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ery was to conduct novelists into many hitherto unexplored bypaths and by many untrodden thoroughfares.

The phases traversed by nineteenthcentury peasant fiction were diverse. Idealism found in Mme. Sand its eloquent exponent, and in her peasant idyls she achieved a compromise between sympathetic sentimentalism and veracity. Romanticism asserted itself in sundry side-studies, as in Barbey d'Aurevilly's portrayal of the village outcast, La Clotte, where the sinister extravaganza of the romantic of romantics is vivified with something approaching æsthetic sincerity. Nor is the romantic element less pronounced in one or more of M. Zola's works in which, abandoning the average man, he deals with exceptional humanity, with Miette in "La Fortune des Rougon," with Angélique in "Le Rêve." Naturalism, with MM. Erckmann-Chatrian, presented itself in lengthy sketches of daily life scenes, whether in war or peace, a naturalism ignoring the grosser elements of existence accentuated by the more venturous disciples of the school. Balzac, the first of the moderns, demonstrated in "Les Paysans" that the object of peasant fiction was to depict nature, not in the idealizations it inspired, but in and for itself; that the aim of the novelist should be to lay hold on life and transcribe in the clearest manner the clearest perceptions attainable of the actual, however base, and the true, however ignoble. Flaubert, in his "Un Coeur Simple," 1 showed the possibility of attaining æsthetic perfection by faithful rative of commonplace peasant sentiment in the prose frame-work of servant life. Maupassant, humorist who never laughs, has exposed in his contes and nouvelles the tragic comedies, the melancholy farces, enacted in farms and cottages without

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number. Alphonse Daudet reverts to the novel of sensational convention in "Le Trésor d'Arlatan," and the morbid temptations that obsess the peasant heroine are paralleled with the obsession of the young Parisian by the memeries of "Madeleine des Délassements." Pierre Loti has contributed his quota to the gallery of peasant portraits, and a kindred atmosphere of personal sympathy-though otherwise the two authors pursue different paths-pervades the peasant novels of René Bazin, in whose works a visionary imagination is never cut asunder from facts intimately known and accurately inscribed.

To take a mere handful of studies from the mass of French fiction which deals with peasant themes during half a century is obviously only to indicate some special type-formulas, some differing methods of treatment, characteristic of certain authors or of certain phases of the author's art. The sketches so given are sketches of contrasts rather than of likenesses, and as contrasts preclude broad generalizations. Nor are they links in the chain of the scientist, for whom each instance must be shaped to illustrate a stage of literary tendency or psychological development. Moreover, their truth or untruth as "représentation de la vie" is left unchallenged. Their interest lies otherwhere. It lies in the just appreciation of æsthetic effects, whenever such effect is so welded with the peasant-theme that to transpose sentiment or plot to any other social background would have precluded its special æsthetic merit.

As the outcome of idealism, George Sand's scenes 3 from the rural life of Berry, if not the earliest in date, are in

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spirit more closely allied to an earlier school than those of other nineteenthcentury authors. For that pre-eminently feminine genius-the interest of whose personality grows in inverse ratio as the literary interest of her work declines-the peasant had not assumed the semblance of a problem. Patient observation of his customs, actions and surroundings, were not for her, as for her great contemporary, Balzac, the fountain-head of inspiration. She wrote of rural life, not as an investigator, but as a participant. Her men and women, Berrichon and Berrichonne, were the boys and girls, cattle- and sheep-keepers, with whom she had companioned during childhood and youth at Nohant; comrades and playmates, whose children and grandchildren she had watched growing to manhood and womanhood in later years.' The pages of her fictions are confessedly pages of affectionate memories, reminiscences of country joys, sorrows, and gaieties; they are the tribute her exuberant intellectuality and her overcolored imagination paid to surviving simplicities and old attachments. The experiences of half a lifetime had passed over her head; an intimate acquaintance with the passions of men and with her own effervescent emotionalisms, the disillusions of marriage, the agitations and disenchantments of her shifting enthusiasms, had been paraphrased in novel after novel; she had at length reached the mile-stone where remembrances displace curiosities, and had withdrawn awhile from speculation to survey the comparatively placid season of childhood. Her treatment of peasant character was essentially dictated by sympathy; her appreciation was more than sympathetic, it was instinctive. Her mother's blood. the blood of "une femme du peuple," ran aggressively in the veins of the See "Histoire de ma Vie." G. Sand 5 Indiana. Lélio, &c.

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great-granddaughter of Maurice de Saxe; it claimed comradeship of equalities with Aurore Dupin's village playfellows and obtained for her in maturity an inestimable literary advantage: the familiarity of knowledge that kinship of class, and kinship alone, can secure. Writing of the villagers of the neighboring parishes of Saint-Chartier and Nohant, she was content to lay aside the tedious exposition of moral and social theories, founded upon her devious lines of moral conduct, which abound in other sections of her novels. In "La Mare au Diable" and its companion narratives the subject governed her treatment of it; the theme governed the author. The George Sand of "Indiana," "Lélio" and "Consuelo," the George Sand of obtrusive reflections, rhetorical philosophy, and declamatory sentimentality, exercised her gift of adaptability, and transferred her pliable talent into the required key. "Si on me demande ce que j'ai voulu faire, je répondrai que j'ai voulu faire une chose très-touchante et très-simple," she explains in a prefatory note to "La Mare au Diable." According to a further statement, appended to "La Petite Fadette," she had sought a refuge from the stormy cataclysms of 1848 at Nohant, where "troublé et navré jusqu'au fond de lâme je m'efforçai de retrouver dans la solitude sinon le calme, au moins la foi," in the composition of her romans champêtres.

Mme. Sand justified and perfected her æsthetic ideal of rural pathos and homely grace. She retained of her former literary manner extreme ease of invention and fluent spontaneity of diction-gifts that constituted the main charm of her romances while they undermined any constructive faculty and eclipsed all powers of condensation in sentiment and conciseness in narrative she may have possessed; she 6 Consuelo, Comtesse L'homme de Neige, &c

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discarded the elaborate melodrama of passion, the strained altitudes and abnormalisms of virtue and vice and incident proper to the romantic. So doing her genius struck gold. How far the figures of la petite Fadette, of Marie in "La Mare au Diable," of Brulette in "Les Maître's Sonneurs," are veracious or unveracious as studies from life models, who may say? In dealing with the manners of rural Berry, she was dealing with a district so distinct in local usage and racial temperament, SO estranged in customs from the neighboring provinces of France, that in the epoch preceding the Revolution, Mirabeau is reported to have counselled the King "de réunir le Berry à son empire au lieu de conquérir des provinces étrangères"; and George Sand herself wrote: "le Berry est resté stationnaire. qu'après la Bretagne et quelques provinces de l'extrême midi . . . c'est le pays le plus conservé qui se puisse trouver à l'heure qu'il est." But, true or untrue as portraiture, the characters she sketched, with a touch as delicate as it is assured, live in freshness and grace. They do more: in them she originated as it is the sole prerogative of genius to originate-a type which literature, in obedience to the axiom "perfection fait école," both accepted and reiterated in manifold imitations and copies."

Her stories are wrought with the least possible expenditure of material. There is scarcely a hint of any world beyond the confines of the low-lying plains of Berry, where M. de la Salle assures us that "il suffit que deux personnes se rencontrent pour que l'envie de danser les gagne"; or if the scene changes it is only to cross the ascending frontier-line to the wilder, well-watered

"Le Berry." Par L. de la Salle. Paris, 1900.

8 La Mare au Diable.

9 Tourguénief's "Récits d'un chasseur" are said to owe something to G. Sand's example. See E. Haumant's "Tourguénief," Paris, 1906.

oak-woods of bas Bourbonnais. Episode and incident are bounded by the everyday conditions of common lives spent in secluded hamlets. George Sand's inevitable preoccupation is the interest of sentiment, and the sentiment of all her genre painting is that of homely idealism.

No such quiet to the mind

As true love with kisses kind.
Tho' love be sweet, learn this of me,
No sweet love but honesty.

A mere thread of a plot, a handful of trivial events suffices. The characters, with hardly disguised habiliments, repeat themselves more than once. "Le beau garçon" (Germain in "La Mare"), equable of temper, tenacious in slowly aroused affections, clean-handed and clean-minded, with the trait of irresoluteness which Mme. Sand is apt to ascribe to the masculine temperament, reappears in Landry, of "La Fadette," and in Tienet, of "Les Maîtres Sonneurs." The girl-heroines are stronger and more individual variants of the type initiated in la petite Marie of "La Mare." Fadette, the village scapegrace, passing from childhood to first girlhood with her "allures de garçon," half malicious, half wistful; part savage, part will-o'-the-wisp; crying, laughing, chanting her mocking-song in the dense night, to the terror of wayfarers as the marsh-lights dance by the river,

J'ai pris ma cape et mon capet: Toute fadette a son fadet,

becomes, as her heart wakens, George Sand's formula of peasant girlhoodtrue, brave, generous, wise too, and prudent; light of word but sober of mind, and above all honest of deed.

"La Mare au Diable" gives perhaps the clearest illustration of the author's intention in her new art. Germain, arrived at the thirty years limit of (in peasant estimation) marriageable age.

has lost the wife he had loved with the exclusive, if tranquil devotion of a simple mind. He lives, still mourning his loss, under the farm-house roof of his father-in-law. But Père Maurice, kindly and sagacious, rules that Germain shall re-marry with a fitting bride, the unknown, but well-endowed, Veuve Guérin. Germain resigns himself to obey with the sadness of an incorrigible, inarticulate regret-when Père Maurice gave him his daughter to wed "nous n'avions pas mis dans nos conditions que je viendrais à l'oubier si j'avais le malheur de la perdre." Nevertheless, patriarchal authority prevails and Germain is despatched, an unwilling suitor, to the village home of la Veuve Guérin with her comely face and worldly goods. Disconsolate, Germain sets out, mounted on the gray farm-horse, "songeant comme songent les hommes qui n'ont pas assez d'idées pour qu'elles se combattent entre elles, mais souffrant d'une douleur sourde." He goes, but La Grise carries two, for it chances that his neighbor, la petite Marie, must perforce leave home to earn a few francs in service at a farm not far from the village whither Germain is bound, and Germain, trustworthy and kind, will see the child-for Marie is little more than a child-well on her way. Nor has La Grise borne her double burden far before PetitPierre, Germain's five-year-old Benjamin-a tactless associate in courtshipwaylays them, and, la petite Marie aiding and abetting, imposes his company upon the two. One by one the incidents of the day are narrated with a lightness of touch that gives due perspective to all. The frugal meal at Mère Rébec's cabaret, necessitated by Petit-Pierre's devouring hunger; the retarded progress of La Grise; the dusk that overtakes the wayfarers on the unfamiliar road; the mist that gathers thickly as they traverse the wood, shrouding the last glimmer of moon

light in dim, bewildering grayness; the night spent by the strayed trio under the great oaks, are described with an unerring sense of proportion. The three figures are always in clear relief: Germain dejected, incapable, in the face of adverse circumstances; petite Marie, alert, helpful, a trifle sharp of tongue, but ever ready of hand; comrade to the man, playmate to the child; reproving with cheerful malice Germain's lack of cheer, the quickness of her woman's wit giving its bright edge to the soundness of her common-sense.

The expedition, inauspicious so far as courtship of Veuve Guérin is concerned, misses its aim; Germain's proposal of marriage is never made, and the farm-service, including conditions not in the bond, is renounced by la petite Marie. So the three return as they came, Germain to discover that life without petite Marie will be life with'out the friend in need; petite Marie to hide her love and reject his suit until Père Maurice sanctions his son-in-law's marriage with the girl they have hired, in neighborly kindness, to tend the sheep. In truth the story is of so slight a texture, woven from so meagre a skein, and colored with so few tints, that the smallest flaw in its art would have proved fatal to the whole scheme; but flaw there is none, the charm is intact, and the scantiness of its elements constitutes the triumph of its simplicity.

The transition from George Sand's well-loved Berry to the Burgundian village-drama Balzac imaged in his sombre novel "Les Paysans" 10 is a transition to the reverse of the medal. It is not so much a passage from sun to shadow as to a total eclipse of every ray of daylight. Shadows lie over Pierre Loti's Celtic north; the gray clouds that drift across the seas hover over the hearts of the Breton peasantry. The mists that float 10 Part I.

across the landes give, as Barbey d'Aurevilly points out, to the population of la Basse Normandie, despite a preponderance of material interests, “la poésie... qui vient de la profondeur des impressions." But such shadows are, compared with Balzac's malignant gloom, a mere film upon the glass. His is a radical transmutation; it is a passage from the spectacle of human nature where tints change, darken to sadness, or are gilded by transverse shafts of pleasure, where men's souls responsively reflect the chequered lights as fortune's wheel turns, to a theatre within whose walls humanity plays its part dyed and blotted past erasure, smeared with splashes of mire and blood and stained with the lees and dregs of stagnant brute passions. The sun may shine, the rain fall, the cold spread its chastities of frost, but the race Balzac summoned upon the stage in his "Comédie Humaine" will not change its spots nor any wind of heaven purify the corruption of its lair.

Balzac regards the peasant as a topic: he utilizes him as a document; his official standpoint is that of the spectator, and all that minute scrutiny can discover, all that a document can communicate, is crowded on to his canvas. With George Sand the negligence of detail, local, geographical, and domestic, evinces a perfect familiarity with the outer framework of the life she drew. She dispensed with carefully accumulated touches, trusting that pictures so complete in her own mind would print themselves, without possibility of error, upon her readers' imagination. She painted her landscapes without recourse to topography, her farm-dwellings without inventories of household goods, her human beings without reference to dictionaries of psychological anatomy. Her aim was simplicity and

11 Prefatory note to "La Petite Fadette." 12 Honoré de Balzac," par. F. Brunetière. Paris, 1906,

-in her peasant fiction-she achieved it.

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Nothing could be farther from Balzac's intention. "Un génie," as she wrote of him, "orageux et puissant . . . écrit avec ses larmes, avec sa bile, avec ses nerfs, un drame tout plein de tortures." The triumph and purpose of his career was "la représentation de la vie" in its integrity, and for his works at large M. Brunetière claims a judgment based on their attainment of this object: "on ne peut donc pour les juger les comparer qu'avec la vie." In the mammoth scheme of "La Comédie Humaine," each novel constitutes but a single page of the vast picture-play Balzac designed, nor is it his fault, but that of the limit of human years and capacity, if in the yet vaster Book of Life-a book without beginning or end -the whole of his immense accomplishment shrinks to a meagre compass, reads as a least fraction of a broken sentence.

...

Three volumes of the Comédie belong to the section treating "Scènes de la Vie de Campagne." "Le Curé de Village" and "Le Médecin de Campagne" portray the peasantry as the philosopher des mœurs conceived of village life subjected to the regenerating influences of religion and philanthrophy. The curé is himself a model of pastoral virtues, piety, humility, self-abnegation. His docile flock leave no impression individually or collectively upon the mind. The story is a plot of criminal intrigue: the connection of Véronique, the miserly banker's wife, with a peasant employé, and a consequent murder. The execution of Véronique's lover leads the secretly guilty woman to lifelong philanthropic penance, under the direction of the curé, in her lover's native village. These are the events upon which the story hinges. Véronique is the central figure; the villagers, their character and customs, are only incidentally sketched. Except in one scene, when in the village church a Mass for the

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