George Sand and Her French Style 2i 



ovvn desires ; when her love of the unaffected and the natural 

 asserted itself and she had leisure for quiet contemplation in the 

 face of nature; — then she was quick to recognize and respond to 

 the charm of just such characters and incidents as she met in 

 her Vall^ noir of the romantic name, and as she has rendered 

 with exquisite sensibility. The simple, unpretentious life of the 

 peasant amid his fields with his robust loves and hates, hopes 

 and fears was a discovery in comparative humanity to French 

 letters. The healthfulness and freshness of these idyls, full of 

 the air of wood and lawn, the breath of morning and evening, is 

 a revelation after the stale intrigue skulking away in the close 

 and tainted atmosphere of city rooms. They justify to the En- 

 glish reader the existence of French fiction. It may be, as M. 

 Brunetiere declares, that George Sand made the French novel 

 capable of sustaining thought;-^ it is of infinitely greater credit 

 to her to have shown that it was possible for the French novel 

 to carry good, clean, wholesome sentiment. No reader of mod- 

 em French fiction can return to these stories without feeling 

 that there life has been triumphantly vindicated against natur- 

 alism, and without feeling, too, that his heart has been purified 

 and gladdened by contact with a great art. 



Of George Sand's latest work it is hardly necessary to speak 

 here. Its merits and demerits are essentially and, as far as we 

 are concerned at present, those of the earlier periods. There is 

 noticeable a constantly growing disinclination to air her per- 

 sonal convictions and feelings, together with a marked tendency 

 to rationalize the action, which is quite new, and a very per- 

 ceptible loss of reality, the result, perhaps, of waning enthusi- 

 asm, perhaps of overstudy of the plot, for she could do nothing 

 well that she could not do naturally. It is better to leave her 

 at the moment when her gift for improvisation, the heritage of 

 the born story-teller, which I have tried to show in its strength 

 and weakness, was at its fullest. This impression is certainly 

 the pleasantest of her to carry away, and, what is more impor- 

 tant, it is also the truest; for it is in respect of this quality that 

 she holds among French novelists of the century — eminently a 

 century of novelists — a unique position. Others may have writ- 



^Manue/ de Vhistoirede la litteraturc fran^aise. 



219 



