PLAYS AND LATER NOVELS.
There are few eminent novelists that have not tried their hands at
writing for the stage; and Madame Sand had additional inducements to do
so, beyond those of ambition satiated with literary success, and tempted
by the charm of making fresh conquest of the public in a more direct and
personal fashion.
From early childhood she had shown a strong liking for the theatre. The
rare performances given by travelling acting-companies at La Chatre had
been her greatest delight when a girl. At the convent-school she had
arranged Moliere from memory for representation by herself and her
school-fellows, careful so to modify the piece as to avoid all
possibility of shocking the nuns. Thus the Sisters applauded _Le Malade
Imaginaire_ without any suspicion that the author was one whose works,
for them, were placed under a ban, and whose very name they held in
devout abhorrence. She inherited from her father a taste for acting,
which she transmitted to her children. We have seen her during her
literary novitiate in Paris, a studious observer at all theatres, from
the classic boards of the Francais down to the lowest of popular stages,
the Funambules, where reigned at that time a real artist in pantomime,
Debureau. His Pierrot, a sort of modified Pulchinello, was renowned; and
attracted more fastidious critics to his audience than the Paris
artisans whose idol he was. Since then Madame Sand had numbered among
her personal friends such leading dramatic celebrities as Madame Dorval,
Bocage, and Pauline Garcia. "I like actors," she says playfully, "which
has scandalized some austere people. I have also been found fault with
for liking the peasantry. Among these I have passed my life, and as I
found them, so have I described them. As these, in the light of the sun,
give us our daily bread for our bodies, so those by gaslight give us our
daily bread of fiction, so needful to the wearied spirit, troubled by
realities." Peasants and players seem to be the types of humanity
farthest removed from each other, and it is worthy of remark that George
Sand was equally successful in her presentation of both.
Her preference for originality and spontaneity before all other
qualities in a dramatic artist was characteristic of herself, though
not of her nation. Thus it was that Madame Dorval, the heroine of
_Antony_ and _Marion Delorme_, won her unbounded admiration. Even in
Racine she clearly preferred her to Mlle. Mars, as being a less studied
actress, and one who abandoned herself more to the inspiration of the
moment. The effect produced, as described by Madame Sand, will be
understood by all keenly alive, like herself, to the enjoyment of
dramatic art. "She" (Madame Dorval) "seemed to me to be myself, more
expansive, and to express in action and emotion all that I seek to
express in writing." And compared with such an art, in which conception
and expression are simultaneous, her own art of words and phrases would
at such moments appear to her as but a pale reflection.
Bocage, the great character actor of his time, was another who likewise
appealed particularly to her sympathies, as the personation, on the
boards, of the protest of the romantic school against the slavery of
convention and tradition. Her acquaintance with him dated from the first
representation of Hugo's _Lucrece Borgia_, February, 1833, when Bocage
and the author of _Indiana_, then strangers to each other, chanced to
sit side by side. In their joint enthusiasm over the play they made the
beginning of a thirty years' friendship, terminated only by Bocage's
death in 1862. "It was difficult not to quarrel with him," she says of
this popular favorite; "he was susceptible and violent; it was
impossible not to be reconciled with him quickly. He was faithful and
magnanimous. He forgave you admirably for wrongs you had never done him,
and it was as good and real as though the pardon had been actual and
well-founded, so strong was his imagination, so complete his good
faith."
The assistance of Madame Dorval, added to the strength of the Comedie
Francaise company, did not, however, save from failure Madame Sand's
first drama, _Cosima_, produced, as will be remembered, in 1840. She
allowed nearly a decade to elapse before again seriously competing for
theatrical honors, by a second effort in a different style, and more
satisfactory in its results.
This, a dramatic adaptation by herself of her novel, _Francois le
Champi_, was produced at the Odeon in the winter of 1849. Generally
speaking, to make a good play out of a good novel, the playwright must
begin by murdering the novel; and here, as in all George Sand's dramatic
versions of her romances, we seem to miss the best part of the original.
However, the curious simplicity of the piece, the rustic scenes and
personages, here faithfully copied from reality, unlike the conventional
village and villager of opera comique, and the pleasing sentiment that
runs through the tale, were found refreshing by audiences upon whom the
sensational incidents and harrowing emotions of their modern drama were
already beginning to pall. The result was a little stage triumph for
Madame Sand. It helped to draw to her pastoral tales the attention they
deserved, but had not instantly won in all quarters. Theophile Gautier
writes playfully of this piece: "The success of _Francois le Champi_ has
given all our vaudeville writers an appetite for rusticity. Only let
this go on a little, and we shall be inundated by what has humorously
been called the 'ruro-drama.' Morvan hats and Berrichon head-dresses
will invade the scenes, and no language be spoken but in dialect."
Madame Sand was naturally encouraged to repeat the experiment. This was
done in _Claudie_ (1851) and _Le Pressoir_ (1853), ruro-dramas both, and
most favorably received. The first-named has a simple and pathetic
story, and, as usual with Madame Sand's plays, it was strengthened at
its first production by the support of some of the best acting talent in
Paris--Fechter, then a rising _jeune premier_, and the veteran Bocage
ably representing, respectively, youth and age. Old Berrichon airs were
introduced with effect, as also such picturesque rustic festival customs
as the ancient harvest-home ceremony, in which the last sheaf is brought
on a wagon, gaily decked out with poppies, cornflowers and ribbons, and
receives a libation of wine poured by the hand of the oldest or youngest
person present.
"But what the theatre can never reproduce," laments Madame Sand, "is the
majesty of the frame--the mountain of sheaves solemnly approaching,
drawn by three pairs of enormous oxen, the whole adorned with flowers,
with fruit, and with fine little children perched upon the top of the
last sheaves."
Henceforward a good deal of her time and interest continued to be
absorbed by these dramatic compositions. But though mostly eliciting
during her lifetime a gratifying amount of public favor and applause,
the best of them cannot for an instant be placed in the same high rank
as her novels. For with all her wide grasp of the value of dramatic art
and her exact appreciation of the strength and weakness of the acting
world, her plays remain, to great expectations, uniformly disappointing.
Her specialty in fiction lies in her favorite art of analyzing and
putting before us, with extreme clearness, the subtlest ramifications,
the most delicate intricacies of feeling and thought. A stage audience
has its eyes and ears too busy to give its full attention to the finer
complications of sentiment and motive; or, at least, in order to keep
its interest alive and its understanding clear, an accentuation of
outline is needed, which she neglects even to seek.
Her assertion, that the niceties of emotion are sufficient to found a
good play upon, no one now will dream of disputing. But for this an art
of execution is needed of which she had not the instinct. The action is
insufficient, or rather, the sense of action is not conveyed. The
slightness of plot--a mere thread in most instances--requires that the
thread shall at least be never allowed to drop. But she cuts or slackens
it perpetually, long arguments and digressions intervening, and the
dialogue, whose monotony is unrelieved by wit, nowhere compensates for
the limited interest of the action. Awkward treatment is but half felt
when subject and situations are dramatically strong; but plays with so
airy and impalpable a basis as these need to be sustained by the utmost
perfection of construction, concision and polish of dialogue.
Her novel _Mauprat_ has many dramatic points, and she received a score
of applications for leave to adapt it to the stage. She preferred to
prepare the version herself, and it was played in the winter of 1853-4,
with moderate success. But it suffers fatally from comparison with its
original. An extreme instance is _Flaminio_ (1854), a protracted drama,
drawn by Madame Sand from her novelette _Teverino_. This is a
fantasy-piece whose audacity is redeemed, as are certain other
blemishes, by the poetic suggestiveness of the figure of Madeline, the
bird-charmer; whilst the picturesque sketch of Teverino, the idealized
Italian bohemian, too indolent to turn his high natural gifts to any
account, has proved invaluable to the race of novelists, who are not yet
tired of reproducing it in large. The work is one addressed mainly to
the imagination.
In the play we come down from the clouds; the poetry is gone, taste is
shocked, fancy uncharmed, the improbabilities become grotesque, and the
whole is distorted and tedious. Madame Sand's personages are never weary
of analyzing their sentiments. Her flowing style, so pleasant to read,
carries us swiftly and easily through her dissertations in print, before
we have time to tire of them. On the stage such colloquies soon appear
lengthy and unnatural. The climax of absurdity is reached in _Flaminio_,
where we find the adventurer expatiating to the man of the world on
"the divinity of his essence."
There is scarcely a department of theatrical literature in which Madame
Sand does not appear as an aspirant. She was a worshipper of
Shakespeare, acknowledging him as the king of dramatic writers. For her
attempt to adapt "As You Like It" to suit the tastes of a Parisian
audience, she disarms criticism by a preface in the form of a letter to
M. Regnier, of the Comedie Francaise, prefixed to the printed play. Here
she says plainly that to resolve to alter Shakespeare is to resolve to
murder, and that she aims at nothing more than at giving the French
public some idea of the original. In "As You Like It" the license of
fancy taken is too wide for the piece to be safely represented to her
countrymen, since it must jar terribly on "that French reason which,"
remarks Madame Sand, "we are so vain of, and which deprives us of so
many originalities quite as precious as itself." The fantastic, which
had so much attraction for her (possibly a result of her part German
origin), is a growth that has hard work to flourish on French soil. The
reader will remember the fate of Weber's _Freischuetz_, outrageously
hissed when first produced at Paris in its original form. Nine days
later it was reproduced, having been taken to pieces and put together
again by M. Castil-Blaze, and thus as _Robin des Bois_ it ran for 357
nights. The reckless imagination that distinguishes the Shakespearian
comedy and does not shrink before the introduction of a lion and a
serpent into the forest of Arden, and the miraculous and instantaneous
conversion of the wretch Oliver into a worthy suitor for Celia, needed
to be toned down for acceptance by the Parisians. But Madame Sand was
less fortunate than M. Castil-Blaze. Her version, produced at the
Theatre Francais, in 1856, failed to please, although supported by such
actors as Delaunay, Arnold-Plessy, and Favart. Macready, who had made
Madame Sand's acquaintance in 1845, when he was giving Shakespearian
performances in Paris, and whom she greatly admired, dedicating to him
her little theatrical romance _Le Chateau des Desertes_, was present at
this representation and records it as a failure. But of her works for
the stage, which number over a score, few like her _Comme il vous
plaira_ missed making some mark at the time, the prestige of her name
and the exceptionally favorable circumstances under which they were
produced securing more than justice for their intrinsic merit. It was
natural that she should over-estimate their value and continue to add to
their number. These pieces would be carefully rehearsed on the little
stage in the house at Nohant, often with the aid of leading professional
actors; and there, at least, the success was unqualified.
Her ingenious novel _Les Beaux Messieurs Bois Dore_, dramatized with the
aid of Paul Meurice and acted in 1862, was a triumph for Madame Sand and
her friend Bocage. The form and spirit of this novel seem inspired by
Sir Walter Scott, and though far from perfect, it is a striking instance
of the versatility of her imaginative powers. The leading character of
the septuagenarian Marquis, with his many amiable virtues, and his one
amiable weakness, a longing to preserve intact his youthfulness of
appearance as he has really preserved his youthfulness of heart, is both
natural and original, comic and half pathetic withal. The part in the
play seemed made for Bocage, and his heart was set upon undertaking it.
But his health was failing at the time, and the manager hesitated about
giving him the role. "Take care, my friend," wrote Bocage to Madame
Sand; "perhaps I shall die if I play the part; but if I play it not, I
shall die of that, to a certainty." She insisted, and play it he did, to
perfection, she tells us. "He did not act the Marquis de Bois Dore; he
was the personage himself, as the author had dreamt him." It was to be
his last achievement, and he knew it. "It is my end," he said one
night, "but I shall die like a soldier on the field of honor." And so he
did, continuing to play the role up till a few days before his death.
More lasting success has attended Madame Sand in two of the lightest of
society comedies, _Le Mariage de Victorine_ and _Le Marquis de
Villemer_, which seem likely to take a permanent place in the
_repertoire_ of the French stage. The first, a continuation that had
suggested itself to her of Sedaine's century-old comedy, _Le Philosophe
sans le savoir_, escapes the ill fate that seems to attend sequels in
general. It is of the slightest materials, but holds together, and is
gracefully conceived and executed. First produced at the Gymnase in
1851, it was revived during the last year of Madame Sand's life in a
manner very gratifying to her, being brought out with great applause at
the Comedie Francaise, preceded on each occasion by Sedaine's play, and
the same artists appearing in both.
The excellent dramatic version of her popular novel _Le Marquis de
Villemer_, first acted in 1864, is free from the defects that weaken
most of her stage compositions. It is said that in preparing it she
accepted some hints from Alexander Dumas the younger. Whatever the
cause, the result is a play where characters, composition and dialogue
leave little to be desired.
_L'autre_, her latest notable stage success, brings us down to 1870,
when it was acted at the Gymnase, Madame Sarah Bernhardt impersonating
the heroine. This not very agreeable play is derived, with material
alterations, from Madame Sand's agreeable novel _La Confession d'une
jeune Fille_, published in 1864.
If, however, her works for the stage, which fill four volumes, added but
little, in proportion to their quantity, to her permanent fame, her
dramatic studies added fresh interest and variety to her experience,
which brought forth excellent fruit in her novels. Actors, their art and
way of life have fared notoriously badly in fiction. Such pictures have
almost invariably fallen into the extreme of unreality or that of
caricature, whether for want of information or want of sympathy in those
who have drawn them.
The subject, always attractive for Madame Sand, is one in which she is
always happy. Already in the first year of her literary career her keen
appreciation of the art and its higher influences had prompted her
clever novelette _La Marquise_. Here she illustrates the power of the
stage as a means of expression--of the truly inspired actor, though his
greatness be but momentary, and his heroism a semblance, to strike a
like chord in the heart of the spectator--and, in a corrupt and
artificial age, to keep alive some latent faith in the ideal. Since
then the stage and players had figured repeatedly in her works.
Sometimes she portrays a perfected type, such as Consuelo, or Imperia in
_Pierre qui roule_, but always side by side with more earthly and faulty
representatives such as Corilla and Anzoleto, or Julia and Albany, in
Narcisse, incarnations of the vanity and instability that are the chief
dangers of the profession, drawn with unsparing realism. In _Le Chateau
des Desertes_ we find further many admirable theories and suggestive
ideas on the subject of the regeneration of the theatre. But it fared
with her theatrical as with her political philosophy: she failed in its
application, not because her theories were false, but for want of
practical aptitude for the craft whose principles she understood so
well.
It is impossible here to do more than cast a rapid glance over the
literary work accomplished by George Sand during the first decade of the
empire. It includes more than a dozen novels, of unequal merit, but of
merit for the most part very high. The _Histoire de ma Vie_ was
published in 1855. It is a study of chosen passages out of her life,
rather than a connected autobiography. One out of the four volumes is
devoted to the story of her father's life before her birth; two more to
the story of her childhood and girlhood. The fourth rather indicates
than fully narrates the facts of her existence from the time of her
marriage till the Revolution of 1848. It offers to her admirers
invaluable glimpses into her life and mind, and is a highly interesting
and characteristic composition, if a most irregular chronicle. It has
given rise to two most incompatible-sounding criticisms. Some have been
chiefly struck by its amazing unreserve, and denounced the
over-frankness of the author in revealing herself to the public. Others
complain that she keeps on a mask throughout, and never allows us to see
into the recesses of her mind. Her passion for the analysis of sentiment
has doubtless led her here, as in her romances, to give very free
expression to truths usually better left unspoken. But her silence on
many points about which her readers, whether from mere curiosity or some
more honorable motive, would gladly have been informed, was then
inevitable. It could not have been broken without wounding the
susceptibilities of living persons, which she did right in respecting,
at the cost of disappointment to an inquisitive public.
In January, 1855, a terrible domestic sorrow befell her in the loss of
her six-years-old grandchild, Jeanne Clesinger, to whom she was devoted.
It affected her profoundly. "Is there a more mortal grief," she
exclaims, "than to outlive, yourself, those who should have bloomed upon
your grave?" The blow told upon her mentally and physically; she could
not rally from its effects, till persuaded to seek a restorative in
change of air and scene, which happily did their work.
"I was ill," she says, when writing of these events to a lady
correspondent, later in the same year; "my son took me away to Italy....
I have seen Rome, revisited Florence, Genoa, Frascati, Spezia,
Marseilles. I have walked a great deal, been out in the sun, the rain,
the wind, for whole days out of doors. This, for me, is a certain
remedy, and I have come back cured."
Those who care to follow the mind of George Sand on this Italian journey
may safely infer from _La Daniella_, a novel written after this tour,
and the scene of which is laid in Rome and the Campagna, that the
author's strongest impression of the Eternal City was one of
disillusion. Her hero, a Berrichon artist on his travels, confesses to a
feeling of uneasiness and regret rather than of surprise and admiration.
The ancient ruins, stupendous in themselves, seemed to her spoilt for
effect by their situation in the center of a modern town. "Of the Rome
of the past not enough exists to overwhelm me with its majesty; of the
Rome of the present not enough to make me forget the first, and much too
much to allow me to see her."
But the Baths of Caracalla, where the picture is not set in a frame of
hideous houses, awakened her native enthusiasm. "A grandiose ruin," she
exclaims, "of colossal proportions; it is shut away, isolated, silent
and respected. There you feel the terrific power of the Caesars, and the
opulence of a nation intoxicated with its royalty over the world."
So in the Appian Way, the road of tombs, the fascination of
desolation--a desolation there unbroken and undisfigured by modern
buildings or otherwise--she felt to the full. But whatever came under
her notice she looked on with the eye of the poet and artist, not of the
archaeologist, and approved or disapproved or passed over it accordingly.
The beauties of nature, at Tivoli and Frascati, appealed much more
surely to her sympathies. But of certain sites in the Campagna much
vaunted by tourists and hand-books she remarks pertinently: "If you were
to pass this village" (Marino) "on the railway within a hundred miles of
Paris, you would not pay it the slightest attention." Such places had
their individuality, but she upheld that there is not a corner in the
universe, "however common-place it may appear, but has a character of
its own, unique in this world, for any one who is disposed to feel or
comprehend it." In one of her village tales a sagacious peasant
professes his profound contempt for the man who cannot like the place he
belongs to.
Neither the grottoes and cascades of Tivoli, the cypress and ilex
gardens of Frascati and Albano, nor the ruins of Tusculum, were ever so
pleasant to her eyes as the poplar-fringed banks of the Indre, the
corn-land sand hedgerows of Berry, and the rocky borders of the Creuse
at Crozant and Argenton. She had not ceased making fresh picturesque
discoveries in her own neighborhood. Of these she records an instance in
her pleasant _Promenades autour d'un village_, a lively sketch of a few
days' walking-tour on the banks of the Creuse, undertaken by herself and
some naturalist friends in June, 1857. In studying the interesting and
secluded village of Gargilesse, with its tenth-century church and crypt
with ancient frescoes, its simple and independent-minded population, in
following the course of a river whose natural wild beauties, equal to
those of the Wye, are as yet undisfigured here by railroad or the hand
of man, lingering on its banks full of summer flowers and butterflies,
exploring the castles of Chateaubrun and La Prugne au Pot, George Sand
is happier, more herself, more communicative than in Rome, "the museum
of the universe."
The years 1858 to 1861 show her to us in the fullest conservation of her
powers and in the heyday of activity. The group of novels belonging to
this period, the climax of what may be called her second career, is
sufficiently remarkable for a novelist who was almost a sexagenarian,
including _Elle et Lui_, _L'Homme de Neige_, _La Ville Noire_,
_Constance Verrier_, _Le Marquis de Villemer_ and _Valvedre_. _Elle et
Lui_, in which George Sand at last broke silence in her own defense on
the subject of her rupture with Alfred de Musset, first appeared in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1859. Though many of the details are
fictitious, the author here told the history of her relations with the
deceased poet much too powerfully for her intention to be mistaken or to
escape severe blame. That a magnanimous silence would have been the
nobler course on her part towards the child of genius whose good genius
she had so signally failed to be, need not be disputed. It must be
remembered, however, that De Musset on his side had not refrained during
his lifetime from denouncing in eloquent verse the friend he had
quarreled with, and satirizing her in pungent prose. Making every
possible allowance for poetical figures of speech, he had said enough to
provoke her to retaliate. It is impossible to suppose that there was not
another side to such a question. But Madame Sand could not defend
herself without accusing her lost lover. She often proved herself a
generous adversary--too generous, indeed, for her own advantage--and in
this instance it was clearly not for her own sake that she deferred her
apology.
It is even conceivable that the poet, when in a just frame of mind, and
not seeking inspiration for his _Nuit de Mai_ or _Histoire d'un Merle
blanc_, would not have seen in _Elle et Lui_ a falsification of the
spirit of their history. The theorizing of the outside world in such
matters is of little worth; but the novel bears, conspicuously among
Madame Sand's productions, the stamp of a study from real life, true in
its leading features. And the conduct of the heroine, Therese, though
accounted for and eloquently defended, is by no means, as related,
ideally blameless. After an attachment so strong as to induce a
seriously-minded person, such as she is represented, to throw aside for
it all other considerations, the hastiness with which, on discovering
her mistake, she entertains the idea of bestowing her hand, if not her
heart, on another, is an exhibition of feminine inconsequence which no
amount of previous misconduct on the part of her lover, Laurent, can
justify. Further, Therese is self-deceived in supposing her passion to
have died out with her esteem. She breaks with the culprit and engages
her word to a worthier man. But enough remains over of the past to
prevent her from keeping the promise she ought never to have made. When
she sacrifices her unselfish friend to return to the lover who has made
her miserable, she is sincere, but not heroic. She is too weak to shake
off the influence of the fatal infatuation and shut out Laurent from her
life, nor yet can she accept her heart's choice for better or worse,
even when experience has left her little to learn with regard to
Laurent. Clearly both friend and lover, out of a novel, would feel
wronged. Therese's excuse lies in the extremely trying character of her
companion, whose vagaries may be supposed to have driven her beside
herself at times, just as her airs of superiority and mute reproach may
have driven him not a little mad. Those who wish to know in what spirit
Madame Sand met the attacks upon her provoked by this book, will find
her reply in a very few words at the conclusion of her preface to _Jean
de la Roche_, published the same year.
Most readers of _Elle et Lui_ have been so preoccupied with the
question of the rights and wrongs of the originals in their behavior to
each other, so inclined to judge of the book according to its supposed
accuracy or inaccuracy as a matter of history, that its force, as a
study of the attraction that so often leads two exceptional but
hopeless, irreconcilable spirits to seek in each other a refuge from the
isolation in which their superiority places them, has been somewhat
overlooked. Laurent, whether a true portrait or not, is only too true to
nature; excessive in his admirable powers and in his despicable
weakness. Therese is an equally faithful picture of a woman not quite up
to the level of her own principles, which are so high that any lapse
from them on her part brings down more disasters on herself and on
others than the misdemeanors of avowedly unscrupulous persons.
Within a few months of _Elle et Lui_ had appeared _L'Homme de Neige_,[D]
a work of totally different but equally characteristic cast. The
author's imagination had still all its old zest and activity, and
readers for whom fancy has any charm will find this Scandinavian romance
thoroughly enjoyable. The subject of the marionette theater, here
introduced with such brilliant and ingenious effect, she had studied
both historically and practically. She and her son found it so
fascinating that, years before this time, a miniature stage had been
constructed by the latter at Nohant, over which he presided, and which
they and their friends found an endless source of amusement. Madame Sand
wrote little dramas expressly for such representations, and would sit up
all night, making dresses for the puppets. In an agreeable little
article she has devoted to the subject, she describes how from the
crudest beginnings they succeeded in elaborating their art to a high
pitch; the _repertoire_ of their lilliputian theater including more than
twenty plays, their "company" over a hundred marionettes.
To the next year, 1860, belong the pleasant tale of artisan life, _La
Ville Noire_, and the well-known and popular _Marquis de Villemer_,
notable as a decided success in a _genre_ seldom adopted by her, that of
the purely society novel.
Already Madame Sand had outlived the period of which she was so
brilliant a representative. After the Romantic movement had spent its
force, a reaction had set in that was influencing the younger school of
writers, and that has continued to give the direction to successful
talent until the present day. Of the so-called "realism," Madame Sand
said that it was nothing new. She saw there merely another form of the
same revolt of nature against affectation and convention which had
prompted the Romantic movement, whose disciples had now become guilty of
affectation in their turn. _Madame Bovary_ she pronounced with truth to
be but concentrated Balzac. She was ready to perceive and do justice to
the great ability of the author, as to original genius in any school;
thus of Tourguenief she speaks with enthusiasm: "Realist to see all,
poet to beautify all, great heart to pity and understand all." But she
deplored the increasing tendency among artists to give the preference
among realities to the ugliest and the most painful. Her personal
leanings avowedly were towards the other extreme; but she was too
large-minded not to recognize that truth in one form or another must
always be the prime object of the artist's search. The manner of its
presentation will vary with the age.
Let the realists, if they like, go on proclaiming that all is
prose, and the idealists that all is poesy. The last will have
their rainy days, the first their days of sunshine. In all arts the
victory remains with a privileged few, who go their own ways; and
the discussions of the "schools" will pass away like old fashions.
On the generation of writers that George Sand saw growing up, any
opinion pronounced must be premature. But with regard to herself, it
should now be possible to regard her work in a true perspective. As with
Byron, Dickens, and other popular celebrities, a phase of infinite
enthusiasm for her writings was duly succeeded by a phase of determined
depreciation. The public opinion that survives when blind friendship and
blind enmity have done their worst is likely to be the judgment of
posterity.