more in the reflections interspersed throughout the tale, something which actually struck at the foundations of society. Therefore it was not pure stupidity which found expression in the clumsy and violent attacks made upon these books and their author by the partisans of the existing order of things. Men had a foreboding that such feelings and thoughts would sooner or later remould the laws governing society. They have begun to do so, and their influence will increase day by day. Their very idealism and enthusiasm makes these books essentially revolutionary. For, as only the inner world exists for the authoress, she allows it to develop freely without taking any thought of the possibility of its development destroying the outer world; and, depicting as she does, chiefly strong feelings, or rather only one, infinitely varied feeling--love, she shows how its laws and the laws of society perpetually come into conflict. Although she casts no doubt upon the necessity and indispensability of marriage in our days, she undermines the belief in its eternal continuance. She certainly at first only attacks husbands, but an examination of her demand for an ideal husband shows that it is a demand which cannot be satisfied under existing conditions. In much the same manner, at a somewhat later period, Kierkegaard undermines Christianity by making an extravagantly ideal demand of the individual Christian. The French Naturalistic School of forty years later, which has often suffered from more or less groundless accusations of immorality, has, in revenge, re-directed the accusation against these enthusiastic early works of George Sand's. When Émile Zola made one of his periodical protests against the idealistic novel, he never omitted to point out the dangers for the family and for society which lie in this constant aspiring beyond the bounds which restrain the individual, this continual representation of a craving for greater intellectual and emotional liberty. He prided himself on never representing unlawful love in a beautiful or inviting light, but always bedraggled with mire. He might have added that he and his successors in the school of Balzac have never felt the need of a higher morality than that in common vogue, and never hold out the prospect of social conditions different from the present. They have imposed a crushing restriction on themselves by limiting themselves to the representation of the outward realities visible to their own eyes, and resolutely refusing to draw any conclusions from their observations. Hence it is that their boldness in representing social relations and situations which literature hitherto had been chary of approaching, is equalled by their weakness, nay insignificance, as thinkers and moralists. They are constantly reduced to seek support from the indubitable harmony of their morality with the universally accepted moral code; they plume themselves on calling vice what other people call vice, and on