Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Merimee, Stendhal, and Sainte-Beuve.  To signalize her equality with her brothers in talent, she adopts male attire:  “I had a sentry-box coat made, of rough grey cloth, with trousers and waist-coat to match.  With a grey hat and a huge cravat of woolen material, I looked exactly like a first-year student.”  In the freedom of this rather unalluring garb she entered into relations Platonic, fraternal, or tempestuously passionate with perhaps the most distinguished series of friends and lovers that ever fluttered about one flame.  There was Aurelien de Seze; Jules Sandeau, her first collaborator, who “reconciled her to life” and gave her a nom de guerre; the inscrutable Merimee, who made no one happy; Musset—­an encounter from which both tiger-moths escaped with singed wings; the odd transitional figure of Pagello; Michel Euraed; Liszt; Chopin, whom she loved and nursed for eight years; her master Lamennais; her master Pierre Leroux; her father-confessor Sainte-Beuve; and Gustave Flaubert, the querulous friend of her last decade.

As we have compressed the long and complex story of her personal relationships, so we must compress the intimately related history of her works and her ideas.  When under the inspiration of Rousseau, the emancipated George Sand began to write, her purposes were but vaguely defined.  She conceived of life as primarily an opportunity for unlimited self-expansion, and of literature as an opportunity for unrestricted self-expression.  “Nevertheless,” she declares, “my instincts have formed, without my privity, the theory I am about to set down,—­a theory which I have generally followed unconsciously. ...  According to this theory, the novel is as much a work of poetry 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