IN 1846, George Sand published Le Peche de M. Antoine.  It was a very dull story of a sin, for sins are not always amusing.  The same year, though, she published La Mare au Diable.  People are apt to say, when comparing the socialistic novels and the pastoral novels by George Sand, that the latter are superb, because they are the result of a conception of art that was quite disinterested, as the author had given up her preaching mania, and devoted herself to depicting people that she knew and things that she liked, without any other care than that of painting them well.  Personally, I think that this was not so.  George Sand’s pastoral style is not essentially different from her socialistic style.  The difference is only in the success of the execution, but the ideas and the intentions are the same.  George Sand is continuing her mission in them, she is going on with her humanitarian dream, that dream which she dreamed when awake.

We have a proof of this in the preface of the author to the reader with which the Mare au Diable begins.  This preface would be disconcerting to any one who does not remember the intellectual atmosphere in which it was written.

People have wondered by what fit of imagination George Sand, when telling such a wholesome story of country life, should evoke the ghastly vision of Holbein’s Dance of Death.  It is the close of day, the horses are thin and exhausted, there is an old peasant, and, skipping about in the furrows near the team, is Death, the only lively, careless, nimble being in this scene of “sweat and weariness.”  She gives us the explanation of it herself.  She wanted to show up the ideal of the new order of things, as opposed to the old ideal, as translated by the ghastly dance.

“We have nothing more to do with death,” she writes, “but with life.  We no longer believe in the neant of the tomb, nor in salvation bought by enforced renunciation.  We want life to be good, because we want it to be fertile. . . .  Every one must be happy, so that the happiness of a few may not be criminal and cursed by God.”  This note we recognize as the common feature of all the socialistic Utopias.  It consists in taking the opposite basis to that on which the Christian idea is founded.  Whilst Christianity puts off, until after death, the possession of happiness, transfiguring death by its eternal hopes, Socialism places its Paradise on earth.  It thus runs the risk of leaving all those without any recourse who do not find this earth a paradise, and it has no answer to give to the lamentations of incurable human misery.

George Sand goes on to expose to us the object of art, as she understands it.  She believes that it is for pleading the cause of the people.