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