her
preaching mania, and devoted herself to depicting people that she knew
and things that she liked, without any other care than that of painting
them well. Personally, I think that this was not so. George Sand's
pastoral style is not essentially different from her socialistic style.
The difference is only in the success of the execution, but the ideas
and the intentions are the same. George Sand is continuing her mission
in them, she is going on with her humanitarian dream, that dream which
she dreamed when awake.

We have a proof of this in the preface of the author to the reader with
which the _Mare au Diable_ begins. This preface would be disconcerting
to any one who does not remember the intellectual atmosphere in which it
was written.

People have wondered by what fit of imagination George Sand, when
telling such a wholesome story of country life, should evoke the ghastly
vision of Holbein's Dance of Death. It is the close of day, the horses
are thin and exhausted, there is an old peasant, and, skipping about in
the furrows near the team, is Death, the only lively, careless,
nimble being in this scene of "sweat and weariness." She gives us the
explanation of it herself. She wanted to show up the ideal of the new
order of things, as opposed to the old ideal, as translated by the
ghastly dance.

"We have nothing more to do with death," she writes, "but with life. We
no longer believe in the _neant_ of the tomb, nor in salvation bought by
enforced renunciation. We want life to be good, because we want it to be
fertile. . . . Every one must be happy, so that the happiness of a few
may not be criminal and cursed by God." This note we recognize as the
common feature of all the socialistic Utopias. It consists in taking the
opposite basis to that on which the Christian idea is founded. Whilst
Christianity puts off, until after death, the possession of happiness,
transfiguring death by its eternal hopes, Socialism places its Paradise
on earth. It thus runs the risk of leaving all those without any
recourse who do not find this earth a paradise, and it has no answer to
give to the lamentations of incurable human misery.

George Sand goes on to expose to us the object of art, as she
understands it. She believes that it is for pleading the cause of the
people.

She does not consider that her _confreres_ in novel-writing and in
Socialism set about their work in the best way. They paint poverty that
is ugly and vile,