has worn, and
incessantly calling for him with piteous lowings. The ox-herd will tell
you: There is a pair of oxen done for! his _brother_ is dead, and this
one will work no more. He ought to be fattened for killing; but we
cannot get him to eat, and in a short time he will have starved himself
to death."[322]

How faithful and close it is, this contact of George Sand with country
things, with the life of nature in its vast plenitude and pathos! And
always in the end the human interest, as is right, emerges and
predominates. What is the central figure in the fresh and calm rural
world of George Sand? It is the peasant. And what is the peasant? He is
France, life, the future. And this is the strength of George Sand, and
of her second movement, after the first movement of energy and revolt
was over, towards nature and beauty, towards the country, towards
primitive life, the peasant. She regarded nature and beauty, not with
the selfish and solitary joy of the artist who but seeks to appropriate
them for his own purposes, she regarded them as a treasure of immense
and hitherto unknown application, as a vast power of healing and delight
for all, and for the peasant first and foremost. Yes she cries, the
simple life is the true one! but the peasant, the great organ of that
life, "the minister in that vast temple which only the sky is vast
enough to embrace," the peasant is not doomed to toil and moil in it
forever, overdone and unawakened, like Holbein's laborer, and to have
for his best comfort the thought that death will set him free. _Non,
nous n'avons plus affaire a la mort, mais a la vie._[323] "Our business
henceforth is not with death, but with life."

Joy is the great lifter of men, the great unfolder. _Il faut que la vie
soit bonne afin qu'elle soit feconde._ "For life to be fruitful, life
must be felt as a blessing":--

"Nature is eternally young, beautiful, bountiful. She pours out beauty
and poetry for all that live, she pours it out on all plants, and the
plants are permitted to expand in it freely. She possesses the secret of
happiness, and no man has been able to take it away from her. The
happiest of men would be he who possessing the science of his labor and
working with his hands, earning his comfort and his freedom by the
exercise of his intelligent force, found time to live by the heart and
by the brain, to understand his own work and to love the work of God.
The artist has satisfactions of this kind i