d sometimes her social disquisitions are very long
treatises. But her art was not dormant when from her inmost soul she
sketched the fate of the Berri peasant whom she loved so well. In the
introduction to that simple delightful Idyll "La Mare au Diable,"
which should be read by all social reformers and by all who really
care for the poor and the causes of poverty, she conveys her
conceptions of the mission of art towards the oppressed unhappy
labourer; oppressed and unhappy, because with form robust and
muscular, with eyes to see, and thoughts that might be cultivated to
understand the beauty and harmony of colour and sounds, delicacy of
tone and grace of outline, in a word, the mysterious beauty of the
world, he, the peasant of Berri, has never under stood the mystery of
the beautiful and his child will never understand it; the result of
excessive toil, and extreme poverty. Imperfect and condemned to
eternal childhood, George Sand recounts his life, touching gently his
errors, and with deep sympathy entering into his trials and griefs.
And a deeper ignorance, she adds, is one that is born of knowledge
which has stifled the sense of beauty. The Berri peasant has no
monopoly in ignorance of beauty, and intimate knowledge of toil and
extreme poverty, but not many of us feel with the peasant's fate, as
George Sand felt it. She never ceased to care for the cause of social
progress, just as she was always heart and soul an artist. George
Eliot has written words "to the reader" about the ruined villages on
the Rhone. In "The Mill on the Floss," she writes, and again the
remarkable difference between the two writers appears as forcibly as
in the two prefaces. "These dead tinted, hollow-eyed skeletons of
villages on the Rhone, oppress me with the feeling that human
life--very much of it--is a narrow ugly grovelling existence, which
even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its
bare vulgarity of conception, and I have a cruel conviction that the
lives, of which these ruins are the traces were part of a gross sum of
obscure vitality that will be swept into the same oblivion with the
generations of ants and beavers." George Eliot saw in imagination
these unhappy and oppressed peasants with clear, unsparing eyes. She
was right in calling her conviction "Cruel," for she saw merely the
outside of the sordid lives of oppressive narrowness, which seemed to
irritate her, these lives of dull men and women out of