delicacy that not unfrequently disfigures her pages and
offends us, offends also as an artistic fault. As a fact it is taste
rather than conscience that she is thus apt to shock. For the almost
passing coarseness of expression or thought is nothing more than the
overflow, the negligent frankness of a rich and active but healthy
nature, not the deliberate obliquity of a corrupt fancy or perverted
mind. Such unreserve, unfortunately, has too commonly been the
transgression of writers of superabundant energy. But her sins are
against outward decorum rather than against the principles upon which
the rules of decorum are based. No one was better capable of
appreciating and indicating with fine touches, delicacy and niceties of
taste and feeling in others. Her sympathy with such sensitiveness is a
corrective that should render harmless what might vitiate taste if that
qualification were absent. And her stories, though including a very few
instances where the subject chosen seems to most English minds too
repulsive to admit of possible redemption, and the frequent incidental
introduction of situations and frank discussion of topics inadmissible
in English fiction of that period--an honorable distinction it seems in
some danger of losing in the present--can hardly be censured from the
French standpoint, as fair critics now admit. It is inconceivable that a
public could be demoralized by _Indiana_ and _Valentine_, at a time when
no subject seemed wicked and morbid enough to satisfy popular taste.
The art of George Sand in the main was sound and healthy, and in flat
opposition to the excesses both of the ultra-romantic and ultra-realist
schools.

Clear-sighted critics, perceiving that the impression produced by her
works is not one to induce men and women to defy the laws of their
country, nor likely to undermine their religious faith, have gone more
to the heart of the matter. The dangerous tendency is more insidious,
they say, and more general. Virtue, and not vice, is made attractive in
her books; but it is an easy virtue, attained without self-conquest. All
her characters, good and bad, act alike from impulse. Those who seek
virtue seek pleasure in so doing, and her philosophy of life seems to be
that people should do as they like. The morality she commends to our
sympathy and admiration is a morality of instinct and emotion, not of
reason and principle. Self-renunciation, immolation of desire in
obedience to accepted precep