was as fond of acting as Goethe, and like him began with a puppet stage, succeeded by amateur theatricals, the chief entertainment provided for her guests at Nohant. Undaunted by many failures, she dramatized several of her novels with moderate success—François le champi, played at the Odéon in 1849, and Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré (1862) were the best; Claudie, produced in 1851, is a charming pastoral play, and Le Marquis de Villemer (1864) (in which she was helped by Dumas fils) was a genuine triumph. Her statue by Clésinger was placed in the foyer of the Théatre Français in 1877.
Of George Sand's style a foreigner can be but an imperfect judge, but French critics, from Sainte-Beuve, Nisard and Caro down to Jules Lemaître and Faguet, have agreed to praise her spontaneity, her correctness of diction, her easy opulence—the lactea ubertas that Quintilian attributes to Livy. The language of her country novels is the genuine patois of middle France rendered in a literary form. Thus in La Petite Fadette, by the happy device of making the hemp dresser the narrator, she speaks (to quote Sainte-Beuve) as though she had on her right the unlettered rustic and on her left a member of the Académie and made herself the interpreter between the two. She hits the happy mean between the studied archaism of Courier's Daphnis et Cloë and the realistic patois of the later kailyard novel which for Southerners requires a glossary. Of her style generally the characteristic quality is fluidity. She has all the abandon of an Italian improvisatore, the simplicity of aBernardin de St Pierre without his mawkishness, the sentimentality of a Rousseau without his egotism, the rhythmic eloquence of a Chateaubriand without his grandiloquence.
As a painter of nature she has much in common with Wordsworth. She keeps her eye on the object, but adds, like Wordsworth, the visionary gleam, and receives from nature but what she herself gives. Like Wordsworth she lays us on the lap of earth and sheds the freshness of the early world. She, too, had found love in huts where poor men dwell, and her miller, her bagpipers, her workers in mosaic are as faithful renderings in prose of peasant life and sentiment as Wordsworth's leech-gatherer and wagoners and gleaners are in verse. Her psychology is not subtle or profound, but her leading characters are clearly conceived and drawn in broad, bold outlines. No one has better understood or more skilfully portrayed the artistic temperament—the musician, the actor, the poet—and no French writer before her had so divined and laid bare the heart of a girl. She works from within outwards, touches first the mainspring and then sets it to play. As Mr Henry James puts it, she interviews herself. Rarely losing touch of earth, and sometimes of the earth earthy, she is still at heart a spiritualist. Her final word on herself rings true, “ Toujours tourmentée des choses divines.”
Unlike Victor Hugo and Balzac, she founded no school, though Fromentin, Theuriet, Cherbuliez, Fabre and Bazin might be claimed as her collateral descendants. In Russia her influence has been greater. She directly inspired Dostoievski, and Turgenieff owes much to her. In England she has found her warmest admirers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote sonnets to “ the large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-named George Sand.” To Thackeray her diction recalled the sound of village bells falling sweetly and softly on the ear, and it sent a shiver through John Stuart Mill, like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart. Leslie Stephen advised Thomas Hardy, then an aspiring contributor to the Cornhill, to read George Sand, whose country stories seemed to him perfect. “ The harmony and grace, even if strictly inimitable, are good to aim at.” He pronounced the Histoire de ma vie about the best biography he had ever read. F. W. H. Myers claimed her as anima naturaliter Christiana and the inspired exponent of the religion of the future.
George Eliot by her very name invites and challenges comparison with George Sand. But it was as a humble follower, not as a rival, that she took George Sand as sponsor. Both women broke with social conventions, but while George Sand (if the expression may be allowed) kicked over the traces, George Eliot was impelled all the more emphatically, because of her exceptional circumstances, to put duty before inclination and to uphold the reign of law and order. Both passed through phases of faith, but while even Positivism did not cool George Eliot's innate religious fervour, with George Sand religion was a passing experience, no deeper than her republicanism and less lasting than her socialism, and she lived and died a gentle savage. Rousseau's Confessions was the favourite book of both (as it was of Emerson), but George Eliot was never converted by the high priest of sentimentalism into a belief in human perfectibility and a return to nature. As a thinker George Eliot is vastly superior; her knowledge is more profound and her psychological analysis subtler and more scientific. But as an artist, in unity of design, in harmony of treatment, in purity and simplicity of language, so felicitous and yet so unstudied, in those qualities which make the best of George Sand's novels masterpieces of art, she is as much her inferior.
Mr Francis Gribble has summed up her character in “ a scornful, insular way” as a light woman. A truer estimate is that of Sainte-Beuve, her intimate friend for more than thirty years, but never her lover. “ In the great crises of action her intellect, her heart and her temperament are at one. She is a thorough woman, but with none of the pettinesses, subterfuges, and mental reservations of her sex; she loves wide vistas and boundless horizons and instinctively seeks them out; she is concerned for universal happiness and takes thought for the improvement of mankind—the last infirmity and most innocent mania of generous souls. Her works are in very deed the echo of our times. Wherever we were wounded and stricken her heart bled in sympathy, and all our maladies and miseries evoked from her a lyric wail.”
George Sand died at Nohant on the 8th of June 1876. To a youth and womanhood of storm and stress had succeeded an old age of serene activity and then of calm decay. Her nights were spent in writing, which seemed in her case a relaxation from the real business of the day, playing with her grandchildren, gardening, conversing with her visitors—it might be Balzac or Dumas, or Octave Feuillet or Matthew Arnold—or writing long letters to Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert. “ Calme, toujours plus de calme,” was her last prayer, and her dying words, “ Ne détruisez pas la verdure.”
Bibliography.—The collected edition of George Sand's works was published in Paris (1862–1883) in 96 volumes, with supplement 109 volumes; the Histoire de ma vie appeared in 20 volumes in 1854–1855. The Étude bibliographique sur les œuvres de George Sand by “ le bibliophile Isaac " (vicomte de Spoelberck) (Brussels, 1868) gives the most. complete bibliography. Of Vladimir Karenin's (pseudonym of Mme Komarova) George Sand, the most complete life, the first two volumes (1899–1901) carry the life down to 1839. There is much new material in George Sand et sa fille, by S. Rocheblave (1905), Correspondance de G. Sand et d'Alfred de Musset (Brussels, 1904), Correspondance entre George Sand et Gustave Flaubert (1904), and Lettres à Alfred de Musset et à Sainte-Beuve (1897). E. M. Caro's George Sand (1887) is rather a critique than a life. Lives by Mirecourt (1855) and by Haussonville (1878) may also be consulted. Of the numerous shorter studies may be mentioned those of Sainte-Beuve in the Causeries du lundi and in Portraits contemporains; Jules Lemaître in Les Contemporains, vol. iv.; E. Faguet, XIXe Siècle; F. W. H. Myers, Essays Ancient and Modern (1883); Henry James in North American Review (April 1902); Matthew Arnold Mixed Essays (1879). See also René Doumic's George Sand (1909), which has been translated into English by Alys Hallard as George Sand: Some Aspects of her Life and Writings (1910). (F. S.)
SAND. When rocks or minerals are pulverized by any agencies,
natural or artificial, the products may be classified as gravels,
sands and muds or clays, according to the size of the individual
particles. If, the grains are so fine as to be impalpable (about
1⁄1000 in. in diameter) the deposit may be regarded; as a mud or clay;
if many of them are as large as peas the rock is a gravel. Sands
may be uniform when they have been sorted out by some
agency such as a gentle current of water or the wind blowing
steadily across smooth arid lands, but usually they vary much
both in the coarseness of their grains and in their mineral composition.
The great source of natural sands is the action of the
atmosphere, frost, rain, plants and other agencies in breaking
up the surfaces of rocks and reducing them to the condition of
fine powder; in other words sands are ordinarily the product
of the agencies of denudation operating on the rocks of the earth's
