temperament dramatic, melancholy, observing, cynical, and satirical.
She insists upon natural goodness; he, upon innate depravity. She
urges her faith in social regeneration; he vents his splenetic
contempt for the mob. Through all the successive shocks of
disillusioning experience, she expects the renovation of humanity by
some religious, some semi-mystical, amelioration of its heart; he
grimly concedes the greater part of humanity to the devil, and can
see no escape for the remnant save in science and aristocratic
organization. For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of
social salvation--it is her means of touching the world with her
ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the
avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence--it is his
subtly critical condemnation of the world.

The origins of these unreconciled antipathies lie deep beneath the
personal relationship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; lie deep
beneath their successors, who with more or less of amenity in their
manners are still debating the same questions today. The main
currents of the nineteenth century, with fluent and refluent tides,
clash beneath the controversy; and as soon as one hears its "long
withdrawing roar," and thinks it is dying away, and is become a part
of ancient history, it begins again, and will be heard, no doubt, by
the last man as a solemn accompaniment to his final contention with
his last adversary.

George Sand was, on the whole, a natural and filial daughter of the
French Revolution. The royal blood which she received from her
father's line mingled in her veins with that of the Parisian
milliner, her mother, and predestined her for a leveller by
preparing in her an instinctive ground of revolt against all those