Unwise
and blameful in conduct she might be for a season; she wronged her
own life, and helped to ruin the life of Musset, who had neither her
discretion nor her years; but when the inevitable rupture came she
could return to her better self.

Through _Andre_, _Simon_, _Mauprat_--the last a tale of love subduing
and purifying the savage instincts in man--her art advanced in
sureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to external
influences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance and
relations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force of
intelligences stronger than her own--of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin,
of Jean Raynaud, of Pierre Leroux. Mystical religious sentiment, an
ardent enthusiasm of humanity, mingled in her mind with all the
discordant formulas of socialism. From 1840 to 1848 her love and large
generosity of nature found satisfaction in the ideals and the hopes
of social reform. Her novels _Consuelo_, _Jeanne_, _Le Meunier
d'Angibault_, _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, become expositions of a thesis,
or are diverted from their true development to advocate a cause. The
art suffers. _Jeanne_, so admirable in its rural heroine, wanders
from nature to humanitarian symbolism; _Consuelo_, in which the
writer studies so happily the artistic temperament, too often loses
itself in a confusion of ill-understood ideas and tedious declamation.
But the gain of escape from the egoism of passion to a more
disinterested, even if a doctrinaire, view of life was great. George
Sand was finding her way.

Indeed, while writing novels in this her second manner, she had found
her way; her third manner was attained before the second had lost
its attraction. _La Mare au Diable_ belongs to the year 1846; _La
Petite Fadette_, to the year of Revolution, 1848, which George Sand,
ever an optimist, hailed with joy; _Francois le Champi_ is but two
years later. In these delightful tales she returns from humanitarian
theories to the fields of Berri, to humble walks, and to the huts
where poor men lie. The genuine idyll of French peasant life was new
to French literature; the better soul of rural France, George Sand
found deep within herself; she had read the external circumstances
and incidents of country life with an eye as faithful in observation
as that of any student who dignifies his collection of human documents
with the style and title of realism in art; with a sense of beauty
and the instincts of affection she