Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/123

108 “The mind of the age struggles confusedly with these problems, better discerning as yet the ill it can no longer bear than the good by which it may supersede it. But women like Sand will speak now, and cannot be silenced; their characters and their eloquence alike foretell an era when such as they shall easier learn to live true lives. But though such forbode, not such shall be parents of it.. Those who would reform the world must show that they do not speak in the heat of wild impulse; their lives must be unstained by passionate error. They must be religious students of the Divine purpose with regard to man, if they would not confound the fancies of a day with the requisitions of eternal good."

So much for the woman Sand, as known to Margaret through her works and by hearsay. Of the writer she knew first through her Seven Strings of the Lyre, a rhapsodic sketch. Margaret prizes in this "the knowledge of the passions and of social institutions, with the celestial choice which was above them.” In the romances André and Jacques she traces “the same high morality of one who had tried the liberty of circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law. . . . Though the sophistry of passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dark and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and begun a new existence beneath the sun of a new ideal." The Lettres d'un Voyageur seem to Margaret shallow,—the work of “a frail woman mourning over her lot.” But when Consuelo appears, she feels herself strengthened in her first interpretation of George Sand's true character, and takes her stand upon the original nobleness and love of right" which even the wild impulses of her