n the contemplation and
reproduction of nature's beauty; but when he sees the affliction of
those who people this paradise of earth, the upright and human-hearted
artist feels a trouble in the midst of his enjoyment. The happy day will
be when mind, heart, and hands shall be alive together, shall work in
concert; when there shall be a harmony between God's munificence and
man's delight in it. Then, instead of the piteous and frightful figure
of Death, skipping along whip in hand by the peasant's side in the
field, the allegorical painter will place there a radiant angel, sowing
with full hands the blessed grain in the smoking furrow.

"And the dream of a kindly, free, poetic, laborious, simple existence
for the tiller of the field is not so hard to realize that it must be
banished into the world of chimaeras. Virgil's sweet and sad cry: 'O
happy peasants, if they but knew their own blessings!' is a regret; but
like all regrets, it is at the same time a prediction. The day will come
when the laborer may be also an artist;--not in the sense of rendering
nature's beauty, a matter which will be then of much less importance,
but in the sense of feeling it. Does not this mysterious intuition of
poetic beauty exist in him already in the form of instinct and of vague
reverie?"[324]

It exists in him, too, adds Madame Sand, in the form of that
_nostalgia_, that homesickness, which forever pursues the genuine French
peasant if you transplant him. The peasant has here, then, the elements
of the poetic sense, and of its high and pure satisfactions.

"But one part of the enjoyment which we possess is wanting to him, a
pure and lofty pleasure which is surely his due, minister that he is in
that vast temple which only the sky is vast enough to embrace. He has
not the conscious knowledge of his sentiment. Those who have sentenced
him to servitude from his mother's womb, not being able to debar him
from reverie, have debarred him from reflection.

"Well, for all that, taking the peasant as he is, incomplete and
seemingly condemned to an eternal childhood, I yet find him a more
beautiful object than the man in whom his acquisition of knowledge has
stifled sentiment. Do not rate yourselves so high above him, many of you
who imagine that you have an imprescriptible right to his obedience; for
you yourselves are the most incomplete and the least seeing of men. That
simplicity of his soul is more to be loved than the false lights of
your