But Prince Bismarck had not abandoned his early ideas; he was waiting till the time was ripe. In 1875 he made a tentative effort, without success, to wring a guarantee from the Reichstag for a new South Sea Company. Next year he was pressed to give his support to a proposed railway from Pretoria to the sea. He refused, but in private made the following significant statement to the intermediate agent:—
“The colonial question is one I have studied for years. I am convinced Germany cannot go on for ever without colonies, but as yet I fail to perceive deep traces of such a movement in the country.” Those deep traces have now been revealed, and it remains to be seen whether the Iron Chancellor will not be able, in spite of the apparently insuperable objects in his way, to give practical effect to the aspirations of the German nation, and to his own earnest conviction.—National Review.
GEORGE SAND.
On the 8th June, 1876, George Sand, the great French novelist, died at her château of Nohant in Berri. The strong right hand that for forty years had been used in the service of her countrymen, sometimes to delight, sometimes to admonish, had dropped the pen in death; the noble heart that, with all its faults and all its deviations from the strict line of social conventionality, had yet ever sided with the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, had ceased to beat, and even in the frivolous, heartless capital where she had lived, men went about knowing they had sustained an irreparable loss and that a blank had been made in their lives that would never be filled.
She was the last of that illustrious fraternity of chosen spirits that flourished fifty years ago in France, of whom Victor Hugo is the sole survivor. Lamartine, Théophile Gautier, Michelet, Alfred de Musset, Balzac, George Sand, were the names that then resounded in the literary world of Paris, while now Emile Zola and Alexandre Dumas fils are its principal adornments. George Sand and Balzac’s novels form as it were the connecting link between the world of romance of the eighteenth century and our own. She has carried the idealism of Jean Jacques’ “Nouvelle Héloïse,” and the poetry of Chateaubriand’s “Renée” into our prosaic nineteenth century, while Balzac presented to his contemporaries as vivid reflections of life as any to be found in the pages of “Manon Lescaut” or “Gil Blas.” The authoress of “Indiana” is the high-priestess of the romantic school; the author of “Le Père Goriot” the exponent of the realistic.
“Love must be idealised in fiction,” she says in the “Histoire de ma Vie.” “We must give it all the force, and all the aspirations we have felt ourselves, besides all the pain we have seen and suffered. Under no circumstances must it ever be debased; it must triumph or die, and we must not be afraid to invest it with an importance in life, which lifts it altogether above ordinary sentiments.”
Balzac, her fellow-worker, used to say: “You seek men as they ought to be; I take them as they are. I idealise and exaggerate their vices; you their virtues.”
By further study of her life and correspondence, we shall know how true this observation is, and how this striving after ideal perfection not only influenced her literary work, but caused so much of that eccentricity and rebellion against social laws which shocked her contemporaries and has made her name a by-word in the mouths of those who could not appreciate her genius, or realise the tenderness and nobility of soul that were hidden under her unfeminine exterior.
The publication of her letters (looked forward to with so much impatience) has recently taken place, and the veil has been still further torn from those domestic relations well known to have been unhappy. Were they written by any one but the authoress of “Elle et Lui,” we should have regretted their appearance as indiscreet, and wanting in loyalty towards one no longer able to protest against the secrets of her life being dragged forth to amuse the crowd. A frequent charge however brought against George Sand is the want of delicacy she has shown in taking the world into her confidence. “Charity towards others, dignity towards myself, sincerity before God,” is the motto prefixed to the “Histoire de ma Vie.” She certainly is both charitable and sincere, but we must agree with her enemies in thinking it an open question whether, so far as concerns herself, she has observed a dignified reserve. Indeed, on various occasions she defiantly proclaimed, “That all hypocrisy was distasteful to her, and that it would have been the recognition of those acts as irregularities which were but the legitimate exercise of her liberty, had she been ashamed of them or endeavored to keep them secret.”