Another generation of peasants had grown up since that first revolutionary generation of her youth, and equality, as its reign proceeded, had not deteriorated but improved them.

“They have advanced greatly in self-respect and well-being, these peasants from twenty years old to forty:  they never ask for anything.  When one meets them they no longer take off their hat.  If they know you they come up to you and hold out their hand.  All foreigners who stay with us are struck with their good bearing, with their amenity, and the simple, friendly, and polite ease of their behavior.  In presence of people whom they esteem they are, like their fathers, models of tact and politeness; but they have more than that mere sentiment of equality which was all that their fathers had,—­they have the idea of equality, and the determination to maintain it.  This step upwards they owe to their having the franchise.  Those who would fain treat them as creatures of a lower order dare not now show this disposition to their face; it would not be pleasant."[339]

Mr. Hamerton’s[340] interesting book about French life has much, I think, to confirm this account of the French peasant.  What I have seen of France myself (and I have seen something) is fully in agreement with it.  Of a civilization and an equality which makes the peasant thus human, gives to the bulk of the people well-being, probity, charity, self-respect, tact, and good manners, let us pardon Madame Sand if she feels and speaks enthusiastically.  Some little variation on our own eternal trio of Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,[341] or on the eternal solo of Philistinism among our brethren of the United States and the Colonies, is surely permissible.

Where one is more inclined to differ from Madame Sand is in her estimate of her Republican friends of the educated classes.  They may stand, she says, for the genius and the soul of France; they represent its “exalted imagination and profound sensibility,” while the peasant represents its humble, sound, indispensable body.  Her protege, the peasant, is much ruder with those eloquent gentlemen, and has his own name for one and all of them, l’avocat, by which he means to convey his belief that words are more to be looked for from that quarter than seriousness and profit.  It seems to me by no means certain but that the peasant is in the right.

George Sand herself has said admirable things of these friends of hers; of their want of patience, temper, wisdom; of their “vague and violent way of talking”; of their interminable flow of “stimulating phrases, cold as death.”  Her own place is of course with the party and propaganda of organic change.  But George Sand felt the poetry of the past; she had no hatreds; the furies, the follies, the self-deceptions of secularist and revolutionist fanatics filled her with dismay.  They are, indeed, the great danger of France, and it is amongst the educated and articulate