"[339]
Mr. Hamerton's[340] interesting book about French life has much, I
think, to confirm this account of the French peasant. What I have seen
of France myself (and I have seen something) is fully in agreement with
it. Of a civilization and an equality which makes the peasant thus
_human_, gives to the bulk of the people well-being, probity, charity,
self-respect, tact, and good manners, let us pardon Madame Sand if she
feels and speaks enthusiastically. Some little variation on our own
eternal trio of Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,[341] or on the
eternal solo of Philistinism among our brethren of the United States and
the Colonies, is surely permissible.
Where one is more inclined to differ from Madame Sand is in her estimate
of her Republican friends of the educated classes. They may stand, she
says, for the genius and the soul of France; they represent its "exalted
imagination and profound sensibility," while the peasant represents its
humble, sound, indispensable body. Her protege, the peasant, is much
ruder with those eloquent gentlemen, and has his own name for one and
all of them, _l'avocat_, by which he means to convey his belief that
words are more to be looked for from that quarter than seriousness and
profit.
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