goldfinches, who trustfully pecked from the hands held out to them, just as she describes it in Teverino.'

George Sand owed something more than her love of birds to her mother, whom she loved passionately, but whose inferior station, barely tolerated by the family, made the daughter suffer keenly;I mean a deep tenderness for the poor and lowly, an advanced predilection for outlaws of all sorts, a revolt against social prejudices and conventionalities, and a certain bohemianism that-in her youth especially was constantly struggling against that good-breeding which nevertheless served her so well for giving her personages the tone proper to good society. Her most perfect specimen of this is the old Marchioness in 'Le Marquis de Villemer'; yet in spite of her plebeian sympathies, the same refinement appears everywhere. And here we have the evidence of her grandmother's and the convent's influence.

Aurore Dupin's years at the English nuns' convent contributed not a little to the formation of a peculiar manner, in which so many contrary elements were combined. Her free-thinking grandmother had put her in this pious retreat out of respect to the customs of society. She wished the dreamy and untrained child, who had grown up in all the freedom of country life, and was adopting peasant habits, to learn good manners. Let us hasten to add that for our future joy, George Sand always remained somewhat a peasant; we owe her admirable pastoral novels to this rustic substratum. She certainly conceived their germ in the ruminating life she led when quite a child at Nohant, in the company of little shepherds who charmed her with the legends she used so well later on.

The convent made a mystic of this wild creature, but not at once, for she bore her well-deserved name of Madcap a long time; still, the influence of a group of women of the highest moral superiority acted upon her by degrees. She has rendered them the most grateful homage in her 'Memoirs,' recognizing that the years spent in that great female family were the happiest and most peaceful of her life.

Religious idealism seems to have been innate with George Sand. Brought up by a Voltairean grandmother with contempt for what she called superstitions, she had made up a religion for, herself out of a compound of mythology, fairy stories, and theories of political equality gathered in. her childish readings- seemingly least fitted to suggest it. Her first poetic effort. and this word must be used from the beginning in speaking of her prose- was written to extol Corambé; a beneficent genius, to whom she raised altars in the park at Nohant when about eleven years old, at the time when she was under the double spell of the Iliad and Jerusalem Delivered.' Jesus and his Gospel succeeded the somewhat pagan phantom she had adored

during her pensive childhood: the most ardent piety seized her, and she came near consecrating herself to a religious life; this would have been a great loss to French literature. Fortunately the wisdom of the nuns curbed her excessive zeal; yet all through life she had that sacred pain, which has been so aptly termed "the anguish of divine things." If it had not been for this, she never could have expressed, as she did many years later in 'Spiridion,' all the agony endured by the soul of a young priest on losing his faith. The influence of her intimacy with Abbé de Lamennais can be traced here; but there is more than that, there is a personal experience.

Aurore astounded her grandmother by coming home a Catholic. She soon ceased to find certitude in dogma, however. A most irregular course of reading led her helter-skelter through all philosophies and all literatures. Spinoza seized her; her admiration made her set Leibnitz above all metaphysicians; she came in turn under the ascendency of Châteaubriand, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Byron; but her real master was Rousseau. By her first novels especially she belongs to his school; no freer from the great fault of declamation than he, as enamored of nature as he had been, and able to speak the burning language of love as he had known how to speak it.

If it is true that modern pedagogy, by following methods and giving an important place to science, has the inevitable result of killing women's imagination and making them uniform, then George Sand was a most privileged creature; for she was brought up without a plan,-educating herself hap-hazard, learning a little Latin when quite a child with Deschartres, her deceased father's preceptor, and no doubt picking up many other things as well, while with that learned and eccentric man. She was influenced by the convent next, where her ardor for learning was somewhat benumbed; and finally turned loose in a library, where like a bee she made honey of everything.

A perfect rage for reading and physical exercise, long hours of. study alternating with long rides, were her peculiarities, when some of her imprudent friends thought it was time to marry this young girl, so entirely free from coquetry or even the desire to please. Her large, black, dreamy eyes seemed ever following some inward vision, and gave her, as she says herself, a stupid look; in fact she never was bright at any period of her life. Her conversation was not brilliant, although she has often made her written dialogues extremely so; talking tired her, and the George Sand of future literary dinners usually played there a mute part. Melancholy by reflection, she needed gayety; and this silent creature often surprised those about her by sudden outbursts of animal spirits. Moreover, she never thought herself handsome. (Balzac, who has described her as

Camille Maupin in his novel 'Beatrix,' has contradicted her on this point.)

She was given in marriage to M. Dudevant, the son of a retired colonel. He had been an officer himself, but was now nothing but a hunting country-gentleman, and at times a hard drinker. It will surprise no one that this hasty and ill-assorted union was unhappy. It is more astonishing that it should have lasted nearly ten years. To give it so long life, it needed the all-powerful assistance of maternity, George Sand's really great passion, and her only lasting and indestructible one. She nursed her children herself; took care of them night and day, even at the beginning of her restless career; always found the time to look after them most tenderly; and at last, in the later period of her life, when she had calmed down, she became the indefatigable educator of her granddaughters. She was most skillful with her needle, and did not despise any household detail. I saw her thus when she was sixty years old; but when she was twenty she enjoyed dancing the bourrée with the peasants on holidays as well.

Finally all this was not enough for her, and she went to Paris for a short time every year; but as her husband, the master of their common fortune, gave her a ridicuously small allowance, she utilized her talents in order to live,- -made crayon portraits, painted miniature ornaments, or collaborated with several journalists from her native province of Berri, for the Figaro. These articles never were remarkable, as George Sand had neither the requisite spirit and dash, nor had she any talent for brevity; although later she succeeded several times in short stories, as those rare pearls 'Lavinia,' 'Metella,' etc., prove. By a remarkable coincidence, 'Lavinia,' published before 1838, resembles Owen Meredith's 'Lucile,' published in 1860, almost stroke for stroke.

One year when she was in the country, having read much of Walter Scott, she wrote her first novel. "Having read it over," she says ingenuously, "I concluded that it was good for nothing; but that I could write some not quite so bad." She had found her vocation.

At first Jules Sandeau wrote with her, and later left her half his surname. As for "George," it is as common a name in Berri as "Patrick" in Ireland. The courts did not decree the legal separation of M. and Madame Dudevant until 1836. It was in favor of the latter, intrusting her with the education of her two children; this proves that all the blame cannot have been hers. By this time she had published her masterpieces, if one can apply this term to George Sand's novels,- for perhaps there is not a perfect one among them, except the pastoral novels. Working without any plan, stopping as if

exhausted when she had said all that was pent up in her, she usually broke down at the dénouement.

These captivating early works are pre-eminently works of passion. It would be a mistake to consider them the voluntary unveiling of the author's life; but one is certain to find it everywhere, and apparently in spite of herself. 'Indiana' was surely not the cry of her personal revolt against marriage, for the selfish lover in it is not any nobler than the tyrannical husband; but just here George Sand has demonstrated with the deepest feeling, in which many a memory echoes, how far she considers a woman superior to man when love is at stake. She seems to be less severe in her opinions with Jacques, a heroic husband, who resolves to commit suicide, so as to save his wife from the shame of becoming guilty towards him. There is no less audacity and horror of conventional forms in Valentine,' where aristocratic prejudices are trampled under foot by the descendant of an illustrious race, in favor of the son of a peasant. The dangerous doctrine that love can dictate duties superior to law is brought forward in these burning pages, and must have served as an excuse to many sensitive souls that went astray; and we may say that they must have been among the best and noblest of such souls, for George Sand never knew how to use the demoralizing language that appeals to base natures.

'Lélia' must be considered a magnificent prose poem, as all the characteristics of the most elevated poetry are found in it: amplitude, rhythm, brilliancy, and powerful imagery. Taken as a whole, it is more out of date than all George Sand's other novels, just on account of this excessive poetic enthusiasm. Yet it is the one containing the greatest beauties. The characters seem like incarnated myths or allegories. Lélia represents agonized aspirations towards the sublime, although we recognize that duality in her which is more or less noticeable in every one, but was present in so extraordinary a degree in George Sand. Sténio, while he recalls Alfred de Musset, typifies the struggles of an inspired poet, whose weak and vacillating will betrays him to seducing sensualism. The priest Magnus stands for the demoralized and fanatic clergy as George Sand saw it; for she was always the enemy of the clergy, if not of religion. As for the philosophical idea,—uniting as it does, in its absurd and entangled action, such strange characters as Trenmor the virtuous convict, Pulchérie the wise courtesan, etc., who all argue and declaim,— we have the key to it; for when George Sand wrote Lélia,' she was painting the agonized state of her own soul facing a terrible enigma. She had reached her thirtieth year without having had her eyes opened to the realities of life; and then suddenly found herself in a great social centre where all the sadness, want, vice, and injustice of

the world confronted her. Up to that time she had wept over her own woes; now she felt like an atom among the millions of creatures crushed by inexorable fate. Her despair is reflected in the character of Lélia, in whom the evil of doubt and the thirst for truth are warring; her heart, incapable of finding happiness anywhere, is consumed with boundless desires; and she dies without having gratified them.

The subject of 'Mauprat' is simpler and more wholesome. It is the effect of passion, working for good this time, upon a wild, violent, and apparently untamable creature, in whom the pure young girl he adores creates a conscience, and as it were, a soul. The supreme power of ennobling love was a subject dear to George Sand. She takes it up again in 'Simon'; where a semi-peasant, by his merit and talents, becomes the equal of the high-born lady. And both these beautiful books end by a happy marriage, no more nor less than a fairy tale. Le Secrétaire Intime,' if it were not the most delightful of fancies without the intention of proving anything, would lead us to believe that clandestine marriages have the greatest chance of being the happiest.

In 'Leone Leoni' George Sand reverses the subject of 'Manon Lescaut,' and shows us how a weak and gentle woman is bewitched and subjugated to the very last by a man most unworthy of her. In 'La Dernière Aldine,' she makes us, by sheer art, accept the somewhat delicate subject of the love of a great Venetian lady for her gondolier; this love, however, for some unknown reason remaining perfectly chaste.

We must not forget that this bold and mad harvest, in which common-sense has no place, was grown in 1830,- the era of all Utopias and anticipated possibilities; when a new world seemed about to be born on the ruins of the old. This was the time when Théophile Gautier went to the theatre with long hair and a pink satin waistcoat, when Balzac wore a monk's white robe instead of a dressinggown, and when George Sand used to cut off her beautiful black locks and wear masculine attire, making herself look a boy of twelve in it on account of her diminutive stature. However much may have been said about this, she never wore those unbecoming clothes except in an intermittent way, finding them more convenient and less expensive than others.

Up to 1840 George Sand wrote under the impulse of feeling, following no system; later on, a system was grafted on the feeling without destroying it. Lamennais's humanitarian Christianity, Michel de Bourges's revolutionary tirades, Pierre Leroux's dreamy socialism, all took hold on her either successively or at once. With more zeal than discernment she made herself the echo of the most