Like these early poets, she was primitive.  Like them, she obeyed a god within her.  All her talent was instinctive, and she had all the ease of instinctive talent.  When Flaubert complained to George Sand of the “tortures” that style cost him, she endeavoured to admire him.

“When I see the difficulty that my old friend has in writing his novel, I am discouraged about my own case, and I say to myself that I am writing poor sort of literature.”

This was merely her charity, for she never understood that there could be any effort in writing.  Consequently she could not understand that it should cause suffering.  For her, writing was a pleasure, as it was the satisfaction of a need.  As her works were no effort to her, they left no trace in her memory.  She had not intended to write them, and, when once written, she forgot them.

“Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, what are these books?” she asks.  “Did I write them?  I do not remember a single word of them.”

Her novels were like fruit, which, when ripe, fell away from her.  George Sand always returned to the celebration of certain great themes which are the eternal subjects of all poetry, subjects such as love and nature, and sentiments like enthusiasm and pity.  The very language completes the illusion.  The choice of words was often far from perfect, as George Sand’s vocabulary was often uncertain, and her expression lacked precision and relief.  But she had the gift of imagery, and her images were always delightfully fresh.  She never lost that rare faculty which she possessed of being surprised at things, so that she looked at everything with youthful eyes.  There is a certain movement which carries the reader on, and a rhythm that is soothing.  She develops the French phrase slowly perhaps, but without any confusion.  Her language is like those rivers which flow along full and limpid, between flowery banks and oases of verdure, rivers by the side of which the traveller loves to linger and to lose himself in dreams.

The share which belongs to George Sand in the history of the French novel is that of having impregnated the novel with the poetry in her own soul.  She gave to the novel a breadth and a range which it had never hitherto had.  She celebrated the hymn of Nature, of love and of goodness in it.  She revealed to us the country and the peasants of France.  She gave satisfaction to the romantic tendency which is in every one of us, to a more or less degree.

All this is more even than is needed to ensure her fame.  She denied ever having written for posterity, and she predicted that in fifty years she would be forgotten.  It may be that there has been for her, as there is for every illustrious author who dies, a time of test and a period of neglect.  The triumph of naturalism, by influencing taste for a time, may have stopped our reading George Sand.  At present we are just as tired of documentary literature as