The English public conceives of her as of a novel-writer who wrote stories more or less interesting; the earlier ones objectionable and dangerous, the later ones, some of them, unexceptionable and fit to be put into the hands of the youth of both sexes.  With such a conception of George Sand, a story of hers like Consuelo[308] comes to be elevated in England into quite an undue relative importance, and to pass with very many people for her typical work, displaying all that is really valuable and significant in the author. Consuelo is a charming story.  But George Sand is something more than a maker of charming stories, and only a portion of her is shown in Consuelo.  She is more, likewise, than a creator of characters.  She has created, with admirable truth to nature, characters most attractive and attaching, such as Edmee, Genevieve, Germain.[309] But she is not adequately expressed by them.  We do not know her unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.

In order to feel this spirit it is not, indeed, necessary to read all that she ever produced.  Even three or four only out of her many books might suffice to show her to us, if they were well chosen; let us say, the Lettres d’un Voyageur, Mauprat, Francois le Champi,[310] and a story which I was glad to see Mr. Myers,[311] in his appreciative notice of Madame Sand, single out for praise,—­Valvedre.[312] In these may be found all the principal elements of their author’s strain:  the cry of agony and revolt, the trust in nature and beauty, the aspiration towards a purged and renewed human society.

Of George Sand’s strain, during forty years, these are the grand elements.  Now it is one of them which appears most prominently, now it is another.  The cry of agony and revolt is in her earlier work only, and passes away in her later.  But in the evolution of these three elements, —­the passion of agony and revolt, the consolation from nature and from beauty, the ideas of social renewal,—­in the evolution of these is George Sand and George Sand’s life and power.  Through their evolution her constant motive declares and unfolds itself, that motive which we have set forth above:  “the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man’s normal life as we shall one day know it.”  This is the motive, and through these elements is its evolution:  an evolution pursued, moreover, with the most unfailing resolve, the most absolute sincerity.

The hour of agony and revolt passed away for George Sand, as it passed away for Goethe, as it passes away for their readers likewise.  It passes away and does not return; yet those who, amid the agitations, more or less stormy, of their youth, betook themselves to the early works of George Sand, may in later life cease to read them, indeed, but they can no more forget them than they can forget Werther[313].  George Sand speaks somewhere of her “days of Corinne."[314] Days of Valentine, many