C. “Well, what is God good for if he won’t take us to heaven when we
die?”[328]
-----
Footnote 328:
On children’s attempts to understand about being buried and going to
heaven, see above, p. 120 ff.
-----
_Sixth Year._
The sixth year, the last with which the diary attempts to deal, is very
meagrely represented. The observation was plainly becoming intermittent
and lax. I have, however, thought it worth while to complete this sketch
of a child’s mental development by a reference to this fragmentary
chapter.
The child continued to be observant of the forms of things. He began to
attend the Kindergarten at the beginning of this year, and this probably
served to develop his visual observation. We have, however, no very
striking illustrations of his perceptual powers. It might interest the
naturalist to know that he compared the head of Mr. Darwin, which he saw
in a photograph, to that of an elephant, and being asked why he thought
them like one another, answered: “Because it is so far from the top of
the head to the ear”. Perhaps admirers of our great naturalist may be
ready to pardon the likening of their hero’s head to that of one of the
most intelligent of the large animal family which he showed to be our
kinsfolk.
Another remark of his at about the same date seems to show that he still
entertained a particularly gross form of the animistic conception that
things are double, and that there is a second filmy body within the
solid tangible one. He was looking at the pictures in Darwin’s _Descent
of Man_, and came on some drawings of the human embryo. His mother asked
him what they looked like, and he replied: “Why, like the inside of
persons of course”. Asked to explain this he pointed to the head, the
eye, the stomach, and so forth.
He spontaneously began to talk (middle of eighth month) about opposition
of colours. He was looking at his coloured soldiers and talking to
himself in this wise: “Which colour is most opposite colour to blue?” He
said that red was its opposite, not yellow as suggested by his father,
in which opinion he probably has a good many older people on his side.
He also observed to his father at the same date: “I tell you, papa, what
two colours are very like one another, blue and green”. The father
remarks, however, that he was now mixing pigments and using them, and
that the knowledge so gained probably made him bring blue and green
nearer to one another than he used to do.
An opportunity of testing his memory occurred at the beginning of the
sixth month. He met a gentleman who had been kind to him during that
memorable visit to the sea-side village D—— just three and a half years
before, and whom he had not seen since. His father asked the child
whether he knew Mr. S. He looked at him steadily, and answered yes.
Asked where he had seen him, he answered: "Down at ——". He had forgotten
the name of the place. On his father further asking him what he
remembered about him he said: “He made me boats and sailed them in a
pool”. This was quite correct. So far as the father can say the fact had
not been spoken of to him since the time. If this is so, it seems worth
recording that a child of five and a half should recall such distinct
impressions of what had occurred when he was only just two.
Fancy, the old frisky, wonder-working fancy, was now getting less
active. At least, we meet this year with none of the pretty fairy-myths
of earlier years. So far as the journal tells us, it was only in sleep
that C. entered the delightful region of wonderland. Here is a quaint
dream of his (end of fifth month). It was Christmas time, and he had
been seeing a huge prize-ox, a shaggy Highland fellow with big head and
curled horns. He had taken a violent fancy to it and wanted his father
to draw it for him. A morning or two afterwards he told his father that
he had had a funny dream. Both his father and his mother were turned
into oxen, and it was a “very nice dream”.
For the rest, the brain of our little Kindergärtner was being engrossed
with the business of getting knowledge, and, as a result of this fancy,
was being taken in hand by sober understanding and drilled to the useful
and necessary task of discovering truth.
We get one or two pretty glimpses of the boy trundling his hoop beside
his father in a late evening walk and now and again stopping to ask
questions. Here is one (end of third month): They were walking home
together across the sands at Hunstanton at the rosy sun-set hour. C. was
much impressed and began asking his father how far off the sun was. On
finding out that the clouds were not a hard substance but could be
passed through, he wanted to know what was on the other side. “Is it
another world, papa, like this?”
Shortly after this date he was talking about the size of the sun, when
he remarked: “I s’pose the sun’s big enough to put on the world and make
see-saw”. He seemed to think of the sun as a disc, and imagined that it
might be balanced on the earth-globe.
What with home instruction and the ‘lessons’ at the Kindergarten his
little brain was being confronted with quite a multitude of new
problems. It was interesting, remarks the father, to note how he would
try to piece together the various scraps of knowledge he thus gathered.
For instance, we find him in the ninth month trying hard to make
something out of the motley presentations of the ‘world’ which he had
got from classical myths as known through the _Tanglewood Tales_ and
from his elementary geography lessons. He asked whether Atlas could
stand in the middle of the sea and not be drowned. On his father’s
trying to evade this awkward question, the boy inquired whether the sea
came half way up the world. Asked to explain what he meant, he
continued: “You know the shore gets lower and lower or else the sea
would not go out; and out in the middle it goes down very deep. Now,
where the sea comes in, is that half way up the world?” One would like
to know how the father met this dark inquiry.
He would sometimes apply his newly-gained knowledge in an odd fashion.
One day (middle of ninth month), he observed that his porridge was
hottest in the middle, and remarked: “That’s just like the earth. It’s
hottest in the middle. There’s real fire there.” This smacks just a
little perhaps of pedantry, and the child, on entering the new world of
school-lore, is, we know, apt to display the pride of learning. Yet we
must beware, writes the ever-apologetic father, of judging the child’s
ways too rigorously by our grown-up standards.
The progress in the more abstract kind of thinking and in the
correlative use of abstract language was very noticeable at this stage.
An odd example of an original way of expressing a newly attained
relation of thought occurred towards the end of the third month. C. was
at this time much occupied with the subject of the bearing-rein, the
cruelty of which he had learnt from a favourite story, the autobiography
of a horse, called _Black Beauty_. One day when walking out, and, as was
his wont, vigilantly observant of all passing horses, he said: “That
horse has bearing-rein at all,” by which he seems to have meant that the
horse had it somewhere or wore it sometimes. The use of expressions like
these, which at once made his statements more cautious and showed a
better grasp of the full sweep of a proposition, was very characteristic
at this period.
Even now, however, he found himself sometimes compelled to eke out his
slender vocabulary by concrete and pictorial descriptions of the
abstract. Thus one day (end of eighth month) he happened to overhear his
father say that he should oppose a proposal of a member of the Library
Committee to which he belonged. C., boy-like, interested in the prospect
of a tussle, asked: "Who is the greatest man, you or Mr. ——?" Asked by
his father, who imagined that the child was thinking of a physical
contest with the honourable gentleman, “Do you mean taller?” he
answered: “No. Who is most like a king?” In this wise, observes the
chronicler, did he try to express his new idea of authority or influence
over others.
While he thus pushed his way into the tangle of abstract ideas, he found
himself now and again pulled up by a thorny obstacle. Some of us can
remember how when young we had much trouble in learning to recognise the
difference between the right and the left hand. C. experienced the same
difficulty. One evening (towards the end of the eleventh month) after
being put to bed he complained of a sore spot on his foot. Being asked
on which foot, the right or the left, he said: “I can’t tell when in
bed. I can’t say when my clothes are off. I know my right side by my
pockets.” It would seem as if the differences in the muscular and other
sensations by help of which we come to distinguish the one side of the
body from the other are too slight to be readily recognised, and that a
clear intuition of this simple and fundamental relation of position is
the work of a prolonged experience.[329]
-----
Footnote 329:
According to Professor Baldwin’s observations the infant shows a
decided right-handedness, that is, a disposition to reach out with the
right hand rather than with the left, by the seventh or eighth month
(quoted by Tracy, _The Psychology of Childhood_, p. 55). But of course
this is a long way from a definite intuition and idea of the right and
the left hand. Mr. E. Kratz finds that more than one-fourth of
children of five coming to a primary school cannot distinguish the
right hand from the left.
-----
By the end of the fourth month—a month after joining the Kindergarten—he
was able to count up to a century. His interest in counting, which was
particularly lively just now, is illustrated in the fact that in the
fifth month, after showing himself very curious about the word
‘fortnight,’ saying again and again that it was a funny word, and asking
what it meant, he put the question: “Does it mean fourteen nights?”
About the same date he proffered a definition of one of the most
difficult of subjects. His mother had been trying to explain the
difference between poetry and prose by saying that the former describes
beautiful things, when he suddenly interrupted her, exclaiming: “Oh yes,
I know, it’s language with ornaments”. But here the diary has, it must
be confessed, the look of wishing to display the boy’s accomplishments,
a fault from which, on the whole, it is creditably free.
As might be expected, the boy’s reasoning was now much sounder, that is
to say, more like our own. Yet now and again the old easy fashion of
induction would crop up. Thus one day (towards end of ninth month) he
was puzzled by the fact that boys of the same age might be of unequal
size. This brought him to the old subject of growth, and he suggested
quite seriously that the taller boys had had more sun. On his father
saying: ‘The sun makes _plants_ grow,’ he added: “And people too”.
His questionings took about this time the direction of origins or
beginnings. As with other children, God did not appear to be the
starting-point in the evolution of things, and he once asked quite
seriously (end of sixth month): “What was God like in his younger days?”
With a like impulse to go back to absolute beginnings he inquired about
the same date, after learning that chicken-pox was only caught from
other animals: “What was the person or thing that first had
chicken-pox?” A little later (beginning of ninth month) he and a boy
companion of nearly the same age were talking about the beginnings of
human life. C. said “I can’t make out how the first man in the world was
able to speak. A word, you know, has a sound, and how did he find out
what sound to make?” His friend then said that his puzzle was how the
first babies were nursed. This child seems to have set out with the
supposition that the history of our race began with the arrival of
babies.
Very little is told us in this unfinished chapter of the child’s
emotional and moral development. As might be expected from the increase
of intellectual activity the movements expressive of the feelings of
strain and perplexity which accompany thought grew more distinct. In
particular it was noticeable at this time that during the fits of
thought the child’s face would take on a quaint old-fashioned look, the
eye-brows being puckered up and the eye-lids twitching.
He continued very sensitive about the cruelties of the world, more
especially towards animals. One day (at the end of the fifth month) his
mother had been reading to him his favourite, _Black Beauty_, in which a
war-horse describes to the equine author the horrors of war. C. was
deeply affected by the picture, and at length exclaimed with much
emphasis, “Oh, ma! why do they do such things? It’s a _beastly_,
_beastly_ world,” at the same time bursting into tears and hiding his
face in his mother’s lap. “So hard,” writes the father, “did the boy
still find it, notwithstanding his increased knowledge, to accept this
human world as a right and just one.”
The religious thought and sentiment remained thoroughly childish. He was
still puzzled about the relations of heaven and the grave. One day (end
of sixth month) his father observed, looking at the Christmas pudding on
the table wreathed with violet flame: “Oh, how I should like to be
burned after death instead of being buried”. On this C. looking alarmed
said: “_I_ won’t be burned. I shouldn’t go to heaven then.” On his
father remarking: “’Tisn’t your body that goes to heaven,” he continued:
“But my _head_ does”. Here, writes the father, we seem to perceive a
transition from the old gross materialism of last year to a more refined
form. C. was now, it may be presumed, localising the soul in the head,
and clinging to the idea that at least that limited portion of our frame
might manage to get away from the dark grave to the bright celestial
regions. It may be too, he adds, that this fancy was aided by seeing
pictures of detached cherub heads.[330]
-----
Footnote 330:
Compare above, p. 123.
-----
A month or two later (beginning of ninth month) he began to attack the
difficult problem of Divine fore-knowledge and free-will. His mother had
been remonstrating with him about his naughty ways. He grew very
miserable and said: “I can’t make out how it is God doesn’t make us
good. I pray to him to make me good.” To this his mother replied that he
must help himself to be good. This only drew from C. the following
protest: “Then what’s the use of having God if we have to help
ourselves”. “Even now,” writes the father, "it looks as if God and
heaven were for him institutions, the _raison d’être_ of which was their
serviceableness to man."
He brought to the consideration of prayer a childish sense of propriety
which sometimes wore a quaint aspect. One day (end of third month) on
his return from the Kindergarten he asked his mother: “Does God teach
us?” and when bidden explain his question continued: “Because they said
that at school” (“Teach us to be good”). He then added: “But anyhow that
isn’t a proper way to speak to God”. His notion of what was the proper
way was illustrated in his own practice. One evening (end of sixth
month) after his bath he was kneeling with his head on his mother’s lap
so that she might dry his hair. He began to pray half audibly in this
wise: “Please, God, let me find out before my birthday, but at least on
my birthday.... So now good-bye!” This ending, obviously borrowed from
his sister’s letters, was varied on another occasion in this way: “With
my love, good-bye”.[331]
-----
Footnote 331:
Compare above, p. 283.
-----
It seems strange that the diary should break off at a time when there
was so much of the quaint and pretty child-traits left to be observed.
No explanation of the abrupt termination is offered, and I am only able
to conjecture that the father was at this time pressed with other work,
and that when he again found the needed leisure he discovered to his
chagrin that time, aided by the school-drill, was already doing its
work. We know that it is about this time that the artist, Nature, is
wont to rub out the characteristic infantile lines in her first crude
sketch of a human mind, and to elaborate a fuller and maturer picture.
And while the onlooking parent may rejoice in the unfolding of the
higher human lineaments, he cannot altogether suppress a pang at the
disappearance of what was so delightfully fresh and lovely.
I will close these extracts, following the father’s own fashion, with a
word of apology. C.’s doings and sayings have seemed to me worth
recording, not because their author was in any sense a remarkable child,
but solely because he was a true child. In spite of his habitual
association with grown-up people he retained with childish independence
his own ways of looking at things. No doubt something of the
intellectual fop, of the assertive prig, peeps out now and again. Yet if
we consider how much attention was given to his utterances, this is not
surprising. For the greater part the sayings appear to me the direct
naïve utterance of genuine childish conviction. And it is possible that
the inevitable impulse of the parent to show off his child has done C.
injustice by making too much, especially in the last chapter of the
diary, of what looks smart. Heaven grant that our observations of the
little ones may never destroy the delightful simplicity and
unconsciousness of their ways, and turn them into disagreeable little
performers, all conscious of their _rôle_, and greedy of admiration.
XII.
GEORGE SAND’S CHILDHOOD.
_The First Years._
Much has been written about George Sand, but singularly little about her
childhood. Yet she herself, when she set to work, between forty and
fifty, to write the _Histoire de ma Vie_, thought it worth while to fill
the best part of two volumes of that work with early reminiscences; and
herein surely she judged wisely. Good descriptions of childish
experience are rare enough. George Sand gives us a singularly full story
of childhood; and, allowing for the fact of its author being a novelist,
one may say that this story reads on the whole like a record of memory.
That a narrative at once so charming and so pathetic should have been
neglected, by English writers at least, can only be set down to the
circumstance that it is not clearly marked off from the tediously full
account of ancestors which precedes it.[332]
-----
Footnote 332:
A selection of scenes from the story, with notes, has been prepared
for young English students by M. Eugène Joël, under the title,
_L’Enfance de George Sand_ (Rivingtons).
-----
The early reminiscences of a great man or woman have a special interest.
Schopenhauer has ingeniously traced out the essential similarity of the
man of genius and the child. Whatever the value of this analogy, it is
certain that the gifted child seems not less but more of a child because
of his gifts. This is emphatically true of the little lady with whom we
are now concerned, and of whom, since we are interested in her on her
own account and not merely as the precursor of the great novelist, we
shall speak by her rightful name, Aurore Dupin.
The reader need not be told that the child who was to become the
representative among modern women of the daring irregularities of genius
was an uncommon child. She would certainly have been set down as strange
and as deficient in childish traits by a commonplace observer. Yet close
inspection shows that the untamed and untamable ‘oddities’ were, after
all, only certain common childish impulses and tendencies exalted, or,
if the reader prefers, exaggerated. Herein lies the chief value of the
story. To this it may be added that this exaggeration of childish
sensibility was set in a _milieu_ admirably fitted to stir and strain it
to the utmost. It was a motley turbulent world into which little Aurore
was unceremoniously pitched, and makes the chronicle of her experience a
thrilling romance. And all this experience, it may be said finally, is
set down with the untroubled regard and the patient hand of one of the
old chroniclers. The forty years had left the memory tenacious and clear
to a remarkable degree—in this respect the story will bear comparison
with the childish recallings of Goethe and the other famous
self-historians; at the same time these years had brought the woman’s
power of quiet retrospect and the artist’s habit of calm complacent
envisagement. Herein lies a further element of value. The writer feels
her identity with the subject of her memoir: she lives over again the
passion-storms and ennuis, the reveries and hoydenish freaks of little
Aurore; yet she can detach herself from her heroine too, and discuss her
and her surroundings with perfect artistic aloofness.
Aurore—or, to give her her full appellation, Amandine Lucile Aurore
Dupin—was born in 1804. Her father, a distinguished officer of the
Empire, was grandson of Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II.,
King of Poland. Her mother was a daughter of a Parisian bird-seller, and
a true child of the people. The student of heredity may, perhaps, find
in this commingling of noble and humble blood a key to much of the wild
and bizarre in the child as well as in the later woman. However this may
be, it is certain that the disparate alliance gave the sombre and almost
tragic hue to the child’s destiny. Through the precious years that
should be given over to happy play and dreams, she was to hear the harsh
and dismal contention of classes, and hear it, too, in the shape of a
bawling strife for the possession of herself.
The first home was a humble lodging in Paris. The father was away. The
mother, disdained by the father’s family, had to be hard at work, and
the baby had its irregular career foreshadowed by being often handed
over to a male nurse, one Pierret, an ugly and quarrelsome though really
good-natured creature, whom an accident suddenly made a devoted friend
of the small family, faithfully dividing his time between the
_estaminet_ and the Dupin _ménage_.
Beyond a recollection of an accident, a fall against the corner of the
chimney-piece, which shock, she tells us, ‘opened my mind to the sense
of life,’ the first three years yield no reminiscences. From that date
onwards, however, her memory moves without a hitch, and gives us a
series of delightful vignette-like pictures of child-life.
Her mother had a fresh, sweet voice, and the first song she sang to
Aurore was the nursery rhyme:—
Allons dans la grange
Voir la poule blanche
Qui pond un bel œut d’argent
Pour ce cher petit enfant.
I was vividly impressed [she writes] with that white hen and that
silver egg which was promised me every evening, and for which I never
thought of asking the next morning. The promise returned always, and
the naïve hope returned with it.
The legend of little Father Christmas, a good old man with a white
beard, who came down the chimney exactly at midnight and placed a simple
present, a red apple or an orange, in her little shoe, excited the
infantile imagination to unusual activity.
Midnight, that fantastic hour which children know not, and which we
point out to them as the unattainable limit of their wakefulness! What
incredible efforts I made not to fall asleep before the appearance of
the little old man. 1 had at once a great desire and a great fear to
see him; but I could never keep awake.
The love of sound, so strong in children, found an outlet in playing
with some brass wirework on the doors of an alcove near her bed.
My special amusement before going to sleep was to run my fingers over
the brass network. The little sounds that I drew thence seemed to me a
heavenly music, and I used to hear my mother say, “There’s Aurore
playing the wirework.”
Her vivid recollection enables her to describe with a sure touch the
oddly mixed and capriciously changeful feeling of children towards their
dolls and other simulacra of living creatures. She somehow had presented
to her a superb Punch, brilliant with gold and scarlet, of whom she was
greatly afraid at first, on account of her doll. Before going to bed she
securely shut up this last in a cupboard, and laid the brilliant monster
on his back on the stove; but her anxieties were not yet over.
I fell asleep very much preoccupied with the manner of existence of
this wicked being who was always laughing, and could pursue me with
his eyes into all the corners of the room. In the night I had a
frightful dream: Punch had got up, his hump had caught on fire on the
stove, and he ran about in all directions, chasing now me, now my
doll, which fled distractedly. Just as he was overtaking us with long
jets of flame, I awoke my mother with my cries.
Her childish way of looking at dolls is thus described in another
place:—
I do not remember to have ever believed that my doll was an animated
being; nevertheless, I have felt for some of my dolls a real maternal
affection.... Children are between the real and the impossible. They
need to care for, to scold, to caress, and to break this fetish of a
child or animal that is given them for a plaything, and with which
they are wrongly accused of growing disgusted too quickly. It is quite
natural, on the contrary, that they should grow disgusted with them.
In breaking them they protest against the lie.
She only broke those, she adds, that could not stand the test of being
undressed, or that proclaimed their unfleshly substance by falling and
breaking their noses. The fluctuations of childish feeling in this
matter, and the triumph of faith over doubt in the case of a real
favourite, are prettily illustrated in a later story of how she parted
from her doll when she was going from home on a long journey.
At the moment of setting out I ran to give it a last look, and when
Pierret promised to come and make it take soup every morning, I began
to fall into a state of doubt, which children are wont to feel
respecting the reality of these creatures, a state truly singular, in
which nascent reason on one side and the need of illusion on the other
combat in their heart greedy of maternal love. I took the two hands of
my doll and joined them over its breast. Pierret remarked that this
was the attitude of a dead person. Thereupon I raised the hands, still
joined, above the head, in the attitude of despair or of invocation.
With this I associated a superstitious idea, thinking that it was an
appeal to the good fairy, and that the doll would be protected,
remaining in this position all the time of my absence.[333]
-----
Footnote 333:
What George Sand here writes about the intrusion of doubt and disgust
into the child’s feeling for the doll does not, I think, contradict
what was said above in chapter ii. on the intensity and persistence of
his faith. In truth these are illustrated in the very resistance to
the occasional attack of the child’s nascent reason, just as they are
illustrated in the resistance to others’ sceptical assaults.
-----
The gift of vivid imagination is probably quite as much a torment as a
joy to a child, as the story of Punch suggests. Aurore’s finely strung
nervous organisation exposed her to a preternatural intensity of fear,
and made any clumsy attempt to ‘frighten’ by suggestion of ‘black hole,’
or other childish horror, more than ordinarily cruel. One day she had
been with her mother and Pierret on a visit to her aunt. On returning
towards the evening she was lazy and wanted the amiable Pierret to carry
her. So to spur her on her mother threatened in fun to leave her alone
if she did not come on. The child knew it was not meant, and daringly
stopped while the others made a feint of moving on. It happened that a
little old woman was just then lighting a lamp hard by, and, having
overheard the talk, turned to the child and said in a broken voice,
‘Beware of me; it is I who take up the wicked little girls, and I shut
them in my lamp all the night’.
It seemed as if the devil had whispered to this good woman the idea
that would most terrify me. I do not remember ever experiencing such a
terror as she caused me. The lamp, with its glittering reflector,
instantly took on fantastic proportions, and I saw myself already shut
in this crystal prison consumed by the flame which the Punch in
petticoats made to burst forth at her pleasure. I ran towards my
mother uttering piercing cries. I heard the old woman laugh, and the
grating sound of the lamp as she remounted gave me a nervous shiver.
At bottom Aurore’s nature was a happy one, and if it encountered in the
real world the terrors of childhood, it found in the ideal world of
fiction its supreme delights. Before she learned to read (about four)
she had managed to stock her small brain with an odd jumble of
supernatural imagery, the outcome of fairy stories recited to her, and
of picture-books setting forth incidents from classical mythology and
the lives of the saints; and she soon began to make artistic use of this
motley material. Her mother, she tells us, used to shut her within four
straw chairs in order to keep her from playing with the fire. She would
then amuse herself by pulling out the straws with her hands (she always
felt the need of occupying her hands) and composing in a loud voice
interminable stories. They were of course modelled on the familiar
fairy-tale pattern. The principal characters were a good fairy, a good
prince, and a beautiful princess. There were but few wicked beings, and
never great misfortunes. ‘All arranged itself under the influence of a
thought, smiling and optimistic as childhood.’ These stories, carried on
day after day, were the subject of amusing comment. ‘Well, Aurore,’ the
aunt used to ask, ‘hasn’t your prince got out of the forest yet?’
To Aurore’s ardent imagination, play, as the story of the doll suggests,
was more than the half-hearted make-believe it often is with duller
children. She was able to immerse her whole consciousness in the scene,
the occupation imagined, so as to lose all account of her actual
surroundings. One evening, at dusk, she and her cousin were playing at
chasing one another from tree to tree, for which the bed-curtains did
duty. The room had disappeared for these little day-dreamers; they were
really in a gloomy country at the oncoming of night and when they were
called to dinner they heard nothing. Aurore’s mother had finally to
carry her to the table, and she could ever after recall the astonishment
she felt on seeing the light, the table, and other real objects about
her.
Even at this tender age the child came into contact with the large
mysterious outer world. At her aunt’s home at Chaillot there was a
garden, the one garden she knew, a small square plot, seeming a vast
region to Aurore, shut in by walls. At the bottom of this garden, on a
green terrace, she and her cousin used to play at fighting battles.
One day we were interrupted in our games by a great commotion outside.
There were cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ marchings with quick step, and
then retirings, the cries continuing all the while. The emperor was,
in fact, passing at some distance, and we heard the tread of the
horses and the emotion of the crowd. We could not look over the walls,
but the whole thing seemed very beautiful to my fancy, and we cried
with all our strength, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ transported by a sympathetic
enthusiasm.
She first saw the Emperor in 1807, from the good Pierret’s shoulders,
where, being a conspicuous object, she attracted Napoleon’s quick eye.
‘I was, as it were, magnetised for a moment by that clear look, so hard
for an instant, and suddenly so benevolent and so sweet.’
The political storm that was then raging on the sea of Europe made
itself felt even in the far-off and seemingly sheltered creek of
Aurore’s small life. Her father was aide-de-camp to Murat at Madrid, and
in 1808 the mother resolved to betake herself to him with her child. It
was a singular experience for a girl just completing her fourth year,
and the narrative of it is romantic enough. Her imagination was
strangely affected by the sight of the great mountains, which seemed to
shut them in and to forbid their moving forwards or backwards. Yet she
felt no fear at the postillion’s malicious fictions about brigands which
quite horrified her mother. In Madrid they found themselves quartered in
a large and magnificent palace. The unaccustomed space and splendour at
first troubled the child. She was tormented by the huge pictures from
which big heads seemed to come out and follow her, and she was further
alarmed by a low mirror which gave her the first sight of her whole
figure and made her feel how big she was.
Murat was not over well pleased at the arrival of his aide-de-camp’s
wife and child, so an attempt was made to propitiate him by decking the
little maid in a gay and coquettish uniform. The child, who was no
coquette, seems to have cared but little for this performance, though
she soon began to find amusement in her new sumptuous dwelling.
As soon as I found myself alone in this large room I placed myself
before the low glass, and I tried some theatrical poses. Then I took
my white rabbit, and tried to force it to do likewise; or rather I
pretended to offer it as a sacrifice to the gods, using a footstool as
altar.... I had not the least feeling of coquetry; my pleasure came
from the make-believe that I was playing in a quartette scene in which
were two little girls and two rabbits. The rabbit and I addressed, in
pantomime, salutations, threats, and prayers to the personages of the
mirror, and we danced the bolero with them.
It was at Madrid that she first made acquaintance with one of Nature’s
most fascinating mysteries, the echo.
I studied this phenomenon with an extreme pleasure. What struck me as
most strange was to hear my own name repeated by my own voice. Then
there occurred to me an odd explanation. I thought that I was double,
and that there was round about me another “I” whom I could not see,
but who always saw me, since he always answered me.
She then combined with this strange phenomenon another, _viz._, the red
and blue balls (ocular spectra) that she got into her eyes after looking
at the golden globe of a church glittering against the sky, and so found
her way to a theory that everything had its double—a theory which, Mr.
Tylor and others tell us, was excogitated in very much the same way by
uncivilised man. She spent days in trying to get sight of her double.
Her mother, who one day surprised her in this search, told her it was
echo, ‘the voice in the air!’
This voice in the air no longer astonished me, but it still charmed
me. I was satisfied at being able to name it, and to call to it,
‘Echo, are you there? Don’t you hear me? Good-day, Echo!’[334]
-----
Footnote 334:
Compare above, p. 113.
-----
The next event of deep import for Aurore was the sudden death of her
father by a fall from his horse, which occurred in the autumn of the
same year. The first visit of the King of Terrors to a home has been a
black landmark in many a child’s life. Aurore was at first ‘annihilated’
by excess of grief and fear, for, as she says, ‘childhood has not the
strength to suffer’. The days that immediately followed the bringing in
of the lifeless body were passed in a sort of stupor. Clear recollection
dates only from the moment when she was to be clad in the conventional
black.
The black made a strong impression on me. I cried in submitting to it;
for though I had worn the black dress and veil of the Spaniards, I had
certainly never put on black stockings, and the stockings frightened
me terribly. I would have it that they were putting on me the legs of
death, and my mother had to show me that she wore them also.[335]
-----
Footnote 335:
Compare this with other accounts of the first impression of death
given above, p. 237 f.
-----
The father’s death brought a profound change into the child’s life. The
despised mother had already been recognised by the paternal grandmother,
and a certain advance made towards a show of amity. Visits were paid to
the grandmother’s château at Nohant, and it was, in fact, when they were
staying there that the fatal accident occurred.
The common loss drew the two women together for a time, but the
contrasts of temperament and of education were too powerful, and the
jealousy which had first directed itself to the father now found a new
object in his talented child. She has given us more than one excellent
description of mother and grandmother. The latter, a blonde with white
and red complexion, imposing air, always dressed in a brown silk robe
and a white wig frizzled in front, was grave and quiet, ‘a veritable
Saxon,’ a friend of the _ancien régime_, a disciple of Voltaire and
Rousseau, albeit a stickler for the conventionalities of high life. The
mother was a brunette, of an ardent temperament, endowed with
considerable talent, yet timid and awkward before grand folk, a Spanish
nature, jealous and passionate, a true democrat withal, and a worshipper
of the Emperor. The problem of dividing poor little Aurore between two
such women, habiting two distinct worlds, would have baffled Solomon
himself. The grandmother insisted on the advantages of bringing up the
child as a lady, and the mother, after a hard struggle, relinquished her
claims, the girl being handed over to the grandmother and transported
into the new world of Nohant.
The story of this struggle, which tore the heart of Aurore as much as
that of her mother, is a tragedy of child-life. Aurore’s instincts bound
her to her mother. She implored her not to give her up for money—she
understood she was to be the richer for the change. She was beside
herself with joy when her grandmother allowed her to visit the maternal
home, and she has given us a charming account of these visits. The rooms
were poor and ugly enough by the side of her grandmother’s salons; yet—
How good my mother seemed, how amiable my sister, how droll and
agreeable my friend Pierret! I could not stop repeating, ‘I am here at
home: down there I am at the house of my grandmother’. ‘Zounds!’ said
Pierret; ‘don’t let her go and say _chez nous_ before Madame Dupin.
She would reproach us with teaching her to talk as they do
_aux-z-halles_!’ And then Pierret would burst out into a fit of
laughter, for he was ready to laugh at anything, and my mother made
fun of him, and I cried out, ‘How we are enjoying ourselves at home!’
When she found that she was to live at Nohant she was beside herself
with grief, and implored her mother to take her away, and to let her
join her in some business enterprise. The mother seemed at first to
yield to these entreaties; but the barriers of rank proved to be
inexorable, and would not let the little orphan pass. The narrative of
the final departure of the mother from Nohant is deeply pathetic. It was
the eve of the parting: and the child resolved to write a letter to her
mother in which for the last time she poured out her passionate love and
her implorings to be taken with her. But the house was sentinelled with
hostile maids, and how to get the letter to its destination? At last,
lover-like, she bethought her of putting it behind a portrait of her
grandfather in her mother’s room. To make sure of her finding it, she
hung her nightcap on the picture, writing on it in pencil ‘Shake the
portrait!’ The mother came, but a provoking maid stayed a long half-hour
with her. Aurore dared not move. Then, having waited another half-hour
for the maid to fall asleep, she crept to her mother, whom she found
reading the letter and weeping. She pressed her child to her heart, but
would listen to no more proposals of flight from Nohant.
I cried no more—I had no more tears; and I began to suffer from a
trouble more profound and lacerating than absence. I said to myself,
‘My mother does not love me as much as I love her’.
In the distraction of her grief she resolved that if it was unbearable
she would walk to Paris and rejoin her mother; and, with characteristic
inventiveness, thought out, by help of her fairy stories, how she would
avoid the anguish of begging by disposing of some precious trinkets.
But the grief, like many another that looks crushing at first, proved
not unbearable. In time the child learnt to take kindly to her new home,
and even to love the stately and severe-looking grandmamma.
_The Grandmother’s Regime._
It was verily a new home, this country house at Nohant. Besides the
grave grandmamma bent on drilling Aurore into the proprieties, there was
another solemn figure in Deschartres, her friend and counsellor, who
combined the functions of steward of the estate and tutor of the young
people. His pupils were Aurore herself, a half-brother Hippolyte, whose
birth added one more irregularity to the family history, and of whom the
_Histoire_ has much to say. Hippolyte was a wild-tempered youth, more
given to mischievous adventure and practical joking than to serious
study, and proved a considerable set-off to the formal gravity of the
elders of the household. A second youthful companion was supplied in
Clotilde, a girl of humble parentage, who was probably introduced by the
authorities as a concession to Rousseau’s teaching, and supplied a link
between the young lady and the peasant world she was to love and to
portray. Beyond the house was the unpretending country of Le Bas Berry,
with its ‘landes’ or wastes, the ‘Valée Noire’ of Aurore’s early
descriptions, which more than one of our writers have found half English
in character, and which was to become to Aurore what the Midlands were
to George Eliot.
The first effect of this forced separation from the mother seems to have
been to throw Aurore in upon herself, and to confirm her natural
tendency to reverie. She says much at this stage of her day-dreaming,
which overtook her both when alone and when joining her companions in
play. It visited her regularly as she sat at her mother’s feet in the
evening listening to her reading, with an old screen covered with green
taffeta between her and the fire.
I saw a little of the fire through this worn taffeta, and it formed on
it little stars, whose radiation I increased by blinking my eyes. Then
little by little I lost the meaning of the phrases which my mother
read. Her voice threw me into a kind of moral stupor, in which it was
impossible for me to follow an idea. Images began to shape themselves
before me, and came and settled on the green screen. They were woods,
meadows, rivers, towns of a grotesque and gigantic architecture, as I
have often seen them in dreams; enchanted palaces with gardens like
nothing that exists, with thousands of birds of azure, gold, and
purple, which sprang on the flowers and let themselves be caught....
There were roses—green, black, violet, and especially blue.[336]... I
closed my eyes and still saw them, but when I reopened them I could
only find them again upon the screen.
-----
Footnote 336:
A blue rose was for a long time the favourite dream of Balzac.
-----
As at Madrid, so at Nohant: the splendour of her new home caused her
alarm at first. On the wall-paper of her bedroom above each door was a
large medallion with a figure: the one a joyous dancing Flora; the other
a grave, severe Bacchante, standing with arm stretched out leaning on
her thyrsus. The first was beloved, the second dreaded. The child’s bed
was so placed that she had to turn her back on her favourite. She hid
her head under the bed-clothes and tried not to see that terribly stern
Bacchante, but in vain.
In the middle of the night I saw it leave its medallion, glide along
the door, grow as big as a real person (as children say), and, walking
to the opposite door, try to snatch the pretty nymph from her niche.
She uttered piercing cries, but the Bacchante paid no heed to them.
She pulled and tore the paper till the nymph detached herself and fled
into the middle of the chamber. The other pursued her thither, and as
the poor fugitive threw herself on my bed in order to hide herself
under my curtain, the furious Bacchante came towards me and pierced us
both with her thyrsus, which had become a steeled lance, whose every
stroke was to me a wound of which I felt the pain.
In her play with Ursule and Hippolyte she continued to indulge in her
passion for vivid imaginative realisation. When playing at crossing the
windings of a river, rudely marked with chalk on the floor, five minutes
would suffice to generate this kind of hallucination.
I lost all notion of reality, and believed I could see the trees, the
water, the rocks—a vast country—and the sky, now bright, now laden
with clouds which were about to burst and increase the danger of
crossing the river. In what a vast space children think they are
acting when they thus walk from table to bed, from the fireplace to
the door!
On one of these occasions, Hippolyte, with the boy’s bent to realism,
took the water jug, and pouring its contents on the floor, produced a
closer semblance of the river. The natural consequence followed: the
children, wholly absorbed in their little drama, were caught by Aurore’s
mother in the very act of paddling with naked feet and legs in a dirty
puddle formed by the water and the staining of the floor, and were
visited with summary chastisement.
More daring pranks would sometimes be ventured on with Hippolyte. One
day, as Deschartres was away shooting, the boy got one of his works on
Incantation, and tried, much in the fashion of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn, to get a peep at the supernatural. Mysterious lines,
digits, etc., were duly traced on the floor with chalk, and other
preparations carried out. Then they awaited with deepening agitation the
first indication of success, the darting out of a blue flame on certain
digits or figures. Long minutes passed, yet no blue flame, no devil’s
horns, appeared to thrill the eager watchers. At length Hippolyte, in
order to keep up the girl’s excitement, put his ear to the floor and
declared that he could hear the crackling sound of a flame. But it was
all in vain. After all it was but a game, ‘though a game that made our
hearts beat’.
Hippolyte was given to dangerous experiments, which he dignified by
high-sounding names. Thus he one day put gunpowder into a big log and
threw this into the fire, with the view of blowing the saucepan into the
kitchen, an occupation which he cheerfully described as studying the
theory of volcanoes. He succeeded in leading on Aurore into pranks of a
decidedly hoydenish character, such as must have sadly grieved the
decorous grandmamma had she known of them. They one day went so far as
to dig a trough across the garden-path, fill this with light wet earth,
duly cover it with sticks and leaves, and then watch Deschartres, who
was particularly vain of his white stockings, as with the stiff, pompous
gait of the pedagogue he marched straight into the trap.
Such a child as Aurore, with her fits of reverie alternating with
somewhat rude outbursts of animal spirits, was not easily drilled into
those proprieties on which Madame Dupin set so high a value. This good
lady took great pains to make Aurore walk properly, wear her gloves,
give up the familiar ‘thou,’ and adopt the stilted mode of address of
the fashionable world. But she did not appreciate these educational
experiments. ‘It seemed to me that she shut me in with herself in a big
box when she said to me, “Amusez-vous tranquillement”.’ While, for the
sake of pleasing her guardian, she outwardly conformed to the rules of
society, in her heart she remained a rebel, and was dreadfully bored,
when she ceased to be amused, by her grandmother’s ‘old Countesses’. One
exception to her general dislike of the grand personages she had now to
meet was made in the case of her great-uncle, the Abbé of Beaumont. He
seems to have been a man of ability and culture, as well as of amiable
heart, and he proved a good friend of the family after the death of
Colonel Dupin by improvising the distraction of a comedy at Nohant, in
which Deschartres’ flute did duty as orchestra, and the little Aurore
was called on to dance a ballet all by herself. The Abbé’s house, which
was decorated throughout in the style of Louis XIV., filled her with
admiration, and she loved to wander, candle in hand, alone through its
vast salons while the older people were absorbed in their cards. This
grand-uncle, by-the-bye, served in part as the prototype of the Canon in
_Consuelo_.
The formal teaching was mostly handed over to Deschartres, though the
grandmother gave instruction in music. Aurore can hardly be said to have
been a backward child. She read well at four. Towards five she learnt to
write, but not having patience to copy out the alphabet, struck out an
original orthography of her own, and indited letters in this to Ursule
and Hippolyte. It was, she tells us, very simple and full of
hieroglyphics. She devoured a certain class of books, and found delight
for five or six months in the stories of Madame d’Aulnoy and of
Perrault, which she came across at Nohant. She adds that though she has
never re-read them since, she could repeat them all from beginning to
end. She tried, out of regard for her grandmamma, to take kindly to
arithmetic, Latin, and French versification, which Deschartres taught
her, but she could not master her dislike. After a little scene, in
which the passionate Deschartres threw a big dictionary at the girl’s
head, the Latin had to be given up altogether. The study she liked best
was history, since it gave her the chance of indulging in the pleasures
of imagination. She had to prepare extracts from a book for her
grandmother, and as she soon found that these were not compared with the
original, she began to introduce additions of her own. Without altering
essential facts, she tells us, she would place the historical personage
in new imaginary situations, so as to develop the character more
completely. In truth, she seems to have used history very much after the
fashion which Aristotle, and after him Lessing, recommend to the poets,
varying the situation, but leaving the character intact.
In addition to these more solid studies, the young lady had special
lessons in dancing and in calligraphy. Both the dancing-master and the
writing-master came in for her ridicule. The latter, she tells us, was
a professor of large pretensions, capable of spoiling the best hand
with his systems.... He had invented various instruments by which he
compelled his pupils to hold up the head, to keep the elbow free,
three fingers extended on the pen, and the little finger stretched on
the paper in such a way as to support the weight of the hand.
It must have been a joyous moment for Aurore when she was set free from
the restraints and impositions of the château for a couple of hours’
visit to some adjoining farm, where she could shout, laugh, and romp
with the peasant girls. Here she would climb the trees, rush wildly down
from the top to the bottom of a mountain of sheaves in the barn, and do
other outrageous things; or when the dream-mood was on her she would
quietly contemplate her rustic friends as they tended the lambs, hunted
for eggs, or gathered fruit from the orchard, weaving their figures into
one of her interminable romances.
Among the charming rural pictures that her pen has drawn for us in these
recollections there is one of a swineherd, called Plaisir, for whom she
conceived a strange friendship. She loved to watch his odd figure,
always clothed in a blouse and hemp trousers, ‘which with his hands and
naked feet had taken the colour and the hardness of the earth,’ armed
with a triangular iron instrument, ‘the sceptre of swineherds,’ and
looking like ‘a gnome of the glebe, a kind of devil between man and
werwolf’. As the swine turned up the soil with their snouts, the birds
would come to forage.
Sometimes these birds perched on the hog merely to get warm, or in
order the better to observe the labour from which they were to profit.
I have often seen an old ashy rook balancing himself there on one leg
with a pensive and melancholy air, while the hog bored deeply in the
soil, and by these labours caused it oscillations which disturbed it,
rendered it impatient, and finally drove it to correct this clumsiness
by strokes of its beak.
Nor was it merely as playmates that the young lady from the château
deigned to associate with the peasantry. She threw herself with ardent
sympathy into the hard toilsome life of the people. One day, as she
chanced to see an old woman stooping, as well as her stiff limbs allowed
her, to gather sticks in her grandmother’s garden, she set vigorously to
work with bill-hook cutting dry wood, working late into the evening, and
forgetting all about her meal, for she was ‘strong as a peasant girl’.
She then set out with blood-stained face and hands, and with a weight
greater than that of her own body, for the poor woman’s hut, where she
enjoyed a well-earned slice from her black loaf.
This contact with the rustic mind, so oddly introduced into the
fashionable scheme of education, exerted a profound effect on the
child’s imagination. She listened eagerly to the superstitious stories
which the hemp-dressers related when they came to crush the hemp,
sitting in the moonlight within view of the crosses of a cemetery. Among
these were a sacristan’s gruesome stories of interments and of the rats
that lived in the belfry. The doings of those rats, she tells us, would
of themselves fill a volume. He knew them all, and had given them the
names of the more important among the deceased villagers. They were very
clever, and could, among other exploits, arrange grains or beans given
them in the form of a circle enclosing a cross. It is hardly surprising
to learn that these stories robbed Aurore of her sleep.
The rustic legend of the _grande bête_ much exercised the girl’s brain.
She tried to reconcile the superstition with what she had learnt about
the animal kingdom. And in this way she concluded that the creature must
be a member of a species almost entirely extinct. She imagined that it
was leading a solitary existence, being able to survive the rest of its
species by hiding during the day and wandering at night. This weird
conception soon began to expand into a zoological romance.
If the girl’s imaginative impulse had been excited by her historical
studies, it could not but be roused to preternatural activity by the
stirring political events of the time. In 1812, when she was just eight
years old, occurred Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. The
absence of all news of the army for fifteen days gave a new direction to
her reverie.
I imagined that I possessed wings, that I darted through space, and
that peering into the abysses of the horizon I discovered the vast
snows and the endless steppes of White Russia. I hovered, took my
bearings in the air, and at last spied the wandering columns of our
unhappy legions. I guided them towards France—for that which tormented
me the most was that they did not know where they were, and that they
were moving towards Asia, plunging more and more into deserts as they
turned their backs on the West.
A quaint illustration of the conflict the child’s mind was passing
through under the contradictory impressions of Napoleon’s character
received from her mother and from her new instructors at Nohant, is
given us in the following:—
Once I dreamt I carried him (the Emperor) through space and set him on
the cupola of the Tuileries. There I had a long talk with him, put him
a thousand questions, and said to him, ‘If thou prove thyself by thy
answers, as people say, a monster, an ambitious man, a drinker of
blood, I will cast thee down and dash thee to pieces on the threshold
of thy palace; but if thou justify thyself, if thou be what I have
believed, the good, the great, the just Emperor, the father of the
French, I will replace thee on thy throne, and with my sword of fire
defend thee from thy enemies’. He thereupon opened his heart and
confessed that he had committed many faults from too great a love of
glory, but he swore that he loved France, and that henceforth he would
only think of the happiness of the people. On this I touched him with
my sword of fire, which rendered him invulnerable.
_A Self-evolved Religion._
Perhaps there is no domain of children’s thought and feeling that is
more remote from our older experience, and consequently less easily
understood by us, than that of religion. Their first ideas about the
supernatural are indeed, as we have seen above, though supplied by us,
not controlled by us.
To most children, presumably, religious instruction comes—at first at
least—with a commanding, authoritative force. The story of the
supernatural, of the Divine Father, of Heaven, and the rest, cannot be
scrutinised by the child—save, indeed, in respect of its inner
consistency—for it tells of things unobservable by sense, and so having
no direct contact with childish experience. Their natural tendency is to
believe, in a submissive, childish way, not troubling about the proof of
the mystery.
But even in this submissive acceptance there lies the germ of a
subsequent transformation. If the child is to believe, he must believe
in his own fashion; he must give body and reality to the ideas of Divine
majesty and goodness, and of spiritual approach and worship. Hence the
way in which children are apt to startle the reverent and amuse the
profane by divulging their crude material fancies about things
spiritual.
Such materialisation of spiritual conceptions is apt to bring trouble to
the young mind. It is all so confusing—this exalted Personage, who
nevertheless is quite unlike earthly dignitaries, this all-encompassing
and never-failing Presence, which all the time refuses to reveal itself
to eye or ear. How much real suffering this may entail in the case of
children at once serious and imaginative we shall never know. The
description of the boy Waldo, in that strangely fascinating book, _The
Story of an African Farm_, kneeling bare-headed in the blazing sun and
offering his dinner on an altar to God, may look exaggerated to some;
but it is essentially true to some of the deepest instincts of
childhood. The child that believes at all, believes intensely, and his
belief grows all-commanding and prolific of action.
While, however, it is the common tendency of children passively to adopt
their elders’ religious beliefs, merely inventing their own modes of
giving effect to them, there is a certain amount of originality
exercised in the formation of the beliefs themselves. Stories of
independent creations of a religious cult by children are no doubt rare;
and this for the very good reason that it needs the greatest force of
self-assertion to resist the pressure of the traditional faith on the
childish mind. The early recollections of George Sand furnish what is
probably the most remarkable instance of childish daring in fashioning a
new religion, with its creed and ritual all complete.
Poor little Aurore’s religious difficulties and experiments at solution
can only be understood in the light of her confusing surroundings. From
her mother—ardent, imaginative, and of a ‘simple and confiding
faith’—she had caught some of the glow of a fervent piety. Then she
suddenly passed into the chilling air of Nohant, where the grandmother
equalled her master Voltaire in cynical contempt of the revered
mysteries. The effect of this sudden change of temperature on the warm
young heart was, as might have been anticipated, extremely painful.
Madame Dupin at once recognised the girl’s temperament, and saw with
dismay the leaning to ‘superstition,’ a trait which she disliked none
the less for recognising in it a bequest from the despised _grisette_
mother. So she applied herself with all the energy of her strong
character to counteract the child’s religious tendencies. Now this might
have proved neither a difficult nor lengthy process if she had
consistently set her face against all religious observances. But though
a disciple of Voltaire, she was also a lady with a conspicuous social
position, and had to make her account with the polite world and the
_‘bienséances’_. So Aurore was not only allowed but encouraged to attend
Mass and to prepare for the ‘First Communion’ like other young ladies of
her station. Madame Dupin well knew the risk she was running with so
inflammable a material, but she counted on her own sufficiency as a
prompt extinguisher of any inconveniently attaching spark of devotion.
In this way the young girl underwent the uncommon if not unique
experience of a regular religious instruction, and, concurrently with
this and from the very hand that had imposed it, a severe training in
rational scepticism and contempt for the faith of the vulgar.
Even if Aurore had not been in her inmost heart something of a _dévote_,
this parallel discipline in outward conformity and inward ridicule would
have been hurtful enough. As it was, it brought into her young life all
the pain of contradiction, all the bitterness of enforced rebellion.
The attendance on Mass could hardly have seemed dangerous to Madame
Dupin. The old _curé_ of Nohant was not troubled with an excess of
reverence. When ordering a procession, in deference to the mandate of
his archbishop, he would seize the occasion for expressing his contempt
for such mummeries. In his congregation there was a queer old lady, who
used to utter her disapproval of the ceremony with a frankness that
would have seemed brutal even in a theatre, by exclaiming, ‘Quelle
diable de Messe!’ And the object of this criticism, on turning to the
congregation to wind up with the familiar _Dominus vobiscum_, would
reply in an under-tone, yet loudly enough for Aurore’s ear, ‘Allez au
diable!’ That the child attached little solemnity to the ritual is
evident from her account to the grandmother of her first visit to the
Mass: ‘I saw the _curé_ who took his breakfast standing up before a big
table, and turned round on us now and then to call us names’.
The preparation for the ‘First Communion’ was a more serious matter. The
girl had now to study the life of Christ, and her heart was touched by
the story. ‘The Gospel (she writes) and the divine drama of the life and
death of Jesus drew from me in secret torrents of tears.’ Her
grandmother, by making now and again ‘a short, dry appeal to her
reason,’ succeeded in getting her to reject the notion of miracles and
of the divinity of Jesus. But though she was thus unable to reach ‘full
faith,’ she resolved _en revanche_ to deny nothing internally.
Accordingly she learnt her catechism ‘like a parrot, without seeking to
understand it, and without thinking of making fun of its mysteries’. For
the rest, she felt a special repugnance towards the confessional. She
was able to recall a few small childish faults, such as telling a lie to
her mother in order to screen the maid Rose, but feared the list would
not satisfy the confessor. Happily, however, he proved to be more
lenient than she had anticipated, and dismissed his young penitent with
a nominal penance.
The day that makes an epoch in the Catholic girl’s life at length
arrived, and Aurore was decked out like the rest of the candidates. The
grandmother, having given a finishing touch to her instructions by
bidding Aurore, while going through the act of decorum with the utmost
decency, ‘not to outrage Divine wisdom and human reason to such an
extent as to believe that she was going to eat her Creator,’ accompanied
her to the church. It was a hard ordeal. The incongruous appearance of
the deistic grandmamma in the place sufficed in itself to throw the
girl’s thoughts into disorder. She felt the hollowness of the whole
thing, and asked herself whether she and her grandmother were not
committing an act of hypocrisy. More than once her repugnance reached
such a pitch that she thought of getting up and saying to her
grandmother, ‘Enough of this: let us go away’. But relief came in
another shape. Going over the scene of the ‘Last Supper’ in her
thoughts, she all at once recognised that the words of Jesus, ‘This is
my body and my blood,’ were nothing but a metaphor. He was too holy and
too great to have wished to deceive his disciples. This discovery of the
symbolism of the rite calmed her by removing all feeling of its
grotesqueness. She left the Communion table quite at peace. Her
contentment gave a new expression to her face, which did not escape the
anxious eyes of Madame Dupin: ‘Softened and terrified, divided between
the fear of having made me devout and that of having caused me to lie to
myself, she pressed me gently to her heart and dropped some tears on my
veil’.
It was out of this conflicting and agitating experience, the full sense
of the beauty of the Christian faith and the equally full comprehension
of the sceptic’s destructive logic, that there was born in Aurore’s
imagination the idea of a new private religion with which nobody else
should meddle. She gives us the origin of this strange conception
clearly enough:—
Since all religion is a fiction (I thought), let us make a story which
may be a religion, or a religion which may be a story. I don’t believe
in my stories, but they give me just as much happiness as though I
did.[337] Besides, should I chance to believe in them from time to
time, nobody will know it, nobody will dispel my illusion by proving
to me that I am dreaming.
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Footnote 337:
She here refers to the stories she had long been accustomed to compose
for her own private delectation.
-----
The form and the name of her new divinity came to her in a dream. He was
to be called ‘Corambé’. His attributes must be given in her own words:—
He was pure and charitable as Jesus, radiant and beautiful as Gabriel;
but it was needful to add a little of the grace of the nymphs and of
the poetry of Orpheus. Accordingly he had a less austere form than the
God of the Christian, and a more spiritual feeling than those of
Homer. And then I was obliged to complete him by investing him on
occasion with the guise of a woman, for that which I had up to this
time loved the best, and understood the best, was a woman—my mother.
And so it was often under the semblance of a woman that he appeared to
me. In short, he had no sex, and assumed all sorts of aspects....
Corambé should have all the attributes of physical and moral beauty,
the gift of eloquence, the omnipotent charm of the arts—above all, the
magic of musical improvisation. I wished to love him as a friend, as a
sister, while revering him as a God. I would not be afraid of him, and
to this end I desired that he should have some of our errors and
weaknesses. I sought that one which could be reconciled with his
perfection, and I found it in an excess of indulgence and kindness.
The religious idea took an historical form, and Aurore proceeded to
develop the several phases of Corambé’s mundane existence in a series of
sacred books or songs. She supposed that she must have composed not less
than a thousand of such songs without ever being tempted to write down a
line of them. In each of these the deity Corambé, who had become human
on touching the earth, was brought into a fresh group of persons. These
were all good people; for although there existed wicked ones, one did
not see them, but only knew of them by the effects of their malice and
madness. Corambé always appears, like Jesus—and one may add, like
Buddha—as the beneficent one, spending himself, and suffering
persecutions and martyrdom, in the cause of humanity.
This occupation of the imagination developed ‘a kind of gentle
hallucination’. Aurore soon learned to betake herself to her
hero-divinity for comfort and delight. Even when her peasant companions
chattered around her she was able to lose herself in her world of
religious romance.
The idea of sacred books was followed by that of a temple and a ritual.
For this purpose she chose a little wood in her grandmother’s garden, a
perfect thicket of young trees and undergrowth, into which nobody ever
penetrated, and which, during the season of leaves, was proof against
any spying eye. Here, in a tiny, natural chamber of green, carpeted with
a magnificent moss, she proceeded to erect an altar against a tree stem,
decking it with shells and other ornaments and crowning it with a wreath
of flowers suspended from a branch above. The little priestess, having
made her temple, sat down on the moss to consider the question of
sacrifices.
To kill animals, or even insects, in order to please him, appeared to
me barbarous and unworthy of his ideal kindliness. I persuaded myself
to do just the opposite—that is, to restore life and liberty on his
altar to all the creatures that I could procure.
Her offering included butterflies, lizards, little green frogs, and
birds. These she would put into a box, lay it on the altar, and then
open it, ‘after having invoked the good genius of liberty and
protection’.
In these mimic rites, hardly removed from genuine childish play, the
doubt-agitated girl found repose: ‘I had then delicious reveries, and
while seeking the marvellous, which had for me so great an attraction, I
began to find the vague idea and the pure feeling of a religion
according to my heart’.
But the sweet sanctuary did not long remain inviolate. One day her boy
playmate came to look for her, and tracked her to her secret grove. He
was awe-struck at the sight, and exclaimed: ‘Ah, miss, the pretty little
altar of the _Fête-Dieu_!’ He was for embellishing it still further, but
she felt the charm was destroyed.
From the instant that other feet than mine had trodden his sanctuary,
Corambé ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted
it, and it seemed to me as if my ceremonies and my sacrifices were
from this time only childishness, that I had not in truth been in
earnest. I destroyed the temple with as much care as I had built it; I
dug a hole at the foot of the tree, where I buried the garlands, the
shells, and all the rustic ornaments, under the ruins of the altar.
This story of Aurore’s religious experiment cannot fail to remind the
reader of biography of the child Goethe’s well-known essays in the same
direction. The boy’s mind, it will be remembered, had been greatly
exercised with the religious problem, first of all under the impression
of horror caused by the earthquake at Lisbon, and later from having to
listen to accounts of the new sects—Separatists, Moravians, and the
rest—who sought a closer communion with the deity than was possible
through the somewhat cold ritual of the established religion. Stirred by
their example, he tried also to realise a closer approach to the Divine
Being. He conceived him, he tells us, as standing in immediate connexion
with Nature. So he invented a form of worship in which natural products
were to represent the world, and a flame burning over these to symbolise
the aspirations of man’s heart. A handsome pyramid-shaped music-stand
was chosen for altar, and on the shelves of this the successive stages
in the evolution of Nature were to be indicated. The rite was to be
carried out at sunrise, the altar-flame to be secured by means of
fumigating pastils and a burning-glass. The first performance was a
success, but in trying to repeat it the boy-priest omitted to put the
pastils into a cup, so the lacquered stand, with its beautiful gold
flowers, was disastrously burnt—a _contretemps_ which took away all
spirit for new offerings.
In comparing these two instances of childish worship, one is struck
perhaps more by their contrast than by their similarity. Each of the two
incidents illustrates, no doubt, a true childish aspiration towards the
great Unseen, and also an impulse to invent a form of worship which
should harmonise with and express the little worshipper’s individual
thoughts. But here the resemblance ceases. The boy-priest felt,
apparently, nothing of the human side of religion: he was the true
precursor of Goethe, the large-eyed man of science and the poet of
pantheism, and found his delight in symbolising the orderliness of
Nature’s work as a whole, and its Divine purpose and control. Aurore
Dupin, on the other hand, approached religion on the human and emotional
side, the side which seems more appropriate to her sex. She thought of
her deity as intently occupied with humanity and its humble kinsfolk in
the sentient world; and she endowed him above all other qualities with
generosity and pitifulness, even to excess. Goethe seems to represent
the speculative, Aurore the humanitarian, element in the religious
impulse of the child.
To follow Aurore into her later religious experiences in the ‘Couvent
des Anglaises’ would be clearly to go beyond the limits of these studies
of childhood. I hope I may have quoted enough from the first chapters of
the autobiography to illustrate not only their deep human and literary
interest, but their special value to the psychological student.