ore successfully than any other of the many novelists who have chosen
it for a frame--of Italy as the artist's native country, that is--not
the Italy of political history, nor of the Medici, but the Italy that is
the second home of painters, poets, and musicians. Can anything be more
enjoyable, and at the same time more vividly true, than George Sand's
delineations of Venice; and, in the first of the _Lettres d'un
Voyageur_, the pictures given of her wanderings on the shores of the
Brenta, of Bassano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, a
delicious land, till quite recently as little tourist-trodden as in
1834? What a contrast to the purely imaginary descriptions in _Lelia_,
written before those beauties had appeared to her except in dreams!

From Genoa the travellers journeyed to Pisa, Florence, and thence to
Venice, where first George Sand felt herself really at home in Italy.
The architecture, the simplicity of Venetian life and manners, the
theatres--from the opera-houses, where Pasta and Donzelli were singing,
down to the national drama of Pulchinello--the pictures, the sea, the
climate, combined to make of it a place of residence so perfectly to her
mind, that again and again in her letters she expresses her wish that
she could bring over her children and there fix her abode.

"It is the only town I can love for its own sake," she says of it.
"Other cities are like prisons, which you put up with for the sake of
your fellow-prisoners." This Italian journey marks a fresh stage in her
artistic development, quite apart from the attendant romantic
circumstances, the alleged disastrous consequences to a child of genius
less wise and fortunate than herself, which has given an otherwise
disproportionate notoriety to this brief episode.

George Sand was no doubt fatally in error when she persuaded herself,
and even succeeded in persuading the poet's anxious mother, that she had
it in her to be his guardian angel, and reform him miraculously in a
short space of time; and that because he had fallen in love with her she
would know how to make him alter a way of life he had no abiding desire
to abandon. Such a task demands a readiness not merely for
self-sacrifice, but for self-suppression; and her individuality was far
too pronounced to merge itself for long in ministering to another's. She
never seems to have possessed the slightest moral ascendancy over him,
beyond the power of wounding him very deeply by the chang