life—­very much of it—­is a narrow ugly grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception, and I have a cruel conviction that the lives, of which these ruins are the traces were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.”  George Eliot saw in imagination these unhappy and oppressed peasants with clear, unsparing eyes.  She was right in calling her conviction “Cruel,” for she saw merely the outside of the sordid lives of oppressive narrowness, which seemed to irritate her, these lives of dull men and women out of keeping with the earth on which they lived.  She never alluded to any possible explanatory causes, such as excessive toil and extreme poverty, which if she had realised, as George Sand realised them, would have brought the tender touch of sympathy with individual lives and griefs that we find so often in George Eliot’s novels.  But George Sand could never have written of any peasants as “part of a gross sum of obscure vitality,” because she could never have felt towards them in that way.  She was too imaginative and tender.  She did not look at the peasantry “en masse”—­but individually, and loved the Berri peasants individually, as they loved and adored her.  Her artistic sense and her humanity illumined her view of them, and she saw their latent 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 “navre 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