The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 3 | Page 2

restoration to dignity and honor of
this poor body, so calumniated by the soul. When women all resort to
the street--when to perform the marriage ceremony it will be enough to

open the window and call on God as witness, priest, and
wedding-guest--then all prudery will be destroyed; there will be
espousals everywhere, and we shall rise the same as the birds to the
grandeur of nature. My criticism on books of the sort of George Sand's
has then no value except in the vulgar order of things past, and
therefore I trust she will not be offended by it. The admiration I profess
for her ought to make her excuse these remarks, which have their origin
in the infelicity of my age. Once I should have been more carried away
by the Muses. Those daughters of heaven were in times past my lovely
mistresses, now they are only my ancient friends. At evening they kept
me company by the fireside, but they soon depart; for I go to bed early,
and then they hasten to take their places around the hearth-stone of
Madame Sand.
Without doubt Madame Sand will in this path prove her intellectual
omnipotence, but yet she will please less, because she will be less
original. She will fancy she augments her power by venturing into the
depths of these reveries, beneath which we deplorable common mortals
are buried, and she will be mistaken. In fact she is much superior to this
extravagance, this vagueness, this presumptuous balderdash. At the
same time that a person endowed with a rare but too flexible faculty,
should be guarded against follies of the higher order, he ought also to
be warned that fantastic compositions, subjective or intimate, painting
(so runs the jargon) are restricted; that their course is in youth; that its
springs are drying up every instant, and that after a number of
productions the writer finishes with nothing but weak repetitions.
Is it very likely that Madame Sand will always find the same charm in
what she now composes? Will not the merit and the enthusiasm of
twenty lose their value in her mind as the works of my first days are
depreciated in mine? There is nothing changeless except the labors of
the antique muse, and they are sustained by a nobility of manners, a
beauty of language, and a majesty of sentiments, which belong to the
entire human species. The fourth book of the Eneid remains forever
exposed to the admiration of men because it is suspended in heaven.
The ships bearing the founder of the Roman Empire,--Dido, the
foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after having announced

Hannibal:
Exoriare aliquis nostius exossibus ulta.--
Love causing the rivality of Rome and Carthage to leap from the flame
of his torch, lighting with his own hand the funeral pile, whose blaze
the fugitive Eneas perceives upon the waves,--is altogether another
thing than the promenade of a dreamer in the woods, or the
disappearance of a libertine who drowns himself in the sea. Madame
Sand will, I trust, yet associate her talents with subjects as durable as
her genius.
Madame Sand can only be converted by the preaching of that
missionary with bald forehead and hoary beard, called Time. A voice
less austere meanwhile enchains the captive ear of the poet. In fact, I
am persuaded that the talent of Madame Sand has some of its roots in
corruption; in becoming modest she would become commonplace. It
would have been otherwise had she always remained in that sanctuary
not frequented by men; her power of love, restrained and concealed
beneath the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her heart those
decent melodies which belong at once to the woman and the angel.
However that may be, audacity of ideas and voluptuousness of manners
form a spot not before cleared up by a daughter of Adam, and which,
submitted to a woman's culture, has yielded a harvest of unknown
flowers. Let us permit Madame Sand to produce these perilous marvels
till the approach of winter; she will sing no more when the North wind
has come. Meanwhile, less improvident than the grasshopper, let her
make provision of glory for the time when there will be a famine of
pleasure. The mother of Musarion was wont to repeat to her child:
"Thou wilt not always be sixteen; will Choereas always remember his
oath, his tears and his caresses?"
For the rest, women have often been seduced, and as it were carried off,
by their own youth, but toward the days of autumn, restored to the
maternal hearth, they have added to their harps the grave or plaintive
chord on which either religion or unhappiness finds expression. Old
age is a traveler in the night time; the earth is hidden from sight and he