tiger himself to manage. And, after he had finished Balzac's Peau de Chagrin, she was a mysterious beauty, whose every look and every word had a profound meaning. The issue of this versatile passion is, that Horace gets tired of his mistress, and behaves so cruelly to her that she leaves him, and he thinks she has committed suicide. The flutterings of temporary remorse, which this event produces in his mind, are stilled by the advances of a patrician coquette and the advice of a patrician debauchee, who explains to him that the suicide of his mistress will be the greatest of advantages to him, and make him irresistible with the fair sex. In the background of the story there is the dim figure of a heavenly-minded waiter, who has nourished a deep love for Marthe through all the vicissitudes of her unchastity, and who, if he is not allowed to adorn the tale by very frequent intervention, points the moral by the superiority which his steady flame evinces over the evanescent scintillations of the student's love.

"I

In Lucrezia Floriani, the imperfect lover is viewed from a very different side. Prince Karol loves well enough, but not wisely enough. We know from the autobiography what was the character attempted to be drawn under this name. have traced," says the authoress, "in Prince Karol the character of a man limited in his nature, exclusive in his feelings, exclusive in his requirements." He represents the affections of a man without manliness. The leading thought of the writer seems to have been, the impossibility of a woman being happy with a love which is in its essential qualities feminine. She finds no strength to support, no calmness to tranquillise her. Karol's love is intense, constant, unselfish. A goodhearted cheerful man of the world is introduced as a rival, in order to exhibit a contrast. Salvator, we read, sought for happiness in love; and when he could not find it, his love vanished gently away. But Karol loved for the sake of loving; no suffering could repel him. And yet he killed his mistress, a woman of large overflowing heart. His eagerness to absorb the whole of her being in return for the surrender of his own, cut her off from every enjoyment, and at length from the possibility of living. He was jealous of her performing the simplest action for another. "If she smelt a flower, if she picked up a stone, if she caught a butterfly to add to her child's collection, if she caressed her dog, he would murmur to himself, 'Every thing pleases and amuses her; she admires and loves every thing; she cannot, then, love me,-me, who do not see or admire, or cherish, or understand aught in the world but her. We are separated by an abyss."" His love is aptly compared to a process of killing by sticking innumerable pins into the flesh;

and his mistress sinks under the agony of an endless series of trifling irritations.

It is much easier to paint the wrong love than the right; but in one tale George Sand has attempted to sketch an affection which is equally profound and durable. Mauprat is one of the best of her novels, and Edmée is perhaps the best of her heroines. The circumstances of the story are so exceptional, that the difficulties of portraying a worthy love in man are hardly met. It is true that Bernard tells the tale when he is eighty, and can say that from his boyhood to his old age he never loved any one else, nor ever for a moment ceased to love Edmée; but the plot, which turns on the moral education of a fierce undisciplined boy, under the guidance of a refined highspirited girl, enables the writer to avoid drawing the perfection of love by drawing the imperfection of an unformed character. What Bernard was after his training was finished and he had won his wife, we are not told; we are only asked to watch how his passion, at first brutal and instinctive, becomes gradually heightened and purified. But we must not examine such points too narrowly. It is seldom that a novelist keeps any purpose in view throughout, and we look for something else in a story than philosophical completeness. And certainly the picture of the two cousins Edmée and Bernard is exquisitely drawn, and the gradual progress of the education conceived with great nicety of thought and worked out with admirable skill. Edmée, caught in the robbers' stronghold of Roche-Mauprat, in order to save her honour purchases her deliverance from disgraceful violence by a vow never to belong to any one but Bernard, then a hot-headed young savage. His first step in education is the victory over himself which lets his cousin go free; and the nature of the victory shows the extremely low moral point at which he begins. His next stage is the determining to obey her wishes-not to get drunk, and not to contradict her father. Then he discovers that she recoils from the childish savage to whom she has bound herself, although she secretly loves him; and he comprehends that she will kill herself rather than give herself to him before he has learnt the lesson of which he stands in such pressing need. The comprehension of this, the realisation to himself of the fact that a woman would rather die than allow herself to be brutalised to his level, is the great awakening force which stimulates him to a new life. It is impossible to describe the beauty with which the action of Edmée's influence is conveyed. Mauprat is not written according to an English model. The handling is broad. George Sand tries to imagine clearly, and she certainly expresses openly, what would be the real feelings of a hot-blooded boy.

She neither shrinks from the subject of physical sensations, nor veils it in the obscurity of penny-a-lining euphemisms. But if she is so far truer to nature than would here be thought decorous, she is also true to nature in a manner that is really admirable. She is true to the power of purity, to the sustaining force of generous thoughts, and to the docility of a passion great enough to be humble.

When, in a love-story, one of the lovers is a married woman, there is undoubtedly a disagreeable aspect in which the progress of a wife's passion may be viewed. The husband is very much in the way; what is to become of him? Novelists have very often solved the problem by making the husband ridiculous, or stupid, or worthless. But this is a very shallow contrivance. Suppose the husband is a worthy, honest, tenderhearted, generous man, is any regard to be shown to his feelings? And if he perceives what is going on, what is he to do? George Sand, who likes difficulties of this sort, and never recoils from any task simply because it is arduous, faces the question boldly, and in two of her novels has given us her opinions, or rather sentiments, on the subject.

In Jacques, the husband, who is in middle life, marries a young wife to whom he is passionately attached, and then sees her fascinated by the attractions of a young man of her own age. Fernande, the heroine, is a very good girl, and tries hard to please and love her husband; but she is only at ease when she is with Octave. The young pair discuss the character and conduct of the husband in a very impartial and ingenuous manner, and are most hearty in pronouncing that he is the object of their deepest respect and admiration. Still love will have its way, and the inexorable affinities impel them to combine. Jacques sees as clearly as possible what is happening. He understands that he is not wanted. He complains that society will not let him act as he would wish; it will not permit him to stand by and calmly bless the union of his wife with her paramour. So he considers that no choice is left him, and he prepares to comfort her by his suicide. But so great is his generosity, that he fears lest he should make the lovers miserable if he leaves them with the sting of thinking they have driven him to death. So, by adopting a few clever precautions, he succeeds in making them suppose that he has accidentally fallen from the cliff at the foot of which his corpse is found. This is one way of getting over the difficulty. The husband behaves most handsomely, and withdraws.

But the husband in the other novel to which we refer, Le Péché de M. Antoine, behaves better, or rather, the circumstances of the plot permit him to take the step which George

Sand would have society make open to every husband. The offspring of the adultery is the heroine of the story, and she brings about a happy reconciliation between her father and the husband of her mother. An unphilosophical irritation has kept them asunder for years; but Gilberte, the heroine, when driven by a storm to seek for shelter, happens to see a portrait of her mother in the house of what, speaking conventionally, we may call the injured husband, and she is struck by its likeness to a miniature which she has often seen in the hands of her father, who, contrary to the usual practice in such cases, has brought her up. "Her modest imagination refusing to comprehend the possibility of an adultery," she is naturally puzzled ; but she takes advantage of the occasion to make friends with the first possessor of the original, and at length gets him to pardon the second possessor. Friendship survives the conflict and consequences of youthful passion, and they are all happy at the end of the book. This, then, is the moral: forgive and forget if you can; or if not, shoot yourself, so as not to annoy any one. If we compare this with the standard of ordinary society, it seems absurd; if with a high standard, it seems lamentably false; and the whole doctrine of elective affinities on which it rests is worse than ridiculous, but it bears a sort of relationship to many thoughts and feelings which we cannot call absolutely untrue or wholly depraved. It belongs to that flux of opinion which is the great characteristic of modern society, when men are striving to gain a substitute for the construction which a past age put on Christianity, and to incorporate their religious traditions and feelings with a mass of thoughts at present utterly confused-partly derived from the notions of antiquity, partly the growth of political changes, and partly the fruit of a real progress in a scientific knowledge both of the moral and the physical world.

It is because there is something elevated in her tone, and because she encounters great and embarrassing problems, that George Sand has made herself a name. But the minor charms, and the minor merits of her writings, ought never to be forgotten. And while we are speaking of her as a portrayer of passion, we cannot omit to notice the many subordinate ways in which she shows her knowledge, her power of reflection, and her sense of beauty with regard to love. Even the physical minutiæ, the magnetism of attraction, the nervous crises, the effect of dress, carriage, and posture, which she notes so carefully, and introduces so effectively, although they belong to the sensual side of love, indicate great power of observation. She constantly makes general remarks on the situation of lovers in the different stages of passion which betray accurate knowledge

and a faculty of sympathetic penetration. Lucrezia Floriani abounds in such remarks. When, for instance, Karol knows that his love is returned, he begins to tremble at his own success, and think his victory had been too easy. "Karol feared to see Lucrezia's love cease as quickly as it had been kindled ; and like all men in such circumstances, he got alarmed at the impulsive haste which he had so much admired and blessed." Sometimes a little touch of sentimentalism is thrown in so as to double and complicate the feelings. When Mauprat receives his first kiss from Edmeé: "This kiss, the first a woman had given me since my infancy, recalled to me, I know not how or why, the last kiss of my mother; and instead of pleasure, it produced in me a profound sadness." But the power of George Sand goes much further. She has shown that she can do what so few have ever really done; she can describe young, fresh, pure love so as to make it seem something new, true to life, and yet her own. There is perhaps no passage in her works which, taken by itself, can rival the beautiful account of Bénédict's feelings for Valentine, as he sat with her and her friend on a summer day by a sheet of water, and watched her image alternately formed and broken on the rippling surface. No one without a real gift of native poetry could have conceived or written it.

Next to her treatment of the passion of love, her socialism is the most salient feature in George Sand's writings. She repeatedly proclaims herself a socialist; and in Le Péché de M. Antoine she has given the world a novel in which her doctrines on this head are supposed to be embodied. But frequently as she recurs to the topic in her writings, we must not ask too narrowly what her creed is, or what she means by socialism. In the first place, she uses the privilege of female philosophers to avoid bringing any point to a direct and definite issue. But she is also checked in her communistic aspirations by her common sense; and in no direction is her combination of sentimentalism with a sound appreciation of actual life so visible as in that of her socialism. She is alternately very untrue and very true, very blind and very clear-sighted. In her great socialist novel, she lays down two propositions, which, if taken out of the haze of fine writing, are simply absurd. The first is, that a capitalist, by setting up manufactures in a poor neighbourhood, and employing work-people, ruins every body about him. The second is, that a proprietor who never interferes with, or is on his guard against the poor, is never robbed. If any one has lived in the country for a fortnight and believes either of these two statements, all reasoning would be powerless to convince him of his error. No wonder that George Sand, who owns she could never manage her own property, and tells us that she never exactly