r_, and the veteran Bocage
ably representing, respectively, youth and age. Old Berrichon airs were
introduced with effect, as also such picturesque rustic festival customs
as the ancient harvest-home ceremony, in which the last sheaf is brought
on a wagon, gaily decked out with poppies, cornflowers and ribbons, and
receives a libation of wine poured by the hand of the oldest or youngest
person present.

"But what the theatre can never reproduce," laments Madame Sand, "is the
majesty of the frame--the mountain of sheaves solemnly approaching,
drawn by three pairs of enormous oxen, the whole adorned with flowers,
with fruit, and with fine little children perched upon the top of the
last sheaves."

Henceforward a good deal of her time and interest continued to be
absorbed by these dramatic compositions. But though mostly eliciting
during her lifetime a gratifying amount of public favor and applause,
the best of them cannot for an instant be placed in the same high rank
as her novels. For with all her wide grasp of the value of dramatic art
and her exact appreciation of the strength and weakness of the acting
world, her plays remain, to great expectations, uniformly disappointing.
Her specialty in fiction lies in her favorite art of analyzing and
putting before us, with extreme clearness, the subtlest ramifications,
the most delicate intricacies of feeling and thought. A stage audience
has its eyes and ears too busy to give its full attention to the finer
complications of sentiment and motive; or, at least, in order to keep
its interest alive and its understanding clear, an accentuation of
outline is needed, which she neglects even to seek.

Her assertion, that the niceties of emotion are sufficient to found a
good play upon, no one now will dream of disputing. But for this an art
of execution is needed of which she had not the instinct. The action is
insufficient, or rather, the sense of action is not conveyed. The
slightness of plot--a mere thread in most instances--requires that the
thread shall at least be never allowed to drop. But she cuts or slackens
it perpetually, long arguments and digressions intervening, and the
dialogue, whose monotony is unrelieved by wit, nowhere compensates for
the limited interest of the action. Awkward treatment is but half felt
when subject and situations are dramatically strong; but plays with so
airy and impalpable a basis as these need to be sustained by the utmost
perfection of con