dice or dislike, arising from
the pretty notorious history and character of Amantine (Amandine?
Armandine?) Lucile Aurore Dupin or Dudevant, commonly called George
Sand, has anything to do with my want of affection or admiration for her
work. I do not recommend her conduct in her earlier days for imitation,
and I am bound to say that I do not think it was ever excused by what
one may call real love. But she seems to have been an extremely good
fellow in her age, and not by any means a very bad fellow in her youth.
She was at one time pretty, or at least good-looking;[174] she was at
all times clever; and if she did not quite deserve that almost
superhuman eulogy awarded in the Devonshire epitaph to

Mary Sexton,
Who pleased many a man and never vexed one,[175]

she did fulfil the primal duty of her sex, and win its greatest triumph,
by complying with the first half of the line, while, if she failed as to
the second, it was perhaps not entirely her fault.[176] Finally,
Balzac's supposed picture of her as Camille in _Beatrix_ has the almost
unique peculiarity, among its author's sketches of women, of being
positively attractive--attractive, that is to say, not merely to the
critic as a powerful study and work of art; not perhaps at all to the
sentimentalist as a victim or an adorable piece of _candeur_; not to the
lover of physical beauty or passion, but to the reader--"sensible" in
the old sense as well as in the new--who feels that here is a woman he
should like to have known, even if he feels likewise that his
weather-eye would have had to be kept open during the knowledge.

[Sidenote: Phases of her work.]

It has been customary--and though these customary things are sometimes
delusive and too often mechanical, there is also occasionally, and, I
think, here, her work, something not negligible in them, if they be not
applied too rigidly--to divide George Sand's long period (nearly half a
century) of novel-production into four sub-periods, corresponding
roughly with the four whole decades of the thirties, forties, fifties,
and sixties.[177] The first, sometimes called, but, I think,
misleadingly, "Romantic," is the period of definite and mainly sexual
revolt, illustrated by such novels as _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lelia_,
and _Jacques_. The second is that of _illumine_ mysticism and
semi-political theorising, to which _Spiridion_, _Consuelo_, _La
Comtesse de Rudolstadt_, and others belong. The third, one of a