The peasant has here, then, the elements
of the poetic sense, and of its high and pure satisfactions.
"But one part of the enjoyment which we possess is wanting to him, a
pure and lofty pleasure which is surely his due, minister that he is in
that vast temple which only the sky is vast enough to embrace. He has
not the conscious knowledge of his sentiment. Those who have sentenced
him to servitude from his mother's womb, not being able to debar him
from reverie, have debarred him from reflection.
"Well, for all that, taking the peasant as he is, incomplete and
seemingly condemned to an eternal childhood, I yet find him a more
beautiful object than the man in whom his acquisition of knowledge has
stifled sentiment. Do not rate yourselves so high above him, many of you
who imagine that you have an imprescriptible right to his obedience; for
you yourselves are the most incomplete and the least seeing of men. That
simplicity of his soul is more to be loved than the false lights of
yours."[325]
In all this we are passing from the second element in George Sand to the
third,--her aspiration for a social new-birth, a _renaissance sociale_.
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