They find
their way, at last, to light and air, but the world will not take off
the brand it has set upon them. The champion of the Rights of Woman
found, in Godwin, one who would plead that cause like a brother. He
who delineated with such purity of traits the form of Woman in the
Marguerite, of whom the weak St. Leon could never learn to be
worthy,--a pearl indeed whose price was above rubies,--was not false
in life to the faith by which he had hallowed his romance. He acted,
as he wrote, like a brother. This form of appeal rarely fails to touch
the basest man:--"Are you acting toward other women in the way you
would have men act towards your sister?" George Sand smokes, wears
male attire, wishes to be addressed as "Mon frere;"--perhaps, if she
found those who were as brothers indeed, she would not care whether
she were brother or sister. [Footnote: A note appended by my sister in
this place, in the first edition, is here omitted, because it is
incorporated in another article in this volume, treating of George
Sand more at length.--[ED.]] We rejoice to see that she, who expresses
such a painful contempt for men in most of her works, as shows she
must have known great wrong from them, depicts, in "La Roche Mauprat,"
a man raised by the workings of love from the depths of savage
sensualism to a moral and intellectual life.
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