Mauprat | Page 5

its
manifestation. No writer--not excepting the Brontes--has shown a
deeper sympathy with uncommon temperaments, misunderstood aims,

consciences with flickering lights, the discontented, the abnormal, or
the unhappy. The great modern specialist for nervous diseases has not
improved on her analysis of the neuropathic and hysterical. There is
scarcely a novel of hers in which some character does not appear who
is, in the usual phrase, out of the common run. Yet, with this perfect
understanding of the exceptional case, she never permits any science of
cause and effect to obscure the rules and principles which in the main
control life for the majority. It was, no doubt, this balance which made
her a popular writer, even while she never ceased to keep in touch with
the most acute minds of France.
She possessed, in addition to creative genius of an order especially
individual and charming, a capacity for the invention of ideas. There
are in many of her chapters more ideas, more suggestions than one
would find in a whole volume of Flaubert. It is not possible that these
surprising, admirable, and usually sound thoughts were the result of
long hours of reflection. They belonged to her nature and a quality of
judgment which, even in her most extravagant romances, is never for a
moment swayed from that sane impartiality described by the
unobservant as common sense.
Her fairness to women was not the least astounding of her gifts. She is
kind to the beautiful, the yielding, above all to the very young, and in
none of her stories has she introduced any violently disagreeable
female characters. Her villains are mostly men, and even these she
invests with a picturesque fatality which drives them to errors, crimes,
and scoundrelism with a certain plaintive, if relentless, grace. The
inconstant lover is invariably pursued by the furies of remorse; the
brutal has always some mitigating influence in his career; the libertine
retains through many vicissitudes a seraphic love for some faithful
Solveig.
Humanity meant far more to her than art: she began her literary career
by describing facts as she knew them: critics drove her to examine their
causes, and so she gradually changed from the chronicler with strong
sympathies to the interpreter with a reasoned philosophy. She
discovered that a great deal of the suffering in this world is due not so

much to original sin, but to a kind of original stupidity, an
unimaginative, stubborn stupidity. People were dishonest because they
believed, wrongly, that dishonesty was somehow successful. They were
cruel because they supposed that repulsive exhibitions of power
inspired a prolonged fear. They were treacherous because they had
never been taught the greater strength of candour. George Sand tried to
point out the advantage of plain dealing, and the natural goodness of
mankind when uncorrupted by a false education. She loved the
wayward and the desolate: pretentiousness in any disguise was the one
thing she suspected and could not tolerate. It may be questioned
whether she ever deceived herself; but it must be said, that on the
whole she flattered weakness--and excused, by enchanting eloquence,
much which cannot always be justified merely on the ground that it is
explicable. But to explain was something--all but everything at the time
of her appearance in literature. Every novel she wrote made for
charity--for a better acquaintance with our neighbour's woes and our
own egoism. Such an attitude of mind is only possible to an absolutely
frank, even Arcadian, nature. She did what she wished to do: she said
what she had to say, not because she wanted to provoke excitement or
astonish the multitude, but because she had succeeded eminently in
leading her own life according to her own lights. The terror of
appearing inconsistent excited her scorn. Appearances never troubled
that unashamed soul. This is the magic, the peculiar fascination of her
books. We find ourselves in the presence of a freshness, a primeval
vigour which produces actually the effect of seeing new scenes, of
facing a fresh climate. Her love of the soil, of flowers, and the sky, for
whatever was young and unspoilt, seems to animate every page--even
in her passages of rhetorical sentiment we never suspect the burning
pastille, the gauze tea-gown, or the depressed pink light. Rhetoric it
may be, but it is the rhetoric of the sea and the wheat field. It can be
spoken in the open air and read by the light of day.
George Sand never confined herself to any especial manner in her
literary work. Her spontaneity of feeling and the actual fecundity, as it
were, of her imaginative gift, could not be restrained, concentrated, and
formally arranged as it was in the case of the two first masters of
modern French novel-writing. Her work in this respect may be

compared to a gold