possibilities, and knew why they were only latent. She knew indeed,
many--if not all kinds of humanity. Once it is recorded she said to
Pere Lacordaire, "You have lived with Saints and Angels. I have lived
with men and women, and I could tell you (and we may well think she
could) some things you do not know." She had indeed run through the
gamut of feeling, and it was in one of those moments when her
experiences of life were overwhelming her--that she exclaimed "J'ai
trop bu la vie." But her gift of genius kept her always vivifying. She
never depresses. From her first years at Nohant to the end of her long
life, she was always _alive_. In the political troubles of 1848, when
she wrote of herself as "navré jusqu 'au fond de l'ame par les orages
exterieurs," and as trying to find in solitude if not calm and
philosophy, at least a faith in ideas, her soul shrank from blood shed
on both sides. "It needed a Dante," she thought, "with his nerves, and
temper, and tears to write a drama full of groans and tortures. It
needed a soul tempered with iron, and with fire, to linger in the
imagination over horrors of a symbolic Hell, when before one's very
eyes is the purgatory of desolation on the earth." But "as a weaker
and gentler artist," George Sand saw what her mission was in those
evil times;--it was to distract the imagination from them, towards
"tenderer sentiments of confidence, of friendship, and of kindness."
Her political and social hopes and aims were always dear to her, but
to interpret nature, to live the quiet life of the affections were the
phases of her middle life. And so she wrote a "sweet song" in prose,
one of the most delightful of her Bergeries, "La Petite Fadette." It
was her contribution to the hatreds and agitations of the time--she
gave a refuge to the souls that could accept it--an "Ideal of calmness
and innocence and reverie." "La Petite Fadette" and "Le Meunier
d'Angibault" reveal her fascinating intelligence and her idyllic
imagination. "Le Meunier d'Angibault," she tells us, was the result of