of Far from the Madding Crowd and The Mill on the Floss, and of Wordsworth, once, too, a torch of revolution, turning to his Michaels and his leech-gatherers and his Peter Bells.  Her exquisite pictures of pastoral life are idealizations of it; her representations of the peasant are not corroborated by Zola’s; to the last she approaches the shield of human nature from the golden side.  But for herself at least she has found a real secret of happiness in country life, tranquil work, and a right direction given to her own heart and conscience.

It is at about this point in her spiritual development that she turns towards Gustave Flaubert—­perhaps a little suspiciously at first, yet resolved from the first, according to her natural instinct and her now fixed principles, to stimulate by believing in his admirable qualities.  Writing from Nohant in 1866 to him at Croisset, she epitomises her distinction as a woman and as an author in this playful sally:  “Sainte-Beuve, who loves you nevertheless, pretends that you are dreadfully vicious.  But perhaps he sees with eyes a bit dirty, like that learned botanist who pretends that the germander is of a dirty yellow.  The observation was so false that I could not help writing on the margin of his book:  ’It is you, whose eyes are dirty.’”

We have spoken of George Sand as a faithful daughter of the French Revolution; and by way of contrast we may speak of Flaubert as a disgruntled son of the Second Empire.  Between his literary advent and hers there is an interval of a generation, during which the proud expansive spirit and the grandiose aspirations imparted to the nation by the first Napoleon dwindled to a spirit of mediocrity and bourgeois smugness under a Napoleon who had inherited nothing great of his predecessor but his name.  This change in the time-spirit may help to explain the most significant difference between Flaubert and George Sand.  He inherited the tastes and imagination of the great romantic generation; but he inherited none of its social and political enthusiasm.  He was disciplined by the romantic writers; yet his reaction to the literary culture of his youth is not ethical but aesthetic; he finds his inspiration less in Rousseau than in Chateaubriand.  He is bred to an admiration of eloquence, the poetic phrase, the splendid picture, life in the grand style; with increasing disgust he finds himself entering a society which, he feels, neither understands nor values any of these things, and which threatens their destruction.  Consequently, we find him actuated as a writer by two complementary passions—­the love of splendor and the hatred of mediocrity—­two passions, of which the second sometimes alternates with the first, sometimes inseparably fuses with it, and ultimately almost extinguishes it.