Müller-Strübing, a German, is said to have drawn her attention to Auerbach's earliest village stories, and thereby to have instigated her to the production of the works which, thanks to their simplicity and calm purity, no less than to their wealth of feeling, have gained her the widest circle of readers. Auerbach was consecrated peasant-annalist by Spinoza, the apostle of natural piety, George Sand by Rousseau, the worshipper of nature. Her French peasants are very certainly not "real" in the same sense as Balzac's in Les Paysans; they are not merely represented with a sympathy which is as strong as his antipathy, but are made out to be amiable, tender-hearted, and sensitively delicate in their feelings; they are to real French peasants what the shepherds of Theocritus were to the real shepherds of Greece. Nevertheless, these tales have one merit which they owe entirely to their subject-matter and which George Sand's other novels lack-they possess the charm, always rare, but doubly rare in French literature, of naïveté. that there was of the peasant girl, of the country child, in George Sand; everything in her which was akin to the plants that grow, to the breeze that blows, knowing not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth; all that which, unconscious and dumb, was so legible in her countenance and behaviour, but was so often nullified in her works by sentimentality and phrase-mongering, revealed itself here in its childlike simplicity. All La Mare au Diable, written in 1841, is the gem of these village tales. In it idealism in French fiction reaches its highest level. In it George Sand gave to the world what she declared to Balzac it was her desire to write-the pastoral of the eighteenth century. XII BALZAC SIDE by side with George Sand and her work we come upon the man whose art she herself characterised as the antipodes of her own. Whilst she, in this particular a genuine Romanticist, turned with repugnance from the social conditions of her day, more disposed to revile and escape from them than to examine and depict them, he, if he did not feel contented, at least felt quite at home in his surroundings, and almost from the beginning of his career regarded the society of his own day and the immediately preceding period as his artistic property, his inexhaustible mine. George Sand was a great character limner, but she was almost more essentially a great landscape painter; and she represented human beings as the landscape painter represents plants; what she showed was the part of humanity which seeks and bathes in the light. Balzac's point of view was the opposite: the part of the human plant which he understood and loved to paint was the root. What Victor Hugo, in La Légende des Siècles, says of the satyr, is applicable to Balzac : "Il peignit l'arbre vu du côté des racines, Le combat meurtrier des plantes assassines." In the exuberantly fertile province of Touraine, "the garden of France," the native province of Rabelais, Honoré de Balzac was born on a spring day in 1799—a man of an exuberantly fertile, full-blooded, warm-blooded nature, with plenty of heart and plenty of brain. Clumsy and tender, coarse and sensitive, the presentient dreamer, the minute observer, this man of curiously complex character combined sentiment, genuine and somewhat ponderous, with a marvellous keenness of vision, combined the seriousness of the scientific investigator with the light humour of the storyteller, the discoverer's perseverance and absorption in his idea with the artist's impulse to present to the eyes of all, in unabashed nakedness, what he had observed, felt, discovered or invented. He was as if created to divine and betray the secrets of society and humanity. Balzac was a powerfully built, broad-shouldered man of middle height, corpulent in later life; the feminine whiteness of his strong, thick neck was his pride; his hair was black and as coarse as horse-hair, and his eyes shone like two black diamonds; they were lion-tamer's eyes, eyes that saw through the wall of a house what was happening inside, that saw through human beings and read their hearts like an open book. His whole appearance indicated a Sisyphus of labour. He came as a youth to Paris, poor and solitary, drawn thither by his irresistible author's vocation and by the hope of winning fame. His father, like most fathers, was extremely unwilling that his son, whom no one credited with being a genius, should give up the profession of law for literature, and therefore left him entirely to his own resources. So there he sat in his garret, unwaited on, shivering with cold, his plaid wrapped round his legs, the coffee-pot on the table on one side of him, the ink-bottle on the other, staring out now and again over the roofs of the great city whose spiritual conqueror and delineator fate had destined him to be. The view was neither extensive nor beautiful-moss-grown tiles, shining in the sun or washed by the rain, roof-gutters, chimneys, and chimney-smoke. His room was neither comfortable nor elegant; the cold wind whistled through the chinks of its window and door. To sweep the floor, to brush his clothes, and to purchase the barest necessaries with the utmost economy, were the daily morning tasks of the young poet who was planning a great tragedy, to be called Cromwell. His recreation was a walk in the neighbouring cemetery of Père Lachaise, which overlooks Paris. From this vantageground young Balzac (like his hero, Rastignac) measured the |