touch the experience of others. Herein we
recognize the first quality of literature. We recognize the second and
more special quality of womanliness in the tone and point of view; they
are novels written by a woman, an Englishwoman, a gentlewoman; no
signature could disguise that fact; and because she has so faithfully
(although unconsciously) kept to her own womanly point of view, her
works are durable. There is nothing of the _doctrinaire_ in Jane
Austen; not a trace of woman's "mission;" but as the most truthful,
charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-witted and unexaggerated of
writers, female literature has reason to be proud of her.

And this is her suggestive portrait of the other, drawn with that skill
which is only displayed when one genius interprets another through
community of feeling and purpose.

Of greater genius, and incomparably deeper experience, George Sand
represents woman's literature more illustriously and more obviously. In
her, quite apart from the magnificent gifts of nature, we see the
influence of sorrow as a determining impulse to write, and the abiding
consciousness of the womanly point of view as the subject matter of her
writings. In vain has she chosen the mask of a man: the features of a
woman are everywhere visible. Since Goethe no one has been able to say
with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography
lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward
disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and
uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought
up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune
as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We may say of this, as
of all the other irregularities of her strange and exceptional life,
that whatever unhappiness and error may be traceable thereto, its
influence on her writings has been beneficial, by giving a greater
range to her experience. It may be selfish to rejoice over the malady
which secretes a pearl, but the possessor of the pearl may at least
congratulate himself that at any rate the pearl has been produced; and
so of the unhappiness of genius. Certainly few women have had such
profound and varied experience as George Sand; none have turned it to
more account. Her writings contain many passages that