conquering life and
harmonising it enabled her to realise herself? If heredity influences
moral standards the mystery certainly is whence George Eliot derived
not her morality, but her "fire of insurgency." It is not difficult to
account for it in George Sand when we remember her mother's life and
temperament, and her own early years. Her father was a good soldier,
but had also many literary gifts. George Sand herself said: "Character
is hereditary, if my readers wish to know me, they must know my
father." George Eliot's creed and pervading view of life was the
supreme responsibility of it, and the inevitableness of the struggles
of the spirit warring against the senses. Her ideal is attainment
through great trial. George Sand, the born hater of conventions,
developed life into a harmony. We feel ultimately in her, a sense of
peculiar serenity and peace, of self realisation, more akin perhaps to
Plato's ideal of a character in harmony with itself, whose various
impulses are so attuned that they form practically a single desire and
this desire satisfies all the forces of the nature. What was this
desire that was involved in the whole aim or system of George Sand's
life? The ethical poet who affirmed emphatically that "conduct was
three-fourths of life," expressed the highest admiration of George
Sand's aims and ethics, and according to Matthew Arnold, her ruling
idea was, that this ordinary human life of love and suffering was
destined to be raised, into an ideal life, and _that_ ideal life is
our real life. Matthew Arnold has written one of his most beautiful
and eloquent and touching essays in this record of his impressions and
estimate of George Sand. Well does he say that "her passions and her
errors have been abundantly talked of." She left them behind her, and
men's memory of them will leave them behind also.

There will remain the sense of benefit and stimulus from that large
and frank nature, that large and pure utterance. Matthew Arnold gives
three principal elements in her strain. Instead of the hopeless echo
of unrealised ideas we hear from her the evolution of character: "1,
Through agony, and revolt; 2, Through consolation from nature and
beauty; 3, Through sense of the Divine ('Je fus toujours tourmente des
choses divines') and social renewal, she passes into the great life
motif of her existence;" that the sentiment of the ideal life is none
other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew