as of analysis. It demands true situations, and characters not only
true but real, grouped about a type intended to epitomize the
sentiment or the main conceptions of the book. This type generally
represents the passion of love, since almost all novels are love-
stories. According to this theory (and it is here that it begins)
the writer must idealize this love, and consequently this type,--and
must not fear to attribute to it all the powers to which he inwardly
aspires, or all the sorrows whose pangs he has observed or felt.
This type must in no wise, however, become degraded by the
vicissitude of events; it must either die or triumph."

In 1831, when her pen began its fluent course through the lyrical
works of her first period--Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, and
the rest--we conceive George Sand's culture, temper, and point of
view to have been fairly comparable with those of the young Shelley
when, fifteen years earlier, he with Mary Godwin joined Byron and
Jane Clairmont in Switzerland--young revoltes, all of them,
nourished on eighteenth century revolutionary philosophy and Gothic
novels. Both these eighteenth century currents meet in the work of
the new romantic group in England and in France. The innermost
origin of the early long poems of Shelley and the early works of
George Sand is in personal passion, in the commotion of a romantic
spirit beating its wings against the cage of custom and circumstance
and institutions. The external form of the plot, whatever is
fantastic and wilful in its setting and its adventures, is due to
the school of Ann Radcliffe. But the quality in Shelley and in
George Sand which bewitched even the austere Matthew Arnold in his
green and salad days is the poetising of that liberative eighteenth
century philosophy into "beautiful idealisms" of a love emancipated
from human limitations, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by