c wars, must seek a new career in
Restoration days. Julien Sorel, the low-born hero of _Le Rouge et
le Noir_, finding the red coat impossible, must don the priestly black
as a cloak for his ambition. Hypocrite, seducer, and assassin, he
ends his career under the knife of the guillotine. _La Chartreuse
de Parme_ exhibits the manners, characters, intrigues of
nineteenth-century Italy, with a remarkable episode which gives a
soldier's experiences of the field of Waterloo. In the artist's
plastic power Beyle was wholly wanting; a collection of ingenious
observations in psychology may be of rare value, but it does not
constitute a work of art. His writings are a whetstone for the
intelligence, but we must bring intelligence to its use, else it will
grind down or break the blade. In 1842 he died, desiring to perpetuate
his expatriation by the epitaph which names him Arrigo Beyle Milanese.

III

Lyrical and idealistic are epithets which a critic is tempted to affix
to the novels of George Sand; but from her early lyrical manner she
advanced to perfect idyllic narrative; and while she idealised, she
observed, incorporating in her best work the results of a patient
and faithful study of reality. A vaguer word may be applied to whatever
she wrote; offspring of her idealism or her realism, it is always
in a true sense poetic.

LUCILE-AURORE DUPIN, a descendant of Marshal Saxe, was born in Paris
in 1804, the daughter of Lieutenant Dupin and a mother of humble
origin--a child at once of the aristocracy and of the people. Her
early years were passed in Berri, at the country-house of her
grandmother. Strong, calm, ruminating, bovine in temperament, she
had a large heart and an ardent imagination. The woods, the flowers,
the pastoral heights and hollows, the furrows of the fields, the
little peasants, the hemp-dressers of the farm, their processes of
life, their store of old tales and rural superstitions made up her
earliest education. Already endless stories shaped themselves in her
brain. At thirteen she was sent to be educated in a Paris convent;
from the boisterous moods which seclusion encouraged, she sank of
a sudden into depths of religious reverie, or rose to heights of
religious exaltation, not to be forgotten when afterwards she wrote
_Spiridion_. The country cooled her devout ardour; she read widely,
poets, historians, philosophers, without method and with boundless
delight; the _Genie du Christianisme_ replaced the _I