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share his responsibility? If the period of the President's tenure of office is to be changed at all, it is to be hoped that not a fixed but an uncertain term will be sanctioned, so that his position may be assimilated to that of the executive chief under our own government, the Prime Minister. The popular election of the President might thus be done away with altogether, and he might be elected, to begin with, by the vote of the two Houses of Congress in joint session, his removal following a vote against any of his Cabinet measures in both Houses. Since the Senate is gradually changed in its composition, and each Senator's term is for six years, the President would have nearly the same guarantee for permanence which an English minister backed by a septennial Parliament enjoys. Some slight changes in other particulars would be needed-for instance, the admission of ministers to Congress; and their responsibility to the Houses would of course follow.

The decline of the American Presidency dates from the election of Andrew Jackson, who succeeded too well in impressing his coarse, strenuous, unscrupulous character upon the political life of the nation. Before his time all the prominent public men in the United States were scholars and thinkers, and the correspondence of the Presidents and ministers, from Washington to the younger Adams, is full of weighty and fruitful thought. But after Jackson came the predominance of conventions and patronage. The men who were worthy to rank with the earlier chiefs of American parties-Clay, Calhoun, Webster-were compelled to resign their ambition for the highest place in the State, and to become the ministers of mediocrities. As immigration flowed in, the work of politics grew easier for the mere intriguer and harder for the statesman; the manipulation of ignorant masses and of busy placemen became an art in itself. The political wisdom that is stored up in the works of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Calhoun, and Webster, was supplanted by the clevernesses of Mr. Chandler, and Mr. Conkling, and Mr. Blaine. The change became slowly visible, but now it is apparent to the most careless observers. If the Americans are tired of the politicians,' and are willing to make an effort to renew the generation of statesmen, they must be prepared to break up the patronage system and to diminish the influence of conventions. If they can accomplish this, the possibilities of statesmanship surely are not exhausted in the nation which nobly won its independence a century ago, and crushed the most formidable rebellion of modern times within our own memories.

EDWARD D. J. WILSON.

GEORGE SAND.

ὧδε γὰρ κρατεῖ

γυναικὸς ἀνδρόβουλον ἐλπίζον κέαρ.

A GREAT SPIRIT has passed from among us; and many, no doubt, have of late been endeavouring to realise distinctly what kind of pleasure they have drawn, what lessons they have learnt, from the multitudinous writings of the most noteworthy woman, with perhaps one exception, who has appeared in literature since Sappho.

To estimate the general result and outcome of a series of romances like George Sand's is no easy task. For while on the one hand they contain implicitly what amounts to a kind of system of philosophy and theology, yet on the other hand the exposition of this system is so fluctuating and fitful, so modified by the dramatic necessities of varied plots, that it is hard to disentangle the operative and permanent from the inert and accidental matter.

Yet it is distinctly as a force, an influence, a promulgation of real or supposed truths, rather than as a repertory of graceful amusement, that these books claim consideration. We know that the moral leadership of the mass of the reading world has passed to a great extent into the hands of romance-writers. Voltaire, Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Chateaubriand, are some of the names which at once occur of Frenchmen who have found in prose fiction a powerful means of influencing the ideals and the conduct of their contemporaries. George Sand and Victor Hugo have succeeded to this power, and these two have on the whole for nearly two generations been the foremost authors in France. Long ago SainteBeuve placed George Sand and Lamennais at the head of living French writers; but the fame of Hugo has waxed; the fame of Lamennais has waned; George Sand's continues to shine with a steady lustre.

I do not mention Balzac in this connection, for Balzac was a novelist pure and simple. His consummate powers of observation and narration were combined with a sterile extravagance in the region of abstract thought, which renders the disquisitions scattered through his romances little better than so much waste paper.

With George Sand the case is very different. Inferior to Balzac

in the power of accurately reproducing the society around her, she chooses by preference subjects which she can approach, not so much from without as from within; her works are the outcome of a meditative nature which lives in imagination through many lives, and applies to all the same guiding conceptions of man's duty and his fate.

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It is somewhat strange, therefore, though the anomaly might be paralleled in the case of some more formal teachers, that while everyone agrees that George Sand's stories are pre-eminently novels with a purpose-Tendenz-Novellen '-yet there is by no means the same concurrence as to what that purpose is, down what stream of tendency they do actually flow.

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Her name was for many years 'a word of fear' in British households, where she was known chiefly from secondhand accounts of Indiana, and was pictured as the semi-masculine assailant of marriage and Christianity. Some German critics, on the other hand, less keenly interested in the maintenance of propriety all over the world, have preferred to view in her the exponent of the ideas of 1830,' the representative of that shadowy alliance between aristocracy, intellect, and the working man, as opposed to the bourgeoisie and the juste milieu, which ended in 1848-51 with the temporary triumph of the working man and the ultimate downfall of everybody. And there is some truth in both of these views. From Indiana (1831) till Mauprat (1836), in what may be called the Romances of Search, there is a tone of indignant protest against the structure of French society which amounts at times to revolt and bitterness. And from Simon (1836) till Le Péché de M. Antoine (1845), there are frequent traces of the political influence exercised over her by Michel de Bourges, Barbès, Louis Blanc, and Pierre Leroux. These strains of feeling correspond to well-marked but passing epochs of her life-the first to her married wretchedness, the second to her absorption, under Michel's ascendency, in the constitutional struggles of a few hopeful but troubled years. But an attentive study of her works, or of her autobiography, reveals a life-long preoccupation of a very different kind. Elle a toujours été tourmentée des choses divines.' Such are the words in which she sums up the true, the inner history of her life-words well expressing the unrest of a ceaseless search, and the pain of a neversatisfied desire. 'Ceci est l'histoire de ma vie,' she says; ma véri

table histoire.'

The passages in her books which indicate this perpetual preoccupation are in a certain sense so obvious as to escape notice. That is to say, they are so numerous and so long that the general reader has for the most part acquired the habit of skipping them. He shares the feelings of the able editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes: Pour Dieu, m'écrivait souvent Buloz, pas tant de mysticisme!' It is

George Sand's gravest artistic fault that she overloads her stories with such a mass of religious reverie. C'est bien possible,' she replies, mais je ne vois pas trop comment j'eusse pu faire pour ne pas écrire avec le propre sang de mon cœur et la propre flamme de ma pensée.'

The defect in art is obvious: it goes so far as to make some of her books almost unreadable, except to religious inquirers (e.g. Spiridion, Mlle. la Quintinie); but, on the other hand, the heartfelt sincerity of her sermons is equally undeniable.

In the earlier romances, the Romances of Search, we hear her appealing with passionate earnestness for light and revelation to an irresponsive heaven. And in the Romances of Exposition, which constitute the great bulk of her works, we have the scheme of the universe, at which she ultimately arrived, enforced upon us in a hundred different ways. This scheme is nothing new; it has even come by this time to possess a kind of orthodoxy of its own; but forty years ago it was less widely held, and its adoption by one who had passed through the extreme phase of Catholicism indicated, in the then state of religious parties, no little breadth and moderation of mind. Briefly stated, it is much as follows:-There is a God, inconceivable and unknown, but approachable by prayer under the aspect of a Father in Heaven; there is a Holy Spirit, or ceaseless influx of grace and light, receivable by sincere and ardent souls: and among the beings who have been filled fullest with this divine inspiration the first place belongs to Jesus Christ, whose life is the highest model which humanity has known. Progress is the law of the universe; the soul's progress, begun on earth, is continued through an infinite series of existences; nor is there any soul which may not ultimately rise to purity and happiness. Unselfish love is the best and most lasting of earthly experiences, for a love begun on earth may endure for ever. Marriage affords the best and the normal setting for such love; but under exceptional circumstances it may exist outside the married state. Religious aspiration and unselfish love should form, as it were, the spirit of life; its substance is best filled out by practical devotion to some impersonal ideal,the scientific or meditative observation of Nature, the improvement of the condition of the people, or the realisation of our visionary conceptions in a sincere and noble art.

There is nothing original in this: Ce que je suis,' says George Sand, tout le monde peut l'être : ce que je vois, tout le monde peut le voir ce que j'espère, tout le monde peut y arriver. Il ne s'agit que d'aimer la vérité, et je crois que tout le monde sent le besoin. de la trouver.'

Perhaps the reader will best be able to test the accuracy of this synopsis of George Sand's teaching if we consider in detail, and with as many extracts as space will allow, her relation to each

of these fundamental topics, the People, the Sexes, Art, Nature, Religion.

This mode of dividing a complex subject will admit of the introduction of a few reflections upon the events of Mme. Dudevant's life, considered as originating or modifying her opinions; and in the course of our analysis we shall perhaps arrive almost insensibly at some more general estimate of her magnitude as an author.

I. To begin, then, with her relation to the people,' under which vague word we mean to include the whole mass of social and political phenomena which have in her time overloaded the French calendar with so many mysterious allusions: the Hundred Days, the revolution of February, the state trials of April, the days of June, the revolution of July, the events of December-landmarks emerging, as it were, from the mingled and turbid under-current of Legitimism, Orleanism, Bonapartism, Saint-Simonism, and the terrible doctrine of Babeuf.'

It has often been remarked that her strangely mixed ancestry seems to have fitted her in an especial manner for comprehending the most widely separated classes of society. On one side she was descended from Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, whose gigantic and almost mythical figure towers above a weltering chaos of lust and war; and the blood of the great Maurice de Saxe ran with indelible nobility through the veins of her father, a gallant officer in Napoleon's army. Her mother was the daughter of a bird-catcher, and a true specimen of the grisette of Paris in all her ignorance, her excitability, her frailty, and her charm. Her father died early, and the care of her childhood was divided between her father's mother, a refined and stately lady of the old régime, and her own mother, who could not live away from the bustle of the Boulevards and the petty quarrels and trifling pleasures of a woman of the people. The mutual antagonism between these two guardians taught the girl many a lesson on the relation of class to class; and the affection which she felt for both combatants helped to give to the works of her later life that catholicity of view which enabled her to enter with equal ease into the essential feelings of every rank of life, to compose both Le Marquis de Villemer and François le Champi.

And it is a noteworthy result of this origin and this education that although George Sand is sometimes coarse and often fantastic in her descriptions of what is called 'high life,' she is never vulgar in the way in which so many French authors, since the First Empire, have been vulgar, with the vulgarity of a literary class revelling in the luxury and fashion into which intellectual power has raised them. Théophile Gautier, for instance, with all his wealth of imagination and grace of style, obviously does not possess what we in England call the instincts of a gentleman.' Now George Sand always has the instincts of a gentleman,' though she may not

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