30 OCTOBER 1886, Page 20

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF A GREAT NOVELIST" IT may be as

well to say at starting that these letters will not with the majority of readers add to George Sand's fame as a writer, though they may enhance her reputation as a friend and a mother ; it is even necessary for the intending student to work patiently through a good many rather commonplace effusions before he arrives at anything particularly interesting. Zip to the time of her separation from her husband, her letters, which are chiefly to her mother, are every-day accounts of her children, her travels, and her way of living generally. It would not be easy to discover from them that her married life was not a happy one ; but the letters are as little worth printing as might be expected from the youth of the writer, letter- writing being par excellence an accomplishment of middle age. After her first departure for Paris, this is changed. The circumstances of George Sand's married life are well known, and need no repetition here ; without doubt she had much and grave cause of complaint against her husband ; but from her own account of herself, it is at least open to question whether she could ever have been happy in any married life. She says herself that "all restraint was insupportable to me ; I have never been able to bear any coercion ;" and though, perhaps, if the coercion had come to her in a happier form, she might have borne with it more patiently, still one feels that the woman who by her own account was "incapable of order and economy," who delighted at one time in taking long solitary rides, from which she returned at midnight, at another in writing all night and sleeping all the morning, was scarcely the material out of which a helpful wife is made. Her visit to Paris, though she says later that she much disliked the town and the life, was for some time evidently delightful to her ; she lived there literally en garcon, and her letters to her friends and co-workers at this time are resolutely boyish and unrestrained in their language and ideas. It is always interesting to trace the steps by which a great man or woman has climbed slowly up the steep hill of fame ; but the abandon of these letters is so near coarseness, that it is pleasanter to read those addressed to her son, whom she had been obliged to leave behind her at Nohant. To him she is always tender, playful, and loving, full of inquiries after his pursuits and health, and amusements ; storing up little • Leiters ef George San& Translated and Edited by Raphael Ledoe de Beau- fort. London : Ward, Downey, and Uo.

anecdotes of her Paris life to repeat to him, and apparently quite unconscious that there was anything in that life which was incompatible with the highest ideal of motherhood. This is on a par with her sending affectionate messages to her husband through her son, in order that the child might not suspect the true state of affairs, and belongs to a certain moral denseness which was at times quite extraordinary in so gifted a nature. After the actual judicial separation took place, some years later, such concealment was, of course, impossible and unneces- sary. Her daughter was left entirely to her care, her son divided his holidays between his father and mother; and in her old age, George Sand found a home with him and his wife.

As the years pass on during this period of the great writer's life, her letters, as is natural, change much in character. The outspoken boyishness of the earlier period gives place to a less outspoken, but more resolute defiance of public opinion in any shape ; conventionalities are to be despised, " proprieties " laughed at and Christianity renounced as a hindrance to true progress. It would not, perhaps, be altogether fair to call George Sand an unbeliever in the full sense of the word ; she believed strenuously in a future life, and she believed, or thought she did, in a God ; she believed, too, at one time in Jesus Christ, and it is not very easy to make out from her letters why she ever abandoned that belief, as she certainly would seem to have done towards the end of her life. In fact, however, she had not, as far as appears, ever given the subject of Christianity any really deep thought. She says herself that she was incapable of study, and like many thousands of her fellow - creatures, she denounced religion because the types she saw round her were not attractive ones, without attempting to discover whether those types were the result of Christianity, or only the result of unfaithfulness to its teaching. The same incapacity for seeing two sides of the question pursued her through life, and is at times amusingly modified as years go on. Marriage had been to her an unhappy experience ; therefore she assures young friends who write to her for advice, that all marriage is miserable and degrading to women, only redeemed by the happiness of having children ; yet she is enchanted with her son's marriage, heaps every kind of praise on her daughter-in-law, and finds evidently the most thorough happiness in their menage. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to many of her doings and writings ; therefore she lays down as an invariable axiom that all public opinion is contemptible and base; but some years later she has discovered that the public judges very fairly on the whole, and ex presses that opinion with equal decision and conviction. Similar instances might be multiplied, but it is needless, for they will strike every reader of the letters; the curious thing is that she seems quite un- conscious of these changes in her views. In some small matters, again, she contradicts herself in a way that is really startling, and yet she is equally unconscious of the fact ; saying, for instance, in one letter that she never revises a proof of any of her writings, while in another she says that her style depends wholly upon punctuation, and that therefore she is obliged to pay great attention to this in her proofs. She also states to a friend that she never writes plays, at a time when several of hers had been represented at Paris theatres ! One cannot easily set down. these errors to slips of the memory.

It was natural that George Sand should take a keen interest in politics, and as she advances in life many of her letters are almost political essays. Her attention, how- ever, would seem to have been centred on internal politics entirely ; of the relations of France with other countries she takes little notice, and except for occasional comments upon the position of Italy and the Papacy, other countries hardly exist for her. In the lives and habits of her own peasantry she took a warm interest, as every reader of her works must see, and spent largely in helping those in her own neighbourhood ; but it never apparently occurred to her to study the ways of other nations to gain hints or help from them. Throughout her life she always calls herself very ignorant and very stupid in taking in what she reads; and with all allowances for exaggeration, it seems probable that she did not read much on general subjects, and confined her political studies to the affairs of her own country.

Her old age shows more pleasantly in her correspondence than her young or middle life ; for she retained the use of her faculties to the last., and her letters lose the bitter and defiant tone that once characterised them, as well as the slanginess that at times disfigured them, while retaining all their thoughtful- ness and vigour. The last is written barely a fortnight before her death. She is fully conscious that that event might be near, and looks forward to it with calmness, though quite willing to use all reasonable means of prolonging life. Probably no end could have been more in accordance with her own wishes, as it took place in her beloved country home, and when she was surrounded by children and grandchildren, after only a short though a painful illness.

A translation from French into English is never easy, and we cannot altogether congratulate M. de Beaufort on his ren- dering of these letters. In the earlier ones especially, he has rounded the sentences and polished the turns of phrase, so as greatly to impair the force and energy of the original ; on the other hand, he has inserted expressions tantamount to swearing in the English, when there are no equiva- lents to them in the French. Some of the words are mis- translated, so as to be almost absurd ; and he has appended the signature of George Sand to letters written before she had become an author, where there is no such signature in the original. There are also several letters omitted which in some cases would have been a decided gain to the book, and which need not have been left out. The second and third volumes are, however, better than the first, and though George Sand's style is as untranslatable in her letters as in her books, still the later correspondence gives more idea of the original, and is on the whole more faithfully rendered. The biographical notice prefixed to the translation is written by too ardent an admirer to be called impartial; but it is a useful little summary for those who like to refresh their memories with it, especially if taken with the grain of salt which is proverbially so often necessary with the histories of nations or of individuals.