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.
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