For George Sand was an indefatigable correspondent; she longs in one of her letters, it is true, for ’a planet where reading and writing are absolutely unknown,’ but still she had a real pleasure in letter-writing.  Her greatest delight was the communication of ideas, and she is always in the heart of the battle.  She discusses pauperism with Louis Napoleon in his prison at Ham, and 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 among our poetic geniuses.  She regarded the novel as still within the domain of poetry.  Her heroes are not dead photographs; they are great