nd liberty with Armand Barbes in his dungeon at
Vincennes; she writes to Lamennais on philosophy, to Mazzini on
socialism, to Lamartine on democracy, and to Ledru-Rollin on justice. Her
letters reveal to us not merely the life of a great novelist but the soul
of a great woman, of a woman who was one with all the noblest movements
of her day and whose sympathy with humanity was boundless absolutely. For
the aristocracy of intellect she had always the deepest veneration, but
the democracy of suffering touched her more. She preached the
regeneration of mankind, not with the noisy ardour of the paid advocate,
but with the enthusiasm of the true evangelist. Of all the artists of
this century she was the most altruistic; she felt every one's
misfortunes except her own. Her faith never left her; to the end of her
life, as she tells us, she was able to believe without illusions. But
the people disappointed her a little. She saw that they followed persons
not principles, and for 'the great man theory' George Sand had no
respect. 'Proper names are the enemies of principles' is one of her
aphorisms.

So from 1850 her letters are more distinctly literary. She discusses
modern realism with Flaubert, and play-writing with Dumas fils; and
protests with passionate vehemence against the doctrine of L'art pour
l'art. 'Art for the sake of itself is an idle sentence,' she writes;
'art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good,
that is the creed I seek.' And in a delightful letter to M. Charles
Poncy she repeats the same idea very charmingly. 'People say that birds
sing for the sake of singing, but I doubt it. They sing their loves and
happiness, and in that they are in keeping with nature. But man must do
something more, and poets only sing in order to move people and to make
them think.' She wanted M. Poncy to be the poet of the people and, if
good advice were all that had been needed, he would certainly have been
the Burns of the workshop. She drew out a delightful scheme for a volume
to be called Songs of all Trades and saw the possibilities of making
handicrafts poetic. Perhaps she valued good intentions in art a little
too much, and she hardly understood that art for art's sake is not meant
to express the final cause of art but is merely a formula of creation;
but, as she herself had scaled Parnassus, we must not quarrel at her
bringing Proletarianism with her. For George Sand must be ranked am