Matthew Arnold has written one of his most beautiful
and eloquent and touching essays in this record of his impressions and
estimate of George Sand. Well does he say that "her passions and her
errors have been abundantly talked of." She left them behind her, and
men's memory of them will leave them behind also.
There will remain the sense of benefit and stimulus from that large
and frank nature, that large and pure utterance. Matthew Arnold gives
three principal elements in her strain. Instead of the hopeless echo
of unrealised ideas we hear from her the evolution of character: "1,
Through agony, and revolt; 2, Through consolation from nature and
beauty; 3, Through sense of the Divine ('Je fus toujours tourmente des
choses divines') and social renewal, she passes into the great life
motif of her existence;" that the sentiment of the ideal life is none
other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew
Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the
serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant.
Browning came across her in her journalistic career in Paris, and he
was not touched with the same admiration.
Mr. Chesterton suggests in his biography of the poet that Browning was
conventional by nature--and through the greatness of his brain he
developed.
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