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 keeping with
the earth on which they lived. She never alluded to any possible
explanatory causes, such as excessive toil and extreme poverty, which
if she had realised, as George Sand realised them, would have brought
the tender touch of sympathy with individual lives and griefs that we
find so often in George Eliot's novels. But George Sand could _never_
have written of any peasants as "part of a gross sum of obscure
vitality," because she could never have felt towards them in that way.
She was too imaginative and tender. She did not look at the peasantry
"en masse"--but individually, and loved the Berri peasants
individually, as they loved and adored her. Her artistic sense and her
humanity illumined her view of them, and she saw their latent