ent and absurd. The best thing
for us to do is to forget these silly dreams and to read _Teverino_ and
_Le Secretaire Intime_. Poor M. Caro! This spirit, which he treats with
such airy flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life. It is remoulding
the world for us and fashioning our age anew. If it is antediluvian, it
is so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia
must be added to our geographies. To what curious straits M. Caro is
driven by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that he
tries to class George Sand's novels with the old _Chansons de geste_, the
stories of adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; whereas in
using fiction as a vehicle of thought, and romance as a means of
influencing the social ideals of her age, George Sand was merely carrying
out the traditions of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and of
Chateaubriand. The novel, says M. Caro, must be allied either to poetry
or to science. That it has found in philosophy one of its strongest
allies seems not to have occurred to him. In an English critic such a
view might possibly be excusable. Our greatest novelists, such as
Fielding, Scott and Thackeray, cared little for the philosophy of their
age. But coming, as it does, from a French critic, the statement seems
to show a strange want of recognition of one of the most important
elements of French fiction. Nor, even in the narrow limits that he has
imposed upon himself, can M. Caro be said to be a very fortunate or
felicitous critic. To take merely one instance out of many, he says
nothing of George Sand's delightful treatment of art and the artist's
life. And yet how exquisitely does she analyse each separate art and
present it to us in its relation to life! In _Consuelo_ she tells us of
music; in _Horace_ of authorship; in _Le Chateau des Desertes_ of acting;
in _Les Maitres Mosaistes_ of mosaic work; in _Le Chateau de Pictordu_ of
portrait painting; and in _La Daniella_ of the painting of landscape.
What Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning have done for England she did for
France. She invented an art literature. It is unnecessary, however, to
discuss any of M. Caro's minor failings, for the whole effect of the
book, so far as it attempts to portray for us the scope and character of
George Sand's genius, is entirely spoiled by the false attitude assumed
from the beginning, and though the dictum may seem to many harsh and
exclusive, we cannot help