self realisation, more akin perhaps to Plato’s ideal of a character in harmony with itself, whose various impulses are so attuned that they form practically a single desire and this desire satisfies all the forces of the nature.  What was this desire that was involved in the whole aim or system of George Sand’s life?  The ethical poet who affirmed emphatically that “conduct was three-fourths of life,” expressed the highest admiration of George Sand’s aims and ethics, and according to Matthew Arnold, her ruling idea was, that this ordinary human life of love and suffering was destined to be raised, into an ideal life, and that ideal life is our real life.  Matthew Arnold has written one of his most beautiful and eloquent and touching essays in this record of his impressions and estimate of George Sand.  Well does he say that “her passions and her errors have been abundantly talked of.”  She left them behind her, and men’s memory of them will leave them behind also.

There will remain the sense of benefit and stimulus from that large and frank nature, that large and pure utterance.  Matthew Arnold gives three principal elements in her strain.  Instead of the hopeless echo of unrealised ideas we hear from her the evolution of character:  “1, Through agony, and revolt; 2, Through consolation from nature and beauty; 3, Through sense of the Divine (’Je fus toujours tourmente des choses divines’) and social renewal, she passes into the great life motif of her existence;” that the sentiment of the ideal life is none other than man’s normal life as we shall one day know it.  Matthew Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant.

Browning came across her in her journalistic career in Paris, and he was not touched with the same admiration.

Mr. Chesterton suggests in his biography of the poet that Browning was conventional by nature—­and through the greatness of his brain he developed.  He certainly developed on many sides, but his development did not include admiration for George Sand and her circle.  It was social tone, his biographer believes, more than opinions, which created this strong aversion in the author of “The Statue and the Bust.”

But Mrs. Browning, though her life had been mainly one long seclusion on her sofa, was unhampered by these conventional barriers.  What she felt was the attraction of the massive and fascinating brain and heart of the great French woman, what she heard was “that eloquent voice,” what she saw was “that noble, that speaking head.”  She had warm, quick sympathies and intuitional appreciations of genius.  In regard to so wide and so complicated a character as George Sand’s, we cannot be astonished at finding very different judgments and impressions; indeed we are prepared to feel in all of them some note of inadequacy and of incompleteness.  But in our relation to her as a Great Writer, of this, as readers, we are assured, we know that it is no common matter to have come into contact with so gifted and great a nature, with a genius that possessed “a current of true and living ideas,” and which produced “amid the inspiration of them.”