classes of France that they prevail.  If the educated and articulate classes in France were as sound in their way as the inarticulate peasant is in his, France would present a different spectacle.  Not “imagination and sensibility” are so much required from the educated classes of France, as simpler, more serious views of life; a knowledge how great a part conduct (if M. Challemel-Lacour[342] will allow me to say so) fills in it; a better example.  The few who see this, such as Madame Sand among the dead, and M. Renan[343] among the living, perhaps awaken on that account, amongst quiet observers at a distance, all the more sympathy; but in France they are isolated.

All the later work of George Sand, however, all her hope of genuine social renovation, take the simple and serious ground so necessary.  “The cure for us is far more simple than we will believe.  All the better natures amongst us see it and feel it.  It is a good direction given by ourselves to our hearts and consciences;—­une bonne direction donnee par nous-memes a nos coeurs et a nos consciences."[344] These are among the last words of her Journal of 1870.

* * * * *

Whether or not the number of George Sand’s works—­always fresh, always attractive, but poured out too lavishly and rapidly—­is likely to prove a hindrance to her fame, I do not care to consider.  Posterity, alarmed at the way in which its literary baggage grows upon it, always seeks to leave behind it as much as it can, as much as it dares,—­everything but masterpieces.  But the immense vibration of George Sand’s voice upon the ear of Europe will not soon die away.  Her passions and her errors have been abundantly talked of.  She left them behind her, and men’s memory of her will leave them behind also.  There will remain of her to mankind the sense of benefit and stimulus from the passage upon earth of that large and frank nature, of that large and pure utterance,—­the the large utterance of the early gods.  There will remain an admiring and ever widening report of that great and ingenuous soul, simple, affectionate, without vanity, without pedantry, human, equitable, patient, kind.  She believed herself, she said, “to be in sympathy, across time and space, with a multitude of honest wills which interrogate their conscience and try to put themselves in accord with it.”  This chain of sympathy will extend more and more.

It is silent, that eloquent voice! it is sunk, that noble, that speaking head! we sum up, as we best can, what she said to us, and we bid her adieu.  From many hearts in many lands a troop of tender and grateful regrets converge towards her humble churchyard in Berry.  Let them be joined by these words of sad homage from one of a nation which she esteemed, and which knew her very little and very ill.  Her guiding thought, the guiding thought which she did her best to make ours too, “the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man’s normal life as we shall one day know it,” is in harmony with words and promises familiar to that sacred place where she lies. Exspectat resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi.[345]