_La Marquise_ is, in my estimation, undoubtedly the best; indeed,
taking nothing but art into consideration, it is possibly her most
perfect work. I fancy it must have been inspired by the memory of her
kind-hearted, dignified grandmother. It fascinates by its combination
of the spirit and customs of the eighteenth century with the timid,
more spiritually enthusiastic amatory passion of the nineteenth. It
is a simple story of a high-born lady of the _ancien régime_, who has
married as they married in those days, and has accepted a lover as they
accepted lovers then, but whose lover bores her to death because he was
not the choice of her heart, but simply the man whom the whole of good
society conspired to force upon her. Young, inexperienced, beautiful,
and innocent in so far that she does not know what love is, she falls
in love with a poor, half-starving, dissipated actor, who on the stage
appears to her an incarnation of manliness and poetry. She sees him,
when he is not aware of her presence, off the stage, and is dismayed by
the difference in his appearance. He has become aware of her interest
in him, and now plays to her alone, and dreams of her alone. They hold
their first and last rendezvous late one evening after the play. The
Marquise, having been cupped in the morning, is fatigued. The actor has
not had time to take off the costume of his part; the ideality of the
stage still clings to him, and he is inspired, beautified, ennobled
by his love, which raises him high above the ordinary conditions of
his life. She is modest, he reverential; she is in love, enraptured
by a poetical illusion; he loves her as she is, loves her longingly,
passionately, but chivalrously; and, after a tempest of passionate
words, they part, without any caress but the kiss she imprints on his
brow as he kneels at her feet.
The old Marquise, who tells the story, is silent for a moment after
concluding it, and then says: "Well, will you believe now in the virtue
of the eighteenth century?" "Madame," replies the person addressed, "I
have not the slightest desire to doubt it; nevertheless, if I were not
so touched by your story, I might allow myself to observe that it was
very wise of you to have yourself cupped that day." "You wretched men!"
said the Marquise, "you are quite incapable of understanding the story
of the heart."
George Sand has written nothing more graceful. The sly sarcasm in this
conclusion, a quality which also distinguishes the equally charming
and equally suggestive little tale, _Teverino_, but which is not
frequently met with in her writings, is quite in the spirit of the
eighteenth century; and the style has that conciseness which is, as a
rule, an indispensable quality in a work destined to descend to future
generations. _La Marquise_ has a rightful claim to a place in every
anthology of French masterpieces.
Amongst the works which George Sand now proceeds to write is a whole
series in which she represents her conception of woman's nature when it
is uncorrupted. The women she draws are chaste and proud and energetic,
susceptible to the passion of love, but remaining on the plane above
it, or retaining their purity even when they yield to it. She inclines
to attribute to woman a moral superiority over man. But the natures of
her heroes, too, are essentially fine, though in the ruling classes
tainted by the inherited tendency to tyrannise over woman and the lower
classes. Rousseau's conviction of the original goodness of nature and
of the depravity of society lies at the foundation of all these works.
Women like Fiamma in _Simon_, Edmée in _Mauprat_, Consuelo in the novel
of the same name (of whom Madame Viardot was to a certain extent the
original), are fine specimens of George Sand's typical young girl.
Her rôle is to inspire, to heal, or to discipline the man. She knows
not vacillation; resolution is the essence of her character; she is
the priestess of patriotism, of liberty, of art, or of civilisation.
Of the novels named, _Consuelo_ is the longest and most famous; it
begins in masterly fashion, but, like many of Balzac's, not to speak of
Dumas', longer works, degenerates into romantic fantasticalness. The
artistic theories of the day led in the direction of exaggeration and
extravagance. It was not Victor Hugo alone who was apt to relapse into
the formless.
Side by side with the books which have the high-minded young girl as
heroine, we find one or two in which the mature woman is the central
figure--in which George Sand has given a more direct representation of
her own character. Such are _Le Secrétaire intime_, a comparatively
weak story, and _Lucrezia Floriani_, one of the most remarkable
productions of her pen. Of this latter book, it may with truth be
said that it is not food for every one (_Non hic piscis omnium_). To
most readers it will seem a forbidding or revolting literary paradox;
for it aims at proving the modesty, nay, the chastity of an unmarried
woman (an Italian actress and play-writer) who has four children by
three fathers. But it is a book in which the authoress has successfully
performed the difficult task she set herself, that of giving us an
understanding of a woman's nature which is so rich and so healthy that
it must always love, so noble that it cannot be degraded, so much that
of the artist that it cannot rest content with a single feeling, and
has the power to recover from repeated disappointments.
George Sand was successful because she simply presented her readers
with the key to her own nature. Many who have heard of the authoress's
irregular life, of her liaisons with Jules Sandeau, Alfred de Musset,
Michel de Bourges, Chopin, Manceau, and half-a-dozen others, must have
asked themselves how books that, with all their passion, are so pure
and noble as hers, could be the outcome of such a disorderly and,
according to accepted ideas, degraded life. And many have felt that the
inherent curiosity of the artist nature (which she defined by saying
that when the conversation turned upon cannibalism her first thought
was: "I wonder what human flesh tastes like;") was not a sufficient
explanation of her conduct. In _Lucrezia Floriani_ she has given us an
exhaustive study of her own character at the age of thirty. I shall
endeavour to make the character intelligible with the help of passages
culled from different parts of the book.
"Lucrezia Floriani by nature was--who would have believed it?--as
chaste as is the soul of a little child. It certainly seems strange
to hear this of a woman who had loved so much and so many.... It is
probable that the sensual part of her organisation was especially
powerfully developed; although to men who did not please her she seemed
frigid.... In the rare intervals when her heart had been tranquil,
her brain had been at rest; and if she could have been prevented from
ever seeing the other sex, she would have made an excellent nun,
calm and vigorous. This is as much as to say that nothing could be
purer than her thoughts when she was alone, and that when she loved,
all that was not her lover was to her, as far as the senses were
concerned, solitude, emptiness, nonentity." Lucrezia says of love: "I
know that it is said to be a sensual impulse; but this is not true
in the case of clever women. With them it follows a regular course;
it takes possession of the brain first, knocking at the door of the
imagination. Without the golden key to that door it cannot enter.
When it has established its mastery there, it descends into the lower
regions; it insinuates itself into all our faculties; and then we love
the man who rules us, as god, brother, husband, everything that a woman
can love." The authoress explains how it was possible for Lucrezia's
soul to be continually possessed afresh by the erotic illusion, and
in particular how her last, ardently passionate attachment for Prince
Karol (Chopin) came into being. "To these rich, strong natures the last
love seems always the first; and certain it is, that if affection is
to be measured by enthusiasm, Lucrezia had never loved so much. The
enthusiasm she had felt for other men had been of short duration. They
had been incapable of maintaining it or renewing it. Love had survived
disillusionment for a certain time; then came the stage of generosity,
solicitude, compassion, devotion, of the motherly feeling, to put it
in a word. It was a marvel that passions so foolishly conceived should
have lasted so long; although the world, judging only by appearances,
was astonished and scandalised to see her breaking the ties so soon
and so completely. In all these attachments she had been hardly a week
happy and blind--and was not the absolute devotion of one, sometimes
two, years, which followed on a love that she recognised to have been
foolish and ill-bestowed, a supreme effort of heroism, greater than the
sacrifice of a whole life for a being felt to be worthy of it?"
We can understand how it was that weak men had an attraction for
Lucrezia. Her independent character in combination with her motherly
instincts drew her to the weak. The idea of being protected was
intolerable to her; and on occasions when she had felt the desire to
lean upon those who were stronger than herself, she had too often been
repelled by their coldness. She was therefore inclined to believe that
love and energy were to be found in combination only in hearts which
had suffered as much as her own.
Finally, we see how her relation to her children--and Lucrezia, like
George Sand, is the tenderest, most affectionate of mothers--influenced
her erotic life. "She had wished to be a mother to her lovers without
ceasing to be the mother of her children, and the conflict between
the two feelings had always ended in the extinction of the less
obstinate passion. The children triumphed, and the lovers, who, to
speak metaphorically, had been taken from the Foundling Hospital of
civilisation, were obliged, sooner or later, to return there."
Lucrezia speaks of her attitude to the verdict of the world on her
character and life in terms which are directly applicable to George
Sand. "I have never sought notoriety. I may have caused scandal, but
never knowingly or willingly. I have never loved two men at the same
time. I have never, even in thought, belonged to more than one during
any given time, that is, as long as my passion lasted. When I no longer
loved a man, I did not deceive him. I broke off with him entirely. I
had vowed, it is true, in my enthusiasm, to love him always; and I made
the vow in absolute good faith. Every time I loved, it was so ardently
and perfectly that I believed it was for the first and last time in my
life. You cannot call me a respectable woman. But I myself am certain
that I am one; I even lay claim to be a virtuous woman, though I know
that, according to your ideas and public opinion, this is blasphemy. I
submit my life to the verdict of the world without rebelling, without
disputing the justice of its general laws, but not acknowledging that
it is right in my case."[6]
The contrast between _Lucrezia Floriani_ and the short series of
simple, beautiful peasant stories which follow it after a short
interval and bring us up to 1848, seems at first sight a very marked
one. In reality, however, the gulf separating _Lucrezia_ from _La
Mare au Diable, François le Champi_, and _La petite Fadette_ is not
so wide as it appears. What attracted George Sand to the peasants
of Berry, to the rustic idylls of her native province, was the very
same Rousseau-like enthusiasm for nature that had lent impetus and
weight to her protests against the laws of society. Her secretary and
intimate friend, Müller-Strübing, a German, is said to have drawn her
attention to Auerbachs earliest village stories, and thereby to have
instigated her to the production of the works which, thanks to their
simplicity and calm purity, no less than to their wealth of feeling,
have gained her the widest circle of readers. Auerbach was consecrated
peasant-annalist by Spinoza, the apostle of natural piety, George Sand
by Rousseau, the worshipper of nature. Her French peasants are very
certainly not "real" in the same sense as Balzac's in _Les Paysans_;
they are not merely represented with a sympathy which is as strong
as his antipathy, but are made out to be amiable, tender-hearted,
and sensitively delicate in their feelings; they are to real French
peasants what the shepherds of Theocritus were to the real shepherds
of Greece. Nevertheless, these tales have one merit which they owe
entirely to their subject-matter and which George Sand's other novels
lack--they possess the charm, always rare, but doubly rare in French
literature, of naïveté. All that there was of the peasant girl, of the
country child, in George Sand; everything in her which was akin to
the plants that grow, to the breeze that blows, knowing not whence it
cometh nor whither it goeth; all that which, unconscious and dumb, was
so legible in her countenance and behaviour, but was so often nullified
in her works by sentimentality and phrase-mongering, revealed itself
here in its childlike simplicity.
_La Mare au Diable_, written in 1841, is the gem of these village
tales. In it idealism in French fiction reaches its highest level. In
it George Sand gave to the world what she declared to Balzac it was her
desire to write--the pastoral of the eighteenth century.
[1] Compare the passages from _Jacques_ quoted in _The Romantic School
in Germany_, pp. 104, 105. Émile Zola latterly adopted a different tone.
[2] Emile Zola writes of the characters in _Jacques_ (_Documents
littéraires_, 222): "I cannot describe the impression produced upon me
by such characters; they confuse me, they astonish me, as people would
who had made a wager to walk upon their hands. Their bitterness and
everlasting complaints are quite incomprehensible to me. What is it
they complain of? What is it they want? They take life from the wrong
side; hence it is only natural that they should be unhappy. Life is
fortunately a much more complaisant damsel than they make her out to
be. One can always get on with her if one is good-natured enough to put
up with the unpleasant hours," In caricaturing George Sand, Zola draws
his own portrait, or rather his own caricature, for he is certainly not
so narrow-mindedly matter-of-fact as this.
[3] Even that determined antagonist of Romanticism and George Sand,
Émile Zola, is obliged to write of George Sand: "The Romantic spirit
animated her creations, but her style remained classic." _Documents
littéraires_. 217.
[4] The writer of an article in _Le Figaro_ (Supplément littéraire) for
June 3, 1893, maintains that it is Jules Sandeau who is referred to in
this passage; but he is mistaken. See _Cosmopolis_ of May 1896, p. 440.
[5] The Prince de Ligne is writing of the qualities of the true
soldier, as De Musset writes of those of the true poet. He says: "Si
vous ne rêvez pas militaire, si vous ne dévorez pas les livres et les
plans de guerre, si vous ne baisez pas les pas des vieux soldats, si
vous ne pleurez pas au récit de leurs combats, si vous ne mourez pas
du désir d'en voir et de honte de n'en avoir pas vu, quoique ce ne
soit pas votre faute, quittez vite un habit que vous déshonorez. Si
l'exercice même d'une seule bataille ne vous transporte pas, si vous ne
sentez pas la volonté de vous trouver partout, si vous êtes distrait,
si vous ne tremblez pas que la pluie n'empêche votre régiment de
manœuvrer; donnez-y votre place à un jeune homme tel que je le veux,"
&c, &c. The manner in which the prose style is reproduced in verse
by De Musset shows his artistic genius even more plainly than the
invention of a new style would have done. A hint from Émile Montégut
put me on the track of this passage.
[6] _Lucrezia Floriani_, 169, 67, 130, 127, 38.
XII
BALZAC
Side by side with George Sand and her work we come upon the man whose
art she herself characterised as the antipodes of her own. Whilst
she, in this particular a genuine Romanticist, turned with repugnance
from the social conditions of her day, more disposed to revile and
escape from them than to examine and depict them, he, if he did not
feel contented, at least felt quite at home in his surroundings, and
almost from the beginning of his career regarded the society of his
own day and the immediately preceding period as his artistic property,
his inexhaustible mine. George Sand was a great character limner, but
she was almost more essentially a great landscape painter; and she
represented human beings as the landscape painter represents plants;
what she showed was the part of humanity which seeks and bathes in the
light. Balzac's point of view was the opposite: the part of the human
plant which he understood and loved to paint was the root. What Victor
Hugo, in _La Légende des Siècles_, says of the satyr, is applicable to
Balzac:
"Il peignit l'arbre vu du côté des racines,
Le combat meurtrier des plantes assassines."
In the exuberantly fertile province of Touraine, "the garden of
France," the native province of Rabelais, Honoré de Balzac was born on
a spring day in 1799--a man of an exuberantly fertile, full-blooded,
warm-blooded nature, with plenty of heart and plenty of brain. Clumsy
and tender, coarse and sensitive, the presentient dreamer, the minute
observer, this man of curiously complex character combined sentiment,
genuine and somewhat ponderous, with a marvellous keenness of vision,
combined the seriousness of the scientific investigator with the light
humour of the storyteller, the discoverer's perseverance and absorption
in his idea with the artist's impulse to present to the eyes of all,
in unabashed nakedness, what he had observed, felt, discovered or
invented. He was as if created to divine and betray the secrets of
society and humanity.
[Illustration: BALZAC]
Balzac was a powerfully built, broad-shouldered man of middle height,
corpulent in later life; the feminine whiteness of his strong, thick
neck was his pride; his hair was black and as coarse as horse-hair, and
his eyes shone like two black diamonds; they were lion-tamer's eyes,
eyes that saw through the wall of a house what was happening inside,
that saw through human beings and read their hearts like an open book.
His whole appearance indicated a Sisyphus of labour.
He came as a youth to Paris, poor and solitary, drawn thither by his
irresistible author's vocation and by the hope of winning fame. His
father, like most fathers, was extremely unwilling that his son, whom
no one credited with being a genius, should give up the profession
of law for literature, and therefore left him entirely to his own
resources. So there he sat in his garret, unwaited on, shivering with
cold, his plaid wrapped round his legs, the coffee-pot on the table
on one side of him, the ink-bottle on the other, staring out now and
again over the roofs of the great city whose spiritual conqueror and
delineator fate had destined him to be. The view was neither extensive
nor beautiful--moss-grown tiles, shining in the sun or washed by the
rain, roof-gutters, chimneys, and chimney-smoke. His room was neither
comfortable nor elegant; the cold wind whistled through the chinks
of its window and door. To sweep the floor, to brush his clothes,
and to purchase the barest necessaries with the utmost economy, were
the daily morning tasks of the young poet who was planning a great
tragedy, to be called _Cromwell_. His recreation was a walk in the
neighbouring cemetery of Père Lachaise, which overlooks Paris. From
this vantage-ground young Balzac (like his hero, Rastignac) measured
the great metropolis with his eye, and made a defiant wager with it
that he would compel it to recognise and honour his unknown name.
The tragedy was soon given up; Balzac's genius was too modern, too
vigorous, to put up with the rules and abstract characters of French
tragedy. And, besides, it was imperative that the young hermit, who
had only obtained conditional leave of absence from home, should make
himself independent as quickly as possible.
He took to hurried novel-writing. As yet he had not the experience of
life requisite to give his productions any lasting value; but he had a
vivid, inexhaustibly productive imagination, and had read enough to be
able to write stories in a certain passable style, the style of most of
the light literature of the day. In 1822 he published, under different
pseudonyms, no fewer than five such novels; and during the following
three years he wrote others which he himself, with all his self-esteem,
could not regard as anything but pot-boilers. In 1822 he writes to his
sister: "I did not send you _Birague_, because it is perfect trash.
... In _Jean Louis_ there is some character-drawing, but the plot is
wretched. The one merit of these books, dear, is that they bring me in
a thousand francs; but I have received the sum in bills which have a
long time to run--will it ever be paid?" Those who have toiled through
one or more of these early works of Balzac's, will not consider his
verdict too harsh. They are distinguished by a certain vivacity--what
the French call _verve_--that is all the good that can be said of them.
That they possessed the merit which their author himself described as
their only one is doubtful, not only because Balzac in his later novels
(see _Un grand Homme de Province à Paris_) gives most unflattering
descriptions of the publishers who pay with promissory notes, but also
because in 1825 he suddenly, in despair, gave up authorship for the
time being, in the hope of making a living as a bookseller and printer.
His brain, which was constantly conceiving plans of every description,
had conceived that of bringing out one-volume editions of the classic
authors. No such editions as yet existed, and he felt convinced that
they would be a good business speculation. And he was right; but the
profits of this, as of all Balzac's later speculations, were reaped by
others; the projector invariably lost by them. In 1837, for example,
when he was in Genoa, the idea occurred to him that the ancient Romans
had probably not exhausted their silver mines in Sardinia. He spoke of
his idea to a Genoese acquaintance, and determined to follow it up.
Next year he spent valuable time in taking a fatiguing journey to the
island, to examine the slag of the mines. The state of matters answered
exactly to his expectations; but when he applied to the authorities
at Turin for permission to work the mines, he found that his Genoese
friend had been beforehand with him, had acquired the exclusive
right to do so, and was already well on the way to become a rich
man. Undoubtedly many of the practical speculations which suggested
themselves to Balzac's busy brain were mere chimeræ; nevertheless, his
genius reveals itself in them. Just as Goethe's was a nature so at
one with nature that his poet's eye, falling accidentally on a palm,
discovered the secret of the metamorphosis of plants (one and the
same original form in every part of the plant), and that his casual
examination of a split sheep's skull laid the foundation of philosophic
anatomy, so Balzac's was to such a degree the nature of the inventor
and discoverer, on the small as well as on the great scale, that he
seemed, like the legendary characters possessed of second sight, to
know instinctively where riches lay hidden, seemed, as it were, to
carry a divining rod which bent of itself towards gold, the nameless,
sexless hero of his works. He certainly was not successful in his
attempts to secure the treasure; he was a magician, not a business man.