Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/346

 In 1831, when her pen began its fluent course through the lyrical works of her first period—Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, and the rest—we conceive George Sand's culture, temper, and point of view to have been fairly comparable with those of the young Shelley, when fifteen years earlier, he, with Mary Godwin, joined Byron and Jane Clairmont in Switzerland—young revoltés, all of them, nourished on eighteenth century revolutionary philosophy and Gothic novels. Both these eighteenth century currents meet in the work of the new romantic group in England and in France. The innermost origin of the early long poems of Shelley and the early works of George Sand is in personal passion, in the commotion of a romantic spirit beating its wings against the cage of custom and circumstance and institutions. The external form of the plot, whatever is fantastic and wilful in its setting and its adventures, is due to the school of Ann Radcliffe. But the quality in Shelley and in George Sand which bewitched even the austere Matthew Arnold, in his green and salad days, is the poetising of that liberative eighteenth century philosophy into "beautiful idealisms" of a love emancipated from human limitatiohs, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by the influences of nature, triumphantly seeking its own or shattered in magnificent despair. In her novels of the first period, George Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant. In Indiana and its immediate successors, consciously or unconsciously, she declares to the