vidual entertaining them but without harm to others. It is almost impossible to avoid confounding a free expression of feelings with a blind obedience to animal instincts, unless we are allowed to test the worth of these feelings by looking at their quality and their consequences; and it must be as true in France as every where else, that love is sensual and degrading unless it raises the moral character, and is fulfilled or repressed according to the dictates of unselfishness. George Sand states her theory to be, that love is a solemn sacrifice to be offered in the presence of God, and necessary for the perfection of individuals. At first this seems a mere commonplace; but George Sand draws two conclusions, which society -English society, at any rate-rejects. The first is, that love is its own justification. The lovers meet; they are fitted for each other, they are framed to go together through a process necessary to complete the growth of their religious nature. Society must not interpose any arrangements which will prevent the happiness of the lovers. The barriers of class, the ties of a union that is conventional, not real, must be swept away. The second consequence is, that when the religious feeling, the highest exaltation of passion, ceases, the tie ceases also. There is nothing binding in love excepting the completeness of its existence. Common sense will immediately tell us that this will never do. Society cannot go on, if adultery is not so much justified as abrogated by the assumption that lovers have a right to love. Right feeling warns us that we are here brought to the verge of impurity. Family life, we perceive, could not continue, if the calm and moderated flow of matured affection, although fallen to a lower level of excitement than the first transports of passion, were not sufficient to make the continuance of the most intimate relation of the sexes permissible. But setting aside the ultimate result to which such considerations will bring us, we may easily acknowledge that the arrangements of modern society, or rather of society in every age and place, sacrifice many individuals to the interests of the community; and also that there is much in the tone of society which brutalises and materialises feelings, to invest which with a poetical and spiritual halo is one of the highest achievements of man. George Sand seizes on this truth; and, regardless of the limitations which common sense imposes and morality enjoins, gives the rein to her fancy, her sensibility, and her enthusiasm.

In judging George Sand, we cannot too often call to mind that she is French, and that in many of the things which seem strange to us she is but describing the habits, or following the fashion, of her countrymen. It is not only that

she looks on life generally from the foreign point of view, and, more especially, treats marriage as the necessary preliminary, not the end, of love-making; but there are a thousand minor touches which separate her widely from English readers, and which belong more to the country than to the individual writer. Not a little of what seems her sentimentalism is really the reflection of actual life. We presume, for example, that we may take as founded on an adequate induction the curious fact that French lovers cry. This alone places the love-stories of France in quite a different sphere from those of England. George Sand's young men think nothing of having a good gush of tears, real running tears, because their mistress pleases them or offends them, or smiles or frowns, or keeps or misses an appointment. An Englishman crying and weeping because a young woman whom he is fond of does not come as soon as he expects, is an impossibility. And if men can cry for such things, how can we, who have no similar feelings whatever, say but that at a stage of excitement a little higher, Frenchmen might feel it not much out of the way if a young lady, when she did come, were to ask them to curse eternity and eat grass? Then, again, George Sand is most wonderfully coarse. Her language would be considered rather plain in England for men to use in conversation with each other; it appears doubly strange from the pen of a female writer. But the French are habitually what we should call coarse, and they call plain-spoken. They call a spade a spade. They do not distinguish between the passions, and speak of the physical symptoms and issues of love as they would of those of fear. We may say of them what Dr. Livingstone says of some of the African tribes, that "they seem to have lost all tradition of the fig-leaf." When, therefore, a Frenchwoman speaks a little more openly than we should, we must not look on her as we should on a woman who violated decorum in a country where vestiges of the tradition still remain.

Nor ought we to call George Sand's novels in a very high degree immoral, if we judge them by the standard of French fiction. No test of immorality can be more crucial than the mode in which female chastity is regarded. Now, although female frailty is the topic on which George Sand writes most largely, it cannot be said that she takes pleasure in the overthrow of chastity, or even that she regards it as a matter of indifference. In most French novels that can fairly be called immoral, the author looks on chastity as a thing which it is a triumph and a glory to surmount. But George Sand feels truly and deeply the mournfulness and the pity of the termination of purity. But then she goes into a field which modern

English writers wholly avoid, not because it does not exist, but because they do not like to enter on it. They never let their female characters wander beyond the influence of those safeguards which the fabric of family life plants round Englishwomen of the upper classes. But in George Sand, as in almost all foreign writers, these external safeguards are never allowed to interfere with the great problem to answer which is the main object of interest with her. She only asks herself what will be the conduct of lovers under given circumstances. Consuelo the heroine is thrown into every temptation which can endanger virtue, ardent passion, dangerous proximity, and isolation from the world. But she has a simplicity which guards her, and she remains pure because she had promised her mother that she would be so. The whole object of Consuelo is to show that by the possession of this simplicity, and its consequent purity, she was raised above the women around her. In Valentine, the most touching and beautiful of George Sand's earlier tales, the heroine is overcome; but it would be absurd to say that a person who conceived and worked out the character of Valentine thought lightly of chastity. Valentine struggles hard, she watches herself, she has little sentimentalism, she honestly and truly desires not to deceive her husband and lose her self-respect. The authoress undoubtedly impels Valentine to her sorrowful end in order to illustrate her main theme, that society has no right to interpose barriers in the way of true affection, and thus create scruples which must finally give way. But the tone which pervades the tale is not at all that of a woman, who could believe that the delights of sensuous passions are any compensation for the loss of purity. To an English reader accustomed to the safeguards of English society, a novel portraying the guilty love of a married woman must seem in some degree immoral; for the whole range of thought is one which it is the object of English society to eliminate from at least the surface of family life. But to a person within this range of thought, and accustomed to look on such temptations as very possible and real, we can conceive the best of George Sand's tales might prove a source of strength quite as much as of weakness. We cannot deny that their warmth of language, their fatalism, and their tendency to shift the blame from the individual on to society, are sources of weakness. But the high value set on purity, and the general elevation of the standard by which the worth of love is tried, might, on the other hand, prove sources of strength.

If we want to see George Sand on her best side, we must observe her estimate of men. The great source of that superiority

of moral tone which, amidst all the immoralities of her novels, makes itself felt when we contrast her writings with those of the ordinary loose novelists of modern France, is the hearty contempt which she entertains for the kind of lovers who form the heroes of worse novelists. The blasé, captivating, polished Parisians to whom the heroines of her contemporaries are wont to sacrifice their easy virtue, are invariably represented by George Sand as the banes of women, as the characters in the tale least to be sympathised with, as the foils of the men who can feel true love. M. de Ramière, in Indiana, is exactly the lover of the common French novel. He wins Indiana's heart; but the whole point of the book is to show his immeasurable inferiority to her, and the pettiness of his timid selfishness. Indiana has that degree of purity and sincerity which makes her loathe the thought of deceiving her husband, and prompts her to throw herself entirely on her lover, if she throws herself on him at all. He is busy with a thousand other thoughtspolitics, success in society, advancement in the world. She has no thought but for him. She makes a great effort; she determines to brave every thing, to suffer every thing, and to give herself wholly to her lover. She leaves her husband's house, and in the middle of the night flies to Raymon. He receives her with earnest entreaties to be allowed to get her a cab, and to send her back before any of the servants can have noticed her absence. With him is contrasted Sir Ralph; an impassible unimpressive character, but possessing such tenacity of affection, and a love so complete, so regardless of consequences, that he loves her equally whether she is chaste or unchaste, kind to him or unkind, and is as ready to die with her in the joint suicide which they take four months to carry out, as to live with her in the glorified hut at the top of an inaccessible mountain, which is their ultimate destination. So too in Valentine, M. de Lansac, the lover whom society forces on Valentine, is contrasted with Bénédict, the lover against whom society warns her, not because she belongs to another man, but because he is poor and ignoble. According to the standard of society, M. de Lansac behaves admirably to Valentine. He is too much a man of the world either to notice or to interfere with her love for Bénédict further than to put on a little stronger screw when he is negotiating money-matters with her and her friends. He lets her know, but with the most cutting politeness, and the most aggravating considerateness, that he is perfectly aware of her secret; but when she implores him to protect her against herself, he tells her that she had better enjoy her first love as much as she can, for she will find that, as she begins to change her lovers, second and third

passions are less and less delightful. In Bénédict there may perhaps be something overstrained, but at any rate he is so drawn that he gives the impression of a simple earnestness of affection. It would be, of course, absurd to say that such contrasts prove any thing as to Parisian society. George Sand, like every other novelist, arranges her puppets as she pleases; and it is as easy to make all dandy lovers heartless as to make all humbler lovers boors. But the puppets indicate the direction in which their mistress moves them. She handles them so as to show her ideal of affection; and putting aside all collateral questions as to the manner in which it is worked out, we must admit that, as compared with the ideal of most French novelists, hers is a very good ideal.

"I think," she says in one of her tales, "that a noble passion ought to be defined as that which elevates us and strengthens us in beauty of sentiment and grandeur of ideas: a bad passion as that which leads us to egotism, to fear, to all the pettinesses of a blind instinct. Every passion, therefore, is lawful or criminal according as it produces the one or the other result; although society, which is not the true expression of the wishes of man, often sanctifies the bad passion, and proscribes the good." This passage, which may be taken as a formula of her whole creed on the subject of love, occurs in Horace, a very singular and not very pleasing tale, the drift, of which is to exhibit another kind of man's love falling short of the ideal. The whole story is an exemplification of the utter abandonment of the conventionalities of society in which George Sand places herself when striking the balance of virtues and vices; for the good character of the book is a grisette who acts throughout with the greatest nobleness, discretion, and selfrespect, and the two lovers are a barmaid and a student. Surveying the world to find the desired kind of love, George Sand noted a counterfeit which evidently filled her with a mixture of pity and indignation. This was the love of a man whose fancy only is touched, whose vanity is pleased, who feels it due to himself to have a mistress, and a proper result of his cultivated taste and varied education that he should look on her in a great many lights, all highly poetical. For the moment he is sincere; but there is no depth in a feeling at the bottom of which lies a shallow egotism. When Horace read Alfred de Musset, he insisted on picturing Marthe-a simple, good-looking, tender-hearted, stupid country girl-as one of the dangerous filles d'Eve of that writer. The next day, after perusing a feuilleton of Jules Janin, she had to become in his eyes an elegant and coquettish woman of fashion. Then, after he had perused the romances of Dumas, she was a tigress, whom he must be a