" It is not difficult to
account for it in George Sand when we remember her mother's life and
temperament, and her own early years. Her father was a good soldier,
but had also many literary gifts. George Sand herself said: "Character
is hereditary, if my readers wish to know me, they must know my
father." George Eliot's creed and pervading view of life was the
supreme responsibility of it, and the inevitableness of the struggles
of the spirit warring against the senses. Her ideal is attainment
through great trial. George Sand, the born hater of conventions,
developed life into a harmony. We feel ultimately in her, a sense of
peculiar serenity and peace, of self realisation, more akin perhaps to
Plato's ideal of a character in harmony with itself, whose various
impulses are so attuned that they form practically a single desire and
this desire satisfies all the forces of the nature. What was this
desire that was involved in the whole aim or system of George Sand's
life? The ethical poet who affirmed emphatically that "conduct was
three-fourths of life," expressed the highest admiration of George
Sand's aims and ethics, and according to Matthew Arnold, her ruling
idea was, that this ordinary human life of love and suffering was
destined to be raised, into an ideal life, and _that_ ideal life is
our real life.
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