which must change or can be changed with things which are unchangeable,
incurable, and permanent. Shakespeare, it is true, makes all his
villains talk poetry, but it is the poetry which a villain, were he a
poet, would inevitably write. George Sand glorifies every mind with her
own peculiar fire and tears. The fire is, fortunately, so much stronger
than the tears that her passion never degenerates into the maudlin. All
the same, she makes too universal a use of her own strongest gifts,
and this is why she cannot be said to excel as a portrait painter. One
merit, however, is certain: if her earliest writings were dangerous,
it was because of her wonderful power of idealization, not because she
filled her pages with the revolting and epicene sensuality of the new
Italian, French, and English schools. Intellectual viciousness was
not her failing, and she never made the modern mistake of confusing
indecency with vigour. She loved nature, air, and light too well and
too truly to go very far wrong in her imaginations. It may indeed be
impossible for many of us to accept all her social and political views;
they have no bearing, fortunately, on the quality of her literary art;
they have to be considered under a different aspect. In politics, her
judgment, as displayed in the letters to Mazzini, was profound. Her
correspondence with Flaubert shows us a capacity for stanch, unblemished
friendship unequalled, probably, in the biographies, whether published
or unpublished, of the remarkable.

With regard to her impiety--for such it should be called--it did not
arise from arrogance, nor was it based in any way upon the higher
learning of her period. Simply she did not possess the religious
instinct. She understood it sympathetically--in _Spiridion_, for
instance, she describes an ascetic nature as it has never been done in
any other work of fiction. Newman himself has not written passages of
deeper or purer mysticism, of more sincere spirituality. Balzac, in