the old Chansons de geste, the stories of adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; whereas in using fiction as a vehicle of thought, and romance as a means of influencing the social ideals of her age, George Sand was merely carrying out the traditions of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and of Chateaubriand.  The novel, says M. Caro, must be allied either to poetry or to science.  That it has found in philosophy one of its strongest allies seems not to have occurred to him.  In an English critic such a view might possibly be excusable.  Our greatest novelists, such as Fielding, Scott and Thackeray cared little for the philosophy of their age.  But coming, as it does, from a French critic, the statement seems to show a strange want of recognition of one of the most important elements of French fiction.  Nor, even in the narrow limits that he has imposed upon himself, can M. Caro be said to be a very fortunate or felicitous critic.  To take merely one instance out of many, he says nothing of George Sand’s delightful treatment of art and the artist’s life.  And yet how exquisitely does she analyse each separate art and present it to us in its relation to life!  In Consuelo she tells us of music; in Horace of authorship; in Le Chateau des Desertes of acting; in Les Maitres Mosaistes of mosaic work; in Le Chateau de Pictordu of portrait painting; and in La Daniella of the painting of landscape.  What Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning have done for England she did for France.  She invented an art literature.  It is unnecessary, however, to discuss any of M. Caro’s minor failings, for the whole effect of the book, so far as it attempts to portray for us the scope and character of George Sand’s genius, is entirely spoiled by the false attitude assumed from the beginning, and though the dictum may seem to many harsh and exclusive, we cannot help feeling that an absolute incapacity for appreciating the spirit of a great writer is no qualification for writing a treatise on the subject.

As for Madame Sand’s private life, which is so intimately connected with her art (for, like Goethe, she had to live her romances before she could write them), M. Caro says hardly anything about it.  He passes it over with a modesty that almost makes one blush, and for fear of wounding the susceptibilities of those grandes dames whose passions M. Paul Bourget analyses with such subtlety, he transforms her mother, who was a typical French grisette, into ‘a very amiable and spirituelle milliner’!  It must be admitted that Joseph Surface himself could hardly show greater tact and delicacy, though we ourselves must plead guilty to preferring Madame Sand’s own description of her as an ‘enfant du vieux pave de Paris.’