rare talent, but by failing to see that the rare talent was pointing out
truths very valuable to his own safety. This is what happened in France
when George Sand--the greatest woman writer the world has known, or is
ever likely to know--was attacked by the orthodox critics of her time.
They feared her warnings; they detested her sincerity--a sincerity
displayed as much in her life as in her works (the hypocrite's Paradise
was precisely her idea of Hell); they resented bitterly an independence
of spirit which in a man would have been in the highest degree
distinguished, which remained, under every test, untamable. With a kind
of _bonhomie_ which one can only compare with Fielding's, with a passion
as great as Montaigne's for acknowledging the truths of experience,
with an absence of self-consciousness truly amazing in the artistic
temperament of either sex, she wrote exactly as she thought, saw and
felt. Humour was not her strong point. She had an exultant joy in
living, but laughter, whether genial or sardonic, is not in her work.
Irony she seldom, if ever, employed; satire she never attempted. It was
on the maternal, the sympathetic side that her femininity, and therefore
her creative genius, was most strongly developed. She was masculine only
in the deliberate libertinism of certain episodes in her own life. This
was a characteristic--one on no account to be overlooked or denied or
disguised, but it was not her character. The character was womanly,
tender, exquisitely patient and good-natured. She would take cross
humanity in her arms, and carry it out into the sunshine of the fields;
she would show it flowers and birds, sing songs to it, tell it stories,
recall its original beauty. Even in her moods of depression and revolt,
one recognises the fatigue of the strong. It is never for a moment the
lassitude of the feeble, the weary spite of a sick and ill-used soul. As
she was free from personal vanity, she was also free from hysteria. On
marriage--the one subject which drove her to a certain though always
disciplined violence--she clearly felt more for others than they