IMPRESSIONS OF GEORGE SAND.


Perhaps the keynote to the charm of George Sand's art is given in her
preface to her exquisite novel "La Derniere Aldini." Here is none of
the accuracy and patience of the scientific enquirer into the
"mysterious mixture" man, which we find in George Eliot's preface to
"Middlemarch." Indeed these prefaces sum up the remarkably differing
characteristics of the two writers. George Eliot is occupied with "the
function of knowledge" in regard to the "ardently willing soul." She
explains in her preface that the aim of her book is to trace the fate
of the Saint. Theresas of a past age, in the ordinary environment and
circumstances of our time. The problem was, how were detachment of
mind and spiritual longing and love to find their developments in a
modern prosaic setting. George Eliot brought to bear on this enquiry
all her great powers of observation, discrimination and thought. Each
page of the novel reveals the conscious endeavour of the born thinker
to express in artistic form some conception that would help to clear
the outlook on which the answer to the problem depended. George Sand,
who had also her philosophising, and her analysing moods, was yet
capable of feeling that novels may be romances. She could write under
the sway of pure emotion and apart from theory. George Eliot never
regarded her novels as mere romances. "Romances," said George Sand in
_her_ preface, "are always 'fantasies,' and these fantasies of the
imagination are like the clouds which pass. Whence come the clouds and
whither do they go? In wandering about the Forest of Fontainebleau
tête à tête with my son I have dreamed of everything else but this
book. This book which I wrote that evening in the little inn, and
which I forgot the next morning, that I might occupy myself only with
the flowers and the butterflies. I could tell you exactly every