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

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 can see nothing but the heavens shining above his head.
I have not seen Madame Sand dressed in men's clothes or wearing the blouse and the