1 8 Prosscr Hall Frye 



tions of a rigid system, they are the peculiarities of flesh and 

 blood. 



Such was George Sand's training. It is well understood now 

 that she belonged to no sect, accepted no creeds, held no tenets 

 or dogmas, literary or otherwise, which might have controlled 

 her at the outset though at the risk of cramping her early genius. 

 But unfortunately, while she began writing solely from her ex- 

 perience and observation, she began at a moment of violent reac- 

 tion and revolt, when her feelings were still running riot with 

 her reason. And this circumstance imparted to her first work, 

 together with a spirit of reality and naturalness hitherto want- 

 ing to French fiction, a wildness and incoherence that marred 

 the product. The naturalness and reality, for which she had 

 her observation and experience to thank, gave her instant popu- 

 larity, her writer's capital at the start; while her revolt produced 

 the mental and moral confusion of her first period. 



Free of creeds and dogmas as she naturally was, she could 

 have met with nothing more unlucky for the development of 

 her genius than that, almost immediately, and before her liter- 

 ary character was formed, she should have fallen under the in- 

 fluence of those who were essentially theorizers and doctrinaires. 

 An admirer of Rousseau from the first, with an obscure bias in 

 her nature toward a hazy humanitarianism, she devoted the pro- 

 duction of her second period, inspired by her masculine friend- 

 ships and attachments, to the ill-advised attempt to make the 

 novel an instrument of social reform.^ No one can doubt that 

 her enthusiasm over Lamennais' Christian communism was sin- 

 cere for the moment, but equally so for another moment was her 

 admiration for Pierre Leroux's socialism, and for still another 

 her interest in free tnasonry. The fact is that these notions for 

 which she was momentarily inspired were never hers by orig- 

 ination and that she never made them so by adoption. The per- 

 sonal weight of those who professed them imposed them upon 

 her feminine susceptibility; and with the artist's impulsiveness 

 she worked them off upon her novels. Naturally her presenta- 



^ la his essay on George Sand in French Poets and Novelists Mr. James 

 traces after Taine a very suggestive connection between her "psychology" 

 and her descent. 



216 



