This latter development can best be studied in her correspondence with Flaubert. She urges him to exercise his will, and he replies that he is as “fatalistic as a Turk.” His fatalism, however, was not oriental but scientific or pseudo-scientific. I have already cited his demand that man be studied “objectively” just as one would study “a mastodon or a crocodile.” Flaubert refused to see any connection between this determinism and his own gloom or between George Sand’s assertion of will and her cheerfulness. It was simply, he held, a matter of temperament, and there is no doubt some truth in this contention. “You at the first leap mount to heaven,” he says, “while I, poor devil, am glued to the earth as though by leaden soles.” And again: “In spite of your great sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as through a golden mist,” whereas “I am constantly dissecting; and when I have finally discovered the corruption in anything that is supposed to be pure, the gangrene in its fairest parts, then I raise my head and laugh.” Yet George Sand’s cheerfulness is also related to her perception of a power in man to work upon himself--a power that sets him apart from other animals. To enter into this region of ethical effort is to escape from the whole fatal circle of naturalism, and at the same time to show some capacity to mature--a rare achievement among the romanticists. The contrast is striking here between George Sand and Hugo, who, as the ripe fruit of his meditations, yields nothing better than the apotheosis of Robespierre and Marat. “I wish to see man as he is,” she writes to Flaubert. “He is not good or bad: he is good and bad. But he is something else besides: being good and bad he has an inner force which leads him to be very bad and a little good, or very good and a little bad. I have often wondered,” she adds, “why your ‘Education Sentimentale’ was so ill received by the public, and the reason, as it seems to me, is that its characters are passive--that they do not act upon themselves.” But the Titaness of the period of “Lélia” can scarcely be said to have acted upon herself, so that she is justified in writing: “I cannot forget that my personal victory over despair is the work of my will, and of a new way of understanding life which is the exact opposite of the one I held formerly.” How different is the weary cry of Flaubert: “I am like a piece of clock work, what I am doing to-day I shall be doing to-morrow; I did exactly the same thing yesterday; I was exactly the same man ten years ago.”