free thought. She was too large-minded to incline to ridicule
the serious convictions of earnest seekers for truth, and she respected
all sincerity of belief--all faith that produced beneficence in action.

The alleged hostility of her romances to marriage resumes itself into a
declared hostility to the conventional French system of match-making.
Much that she was condemned for venturing to put forward we should
simply take for granted in England, where--whichever system work the
best in practice--to the strictest Philistine's ideas of propriety there
is nothing unbecoming in a love-match. The aim and end of true love in
her stories is always marriage, whether it be the simple attachment of
Germain, the field-laborer, for the rustic maiden of his choice, the
romantic predilection of the rich young widow in _Pierre qui roule_ for
the handsome actor Laurence, or the worship of Count Albert for the
_cantatrice_ Consuelo. Her ideal of marriage was, no doubt, a high one,
"the indissoluble attachment of two hearts fired with a like love;" a
love "great, noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal." Among French
novelists she should rather be noted for the extremely small proportion
of her numerous romances that have domestic infelicity for a theme.

Her remark that their real offense was that they were a great deal too
moral for some of their critics, hit home, inasmuch as in her attack on
the ordinary marriage system of France she struck directly at the
fashionable immorality which is its direct result, and which she saw,
both in life and in literature, pass free of censure. It is the selfish
intriguer who meets with least mercy in her pages, and who is there held
up, not only to dislike, but to ridicule.

Persons perplexed by the fact that particular novels of hers which,
judged by certain theories, ought to be morally hurtful, do yet produce
a very different effect, have accounted for it in different ways. One
explains it by saying that if there is poison on one page there is
always the antidote on the next. Another observes that a certain
morality of misfortune is never absent from her fictions. In other
words, she nowhere presents us with the spectacle of real happiness
reaped at the expense of a violation of conscience. And in the rare
cases where the purpose of the novel seems questionable, she defeats her
own end. For truth always preponderates over error in her conceptions,
and the result is a moral effect.

The want of