d from the lagunes of Venice to the frontier
of Bohemia and the castle of Rudolstadt, the character of the story
becomes less naturalistic; the storyteller loses herself somewhat in
subterranean passages and the mazes of adventure generally. She wrote
on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new
horizons which the artistic and historical researches her work required
kept opening to her view. But the powerful contrast between the two
pictures,--of bright, sunshiny, free, sensuous, careless Venetian
folk-life, and of the stern gloom of the mediaeval castle, where the more
spiritual consolations of existence come into prominence--is singularly
effective and original. So also is the charming way in which an incident
in the boyhood of young Joseph Haydn is treated by her fancy, in the
episode of Consuelo's flight from the castle, when he becomes her
fellow-traveller, and their adventures across country are told with
such zest and _entrain_, in pages where life-sketches of character, such
as the good-natured, self-indulgent canon, the violent, abandoned
Corilla, make us forget the wildest improbabilities of the fiction
itself. The concluding portion of the book, again entirely different in
frame, with its delineation of art-life in a fashionable capital,
Vienna, is as true as it is brilliant. It teems with suggestive ideas on
the subject of musical and dramatic art, and with excellently drawn
types. The relations of professional and amateur, the contradictions and
contentions to which, in a woman's nature, the rival forces of love and
of an artistic vocation may give rise, have never been better portrayed
in any novel. The heroine, Consuelo, is of course an ideal character:
her achievements partake of the marvellous; and there are digressions in
the book which are diffuse in the extreme; but nowhere is the author's
imagination more attractively displayed and her style more engaging. The
tone throughout is noble and pure. To look on _Consuelo_ as an agreeable
story merely is to overlook the elevation of the moral standard of the
book, in which much of its power resides. It marks more strongly than
_Mauprat_ the change that had come over the spirit of George Sand's
compositions.

In the continuation, _La Comtesse de Rodolstadt_, which followed
immediately in the _Revue Independante_, 1843, the novelist strays
further and further from reality--the _terra firma_ on which her fancy
improvises such charming