Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/60

 an irresistible charm; and I say this with a full sense of what there is false and fantastical in the substance of both books. Hold them up against the light of a certain sort of ripe reason, and they seem as porous as a pair of sieves; but subject them simply to the literary test, and they hold together very bravely. The author's philosophic predilections were at once her merit and her weakness. On the one side it was a great mind, curious about all things, open to all things, nobly accessible to experience, asking only to live, expand, respond; on the other side stood a great personal volition, making large exactions of life and society and needing constantly to justify itself—stirring up rebellion and calling down revolution in order to cover up and legitimate its own agitation. George Sand's was a French mind, and as a French mind it had to theorize; but if the positive side of its criticisms of most human institutions was precipitate and ill balanced, the error was in a great measure atoned for in later years. The last half of Mme. Sand's career was a period of assent and acceptance; she had decided to make the best of those social arrangements which surrounded her—remembering, as it were, the homely native proverb which declares that when one has not got what one likes one must like what one has got. Into the phase of acceptance and serenity, the disposition to admit that even as it is society pays, according to the vulgar locution, our author passed at about the time that the Second Empire settled down upon France. I suspect the fact I speak of was rather a coincidence than an effect. It is very true that the Second Empire may have seemed the death-knell of "philosophy"; it may very well have appeared profitless to ask questions of a world which anticipated you with such answers as that. But I take it rather that Mme. Sand was simply weary of criticism; the pendulum had swung into the opposite quarter—as it is needless to remark that it always does.

I have delayed too long to say how far it had swung in the first direction; and I have delayed from the feeling that it is difficult to say it in the pages of an American magazine. For twenty years before the period I just now spoke of she had written about love, and she continued to do so for a greater number of years after it. Love was her inveterate theme, her specialty, and one misses the main point if one fails to put this in the clearest light. On the other hand, to say all that it is consistent to say on the matter would be to say a great deal which it belongs to our American etiquette to leave unsaid. So true is this that I hasten to declare that no complete and satisfactory analysis of George Sand's work can be written in English. We can only go to a certain point—which I confess I consider a great comfort. We will, however, go as far as we can. We have seen that George Sand was, by the force of heredity, projected into this field with a certain violence; she took possession of it as a conqueror, and she was never compelled to retreat. The reproach brought against her by her critics is that she has for the most part portrayed vicious love, not virtuous love. But the reply to this, from her own side, would be that she has at all events portrayed something which those who disparage her activity have not portrayed. She may claim that although she has the critics against her, the writers of her own class who represent virtuous love have not pushed her out of the field. She has the advantage that she has portrayed a passion, and those of the other group have the disadvantage that they have not. In English literature, which I suppose is more especially the region of virtuous love, we do not "go into" the matter, as the phrase is (I speak of course of English prose). We have agreed among our own confines that there is a certain point at which all elucidation of it should stop short; that among the things which it is possible to say about it, the greater number had on