Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/55

1877.] all her great merit and all her strange defects. I should recommend the perusal of the scattered passages of "L'Histoire de ma Vie" which treat of this lady to a person ignorant of Mme. Sand, and desiring to make her acquaintance; they are an excellent measure of her power. On one side an extraordinary familiarity with the things of the mind, the play of character, the psychological mystery, and a beautiful clearness and quietness, a beautiful instinct of justice in dealing with them; on the other side a startling absence of delicacy, of reticence, of the sense of certain spiritual sanctities and reservations. That a woman should deal in so free-handed a fashion with a female parent, upon whom nature and time have enabled her to look down from an eminence, seems at first a considerable anomaly; and the woman who does it must to no slight extent have shaken herself free from the bonds of custom. I do not mean that George Sand talks scandal and tittle-tattle about her mother; but Mme. Dupin having been a light woman and an essentially irregular character, her daughter holds her up in the sunshine of her own luminous contemplation with all her imperfections on her head. At the same time it is very finely done—very intelligently and appreciatively; it is at the worst a remarkable exhibition of the disinterestedness of a great imagination

It must be remembered also that the young Aurore Dupin "belonged" much more to her grandmother than to her mother, to whom in her childhood she was only lent, as it were, on certain occasions. There is nothing in all George Sand better than her history of the relations of these two women, united at once and divided (after the death of the son and husband) by a common grief and a common interest; full of mutual jealousies and defiances, and alternately quarrelling and "making up" over their little girl. Jealousy carried the day. One was a patrician and the other a jealous democrat, and no common ground was attainable. Among the reproaches addressed by her critics to the author of "Valentine" and "Valvèdre" is the charge of a very imperfect knowledge of family life and a tendency to strike false notes in the portrayal of it. It is apparent that both before and after her marriage her observation of family life was peculiarly restricted and perverted. Of what it must have been in the former case this figure of her mother may give us an impression; of what it was in the latter we may get an idea from the somewhat idealized ménage in "Lucrezia Floriani."

George Sand's literary fame came to her very abruptly. The history of her marriage, which is briefly related in her memoirs, is sufficiently well known. The thing was done, on her behalf, by her relatives (she had a small property), and the husband of their choice, M. Dudevant, was neither appreciative nor sympathetic. His tastes were vulgar and his manners frequently brutal; and after a short period of violent dissension, and the birth of two children, the young couple separated. It is safe to say, however, that even with an "appreciative" husband Mme. Sand would not have accepted matrimony once for all. She represents herself as an essentially dormant, passive, and shrinking nature, upon which celebrity and productivity were forced by circumstances, and whose unsuspectingness of its own powers was dissipated only by the violent breaking of a spell. There is evidently much truth in these assertions, for of all great literary people, few strike us as having had a smaller measure of the more vulgar avidities and ambitions. But for all that, it is tolerably plain that even by this profoundly slumbering genius the most brilliant matrimonial associate would have been utterly overmatched. Mme. Sand, even before she had written "Indiana," was too imperious a force, too powerful a machine, to make the limits of her activity coincide with those of wifely submissiveness. It is