George Sand—generalities about her.

There is a Scotch proverb (not, I think, among those most generally known), "Never tell your foe when your foot sleeps"; and some have held that this applies specially to the revelation, by an author, of his own weak points. I do not agree with them, having always had a fancy for playing and seeing cards on table—except at cards themselves, where a dummy seems to me only to spoil the game. Therefore I admit, in coming to George Sand, that this famous novelist has not, as a novelist, ever been a favourite of mine—that I have generally experienced some, and occasionally great, difficulty in reading her. Even the "purged considerate mind" (without, I venture to hope, much dulling of the literary palate) which I have brought to the last readings necessary for this book, has but partially removed this difficulty. The causes of it, and their soundness or unsoundness as reasons, must be postponed for a little—till, as usual, sufficient survey and analysis of at least specimens (for here as elsewhere the immense bulk of the total work defies anything more than "sampling") have supplied due evidence. But it may be said at once that no kind of prejudice or dislike, arising from the pretty notorious history and character of Amantine (Amandine? Armandine?) Lucile Aurore Dupin or Dudevant, commonly called George Sand, has anything to do with my want of affection or admiration for her work. I do not recommend her conduct in her earlier days for imitation, and I am bound to say that I do not think it was ever excused by what one may call real love. But she seems to have been an extremely good fellow in her age, and not by any means a very bad fellow in her youth. She was at one time pretty, or at least good-looking;[174] she was at all times clever; and if she did not quite deserve that almost superhuman eulogy awarded in the Devonshire epitaph to

Mary Sexton,
Who pleased many a man and never vexed one,[175]

she did fulfil the primal duty of her sex, and win its greatest triumph, by complying with the first half of the line, while, if she failed as to the second, it was perhaps not entirely her fault.[176] Finally, Balzac's supposed picture of her as Camille in Béatrix has the almost unique peculiarity, among its author's sketches of women, of being positively attractive—attractive, that is to say, not merely to the critic as a powerful study and work of art; not perhaps at all to the sentimentalist as a victim or an adorable piece of candeur; not to the lover of physical beauty or passion, but to the reader—"sensible" in the old sense as well as in the new—who feels that here is a woman he should like to have known, even if he feels likewise that his weather-eye would have had to be kept open during the knowledge.

Phases of her work.

It has been customary—and though these customary things are sometimes delusive and too often mechanical, there is also occasionally, and, I think, here, her work, something not negligible in them, if they be not applied too rigidly—to divide George Sand's long period (nearly half a century) of novel-production into four sub-periods, corresponding roughly with the four whole decades of the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties.[177] The first, sometimes called, but, I think, misleadingly, "Romantic," is the period of definite and mainly sexual revolt, illustrated by such novels as Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, and Jacques. The second is that of illuminé mysticism and semi-political theorising, to which Spiridion, Consuelo, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, and others belong. The third, one of a certain apaisement, when the author had finally settled at her country-house of Nohant in Berry, turns to studies of rural life: La Petite Fadette, François le Champi, La Mare au Diable, etc. The last is represented by novels of no one particular, or at least single, scope or bent, Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré, Le Marquis de Villemer, Mademoiselle La Quintinie, etc., reaching to Flamarande and its sequel shortly before her death. The thing, as has been hinted already, is one of those first rough sketches of the ground which, if not too closely adhered to, are often useful. As a matter of fact, the divisions often—as one might be sure they would—run cross. There is a lot of occult or semi-occult stuff in Lélia, and the "period of appeasement" did not show much reconciliation and forgiveness of injury in Elle et Lui, whether we take this as by the injured or as by her who had done the wrong. But if we take the two first novels briefly and Lélia itself more fully for Period I.; Consuelo and its sequel (Spiridion has been "done and done thoroughly"[178] by Thackeray in the Paris Sketch-book) for II.; the three above-mentioned berquinades for the Third, with Lucrezia Floriani thrown between as an all-important outsider, and Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré for IV., giving each some detailed criticism, with a few remarks on others, it ought to suffice as a fairly solid groundwork for a general summing-up.

Indiana.

To understand the furore with which Indiana and Valentine were received, one must remember the time and the circumstance with even more care than is usually desirable. They were—if not quite so well written as they seemed even to Thackeray—written very well; they expressed the full outburst of the French Sturm und Drang movement; there was nothing like them either in French or in any other literature, though Bulwer was beginning similar things with us. Essentially, and when taken sub specie aeternitatis, they are very nearly rubbish. The frail (extremely frail) and gentle Indiana, with her terrible husband, whose crimes against her and nature even reach the abominable pitch of declaring himself ready to shoot expected poachers and possible burglars; her creole maid and foster-sister "Noun," who disguises herself in Indiana's garments and occupies her room, receives there a lover who is afterwards her mistress's, but soon commits suicide; the lover himself, a most appalling "tiger," as his own time would have called him; and the enigmatic English cousin, indifferently designated as "Sir Rodolphe Brown," "Sir Ralph," "Sir Brown," and "M. Brown," with whom Indiana makes a third trial of hitherto "incomprised" and unattained happiness—are all inhabitants of a sort of toy doll's-house partaking of the lunatic-asylum. But the author's three prefaces, written at intervals of exactly ten years, passably inconsistent in detail, but all agreeing in contempt of critics and lofty anarchist sentiment, are great fun, and are almost a reward for reading the book.

Valentine.