Mme. Karénine does not belong to the School of Moral Rehabilitation, so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject; indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a prude and, if critically she is given to discovering a masterpiece under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behaviour. The list of lovers is a longer one than given by earlier biographers. Dumas fils, a close observer of the novelist, asserts that she had no temperament at all, thus corroborating the earlier testimony of Heine. This further complicates the problem. She was not, then, a perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could devour, and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose delectation! A "cold devil"--à la Félicien Rops. I doubt this. Maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a metaphysical Messalina. She presided at numerous artistic accouchements; she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to many poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness. Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and Robert; George Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the same kind of a moral galley, but with heavier oars and through the Sargossian seas of British prudery. In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful grandmother. She had the featherbed temperament, and soothed masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and the idol of the literary world. How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant virtues--save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was thrust upon her. At Nohant, her château in Berri, there was usually a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the Shelley-Godwin gatherings. II