Her
correspondence with Flaubert shows us a capacity for stanch, unblemished
friendship unequalled, probably, in the biographies, whether published
or unpublished, of the remarkable.
With regard to her impiety--for such it should be called--it did not
arise from arrogance, nor was it based in any way upon the higher
learning of her period. Simply she did not possess the religious
instinct. She understood it sympathetically--in _Spiridion_, for
instance, she describes an ascetic nature as it has never been done in
any other work of fiction. Newman himself has not written passages of
deeper or purer mysticism, of more sincere spirituality. Balzac, in
_Seraphita_, attempted something of the kind, but the result was never
more than a _tour de force_. He could invent, he could describe, but
George Sand felt; and as she felt, she composed, living with and
loving with an understanding love all her creations. But it has to be
remembered always that she repudiated all religious restraint, that she
believed in the human heart, that she acknowledged no higher law than
its own impulses, that she saw love where others see only a cruel
struggle for existence, that she found beauty where ordinary visions can
detect little besides a selfishness worse than brutal and a squalor more
pitiful than death. Everywhere she insists upon the purifying influence
of affection, no matter how degraded in its circumstances or how illegal
in its manifestation.
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