Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/121

106 tation. The light and the shade of her character, as known to the public, were at the height of their contrast. To the literary merit of her work was added the interest of a mysterious personality, which rebelled against the limits of sex, and, not content to be either man or woman, touched with a new and strange protest the imagination of the time.

The inexorable progress of events has changed this, with so much else. Youth, beauty, sex, all imperial in their day, are discrowned by the dusty kind of Time, and ranged in the gallery of the things that were. George Sand's volumes still glow and sparkle on the hook-shelf; but George Sand's personality and her passions are dim visions of the past, and touch us no longer. When Margaret wrote of her, the woman was at the zenith of her power, and the intoxication of her influence was so great that a calm judgment concerning it was difficult. Like a wild Bacchante, she led her chorus of bold spirits through the formal ways of French society, which in her we view were bristling with pruriency and veiled with hypocrisy. Like Margaret's, her cry was, “Truth at all hazards!” But hers was not the ideal truth which Margaret followed so zealously. “So vile are men, so weak are women, so ruthless in passion," were the utterances of her sincerity, Mistress of the revels, she did indeed command a new unmasking at the banquet, thoughtless of the risk of profaning innocent imaginations with sad facts which they had no need to know, and which, shown by such a master of art and expression, might bear with them the danger, fabled in the mingled beauty and horror of the Gorgon's head.

George Sand was saved by the sincerity of her inten-