matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to
make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas
of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human
conception of God, I have my doubts."

In addition to the charges of violence and cruelty, which he brought
against all antiquity as well as against modern times, much in the
fashion of Swift or the older Mark Twain, Flaubert nursed four grave
causes of indignation, made four major charges of folly against
modern "Christian" civilization. In religion, we have substituted
for Justice the doctrine of Grace. In our sociological
considerations we act no longer with discrimination but upon a
principle of universal sympathy. In the field of art and literature
we have abandoned criticism and research for the Beautiful in favor
of universal puffery. In politics we have nullified intelligence and
renounced leadership to embrace universal suffrage, which is the
last disgrace of the human spirit.

It must be acknowledged that Flaubert's arraignment of modern
society possesses the characteristics commended by the late Barett
Wendell: it is marked in a high degree by "unity, mass, and
coherence." It must be admitted also that George Sand possessed in a
high degree the Pauline virtue of being "not easily provoked," or
she never could have endured so patiently, so sweetly, Flaubert's
reiterated and increasingly ferocious assaults upon her own master
passion, her ruling principle. George Sand was one whose entire life
signally attested the power of a "saving grace," resident in the
creative and recuperative energies of nature, resident in the
magical, the miracle-working, powers of the human heart, the powers
of love and sympathy. She was a modern spiritual adventurer who had