The passage is part of a protest made by George Sand against the charge that it was her desire to flatter the lower classes by producing idealised representations of them--this explains how she came to give such pointed, dogmatic expression to the idealism of her nature. Most undoubtedly she was the idealist, all her life long; but it was not really the desire to delineate human beings as "they ought to be" which inspired her to write, but the desire to show what they could be if society did not hamper their spiritual growth, corrupt them, and destroy their happiness; hence, in her delineations of the representatives of "society" no leniency was shown. What George Sand originally meant to give was a picture of life as it is, of reality as she had experienced and observed it; what she gave was the feminine enthusiast's view of reality. The section she saw was a patch of earth with the brightness of heaven over it. Her clear-sightedness was the clear-sightedness of the poet. The period was the period of enormous productivity. Victor Hugo, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, wrote ceaselessly, piling work upon work. Dumas at last regularly manufactured books; he published four or five novels at a time, and with the help of numerous collaborators produced a good-sized shelf of volumes in a year. George Sand's productivity was almost as remarkable. Her works fill 110 closely printed volumes. I can make no attempt here to criticise them all. It is only of consequence that I should indicate the main features of the most important works, the ideas which permeate them, the results which remain even when the details of the books are forgotten.