hour of ruin. Yes, in 1870 she predicted _ce reveil general qui va
suivre, a la grande surprise des autres nations, l'espece d'agonie ou
elles nous voient tombes_,[335] "the general re-arising which, to the
astonishment of other nations, is about to follow the sort of agony in
which they now see us lying." To the condition, character, and qualities
of the French peasant this recovery is in the main due. His material
well-being is known to all of us. M. de Laveleye,[336] the well-known
economist, a Belgian and a Protestant, says that France, being the
country of Europe where the soil is more divided than anywhere except in
Switzerland and Norway, is at the same time the country where well-being
is most widely spread, where wealth has of late years increased most,
and where population is least outrunning the limits which, for the
comfort and progress of the working classes themselves, seem necessary.
George Sand could see, of course, the well-being of the French peasant,
for we can all see it.
But there is more. George Sand was a woman, with a woman's ideal of
gentleness, of "the charm of good manners," as essential to
civilization. She has somewhere spoken admirably of the variety and
balance of forces which go to make up true civilization; "certain forces
of weakness, docility, attractiveness, suavity, are here just as real
forces as forces of vigor, encroachment, violence, or brutality." Yes,
as real _forces_, although Prince Bismarck cannot see it; because human
nature requires them, and, often as they may be baffled, and slow as may
be the process of their asserting themselves, mankind is not satisfied
with its own civilization, and keeps fidgeting at it and altering it
again and again, until room is made for them. George Sand thought the
French people,--meaning principally, again, by the French people the
_people_ properly so called, the peasant,--she thought it "the most
kindly, the most amiable, of all peoples." Nothing is more touching than
to read in her _Journal_, written in 1870, while she was witnessing what
seemed to be "the agony of the Latin races," and undergoing what seemed
to be the process of "dying in a general death of one's family, one's
country, and one's nation," how constant is her defence of the people,
the peasant, against her Republican friends. Her Republican friends were
furious with the peasant; accused him of stolidity, cowardice, want of
patriotism; accused him of having given them the Empire, with all its
vileness; wanted to take away from him the suffrage. Again and again
does George Sand take up his defence, and warn her friends of the folly
and danger of their false estimate of him. "The contempt of the masses,
there," she cries, "is the misfortune and crime of the present
moment!"[337] "To execrate the people," she exclaims again, "is real
blasphemy; the people is worth more than we are."
If the peasant gave us the Empire, says Madame Sand, it was because he
saw the parties of liberals disputing, gesticulating, and threatening to
tear one another asunder and France too; he was told _the Empire is
peace_, and he accepted the Empire. The peasant was deceived, he is
uninstructed, he moves slowly; but he moves, he has admirable virtues,
and in him, says George Sand, is our life:--
"Poor Jacques Bonhomme! accuse thee and despise thee who will; for my
part I pity thee, and in spite of thy faults I shall always love thee.
Never will I forget how, a child, I was carried asleep on thy shoulders,
how I was given over to thy care and followed thee everywhere, to the
field, the stall, the cottage. They are all dead, those good old people
who have borne me in their arms; but I remember them well, and I
appreciate at this hour, to the minutest detail, the pureness, the
kindness, the patience, the good humor, the poetry, which presided over