Perhaps the keynote to the charm of George Sand’s art is given in her preface to her exquisite novel “La Derniere Aldini.”  Here is none of the accuracy and patience of the scientific enquirer into the “mysterious mixture” man, which we find in George Eliot’s preface to “Middlemarch.”  Indeed these prefaces sum up the remarkably differing characteristics of the two writers.  George Eliot is occupied with “the function of knowledge” in regard to the “ardently willing soul.”  She explains in her preface that the aim of her book is to trace the fate of the Saint.  Theresas of a past age, in the ordinary environment and circumstances of our time.  The problem was, how were detachment of mind and spiritual longing and love to find their developments in a modern prosaic setting.  George Eliot brought to bear on this enquiry all her great powers of observation, discrimination and thought.  Each page of the novel reveals the conscious endeavour of the born thinker to express in artistic form some conception that would help to clear the outlook on which the answer to the problem depended.  George Sand, who had also her philosophising, and her analysing moods, was yet capable of feeling that novels may be romances.  She could write under the sway of pure emotion and apart from theory.  George Eliot never regarded her novels as mere romances.  “Romances,” said George Sand in her preface, “are always ‘fantasies,’ and these fantasies of the imagination are like the clouds which pass.  Whence come the clouds and whither do they go?  In wandering about the Forest of Fontainebleau tete a tete with my son I have dreamed of everything else but this book.  This book which I wrote that evening in the little inn, and which I forgot the next morning, that I might occupy myself only with the flowers and the butterflies.  I could tell you exactly every expedition we made, each amusement we had, but I can not tell you why my spirit went that evening to Venice.  I could easily find a good reason, but it will be more sincere to confess that I do not remember it.”

The mind of George Sand, instead of being engaged with a problem, was like an AEolian harp breathed upon “by every azure breath,

  “That under heaven is blown
  To harmonies and hues beneath,
  As tender as its own.”

So responsive was she that she gave back in wealth of sentiment and idea, the beauty wafted to her by the forest winds.  So instinct with emotion, so alive and receptive and creative that a passing impulse resulted in a work of art of the touching beauty of “La Derniere Aldini.”  So unanalytic of self, that she could not remember the driving impulse that caused her to write the novel.  Impulses like clouds come and go, and the artist soul is the sure recipient of them.  It sees and “follows the gleam”—­it feels the mystic influences.  This is the foundation of that inexplicable thing inspiration, genius.  This receptive-creative faculty is the gift George Sand received, and this preface is the keynote to it.