The form of such outbursts as we have quoted will always be distasteful to an Englishman.  It is to be remembered that they came from Madame Sand under the pressure and anguish of the terrible calamities of 1870.  But what we are most concerned with, and what Englishmen in general regard too little, is the degree of truth contained in these allegations that France is the most civilized of nations, and that she is so, above all, by her “holy doctrine of equality.”  How comes the idea to be so current; and to be passionately believed in, as we have seen, by such a woman as George Sand?  It was so passionately believed in by her, that when one seeks, as I am now seeking, to recall her image, the image is incomplete if the passionate belief is kept from appearing.

I will not, with my scanty space, now discuss the belief; but I will seek to indicate how it must have commended itself, I think, to George Sand.  I have somewhere called France “the country of Europe where the people is most alive."[333] The people is what interested George Sand.  And in France the people is, above all, the peasant.  The workman in Paris or in other great towns of France may afford material for such pictures as those which M. Zola[334] has lately given us in L’Assommoir—­pictures of a kind long ago labelled by Madame Sand as “the literature of mysteries of iniquity, which men of talent and imagination try to bring into fashion.”  But the real people in France, the foundation of things there, both in George Sand’s eyes and in reality, is the peasant.  The peasant was the object of Madame Sand’s fondest predilections in the present, and happiest hopes in the future.  The Revolution and its doctrine of equality had made the French peasant.  What wonder, then, if she saluted the doctrine as a holy and paramount one?

And the French peasant is really, so far as I can see, the largest and strongest element of soundness which the body social of any European nation possesses.  To him is due that astonishing recovery which France has made since her defeat, and which George Sand predicted in the very 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.