Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/63

 George Sand without finding an example of what I mean. I glance at a venture into "Teverino," and I find Lady G., who has left her husband at the inn and gone out to spend a day with the more fascinating Léonce, "passing her beautiful hands over the eyes of Léonce, peut-étre par tendresse naïve, perhaps to convince herself that it was really tears she saw shining in them." The peut-étre here, the tendresse naïve, the alternatives, the impartial way in which you are given your choice, are extremely characteristic of Mme. Sand. They remind us of the heroine of "Isidora," who alludes in conversation to "une de mes premières fautes." In the list of Mme. Sand's more technically amatory novels, however, there is a distinction to be made; the earlier strike me as superior to the later. The fault of the earlier—the fact that passion is too intellectual, too pedantic, too sophistical, too much bent upon proving its self-abnegation and humility, maternity, fraternity, humanity, or some fine thing that it really is not and that it is much simpler and better for not pretending to be—this fault is infinitely exaggerated in the tales written after "Lucrezia Floriani." "Indiana," "Valentine," "Jacques," and "Mauprat" are, comparatively speaking, frankly and honestly passionate; they do not represent the love that declines to compromise with circumstances as a sort of eating of one's cake and having it too—an eating it as pleasure and a having it as virtue. But the stories of the type of "Lucrezia Floriani," which indeed is the most argumentative, have an indefinable falsity of tone. Mme. Sand had here begun to play with her topic intellectually; the first freshness of her interest in it had gone, and invention had taken the place of conviction. To acquit one's self happily of such experiments, one must certainly have all the gifts that George Sand possessed. But one must also have two or three that she lacked. Her sense of purity was eminently defective. This is a brief statement, but it means a great deal. Of what it means there are few of her novels that do not contain a number of illustrations. She had no fixed ideal of delicacy; and if there is an essential difference between the clean and the unclean, it is impossible to describe what are called the relations of the sexes without such a fixed ideal.

An ideal of some sort of course Mme. Sand had, but it was hardly more useful than a pair of spectacles that is continually being mislaid. Her sense of purity is not so much absent as confused; it is, indeed, at times oppressively present, in the strongest attitudes—attitudes which are the natural result of its having to accommodate itself to an "inside view" of the relations I have just mentioned. Her discrimination between what is agreeable and possible to people of delicacy and what is not had no need to be perverted or bewildered by romance writing; we see in her first books that it is not to be trusted. She has no appreciation of what may be called purity of composition. There is something very fine about "Valentine," in spite of its contemptible hero; there is something very sweet and generous in the figure of the young girl. But why, desiring to give us an impression of great purity in her heroine, should the author provide her with a half-sister who is at once an illegitimate daughter and the mother of a child born out of wedlock, and who, in addition, is half in love with Valentine's lover? though George Sand thinks to better the matter by representing this love as partly maternal. After Valentine's marriage, a compulsory and most unhappy one, this half-sister plots with the doctor to place the young wife and the lover whom she has had to dismiss once more en rapport. She hesitates, it is true, and inquires of the physician if their scheme will not appear unlawful