Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/56

 very possible that for her to write "Indiana" and become a woman of letters a spell had to be broken; but the real breaking of the spell lay not in the vulgarity of a husband, but in the deepening sense, quickened by the initiations of marriage, that outside of the quiet meadows of Nohant there was a vast affair called life, with which she had a capacity for making acquaintance at first hand. This making acquaintance with life at first hand is, roughly speaking, the great thing that, as a woman, Mme. Sand achieved; and she was predestined to achieve it. She was more masculine than any man she might have married; and what powerfully masculine person—even leaving genius apart—is content at five-and-twenty with submissiveness and renunciation? "It was a mere accident that George Sand was a woman," a person who had known her well said to the writer of these pages; and though the statement needs an ultimate corrective, it represents a great deal of truth. What was feminine in her was the quality of her genius; the quantity of it—its force, and mass, and energy—was masculine, and masculine were her temperament and character. All this masculinity needed to set itself free; which it proceeded to do according to its temporary light. Her separation from her husband was judicial, and assured her the custody of her children; but as, in return for this privilege, she made financial concessions, it left her without income (though in possession of the property of Nohant) and dependent upon her labors for support. She had betaken herself to Paris in quest of labor, and it was with this that her career began.

This determination to address herself to life at first hand—this personal, moral impulse, which was not at all a literary impulse—was her great inspiration, the great pivot on which her history wheeled round into the bright light of experience and fame. It is, strictly, as I said just now, the most interesting thing about her. Such a disposition was not customary, was not what is usually called womanly, was not modest or delicate, or, for many other persons, in any way comfortable. But it had one great merit: it was in a high degree original and active; and because it was this, it constitutes the great service which George Sand rendered her sex—a service in which, I hasten to add, there was as much of fortune as of virtue. The disposition to cultivate an "acquaintance with life at first hand" might pass for an elegant way of describing the attitude of many young women who are never far to seek, and who render no service to their own sex—whatever they may render to the other.

George Sand's superiority was that she looked at life from a high point of view, and that she had an extraordinary talent. She painted fans and glove boxes to get money, and got very little. "Indiana," however—a mere experiment—put her on her feet, and her reputation dawned. She found that she could write, and she took up her pen never to lay it down. Her early novels, all of them brilliant, and each one at that day a literary event, followed each other with extraordinary rapidity. About this sudden entrance into literature, into philosophy, into rebellion, and into a great many other matters, there are various different things to be said. Very remarkable, indeed, was the immediate development of the literary faculty in this needy young woman, who lived in cheap lodgings and looked for "employment." She wrote as a bird sings; but unlike most birds, she found it unnecessary to indulge, by way of prelude, in twitterings and vocal exercises; she broke out at once with her full volume of expression. From the beginning she had a great style. "Indiana," perhaps, is rather in falsetto, as the first attempts of young, sentimental writers are apt to be; but in "Valentine," which immediately followed, there is proof of the highest literary instinct—an art of