Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the
serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant.

Browning came across her in her journalistic career in Paris, and he
was not touched with the same admiration.

Mr. Chesterton suggests in his biography of the poet that Browning was
conventional by nature--and through the greatness of his brain he
developed. He certainly developed on many sides, but his development
did not include admiration for George Sand and her circle. It was
social tone, his biographer believes, more than _opinions_, which
created this strong aversion in the author of "The Statue and the
Bust."

But Mrs. Browning, though her life had been mainly one long seclusion
on her sofa, was unhampered by these conventional barriers. What she
felt was the attraction of the massive and fascinating brain and heart
of the great French woman, what she heard was "that eloquent voice,"
what she saw was "that noble, that speaking head." She had warm, quick
sympathies and intuitional appreciations of genius. In regard to so
wide and so complicated a character as George Sand's, we cannot be
astonished at finding very different judgments and impressions; indeed
we are prepared to feel in all of them some note of inadequacy and of
incompleteness. But in our relation to her as a Great Writer, of this,
as readers, we are assured, we _know_ that it is no common matter to
have come into contact with so gifted and great a nature, with a
genius that possessed "a current of true and living ideas," and which
produced "amid the inspiration of them."

NOTES:

[1: 1886. "Mind" Vol. 11. "The need of a Society for experimental
Psychology."]

[2: 1888. "Mind" Vol. 13. "The Psychological Laboratory at Leipsic."]

[3: Essays. On the genius and tendency of the writings of Thomas
Carlyle. "The Camelot Series."]

[4: See supplementary notice of "Hamlet" in Charles Knight's Pictorial
Edition of Shakespeare.]

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