and work to the
complete existence of the individual, from what is collective." When
forced by actual experience to point out what she holds to be the
rightful application of the idea, she limits it to voluntary
association; and she hoped great things from the co-operative principle,
as tending to eliminate the ills of extreme inequalities in the social
structure, and to preserve everything in it that is worth preserving.

CHAPTER VIII.

NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN.

By her novels classed as "socialistic," Madame Sand had, as we have
seen, incurred the public hostility of those whom her doctrines alarmed.
And yet her "communist" heroes and heroines are the most pacific and
inoffensive of social influences. They merely aspire to isolate
themselves, and personally to practice principles and virtues of the
highest order; unworldliness such as, if general, might indeed turn the
earth into the desired Utopia. Nothing can be said against their
example, unless that it is too good, and that there is little hope of
its being widely followed.

Charges of another sort, no less bitter, and though exaggerated,
somewhat better founded, assailed her after the appearance in 1847 of
_Lucrezia Floriani_, a novel of character-analysis entirely, but into
which she was accused of having introduced an unflattering portrait of
Frederic Chopin, whose long and long-requited attachment to her entitled
him to better treatment at her hands.

With respect to the general question of such alleged fictitious
reproductions, few novelists escape getting into trouble on this head.
It has been aptly observed by Mr. Hamerton that the usual procedure of
the reading public in such cases is to fix on some real personage as
distinctly unlike the character in the book as possible, for the
original, and then to complain of the unfaithfulness of the resemblance.
Madame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts would have revolted against
the practice--now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior
writers--of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of
well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin
himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work
without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations
to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially from those of the
personages in the romance.

_Lucrezia Floriani_ is a _cantatrice_ of genius, who, whilst still
young, has retired f