shall paint justice as it should, as it may, be in our modern
society?"

To Sainte-Beuve, himself an unscathed intellectual Odysseus, she
declares herself greatly indebted intellectually; but on the whole
his influence seems to have been tranquillizing. The material for
the radical program, economic, political, and religious, which, like
a spiritual ancestor of H. G. Wells, she eagerly sought to
popularize by the novels of her middle years, was supplied mainly by
Saint-Simon, Lamennais, and Leroux. Her new "religion of humanity,"
a kind of theosophical socialism, is too fantastically garbed to
charm the sober spirits of our age. And yet from the ruins of that
time and from the emotional extravagance of books grown tedious,
which she has left behind her, George Sand emerges for us with one
radiant perception which must be included in whatever religion
animates a democratic society: "Everyone must be happy, so that the
happiness of a few may not be criminal and cursed by God."

One of George Sand's French critics, M. Caro, a member of the
Academy, who deals somewhat austerely with her religiose enthusiasms
and with her Utopian projects for social reformation, remarks
gravely and not without tenderness:

"The one thing needful to this soul, so strong, so rich in
enthusiasm, is a humble moral quality that she disdains, and when
she has occasion to speak of it, even slanders,--namely resignation.
This is not, as she seems to think, the sluggish virtue of base
souls, who, in their superstitious servitude to force, hasten to
crouch beneath every yoke. That is a false and degrading
resignation; genuine resignation grows out of the conception of the