th the enchanter's wand and mirror," wrote
Sainte-Beuve, a few months later, when he did not hesitate to compare
the young author to Madame de Stael. The novel of sentimental analysis,
a style in which George Sand is unsurpassed, was then a fresh and
promising field. _Indiana_, without the aid of marvellous incidents,
startling crimes, or iniquitous mysteries, riveted the attention of its
readers as firmly as the most thrilling tales of adventure and horror.
It is a "soul's tragedy," and that is all--the love-tragedy vulgarized
since by repeated treatment by inferior novelists, of a romantic,
sensitive, passionate, high-natured girl, hopelessly ill-mated with a
somewhat tyrannical and stupid, yet not entirely ill-disposed old
colonel, and exposed to the seductions of a Lovelace--the truth about
whose unloveable character, in its profound and heartless egoism, first
bursts upon her at the moment when, maddened by brutal insult, she is
driven to claim the generous devotion he has proffered a thousand times.
Side by side with the ideal of selfishness, Raymon stands in contrast
with the ideally chivalrous Ralph, Indiana's despised cousin, who,
loving her disinterestedly and in silence, has watched over her as a
guardian-friend to the last, and does save her ultimately. The florid
descriptions, the high-flown strains of emotion, which now strike as
blemishes in the book, were counted beauties fifty years since; and even
to-day, when reaction has brought about an extreme distaste for
emotional writing, they cannot conceal the superior ability of the
novelist. The sentiment, however extravagantly worded, is genuine and
spontaneous, and has the true ring of passionate conviction. The
characters are vividly, if somewhat closely drawn and contrasted, the
scenes graphic; every page is colored by fervid imagination, and despite
some violations of probability in the latter portion, out of keeping
artistically with the natural character of the rest of the book, the
whole has the strength of that unity and completeness of conception
which is the distinguishing stamp of a genius of the first order. The
_entrain_ of the style is irresistible. It was written, she tells us,
_tout d'un jet_, under the force of a stimulus from within. Ceasing to
counterfeit the manner of anyone, or to consult the exigencies of the
book-market, she for the first time ventures to be herself responsible
for the inspiration and the mode of expression adopted.