d that she did not assail the institution of marriage, but only the
things that are perpetrated in its name.

"But all the same [as another has well said], her eloquent
expositions of ill-assorted unions, her daring appeals from the
obligations they impose to the affections they outrage, her
assertion of the rights of nature over the conventions of society,
have the final effect of justifying the violation of duty on the
precarious ground of passion and inclination.

"Nobody who knows what the actual life of George Sand has been can
doubt for a moment the true nature of her opinions on the subject
of marriage. It is not a pleasant subject to touch, and we should
shrink from it if it were not as notorious as everything else by
which she has become famous in her time. It forms in reality as
much a part of the philosophy she desires to impress upon the world
as the books through which she has expanded her theory. It is
neither more nor less than her theory of freedom and independence
in the matter of passion (we dare not dignify it by any higher
name) put into action,--rather vagrant action, we fear, but on that
account all the more decisive."

Society and she were naturally at war from the beginning of her career;
and she suffered from it, though she dealt many bitter blows at it even
while she suffered. "What has it done," she says in one place,--

"what has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for
our children, this society shielded with such care? Nothing. Those
whom it calls vain complainers, and rebels, and madmen, may reply:
Suffer us to bewail our martyrs, poets without a country that we
are, forlorn singers well versed in the causes of their misery and
of our own. You do not comprehend the malady which killed them;
they themselves did not comprehend it. If one or two of us at the
present day open our eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange
and unaccountable good Providence? and have we not to seek our
grain of faith in storm and darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the
absence of all sympathy, all example, all brotherly aid, all
protection and countenance in high places? Try yourselves to speak
to your brethren heart to heart, conscience to conscience! Try it!
but you cannot, busied as you are with watching and patching up in
all dire