folly,’ as says M. Voltaire. ...  Neo-Catholicism on the one hand, and Socialism on the other, have stultified France.”  In another letter of the same Period and similar provocation:  “However much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no matter what one says.  All the advance that one can hope for, is to make the brute a little less wicked.  But as for elevating the ideas of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human conception of God, I have my doubts.”

In addition to the charges of violence and cruelty, which he brought against all antiquity as well as against modern times, much in the fashion of Swift or the older Mark Twain, Flaubert nursed four grave causes of indignation, made four major charges of folly against modern “Christian” civilization.  In religion, we have substituted for Justice the doctrine of Grace.  In our sociological considerations we act no longer with discrimination but upon a principle of universal sympathy.  In the field of art and literature we have abandoned criticism and research for the Beautiful in favor of universal puffery.  In politics we have nullified intelligence and renounced leadership to embrace universal suffrage, which is the last disgrace of the human spirit.

It must be acknowledged that Flaubert’s arraignment of modern society possesses the characteristics commended by the late Barett Wendell:  it is marked in a high degree by “unity, mass, and coherence.”  It must be admitted also that George Sand possessed in a high degree the Pauline virtue of being “not easily provoked,” or she never could have endured so patiently, so sweetly, Flaubert’s reiterated and increasingly ferocious assaults upon her own master passion, her ruling principle.  George Sand was one whose entire life signally attested the power of a “saving grace,” resident in the creative and recuperative energies of nature, resident in the magical, the miracle-working, powers of the human heart, the powers of love and sympathy.  She was a modern spiritual adventurer who had escaped unscathed from all the anathemas of the old theology; and she abounded, like St. Francis, in her sense of the new dispensation and in her benedictive exuberance towards all the creatures of God, including not merely sun, moon, and stars and her sister the lamb but also her brother the wolf.  On this principle she loves Flaubert!—­and archly asserts her arch-heresy in his teeth.  He complains that her fundamental defect is that she doesn’t know how to “hate.”  She replies, with a point that seems never really to have pierced his thick casing of masculine egotism: