George Sand and Balzac are often set in antithesis to each other as respectively idealistic and realistic writers. Different enough, indeed, they are, but the difference is that of temperament, of genius, and not that of method. Balzac is all conscience (his sort of conscience), will, work; George Sand is all freedom, improvisation, play--around her everywhere a nameless exquisite charm. 5. MUSSET. Alfred de Musset makes a melancholy figure in literary history. Few men ever had a more brilliant morning than he; few men ever had an evening more somber. And Musset's evening fell at mid-day. Heine, with that bitterness which was his, could say of the still youthful poet, "A young man with a very fine future--behind him!" What this writer accomplished, he accomplished by the pure felicity of genius--genius, flushed and quickened with the warm blood of youth. He did nothing in the way of self-tasking, but all in the way of self-indulging. He obeyed whim, and not will. When the whim failed, he failed. Will indeed he seemed not to have, but only willfulness. He died at forty-seven, but he had already ceased living at forty. It is generally agreed that in what makes genius for the poet, namely, capacity of poetic feeling, propensity to poetic rhythm, command of poetic phrase, and power to see with the imagination, Musset belongs among the foremost singers of France. What he lacked was moral equipment to match. We mean not moral goodness, though this, too, he missed, but moral strength. He might have soared like the eagle, for he had eagle's pinions; but he had not the eagle's heart, and after a few daring upward flights he fluttered ignobly downward, and thereafter, except at intervals too rare, kept the ground. Some charge this lamentable failure on Musset's part to the ill influence over him of George Sand, with whom in the fresh splendor of his young fame he entered into an unhappy "relation"--a "relation" sought by the woman in the case, who of the two was the older. She, as some think, sucked Musset's heart out of him like a vampire. But what a confession to make on the man's behalf of flaccid moral fiber in him! Such a man, one would say, was certain to fall in due time prey to some one; in default of other hunter, then prey to himself. It is one of the things least consistent with a favorable view of George Sand's fundamental character that, two years after Musset's death, and some twenty years after the time of her "relation" with him, she should publish, thinly veiled under the form of fiction, a story of that relation, in which she herself appeared vindicated, and the unhappy dead was held up to the laughter and contempt of Europe. Paul de Musset, Alfred's brother, replied in a book which claimed to set the facts in their true light before the world. Wretched wrangle! A little more of dull conformity on her part to things as she found them, and a little less of passionate protest against them in literature and in