seekers of a new and better
world proves nothing, George Sand maintains, for the world as it is.
Ineffectual they may be, but the world is still more ineffectual, and it
is the world's course which is doomed to ruin, not theirs. "What has it
done," exclaims George Sand in her preface to Guerin's _Centaure_, "what
has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for our
children, this society shielded with such care?" Nothing. Those whom it
calls vain complainers and rebels and madmen, may reply:--

"Suffer us to bewail our martyrs, poets without a country that we are,
forlorn singers, well versed in the causes of their misery and of our
own. You do not comprehend the malady which killed them; they themselves
did not comprehend it. If one or two of us at the present day open our
eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange and unaccountable good
Providence; and have we not to seek our grain of faith in storm and
darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the absence of all sympathy, all
example, all brotherly aid, all protection and countenance in high
places? Try yourselves to speak to your brethren heart to heart,
conscience to conscience! Try it!--but you cannot, busied as you are
with watching and patching up in all directions your dykes which the
flood is invading. The material existence of this society of yours
absorbs all your care, and requires more than all your efforts.
Meanwhile the powers of human thought are growing into strength, and
rise on all sides around you. Amongst these threatening apparitions,
there are some which fade away and reenter the darkness, because the
hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened
them could strive no longer with the horrors of this present chaos; but
there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you,
up and alive, to say: 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and
we, we do not mean to die.'"

She did not, indeed. How should she faint and fail before her time,
because of a world out of joint, because of the reign of stupidity,
because of the passions of youth, because of the difficulties and
disgusts of married life in the native seats of the _homme sensuel
moyen_, the average sensual man, she who could feel so well the power of
those eternal consolers, nature and beauty? From the very first they
introduce a note of suavity in her strain of grief and passion. Who can
forget the lanes and meadows of _Valentine_?

Georg