particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power." Woman as she was, her feelings when aroused were ever of a vehemence to overbalance her critical judgment; and in writing for the gratification of these feelings rather than from the instinct of letters she was likely, no matter at what time of life, to reproduce the emotional confusion of her earliest period. A remark that she herself makes in her memoirs concerning le Piccinino is significant in this connection, and justifies in closing as well as illustrates my use of the word "extra-literary" as a general designation for all this kind of work. "Ce que je pense de la noblesse de race, je l'ai écrit dans le Piccinino," she says, "et je n'ai peut-être fait ce roman que pour faire les trois chapitres où j'ai développé mon sentiment sur la noblesse." It is often so, too often, in fact, that the purpose of her novels early and late, as she confesses here, is to be sought and found outside of character, situation, and plot.

De Musset himself, whatever else he may or may not have stood for, was one of the few exclusively literary ascendencies to which she ever submitted. He it was who awoke her to the existence of such a thing as form and taught her all she ever learned, except of herself, about style. It is impossible to estimate how

great was the detriment to her genius that she should have been so long under influences that, while intellectual, were in no sense literary, and should have been obliged to work her way alone out of much that was harmful to her spirit. Had her flow been less full and copious, it may well be questioned whether the stream would not have choked in the sands of sociological and metaphysical discussion with which she was surrounded, and she have ended where George Eliot began, as a mere controversialist. It is not a little singular that these two women, the greatest littératrices of their respective countries, should both have been for a time under the dominance of inspirations other than literary, and should have been more or less diverted from their proper paths and more or less hindered in their proper activities by philosophical speculation. Of the two, George Eliot was more inclined to such thought, and never, indeed, got quite clear of the clutter of erudition, while George Sand was in reality of no great philosophical bent and never assimilated such ideas thoroughly enough to handle them with firmness.

As a result of her feeble grasp of such subjects and of the vivacity of her feelings, she was at her best when she centred her novels neither in a doctrinal motif nor a merely personal emotion, but in some simple episode of common life which she had noticed and been touched by.

Her masterpieces are few in number-as any one's must be-but they are perfect in their kind: la Mare au diable, la Petite Fadette, François le champi. Les Maîtres sonneurs, of the same attempt as the others, errs by excessive development; it overreaches and outruns itself and in spite of much good grows wearisome by its length; while Jeanne and the Meunier d'Angibault, which are sometimes classed with these, show traces of confusion due partly to the introduction of extra-literary ideas and partly to the mixture of idyllic and social elements; so that none of these latter three can be ranked as masterpieces beside the former. Her own district of Berri, which she always loved and to which she returned more and more in later life, furnished her with the setting for these flawless gems. After the welter of passions and ideas, into which she had been cast young and in which she was long whirled, had subsided, and she could attend to the voice of her own desires; when her love of the unaffected and the natural asserted itself and she had leisure for quiet contemplation in the face of nature;-then she was quick to recognise and respond to the charm of just such characters and incidents as she met in her Vallée noire of the romantic name, and as she has rendered with exquisite sensibility. The simple, unpretentious life of the peasant amid

his fields with his robust loves and hates, hopes and fears, was a discovery in comparative humanity to French letters. The healthfulness and freshness of these idyls, full of the air of wood and lawn, the breath of morning and evening, is a revelation after the stale intrigue skulking away in the close and tainted atmosphere of city rooms. They justify to the English reader the existence of French fiction. It may be, as M. Brunetière declares, that George Sand made the French novel capable of sustaining thought; it is of infinitely greater credit to her to have shown that it was possible for the French novel to carry good, clean, wholesome sentiment. No reader of modern French fiction can return to these stories without feeling that there life, as well as literature, has been triumphantly vindicated against naturalism, and without feeling, too, that his heart has been purified and gladdened by contact with a simple and sincere art.

ZOLA

R. VIZETELLY'S account of Zola1 is

MR. at all events the best in the language.

And indeed, though decidedly partial and unnecessarily obstructed with "shop," it is by no means an unserviceable or uninteresting book. Mr. Vizetelly is a "journalist." As foreign correspondent of the London papers he has spent a good deal of time in Paris and is thoroughly acquainted with the life, habits, and habitat of the gens de lettres and with the ins and outs of the literary business. His father's was one of the first English houses to venture upon the publication of Zola to any extent; and latterly he himself has served as the novelist's interpreter and intermediary, and has enjoyed in that capacity some degree of intimacy with his principal. As a source of information, then, as a collection of fact, anecdote, and detail, the biography may be considered as authoritative as anything we have, though it suffers from one serious drawback, the uneventfulness and tedium of modern authorship.

Zola was born at Paris, April 2, 1840; he 1 Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer. By E. A. Vizetelly. New York: John Lane.