and for expressing them. We know, too, that an irregular life is neither
the origin nor the stamp of extraordinary intellectual worth. All the
cripples of Bohemian life prove to us that genius is not the outcome
of that kind of life, but that, on the contrary, such life is apt to
paralyze talent. It is very convenient, though, for the artist and for
every other variety of "superior beings" to make themselves believe that
ordinary morals are not for them. The best argument we can have against
this theory is the case of George Sand. The artist, in her case, was
eminently a very regular and hard-working _bourgeois_ woman.

The art in which George Sand gave evidence of the surest taste was
music. That is worthy of notice. In one of her _Lettres d'un voyageur_,
she celebrates Liszt attacking the _Dies irae_ on the Fribourg organ.
She devotes another letter to the praise of Meyer-beer. She has analyzed
the different forms of musical emotion in several of her books. One of
the ideas dear to romanticism was that of the union and fusion of all
the arts. The writer can, and in a certain way he ought, to produce
with words the same effects that the painter does with colours and the
sculptor with lines. We all know how much literature romantic painters
and sculptors have put into their art. The romantic writers were less
inclined to accord the same welcome to music as to the plastic arts.
Theophile Gautier is said to have exclaimed that music was "the most
disagreeable and the dearest of all the arts." Neither Lamartine, Hugo,
nor any other of the great writers of that period was influenced by
music. Musset was the first one to be impassioned by it, and this may
have been as much through his dandyism as from conviction.

_Fille de la douleur, Harmonie, Harmonie,
Langue que fiour l'amour invents le ginie,
Qui nous viens d'Italie, et qui lui vins des cieux,
Douce langue du coeur, la seule ou la pensee,
Cette vierge craintive et d'une ombre ofensie,
Passe en gardant son voile et sans craindre les eux,
Qui sait ce qu'un enfant peut entendre et peut dire
Dans tes soupirs divins nes de l'air qu'il respire,
Tristes comme son coeur et doux comme sa voix?_

George Sand, who agreed with Musset, claimed for "the most beautiful
of all the arts," the honour of being able to paint "all the shades
of sentiment and all the phases of passion." "Music," she says, "can
express everything. For describ