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singularly unsuccessful bit of diplomacy.* He and Mr Gladstone, without the knowledge of their Cabinet colleagues but with the permission of Queen Victoria, and apparently at the instigation of Napoleon himself, sent to Berlin a moving despatch suggesting a reduction of the Prussian army if the French would agree to a reduction pari passu of theirs. France, observed Lord Clarendon, was now under responsible government, and was never more peacefully disposed, Emperor and people being at one in their desire for national economy and peace.† What guarantee, asked Bismarck in reply, can you give us for the maintenance of peace or for security against danger? You live in a happy island and have not to fear invasion, but on our frontiers are three great Empires, against whom we must take precautions, and as to these matters we are bound to judge for ourselves and on our own responsibility.' Thus the well-meant efforts of the two British statesmen came to nothing. Reduction of armaments will naturally follow the growth of general confidence in the peaceful dispositions of nations towards each other. In times of mutual distrust and suspicion, and of unsatisfied national ambitions, it is pure waste of time, or worse, to urge disarmament.

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There is much good reading in the two works that Sir Herbert Maxwell and Lord Newton have put before the public; and the result on the whole, unless we are much mistaken, will be to increase the respect felt for the aims and objects of British foreign policy, and for the ability and skill with which our statesmen and diplomatic agents endeavour to carry it out.

*It is somewhat strange that this curious episode, which forms one of the most interesting chapters in Lord Lyons' Life and is there given in detail for the first time, should be barely mentioned in that of Lord Clarendon. It is briefly recorded by Ollivier, Empire Libéral,' vol. xiii, pp. 64-70.

† 'Life of Lord Lyons,' vol. i, p. 252.

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Art. 2.-GEORGE SAND.

George Sand, sa Vie et ses Œuvres.
Par Vladimir Karénine.

Vol. III (1838-1848). Paris: Plon, 1912.

IT has much occurred to us, touching those further liberations of the subordinate sex which fill our ears just now with their multitudinous sound, that the promoters of the great cause make a good deal less than they might of one of their very first contentious' assets,' if it may not indeed be looked at as quite the first; and thereby fail to pass about, to the general elation, a great vessel of truth. Is this because the life and example of George Sand are things unknown or obscure to the talkers and fighters of to-day-present and vivid as they were to those of the last mid-century, or because of some fear that to invoke victory in her name might, for particular, for even rueful reasons, not be altogether a safe course? It is difficult to account otherwise for the fact that so ample and embossed a shield, and one that shines too at last with a strong and settled lustre, is rather left hanging on the wall than seen to cover advances or ward off attacks in the fray. Certain it is that if a lapse of tradition appeared at one time to have left a little in the lurch the figure of the greatest of all women of letters, of Letters in truth most exactly, as we hold her surely to have been, that explanation should have begun to fail, some fourteen years ago, with the publication of the first volume of Madame Vladimir Karénine's biography, and even in spite of the fact that this singularly interesting work was not till a twelvemonth ago to arrive at the dignity of a third, which leaves it, for all its amplitude, still incomplete. The latest instalment, now before us, follows its predecessors after an interval that had alarmed us not a little for the proper consummation; and the story is even now carried but to the eve of the Revolution of 1848, after which its heroine (that of the Revolution, we may almost say, as well as of the narrative) was to have some twenty-seven years to live. Madame Karénine appears to be a Russian critic writing under a pseudonym; portions of her overbrimming study have appeared dispersedly, we gather, in Russian periodicals, but the harmonious French idiom, of which she is all-sufficient

mistress, welds them effectively together, and the result may already be pronounced a commemorative monument of all but the first order. The first order in such attempts has for its sign a faculty of selection and synthesis, not to say a sense of composition and proportion, which neither the chronicler nor the critic in these too multiplied pages is able consistently to exhibit; though on the other hand they represent quite the high-water mark of patience and persistence, of the ideal biographic curiosity. They enjoy further the advantage of the documented state in a degree that was scarce to have been hoped for, every source of information that had remained in reserve -and these proved admirably numerous-having been opened to our inquirer by the confidence of the illustrious lady's two great-granddaughters, both alive at the time the work was begun. Add to this that there has grown up in France a copious George Sand literature, a vast body of illustrative odds and ends, relics and revelations, on which the would-be propagator of the last word is now free to draw-always with discrimination. Ideally, well-nigh overwhelmingly informed we may at present therefore hold ourselves; and were that state all that is in question for us nothing could exceed our advantage.

Just the beauty and the interest of the case are, however, that such a condition by no means exhausts our opportunity, since in no like connexion could it be less said that to know most is most easily or most complacently to conclude. May we not decidedly feel the sense and the 'lesson,' the suggestive spread, of a career as a thing scarce really to be measured when the effect of more and more acquaintance with it is simply to make the bounds of appreciation recede? This is why the figure now shown us, blazed upon to the last intensity by the lamplight of investigation, and with the rank oil consumed in the process fairly filling the air, declines to let us off from an hour of that contemplation which yet involves discomfiture for us so long as certain lucidities on our own part, certain serenities of assurance, fail correspondingly to play up. We feel ourselves so outfaced, as it were; we somehow want in any such case to meet and match the assurances with which the subject himself or herself immitigably bristles, and are nevertheless

by no means certain that our bringing up premature forces or trying to reply with lights of our own may not check the current of communication, practically without sense for us unless flowing at its fullest. At our biographer's rate of progress we shall still have much to wait for; but it can meanwhile not be said that we have not plenty to go on with. To this may be added that the stretch of 'life,' apart from the more concrete exhibition, already accounted for by our three volumes (if one may discriminate between production' and life to a degree that is in this connexion exceptionally questionable), represents to all appearance the most violently and variously agitated face of the career. The establishment of the Second Empire ushered in for Madame Sand, we seem in course of preparation to make out, the long period already more or less known to fame, that is to criticism, as the period of her great placidity, her more or less notorious appeasement; a string of afternoon hours as hazily golden as so many reigns of Antonines, when her genius had mastered the high art of acting without waste, when a happy play of inspiration had all the air, so far as our spectatorship went, of filling her large capacity and her beautiful form to the brim, and when the gathered fruit of what she had dauntlessly done and been heaped itself upon her table as a rich feast for memory and philosophy. So she came in for the enjoyment of all the sagesse her contemporaries (with only such exceptions as M. Paul de Musset and Madame Louise Colet and the few discordant pleaders for poor Chopin) finally rejoiced on their side to acclaim; the sum of her aspects composing,' arranging themselves in relation to each other, with a felicity that nothing could exceed and that swept with great glosses and justifications every aspect of the past. To few has it been given to'pay' so little, according to our superstition of payment, in proportion to such enormities of ostensibly buying or borrowing-which fact, we have to recognise, left an existence as far removed either from moral, or intellectual, or even social bankruptcy as if it had proceeded from the first but on the most saving lines.

That is what remains on the whole most inimitable in the picture-the impression it conveys of an art of life by which the rough sense of the homely adage that

we may not both eat our cake and have it was to be signally falsified; this wondrous mistress of the matter strikes us so as having consumed her refreshment, her vital supply, to the last crumb, so far as the provision meant at least freedom and ease, and yet having ever found on the shelf the luxury in question undiminished. Superlatively interesting the idea of how this result was, how it could be, achieved-given the world as we on our side of the water mainly know it; and it is as meeting the mystery that the monument before us has doubtless most significance. We shall presently see, in the light of our renewed occasion, how the question is solved; yet, we may as well at once say that this will have had for its conclusion to present our heroine-mainly figuring as a novelist of the romantic or sentimental order once pre-eminent but now of shrunken credit-simply as a supreme case of the successful practice of life itself. We have to distinguish for this induction after a fashion in which neither Madame Sand nor her historian has seemed at all positively concerned to distinguish; the indifference on the historian's part sufficiently indicated, we feel, by the complacency with which, to be thorough, she explores even the most thankless tracts of her author's fictional activity, telling the tales over, as she comes to them, on much the same scale on which she unfolds the situations otherwise documented. The writer of Consuelo' and 'Claudie' and a hundred other things is to this view a literary genius whose output, as our current term so gracefully has it, the exercise of an inordinate personal energy happens to mark; whereas the exercise of personal energy is for ourselves what most reflects the genius-recorded though this again chances here to be through the inestimable fact of the possession of style. Of the action of that perfect, that only real preservative in face of other perils George Sand is a wondrous example; but her letters alone suffice to show it, and the style of her letters is no more than the breath of her nature, her so remarkable one, in which expression and aspiration were much the same function. That is what it is really to have style-when you set about performing the act of life. The forms taken by this latter impulse then cover everything; they serve for your adventures not less than they may serve at

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