" 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.
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