s' later date, is an equally perfect study. From the time of
_Indiana_ onwards she continued to produce at the rate of about two
novels a year; and at intervals, rare intervals, the product was a
failure. But we shall find her when approaching seventy still writing
on, without a trace of the weakness of old age.

The charge of "unreality" so commonly brought against her novels it may
be well briefly to examine. Such little fantasy-pieces in Hoffmann's
manner as _Le Chateau des Desertes_, _Teverino_, and others, making no
pretense to be exact studies of nature, cannot fairly be censured on
this head. Like fairy tales they have a place of their own in art. One
of the prettiest of these is _Les Dames Vertes_, in which the fable
seems to lead us over the borders of the supernatural; but the secret of
the mystification, well kept till the last, is itself so pleasing and
original that the reader has no disappointing sense as of having had a
hoax played upon his imagination.

In character drawing no one can, on occasion, be a more uncompromising
realist than George Sand. Andre, Horace, Laurent in _Elle et Lui_,
Pauline, Corilla, Alida in _Valvedre_, might be cited as examples. But
her theory was unquestionably not the theory which guides the modern
school of novel writers. She wrote, she states explicitly, for those
"who desire to find in a novel a sort of ideal life." She made this her
aim, but without depreciation of the widely different aims of other
authors. "You paint mankind as they are," she said to Balzac; "I, as
they ought to be, or might become. You write the comedy of humanity. I
should like to write the eclogue, the poem, the romance of humanity."
She has been taxed with flattering nature and human nature because her
love of beauty--defined by her as the highest expression of
truth--dictated her choice of subjects. An artist who paints roses
paints from reality as entirely as he who paints mud. Her principle was
to choose among realities those which seemed best worth painting.

The amount of idealization in her peasant sketches was naturally
over-estimated by those who, never having studied the class, could not
conceive of a peasant except conventionally, as a drunken boor. The very
just portrait of Cecilia Boccaferri, the conscientious but obscure
artist in _Le Chateau des Desertes_, might seem over-flattered to such
as imagine that all opera-singers must be persons of riotous living. The
types she prefers to pr