“Nature is eternally young, beautiful, bountiful.  She pours out beauty and poetry for all that live, she pours it out on all plants, and the plants are permitted to expand in it freely.  She possesses the secret of happiness, and no man has been able to take it away from her.  The happiest of men would be he who possessing the science of his labor and working with his hands, earning his comfort and his freedom by the exercise of his intelligent force, found time to live by the heart and by the brain, to understand his own work and to love the work of God.  The artist has satisfactions of this kind in the contemplation and reproduction of nature’s beauty; but when he sees the affliction of those who people this paradise of earth, the upright and human-hearted artist feels a trouble in the midst of his enjoyment.  The happy day will be when mind, heart, and hands shall be alive together, shall work in concert; when there shall be a harmony between God’s munificence and man’s delight in it.  Then, instead of the piteous and frightful figure of Death, skipping along whip in hand by the peasant’s side in the field, the allegorical painter will place there a radiant angel, sowing with full hands the blessed grain in the smoking furrow.

“And the dream of a kindly, free, poetic, laborious, simple existence for the tiller of the field is not so hard to realize that it must be banished into the world of chimaeras.  Virgil’s sweet and sad cry:  ’O happy peasants, if they but knew their own blessings!’ is a regret; but like all regrets, it is at the same time a prediction.  The day will come when the laborer may be also an artist;—­not in the sense of rendering nature’s beauty, a matter which will be then of much less importance, but in the sense of feeling it.  Does not this mysterious intuition of poetic beauty exist in him already in the form of instinct and of vague reverie?"[324]

It exists in him, too, adds Madame Sand, in the form of that nostalgia, that homesickness, which forever pursues the genuine French peasant if you transplant him.  The peasant has here, then, the elements of the poetic sense, and of its high and pure satisfactions.

“But one part of the enjoyment which we possess is wanting to him, a pure and lofty pleasure which is surely his due, minister that he is in that vast temple which only the sky is vast enough to embrace.  He has not the conscious knowledge of his sentiment.  Those who have sentenced him to servitude from his mother’s womb, not being able to debar him from reverie, have debarred him from reflection.

“Well, for all that, taking the peasant as he is, incomplete and seemingly condemned to an eternal childhood, I yet find him a more beautiful object than the man in whom his acquisition of knowledge has stifled sentiment.  Do not rate yourselves so high above him, many of you who imagine that you have an imprescriptible right to his obedience; for you yourselves are the most incomplete and the least seeing of men.  That simplicity of his soul is more to be loved than the false lights of yours."[325]