the night long among Alpine precipices brooding over the abyss; Trenmor, the returned gentleman convict and Apostle of the Carbonari, whose soul has been refreshed, made young and regenerated at the galleys; and the mad Irish priest Magnus, are impossible personages, inviting to easy ridicule, and neither wisdom nor folly from their lips is likely to beguile the ears of the present generation.

It is no novel, but a poetical essay, fantastically conceived and executed with the sans gêne of an improvisatore. For those who admire the genius of George Sand its interest as a psychological revelation remains unabated. Into Lélia, she owns, she put more of her real self than into any other of her books—of herself, that is, and her state of mind at the dawn of a period of moral disturbance and revolt. All must continue to