Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/66

 Drôlatiques," and as Thackeray made in "Henry Esmond." George Sand's attempt to return to a more naif and archaic stage of the language which she usually handled in so modern and voluminous a fashion was quite as successful as that of her fellows. In "Les Maîtres Sonneurs" it is extremely felicitous, and the success could only have been achieved by an extraordinarily sympathetic and flexible talent. This is one of the impressions George Sand's reader—even if he has read her but once—brings away with him. His other prevailing impression will bear upon that quality which, if it must be expressed in a single word, may best be called the generosity of her genius. It is true that there are one or two things which limit this generosity. We think, for example, of Mme. Sand's peculiar power of self-defence, her constant need to justify, to glorify, to place in a becoming light, to "arrange," as I said at the outset, those errors and weaknesses in which her own personal credit may be at stake. She never accepts a weakness as a weakness; she always dresses it out as a virtue; and if her heroines abandon their lovers and lie to their husbands, you may be sure it is from motives of the highest morality. Such productions as "Lucrezda Floriani" and "Elle et Lui" may be attributed to an ungenerous disposition—both of them being stories in which Mme. Sand is supposed to have described her relations with distinguished men who were dead, and whose death enabled her without contradiction to portray them as monsters of selfishness, while the female protagonist shone forth the noblest of her sex. But without taking up the discussion provoked by these works, we may say that, on the face of the matter, there is a good deal of justification for their author. She poured her material into the crucible of art, and the artist's material is of necessity in a large measure his experience. Mme. Sand never described the actual; this was often her artistic weakness, and as she has the reproach she should also have the credit. "Lucrezia Floriani" and "Elle et Lui" were doubtless to her imagination simply tales of what might have been.

It is hard not to feel that there is a certain high good conscience and passionate sincerity in the words in which, in one of her prefaces, she alludes to the poor novel which Alfred de Musset's brother put forth as an incriminative retort to "Elle et Lui." Some of her friends had advised her not to notice the book; "but after reflection she judged it to be her duty to attend to it at the proper time and place. She was, however, by no means in haste. She was in Auvergne following the imaginary traces of the fiofures of her new novel along the scented byway, among the sweetest scenes of spring. She had brought the pamphlet with her to read it; but she did not read it. She had forgotten her herbarium, and the pages of the infamous book, used as a substitute, were purified by the contact of the wild flowers of Puy-de-Dôme and Sarcy. Sweet perfumes of the things of God, who to you could prefer the memory of the foulnesses of civilization?"

It must, however, to be just all round, be further remembered that those persons and causes which Mme. Sand has been charged first and last with misrepresenting belonged to the silent, inarticulate, even defunct class. She was always the talker, the survivor, the adversary armed with a gift of expression so magical as almost to place a premium upon sophistry. To weigh everything, I imagine she really outlived experience, morally, to a degree which made her feel, in retrospect, as if she were dealing with the history of another person. "Où sont-ils, où sont-ils, nos amours passés?" she exclaims in one of her later novels. (What has become of the passions we have shuffled off? into what dusky limbo are they flung away?) And she goes on to say that it is a great mistake to suppose that we die only once