ing scenes of nature it has ideal colours
and lines, neither exact nor yet too minute, but which are all the more
vaguely and delightfully poetical."(31)

(31) Eleventh _Lettre d'un voyageur_: To Giacomo Meyerbeer.

As examples of music in literature we have George Sand's phrase, more
lyrical and musical than picturesque. We have, too, the gentle, soothing
strophes of Sully Prudhomme and the vague melody of the Verlaine songs:
"_De la musique avant toute chose_." It would be absurd to exaggerate
the influence exercised by George Sand, and to attribute to her an
importance which does not belong to her, over poetical evolution. It is
only fair to say, though, that music, which was looked upon suspiciously
for so long a time by classical writers of sane and sure taste, has
completely invaded our present society, so that we are becoming more
and more imbued with it. George Sand's predilection for modern art is
another feature which makes her one of us, showing that her tendencies
were very marked for things of the present day.

VII

THE HUMANITARIAN DREAM

PIERRE LEROUX--SOCIALISTIC NOVELS

Hitherto we have seen George Sand put into her work her sufferings,
her protests as a woman, and her dreams as an artist. But the
nineteenth-century writer did not confine his ambitions to this modest
task. He belonged to a corporation which counted among its members
Voltaire and Rousseau. The eighteenth-century philosophers had changed
the object of literature. Instead of an instrument of analysis, they
had made of it a weapon for combat, an incomparable weapon for attacking
institutions and for overthrowing governments. The fact is, that from
the time of the Restoration we shall scarcely meet with a single writer,
from the philosopher to the vaudevillist, and from the professor to the
song-maker, who did not wish to act as a torch on the path of humanity.
Poets make revolutions, and show Plato how wrong he was in driving them
away from his Republic. Sophocles was appointed a general at Athens for
having written a good tragedy, and so novelists, dramatists, critics and
makers of puns devoted themselves to making laws. George Sand was too
much a woman of her times to keep aloof from such a movement. We shall
now have to study her in her socialistic _role_.

We can easily imagine on what side her sympathies were. She had always
been battling with institutions, and it seemed to her that institutions
were undoubtedly i