Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/59

 to read them. She never took herself too much au serieux—she never postured at all as a woman of letters. She scribbled, she might have said—scribbled as well as she could; but when she was not scribbling she never thought of it; though she liked to think of all the great things that were worth scribbling about—love and religion and science and art, and man's political destiny. Her reader feels that she has no vanity, and all her contemporaries agree that her generosity was extreme.

She calls herself a sphinx bon enfant, or says at least that she looked like one. Judgments may differ as to what degree she was a sphinx; but her good nature is all-pervading. Some of her books are redolent of it—some of the more "objective" ones: "Consuelo," "Les Maîtres Sonneurs" "L'Homme de Neige," "Les beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré." She is often passionate, but she is never rancorous; even her violent attacks upon the church give one no impression of small acrimony. She has all a woman's loquacity, but she has never a woman's shrillness; and perhaps one can hardly indicate better the difference between great passion and small than by saying that she is never hysterical. During the last half of her career, her books went out of fashion among the new literary generation. "Realism" had been invented, or rather propagated; and in the light of "Madame Bovary," her own facile fictions began to be regarded as the work of a sort of superior Mrs. Radcliffe. She was antiquated; she belonged to the infancy of art. She accepted this destiny with a cheerfulness which it would have savored of vanity even to make explicit. The realists were her personal friends; she knew that they did not, and could not, read her books; for what could Gustave Flaubert make of "Monsieur Sylvestre," what could Ivan Tourguéneff make of "Césarine Dietrich"? It made no difference; she contented herself with reading their productions, never mentioned her own, and continued to write charming, improbable romances for initiated persons of the optimistic class.

After the first few years she fell into this more and more; she wrote stories for the story's sake. Among the novels produced during a long period before her death I can think of but one, "Mademoiselle La Quintinie," which is of a controversial cast. All her early novels, on the other hand, were controversial—if this is not too mild a description of the passionate contempt for the institution of marriage expressed in "Indiana," "Valentine," "Lélia," and "Jacques." Her own acquaintance with matrimony had been of a painful kind, and the burden of three at least of these remarkable tales ("Lélia" stands rather apart) is the misery produced by an indissoluble matrimonial knot. "Jacques" is the story of an unhappy marriage from which there is no issue but by the suicide of one of the conjoints; the husband throws himself into an Alpine crevasse, in order to leave his wife to an undisturbed enjoyment of her loves.

It very soon became apparent that these matters were handled in a new and superior fashion. There had been plenty of tales about husbands, wives, and "third parties," but since the "Nouvelle Héloise" there had been none of a high value or of a philosophic tone. Mme. Sand, from the first, was nothing if not philosophic; the iniquity of marriage arrangements was to her mind but one of a hundred abominations in a society which needed a complete overhauling, and to which she proceeded to propose a loftier line of conduct. The passionate eloquence of the writer in all this was only equalled by her extraordinary self-confidence. "Valentine" seems to me even now a very eloquent book, and "Jacques" is hardly less so; it is easy to imagine their having made an immense impression. The intellectual freshness, the sentimental force of "Valentine" must have had