Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/196

186 special good is to live on when all else seems to be dying. That is why Providence delivers it from passions too personal or too general, and has given to its organisation patience and persistence, an enduring sensibility, and that contemplative sense upon which rests invincible faith.

Her novel, Les Maîtres Sonneurs, the first-fruits of the year 1853, is what most will consider a very good equivalent for party pamphlets and political diatribes.

When composing La Mare au Diable, in 1846, Madame Sand looked forward to writing a series of such peasant tales, to be collectively entitled Les Veillées du Chanvreur, the hemp-beaters being, as will be recollected, the Scheherazades of each village. Their number was never to be thus augmented, but the idea is recalled by the chapter-headings of Les Maîtres Sonneurs, in which Étienne Despardieu, or Tiennet, the rustic narrator, tells, in the successive veillées of a month, the romance of his youth. It is a work of a very different type to the rural tales that had preceded it, and should be regarded apart from them. It is longer, more complex in form and sentiment, more of an ideal composition. Les Maîtres Sonneurs is a delightful pastoral, woodland fantasy, standing by itself among romances much as stands a kindred work of imagination, "As You Like It," among plays, yet thoroughly characteristic of George Sand, the nature-lover, the seer into the mysteries of human character, and the imaginative artist. The agreeable preponderates in the