keeping with
the earth on which they lived. She never alluded to any possible
explanatory causes, such as excessive toil and extreme poverty, which
if she had realised, as George Sand realised them, would have brought
the tender touch of sympathy with individual lives and griefs that we
find so often in George Eliot's novels. But George Sand could _never_
have written of any peasants as "part of a gross sum of obscure
vitality," because she could never have felt towards them in that way.
She was too imaginative and tender. She did not look at the peasantry
"en masse"--but individually, and loved the Berri peasants
individually, as they loved and adored her. Her artistic sense and her
humanity illumined her view of them, and she saw their latent
possibilities, and knew why they were only latent. She knew indeed,
many--if not all kinds of humanity. Once it is recorded she said to
Pere Lacordaire, "You have lived with Saints and Angels. I have lived
with men and women, and I could tell you (and we may well think she
could) some things you do not know." She had indeed run through the
gamut of feeling, and it was in one of those moments when her
experiences of life were overwhelming her--that she exclaimed "J'ai
trop bu la vie." But her gift of genius kept her always vivifying. She
never depresses. From her first years at Nohant to the end of her long
life, she was always _alive_. In the political troubles of 1848, when
she wrote of herself as "navre jusqu 'au fond de l'ame par les orages
exterieurs," and as trying to find in solitude if not calm and
philosophy, at least a faith in ideas, her soul shrank from blood shed
on both sides. "It needed a Dante," she thought, "with his nerves, and
temper, and tears to write a drama full of groans and tortures. It
needed a soul tempered with iron, and with fire, to linger in the
imagination over horrors of a symbolic Hell, when before one's very
eyes is the purgatory of desolation on the earth." But "as a weaker
and gentler artist," George Sand saw what her mission was in those
evil times;--it was to distract the imagination from them, towards
"tenderer sentiments of confidence, of friendship, and of kindness."
Her political and social hopes and aims were always dear to her, but
to interpret nature, to live the quiet life of the affections were the
phases of her middle life. And so she wrote a "sweet song" in prose,
one of the most delightful of her Bergeries, "La Petite Fadette." It