The Devils Pool

The Devil's Pool, by George Sand

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Title: The Devil's Pool
Author: George Sand
Illustrator: E. Abot
Translator: Jane Minot Sedgwick And Ellery Sedgwick
Release Date: July 4, 2007 [EBook #21993]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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DEVIL'S POOL ***

Produced by David Widger

THE DEVIL'S POOL
By George Sand

Translated From The French By Jane Minot Sedgwick And Ellery
Sedgwick
With An Etching By E. Abot
1901

THE DEVIL'S POOL

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
A la sueur de ton visaige, Tu gagnerais ta pauvre vie. Après long
travail et usaige, Voicy la mort qui te convie. *
THIS quaint old French verse, written under one of Holbein's pictures,
is profoundly melancholy. The engraving represents a laborer driving
his plow through the middle of a field. Beyond him stretches a vast
horizon, dotted with wretched huts; the sun is sinking behind the hill. It
is the end of a hard day's work. The peasant is old, bent, and clothed in
rags. He is urging onward a team of four thin and exhausted horses; the
plowshare sinks into a stony and ungrateful soil. One being only is
active and alert in this scene of toil and sorrow. It is a fantastic creature.
A skeleton armed with a whip, who acts as plowboy to the old laborer,
and running along through the furrow beside the terrified horses, goads
them on. This is the specter Death, whom Holbein has introduced
allegorically into that series of religious and philosophic subjects, at
once melancholy and grotesque, entitled "The Dance of Death."
* In toil and sorrow thou shalt eat The bitter bread of poverty. After the
burden and the heat, Lo! it is Death who calls for thee.
In this collection, or rather this mighty composition, where Death, who
plays his part on every page, is the connecting link and predominating
thought, Holbein has called up kings, popes, lovers, gamesters,
drunkards, nuns, courtesans, thieves, warriors, monks, Jews, and

travelers,--all the people of his time and our own; and everywhere the
specter Death is among them, taunting, threatening, and triumphing. He
is absent from one picture only, where Lazarus, lying on a dunghill at
the rich man's door, declares that the specter has no terrors for him;
probably because he has nothing to lose, and his existence is already a
life in death.
Is there comfort in this stoical thought of the half-pagan Christianity of
the Renaissance, and does it satisfy religious souls? The upstart, the
rogue, the tyrant, the rake, and all those haughty sinners who make an
ill use of life, and whose steps are dogged by Death, will be surely
punished; but can the reflection that death is no evil make amends for
the long hardships of the blind man, the beggar, the madman, and the
poor peasant? No! An inexorable sadness, an appalling fatality brood
over the artist's work. It is like a bitter curse, hurled against the fate of
humanity.
Holbein's faithful delineation of the society in which he lived is, indeed,
painful satire. His attention was engrossed by crime and calamity; but
what shall we, who are artists of a later date, portray? Shall we look to
find the reward of the human beings of to-day in the contemplation of
death, and shall we invoke it as the penalty of unrighteousness and the
compensation of suffering?
No, henceforth, our business is not with death, but with life. We believe
no longer in the nothingness of the grave, nor in safety bought with the
price of a forced renunciation; life must be enjoyed in order to be
fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor need no
longer exult in the death of the rich. All must be made happy, that the
good fortune of a few may not be a crime and a curse. As the laborer
sows his wheat, he must know that he is helping forward the work of
life, instead of rejoicing that Death walks at his side. We may no longer
consider death as the chastisement of prosperity or the consolation of
distress, for God has decreed it neither as the punishment nor the
compensation of life. Life has been blessed by Him, and it is no longer
permissible for us to leave the grave as the only refuge for those whom
we are unwilling to make happy.

There are some artists of our own day, who, after a