(2) The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems.  By Rennell Rodd. (David Stott.)

(3) The Wind and Six Sonnets.  By James Ross. (Bristol:  J. W. Arrowsmith.)

(4) Saul of Tarsus.  By Isaac Sharp. (Kegan Paul.)

(5) Highland Daydreams.  By George Mackenzie. (Inverness:  Office of the Northern Chronicle.)

(6) The Story of the Cross.  By Charles Nash. (Elliot Stock.)

M. CARO ON GEORGE SAND

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1888.)

The biography of a very great man from the pen of a very ladylike writer—­this is the best description we can give of M. Caro’s Life of George Sand.  The late Professor of the Sorbonne could chatter charmingly about culture, and had all the fascinating insincerity of an accomplished phrase-maker; being an extremely superior person he had a great contempt for Democracy and its doings, but he was always popular with the Duchesses of the Faubourg, as there was nothing in history or in literature that he could not explain away for their edification; having never done anything remarkable he was naturally elected a member of the Academy, and he always remained loyal to the traditions of that thoroughly respectable and thoroughly pretentious institution.  In fact, he was just the sort of man who should never have attempted to write a Life of George Sand or to interpret George Sand’s genius.  He was too feminine to appreciate the grandeur of that large womanly nature, too much of a dilettante to realise the masculine force of that strong and ardent mind.  He never gets at the secret of George Sand, and never brings us near to her wonderful personality.  He looks on her simply as a litterateur, as a writer of pretty stories of country life and of charming, if somewhat exaggerated, romances.  But George Sand was much more than this.  Beautiful as are such books as Consuelo and Mauprat, Francois le Champi and La Mare au Diable, yet in none of them is she adequately expressed, by none of them is she adequately revealed.  As Mr. Matthew Arnold said, many years ago, ’We do not know George Sand unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.’  With this spirit, however, M. Caro has no sympathy.  Madame Sand’s doctrines are antediluvian, he tells us, her philosophy is quite dead and her ideas of social regeneration are Utopian, incoherent and absurd.  The best thing for us to do is to forget these silly dreams and to read Teverino and Le Secretaire Intime.  Poor M. Caro!  This spirit, which he treats with such airy flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life.  It is remoulding the world for us and fashioning our age anew.  If it is antediluvian, it is so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia must be added to our geographies.  To what curious straits M. Caro is driven by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that he tries to class George Sand’s novels with