BOOKS.

GEORGE SAND.*

A VERY charming study of George Sand, by M. Caro, of the French Academy, has lately been translated into, on the whole, excellent English by M. Gustave Masson, one of the Assistant- Masters of Harrow. As a psychological study, which it pro- fesses to be, it is admirably done. M. Caro brings to the work a keen critical power, a patient analysis, and a very sympathetic insight. While doing full justice to George Sand's genius, he neither hides from himself nor from his readers how seriously her moral defects interfere with the high ideal she sets before herself in her literary work. Taking the leading points of her personal experience, M. Caro skilfully renders that experience into the pages of her novels. By no means a simple worshipper of her genius, he shows how her own and her friends' systema- tised theories went far at one time to ruin her work. Indeed, her transcendent imagination alone saved her from degenerating into the theorist and rhetorician.

The study begins with a vivid little sketch of her early life. 4' As a little child, she would lose in endless reverie all sense of the world around her." When only four years old, her little brain would work upon the speculations of life and, death until she wholly lost herself in the visions she had called up. Romance was the atmosphere she lived in. Before she was conscious of their meaning, she would compose stories which thrilled with delight or terror the little company of peasant.children she gathered round her by the fire. The circumstances of her birth, combined with the contending temperaments inherited from her parents, threatened at one time to develop a melancholy suicidal in its tendency. As she came to -realise more clearly the history of her birth, she had almost resolved at one time to break altogether with her paternal relatives, renounce her grandmother's fortune, and throw away all that might fit her for position in the world. The convent-school life which followed brought rest and fresh sources of interest. For some time she was foremost in the amusements and esteem of her comrades. From such an ardent temperament as George Sand's, the reaction which followed was only to be ex- pected. The eager excitement of youthful escapades was not sufficient to hold her long. One day the deeper needs of her nature asserted themselves, and she gave herself up to devotion with the same ardour and fire which led her afterwards to abandon herself so completely to lower passions. Naturally this ill-disciplined enthusiasm wore itself out. But though the mystic vision faded completely, the spiritual sense never wholly left her. Plunged as she was in an immoral society, materialism never closed in upon her ; and in later life, when passions had spent themselves, and bizarre enthusiasms were modified into more practical forms, she could be almost tender towards a Christianity she had left so long behind.

Passing from her life to her novels, M. Caro shows how she -drew her inspiration from two sources, Love and Nature. So far as the intention was concerned, her ideal of romance-writing was a high one. "A novel," she says, "should be as much a poetical as an analytical work. • It requires true and even real situations and characters grouped about a type, intending to show forth the feeling or the principal idea of the book."

This was an early theory of hers. Her later expressions only tend to emphasise and enlarge this theory. In writing to a young aspirant to literary honours, she says :—" You think you can produce without having amassed No, one cannot do so. It is necessary to have lived and searched. It is necessary to have digested much, to have loved and suffered and waited, and to be always labouring." Bat this high ideal was often clouded by two adverse influences,—one from the outside, which showed itself in an exaggerated acceptance of

• George Sand. By Mine Marie Caro, Member of the French Academy. Translated by Gustave Masson. London : George liontledge and Bons. IBM

the political nostrums of a peculiarly excitable time; the other from her own life, which fell far below the standard she raises in her novels. From this moral weakness few of her characters, even the best, are exempt. With great aims and much noble conception, in practical outcome her women at least rarely show any trace of the discipline and reticence which are of the essence of high moral action. No doubt many of her heroines fascinate and subdue criticism ; but taken apart from their lovely setting, few will bear a close analysis. In conception they are creations of noble and. self-sacrificing love. In reality they are swept away by nnresisted and altogether reprehensible passions. Viewed in relation to later French writers, George Sand's novels may be called models of decorous propriety ; but although Zola and Daudet draw the dark side of life with horrible and photo- graphic truth, George Sand, while intending to raise mankind, often only succeeds in investing vice, and even crime, with a fictitious and demoralising fascination. Zola repels his readers by disgust. In reading Valentine or Indiana, one almost loses sense of their immorality through the soft light which is cast over the characters.

In an able criticism on the part novels play in modern life, M. Caro touches on some of the inherent weaknesses of French fiction. From the superficial view taken of life, passion alone asserts itself. Weakness and timidity are the only causes for its absence. The ability to indulge in vice is the one rule recognised. Strength of principle is never allowed a counter- acting force. Idealism having vanished from the modern French novel, ideal virtues have no place there. The power to carry out high principle at the cost of personal suffering, or still less of personal abnegation, does not enter into the conception. It would be looked upon as a waste of material,—a purposeless foregoing of experience and sensation that can only result in a stupid sort of sanctity. The picture of quiet strength is too simple to arouse interest, so force is rarely found on the Bide of virtue. Speaking of Zola, and others of the same school, M. Caro says :—" And what art is that, if it is art at all, which gives us a succession of degraded types, situa- tions alternately gloomy and violent, trivial scenes, and common or odious scandals, under colour of studies of manners, of the representation of the realities of our every-day life, which occupy and pursue our attention ? The incurable vice of the novel thus understood, would seem to be the negation of its legitimate aim, which is to raise mankind for a moment above the sadness and misery, the trivialities and tedium of every-day life, and to take him for a few hours into a world where he may at least change the course of his ideas and his commonplace cares, where feelings have more strength, characters more unity, passions more nobility, love more loftiness and duration, the sun more brightness." And going on to give a graceful and generous tribute of praise to English and Russian novels, M. Caro says :—" The two most recent forms of the novel, whether in George Eliot or Tolstoi, join to a foundation of realism which is demanded by the natural needs of the modern mind, severe aspirations and lofty aims that bring them singularly near, in certain points, to the ideal just described." ln this same category, no doubt, M. Caro would to a great extent place Madame Sand. As he says :—" To seek by every possible means the most complete and enchanting expression of the dream of life,—is not this art ? No one has more freely and more fully taught us the enchantments of this dream."

But it is in his analysis of her style that M. Caro is at his best. He begins by asking the question,—" What part does Madame Saud give to imagination, and what part to observa-

tion ? The question has often been thus cursorily decided ; an idealist and a romanticist, Madame Sand does not observe." To

so summary a settlement of such a question, M. Caro naturally objects, and also to the very usual but erroneous conclusion that the schools of observation and imagination, or, in other words, realism and idealism, are necessarily irreconcilable. That differing temperaments will naturally tend in particular direc- tions, is both to be expected and desired. As M. Caro says, Balzac and George Saud may be taken as examples of styles

varying in their tendency without contradicting each other in their outcome. George Sand was no doubt before all things an

idealist. Each novel may be said to be the embodiment of an

idea. But once having admitted this, we find George Sand. careful in observation and minute in detail. It is this enuncia- tion of the idea that is both the strength and the weakness of her novels. When that idea is simple and noble, the novel, how- ever much we may differ from its theory, is simple and noble in

its expression. This is seen in Jacques, which is the embodi- ment of her "ideal of love in a man, a Stoic succumbing to love, and loving with the depth and loftiness which a Stoic can bring to such matter." But in the novels of what M. Caro calls her "second period," "those which occupy Madame Sand's literary life from 1840 to 1848 the interest is certainly less sustained, and one's sympathy, which is constantly repulsed, becomes chilled." The motive has changed, and instead of "more or less idealised portraiture of the human heart, the analysis of the soul in fictitious situations," we have "the begin- ning of a socialistic lecture !" The inspiration has ceased to be from within, and comes now from the outside,—the theories of "doctrinal socialism." In support of this criticism, M. Caro quotes her Compagnons du Tour de France, a work compara- tively little read in England, Horace, Jeanne—both of which would have been charming stories if divested of socialism and allegory—and Consuelo, with its oracle in Count Albert and its "universal communism." But even these are fascinating reading by the side of such books as the Comtesse do Budocsicult and Le Meunier d'Augebault. But these "humanitarian dreams" were to pass. The Revolution of 1848 was rudely to awaken her among many others. As M. Caro says, "it needed the terrible insurrection of Jane to break the charm and deliver the captive imagination :"—

" After those disastrous days," writes George Sand of herself, "being agitated and utterly heart-broken by the outward tempest, I strove to recover in solitude, if not in calmness, at least faith In moments such as these, a strong and powerful genius, like Dante, with his tears, with his wrath, with his sinews, a terrible poem, a drama full of tortures and lamentations. In our day, the artist who is weaker and more sensitive, who is but the reflection and echo of a generation very like himself, feels the imperious need of turning away his eyes and diverting his imagination by returning to an ideal of calm, of innocence, and of contemplation. Iu times when the evil springs from the mutual misunderstandings and hatreds of men, the artist's mission is to glorify gentleness, trust, and friendship, thus reminding his hardened or discouraged fellows that pure morals, tender feelings, and primitive equity are, or may still be, of this world. The way of salvation will not be found in direct allusions to existing evils, in an appeal to fermenting passions ; sweet song, the sound of a rustic pipe, a tale to quiet little children and send them to sleep without fear or suEfering,—these are better than the spectacle of actual evils darkened and intensified by fictitious colouring."

And La Petite Paddle was the fulfilment of the promise.

It is impossible to follow M. Caro through his study of the whole course of George Sand's inspiration. Enough has been given to show what admirable insight and tact he brings to his labour of love. A less sympathetic writer would not have dis- covered the noble idealism and high purpose still remaining in a nature whose actions will not bear examination. A less dis- criminating critic would have slurred over her defects and flattered her shortcomings. The present gtude escapes both these dangers. It is a healthy and invigorating analysis of what constituted the greatness and marred the perfection of one who, in spite of all that can be urged to the contrary, will always hold her place among the classics of her nation.