George Sand, with
her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative
of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La
Petite Fadette," etc., 1841-1849), which is as far removed from the
turbid stream of Balzac ("Les Paysans") and Zola ("La Terre"), as
Paradise is from the Inferno. There is an echo of Rousseau's gospel of
nature in all these tales, and the same optimistic delusion regarding
"the people" for which the eighteenth century paid so dearly. The
painters likewise caught the tendency, and with the same thorough-going
conscientiousness as their brethren of the quill, disguised coarseness
as strength, bluntness as honesty, churlishness as dignity. What an
idyllic sweetness there is, for instance, in Tidemand's scenes of
Norwegian peasant life! What a _spirituelle_ and movingly sentimental
note in the corresponding German scenes of Knaus and Huebner, and, _longo
intervallo_, Meyerheim and Meyer von Bremen. Not a breath of the broad
humor of Teniers and Van Ostade in these masters; scarcely a hint of the
robust animality and clownish jollity with which the clear-sighted
Dutchmen endowed their rural revellers.
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