“Artists are spoiled children and the best are great egotists.  You say that I love them too well; I like them as I like the woods and the fields, everything, everyone that I know a little and that I study continually.  I make my life in the midst of all that, and as I like my life, I like all that nourishes it and renews it.  They do me a lot of ill turns which I see, but which I no longer feel.  I know that there are thorns in the hedges, but that does not prevent me from putting out my hands and finding flowers there.  If all are not beautiful, all are interesting.  The day you took me to the Abbey of Saint-Georges I found the scrofularia borealis, a very rare plant in France.  I was enchanted; there was much——­in the neighborhood where I gathered it.  Such is life!

“And if one does not take life like that, one cannot take it in any way, and then how can one endure it?  I find it amusing and interesting, and since I accept everything, I am so much happier and more enthusiastic when I meet the beautiful and the good.  If I did not have a great knowledge of the species, I should not have quickly understood you, or known you or loved you.”

Two years later the principles and tempers of both these philosophers were put to their severest trial.  In 1870, George Sand had opportunity to apply her doctrine of universal acceptance to the Prussians in Paris.  Flaubert had opportunity to welcome scientific organization in the Prussian occupation of his own home at Croisset.  The first reaction of both was a quite simple consternation and rage, in which Flaubert cries, “The hopeless barbarism of humanity fills me with a black melancholy,” and George Sand, for the moment assenting, rejoins:  “Men are ferocious and conceited brutes.”  As the war thickens around him and the wakened militancy of his compatriots presses him hard, Flaubert becomes more and more depressed; he forebodes a general collapse of civilization—­before the century passes, a conflict of races, “in which several millions of men kill one another in one engagement.”  With the curiously vengeful satisfaction which mortals take in their own misery when it offers occasion to cry “I told you so,” he exclaims:  “Behold then, the natural man.  Make theories now!  Boast the progress, the enlightenment and the good sense of the masses, and the gentleness of the French people!  I assure you that anyone here who ventured to preach peace would get himself murdered.”

George Sand in her fields at Nohant—­not “above” but a little aside from the conflict—­turns instinctively to her peasant doggedly, placidly, sticking at his plow; turns to her peasant with a kind of intuition that he is a symbol of faith, that he holds the keys to a consolation, which the rest of us blindly grope for:  “He is imbecile, people say; no, he is a child in prosperity, a man in disaster, more of a man than we who complain; he says nothing, and while people are killing, he is sowing, repairing continually