Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/94

84 events, and in which, if it is to be regarded as reflecting personal idiosyncrasies in the slightest degree, the poet certainly makes himself out as the most insupportable of human companions. None the less did the publication of Elle et Lui, a quarter of a century later, provoke a savage retort from the deceased poet's brother, in Lui et Elle. Finally, in Lui, a third novelist, Madame Colet, presented the world with a separate version of the affair from one who imagined she could have made up to the poet for what he had lost.

But it needs no deep study of human nature, or yet of these novels, to understand the impracticability of two such minds long remaining together in unity. Genius, in private life, is apt to be a torment—its foibles demanding infinite patience, forbearance, nay, affectionate blindness, in those who would minister to its happiness, and mitigate the worst results of those foibles themselves. Certainly George Sand, for a genius, was a wonderfully equable character; her "satanic" moods showed themselves chiefly in pen and ink; her nerves were very strong, the balance of her physical and mental organisation was splendidly even, as one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But the very vigour of her character, its force of self-assertion, unfitted her to be the complement to any but a very yielding nature. The direct influence a passive, merely receptive spirit would have accepted, and gratefully, was soon felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in