the influences of nature, triumphantly seeking its own or shattered
in magnificent despair. In her novels of the first period, George
Sand takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant. In Indiana and its
immediate successors, consciously or unconsciously, she declares to
the world what a beautiful soul M. Dudevant condemned to sewing on
buttons; in Jacques she paints the man who might fitly have matched
her spirit; and by the entire series, which now impresses us as
fantastic in sentiment no less than in plot, she won her early
reputation as the apologist for free love, the adversary of
marriage.

In her middle period--say from 1838 to 1848--of which The Miller of
Aginbault, Consuelo, and The Countess of Rudolstadt are
representative works, there is a marked subsidence of her personal
emotion, and, in compensation, a rising tide of humanitarian
enthusiasm. Gradually satiated with erotic passion, gradually
convinced that it is rather a mischief-maker than a reconstructive
force in a decrepit society, she is groping, indeed, between her
successive liaisons for an elusive felicity, for a larger mission
than inspiring Musset's Alexandrines or Chopin's nocturnes. It is
somewhat amusing, and at the same time indicative of her vague but
deep-seated moral yearnings, to find her writing rebukingly to
Sainte-Beuve, as early as 1834, apropos of his epicurean Volupte:
"Let the rest do as they like; but you, dear friend, you must
produce a book which will change and better mankind, do you see? You
can, and therefore should. Oh, if poor I could do it! I should lift
my head again and my heart would no longer be broken; but in vain I
seek a religion: Shall it be God, shall it be love, friendship, the
public welfare? Alas, it seems to me that my soul is framed to
receive all these impressions, without one effacing another ... Who