merged herself in what she saw;
her feeling for nature is realised in gracious art, and her art seems
itself to be nature.

In the novels of her latest years she moved from Berri to other regions
of France, and interpreted aristocratic together with peasant life.
Old, experienced, infinitely good and attaching, she has tales for
her grandchildren, and romances--_Jean de la Roche_, _Le Marquis de
Villemer_, and the rest--for her other grandchildren the public. The
soul of the peasant, of the artist, of the man who must lean upon
a stronger woman's arm, of the girl--neither child nor fully
adult--she entered into with deepest and truest sympathy. The simple,
austere, stoical, heroic man she admired as one above her. Her style
at its best, flowing without impetuosity, full and pure without
commotion, harmonious without complex involutions, can mirror beauty
as faithfully and as magically as an inland river. "Calme, toujours
plus calme," was a frequent utterance of her declining years. "Ne
detruisez pas la verdure" were her latest words. In 1876 George Sand
died. Her memoirs and her correspondence make us intimate with a
spirit, amid all its errors, sweet, generous, and gaining through
experience a wisdom for the season of old age.

IV

George Sand may be described as an "idealist," if we add the words
"with a remarkable gift for observation." Her great contemporary
HONORE DE BALZAC is named a realist, but he was a realist haunted
or attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance. Born in 1799 at
Tours, son of an advocate turned military commissariat-agent, Honore
de Balzac, after some training in the law, resolved to write, and,
if possible, not to starve. With his robust frame, his resolute will,
manifest in a face coarsely powerful, his large good-nature, his large
egoism, his audacity of brain, it seemed as if he might shoulder his
way through the crowd to fortune and to fame. But fortune and fame
were hard to come at. His tragedy _Cromwell_ was condemned by all
who saw the manuscript; his novels were published, and lie deep in
their refuge under the waters of oblivion. He tried the trades of
publisher, printer, type-founder, and succeeded in encumbering
himself with debt. At length in 1829 _Le Dernier Chouan_, a
half-historical tale of Brittany in 1800, not uninfluenced by Scott,
was received with a measure of favour.

Next year Balzac found his truer self, overlaid with journalism,
pamphleteering, and miscell