George Sand's novels with the old Chansons de geste, the stories of
adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; whereas in using
fiction as a vehicle of thought, and romance as a means of influencing
the social ideals of her age, George Sand was merely carrying out the
traditions of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and of Chateaubriand. The
novel, says M. Caro, must be allied either to poetry or to science. That
it has found in philosophy one of its strongest allies seems not to have
occurred to him. In an English critic such a view might possibly be
excusable. Our greatest novelists, such as Fielding, Scott and Thackeray
cared little for the philosophy of their age. But coming, as it does,
from a French critic, the statement seems to show a strange want of
recognition of one of the most important elements of French fiction. Nor,
even in the narrow limits that he has imposed upon himself, can M. Caro
be said to be a very fortunate or felicitous critic. To take merely one
instance out of many, he says nothing of George Sand's delightful
treatment of art and the artist's life. And yet how exquisitely does she
analyse each separate art and present it to us in its relation to life!
In Consuelo she tells us of music; in Horace of authorship; in Le Chateau
des Desertes of acting; in Les Maitres Mosaistes of mosaic work; in Le
Chateau de Pictordu of portrait painting; and in La Daniella of the
painting of landscape. What Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning have done for
England she did for France. She invented an art literature. It is
unnecessary, however, to discuss any of M. Caro's minor failings, for the
whole effect of the book, so far as it attempts to portray for us the
scope and character of George Sand's genius, is entirely spoiled by the
false attitude assumed from the beginning, and though the dictum may seem
to many harsh and exclusive, we cannot help feeling that an absolute
incapacity for appreciating the spirit of a great writer is no
qualification for writing a treatise on the subject.

As for Madame Sand's private life, which is so intimately connected with
her art (for, like Goethe, she had to live her romances before she could
write them), M. Caro says hardly anything about it. He passes it over
with a modesty that almost makes one blush, and for fear of wounding the
susceptibilities of those grandes dames whose passions M. Paul Bourget
analyses with such subtlety, he transforms her mother, who was