esent, if exceptional, are not impossible or
non-existent. An absolutely faultless heroine, such as Consuelo, she
seldom attempts to bring before us; an ideal hero; never.

Further, even when the idealism is greatest the essence is true. Her
most fanciful conceptions, most improbable combinations, seem more
natural than do every-day scenes and characters treated by inferior
artists. This is only partly due to the inimitable little touches of
nature that renew the impression of reality at every page. Her
imagination modified her material, but only in order the more vividly to
illustrate truths positive and everlasting. So did Shakespeare when he
drew Prospero and Miranda, Caliban and Ariel. Art, as regarded by George
Sand, is a search for ideal truth rather than a study of positive
reality. This principle determined the spirit of her romances. She was
the highest in her _genre_; let the world decide which _genre_ is the
highest.

When, after the publication of _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lelia_ and
_Jacques_, the moral tendency of her works was so sharply attacked, it
was contended on her behalf by some friendly critics that art and
social morality have no necessary connection--a line of defense she
would have been the last to take up for herself. In the present day her
judges complain rather of her incessant moralizing, and on the whole
with more reason. She indignantly denied that her novels had the evil
tendencies imputed to them. Certainly the supposition of the
antagonistic spirit of her writings to Christianity and marriage
vanishes in proportion to the reader's acquaintance with her works. But
against certain doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church
which she believed to be pernicious in their influence, she from the
first declared war, and by her frank audacity made bitter enemies. M.
Renan relates that when he was a boy of fifteen his ecclesiastical
superiors showed him George Sand, emblematically portrayed for the
admonition of the youth under their care, as a woman in black trampling
on a cross! Now, it is not merely that her own faith was eminently
Christian in character, and that the Christian ideal seemed to her the
most perfect that has yet presented itself to the mind of man; but if
unable to accept for herself the doctrine of revelation as commonly
interpreted, she is utterly without the aggressiveness of spirit, the
petty flippancy, that often betray the intellectual bigot under the
banner of