to his wife--a jealousy which is backed up by an equally
unfounded suspicion (supported by the most outrageous proceedings of
espionage and something like burglary) on the part of a confidential
servant, who, as we are informed at last, has himself had a secret
passion for his innocent mistress. It is more like a Feuillet book than
a George Sand, and in this respect shows the curious faculty--possessed
also by some lady novelists of our own--of adapting itself to the change
of novel-fashion. But to me at least it appeals not.

So turn we from particulars (for individual notice of the hundred books
is impossible) to generals.

[Sidenote: Summary and judgment.]

[Sidenote: Style.]

It may be difficult to sum up the characteristics of such a writer as
George Sand shortly, but it has to be done. There is to be allowed
her--of course and at once--an extraordinary fertility, and a hardly
less extraordinary escape from absolute sinking into the trivial. She is
preposterous early, somewhat facile and "journalistic" later, but she is
never exactly commonplace. She belongs to the school of immense and
almost mechanical producers who are represented in English by Anthony
Trollope as their "prior" and by Mrs. Oliphant[195] and Miss Braddon as
commandresses of the order. (I think she runs a good deal below the
Prior but a good deal above the Commandresses.[196]) But, if she does so
belong, it is very mainly due, not to any pre-eminence of narrative
faculty, but to that gift of style which has been for nearly a hundred
years admitted. Now I have in this _History_ more than once, and by no
means with tongue in cheek, expressed a diffidence about giving opinions
on this point. I have, it is true, read French for more than sixty
years, and I have been accustomed to "read for style" in it, and in
divers other languages, for at least fifty. But I see such extraordinary
blunders made by foreigners in regard to this side of our own
literature, that I can never be sure--being less conceited than the
pious originator of the phrase--that even the Grace of God has prevented
me from going the same way. Still, if I have any right to publish this
book, I must have a little--I will not say "right," but _venia_ or
licence--to say what seems to me to be the fact of the matter. That
fact--or that seeming of fact--is that George Sand's style is _too_
facile to be first-rate. By this I do not mean that it is too plain. On
the contrary, it is sometim