CONSUELO--HOME LIFE AT NOHANT.
CONSUELO first appeared in the _Revue Independante_, 1842-43. This noble
book might not be inaptly described as,
--a whole which, irregular in parts,
Yet left a grand impression on the mind.
Its reckless proportions naturally "shocked the connoisseurs" among
literary critics, especially in her own land; but nevertheless it
became, and deservedly, one of her most popular productions, and did
more than any other single novel she ever wrote to spread her popularity
abroad. If _Indiana_, _Valentine_, and _Lelia_ had never been written to
create the fame of George Sand, _Consuelo_ would have done so, and may
be said to have established it over again, on a better and more lasting
basis. Upon so well-known a work lengthened comment here would be
superfluous. Originally intended for a novelette,--the opening chapters
appear in the _Revue_ under the modest heading, _Consuelo_,
_conte_,--the beginning was so successful that the author was urged to
extend her plan beyond its first proposed limits. The novel is an
ephemeral form of art, no doubt, but it is difficult to conceive of a
stage of social and intellectual progress when the first part of
_Consuelo_ will cease to be read with interest and delight.
The heroine once transported from the lagunes of Venice to the frontier
of Bohemia and the castle of Rudolstadt, the character of the story
becomes less naturalistic; the storyteller loses herself somewhat in
subterranean passages and the mazes of adventure generally. She wrote
on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new
horizons which the artistic and historical researches her work required
kept opening to her view. But the powerful contrast between the two
pictures,--of bright, sunshiny, free, sensuous, careless Venetian
folk-life, and of the stern gloom of the mediaeval castle, where the more
spiritual consolations of existence come into prominence--is singularly
effective and original. So also is the charming way in which an incident
in the boyhood of young Joseph Haydn is treated by her fancy, in the
episode of Consuelo's flight from the castle, when he becomes her
fellow-traveller, and their adventures across country are told with
such zest and _entrain_, in pages where life-sketches of character, such
as the good-natured, self-indulgent canon, the violent, abandoned
Corilla, make us forget the wildest improbabilities of the fiction
itself. The concluding portion of the book, again entirely different in
frame, with its delineation of art-life in a fashionable capital,
Vienna, is as true as it is brilliant. It teems with suggestive ideas on
the subject of musical and dramatic art, and with excellently drawn
types. The relations of professional and amateur, the contradictions and
contentions to which, in a woman's nature, the rival forces of love and
of an artistic vocation may give rise, have never been better portrayed
in any novel. The heroine, Consuelo, is of course an ideal character:
her achievements partake of the marvellous; and there are digressions in
the book which are diffuse in the extreme; but nowhere is the author's
imagination more attractively displayed and her style more engaging. The
tone throughout is noble and pure. To look on _Consuelo_ as an agreeable
story merely is to overlook the elevation of the moral standard of the
book, in which much of its power resides. It marks more strongly than
_Mauprat_ the change that had come over the spirit of George Sand's
compositions.
In the continuation, _La Comtesse de Rodolstadt_, which followed
immediately in the _Revue Independante_, 1843, the novelist strays
further and further from reality--the _terra firma_ on which her fancy
improvises such charming dances. Here she only touches the ground now
and then, and between whiles her imagination asks ours to accompany it
on the most extraordinary flights. As a novel of adventure, it is
written with unflagging spirit; and in the rites and doctrines of the
_Illuminati_, an idealization of the feature of the secret sects of the
last century, she found a new medium of expression for her sentiments
regarding the present abuses of society and the need of thorough
renovation. Secret societies, at that time, were extremely numerous and
active among the Republican workers in France. Madame Sand seems
thoroughly to have appreciated their dangers, and has expressly stated
that she was no advocate of such sects; that though under a tyranny,
such as that which oppressed Germany in the times of which she wrote,
they may be a necessity, elsewhere they are an abuse if not a crime.
"The custom indeed I have never regarded as applicable for good in our
time and our country; I have never believed that it can bring forth
anything in future but a dictatorship, and the dictatorial principle is
one I have never accepted." (_Histoire de ma Vie._)
But the romance of the subject was irresistibly tempting to her
inventive faculty. "Tell Leroux to send me some more books on
freemasonry, if he can find any," she writes to a correspondent at Paris
whilst working at the _Comtesse de Rudolstadt_ at Nohant; "I am plunged
into it over head and ears. Tell him also that he has there thrown me
into an abyss of follies and absurdities, but that I am dabbling about
courageously though prepared to extract nothing but nonsense."
For the musical miracles which it is given to Madame Sand's heroes and
heroines to perform at a trifling cost, she may well at this time have
come to regard them as almost in the natural order. She had received her
second, and her best musical education through the contemplation of
original musical genius, of the rarest quality, among her most intimate
friends, her constant guests at Paris and Nohant. The vocal and
instrumental feats of Consuelo and Count Albert themselves are not more
astonishing than the actual recorded achievements of Liszt, pronounced a
perfect _virtuoso_ at twelve years old--and no wonder! The boy had so
carried away his accompanyists, the band of the Italian opera at Paris,
by his performance of the solo in an orchestral piece, that when the
moment came for them to strike in, one and all forgot to do so, but
remained silent, petrified with amazement. And Liszt when in the full
development of his genius, had, as we have seen, been the art-comrade of
George Sand; he had spent the whole of the summer season of 1837 at
Nohant, transcribing Beethoven's symphonies for the piano-forte whilst
she wrote her romances; she was familiar with his marvellous
improvisations. In her "Trip to Chamounix" (_Lettres d'un Voyageur_, No.
VI.) she has drawn a vivid picture of their extraordinary effect,
describing his unrehearsed organ recital in the Cathedral of Freibourg
to his little party of travelling companions. Nor was the charm of
Chopin's gift less magical. The well-known anecdotes related on this
subject are like so many glimpses into a musical paradise. Madame Sand
has given us an amusing one herself. It is evening in her _salon_ at
Paris. At the piano is Chopin; and she, her son, Eugene Delacroix, and
the Polish poet Mickiewicz sit listening whilst the composer, in an
inspired mood, is extemporizing in the sublimest manner to the little
circle. All are in silent raptures; when the servant breaks in with the
alarm--the house is on fire. They rush to the room where the flames are,
and succeed after a time in extinguishing them. Then they perceive that
the poet Mickiewicz is missing. On returning to the _salon_ they find
him as they left him, rapt, entranced, unconscious of the stir around
him, of the scare that had driven all the rest from the room. "He did
not even know we had gone and left him alone. He was listening to
Chopin, he had continued to hear him." Nor could the bewitched poet be
brought down from the clouds that evening. He remained deaf to their
banter, to Madame Sand's laughing admonition, "Next time I am with you
when the house takes fire, I must begin by putting you into a safe
place, for I see you would get burnt like a mere faggot, before you knew
what was going on."
Eugene Delacroix, one of Madame Sand's earliest and most valued friends
in the artist-world, and one of the many with whom she enjoyed along and
unclouded friendship, gives in his letters some agreeable pictures of
life at Nohant, during his visits there in the successive summers of
1845 and 1846:--
When not assembled together with the rest for dinner, breakfast, a
game of billiards, or a walk, you are in your room reading, or
lounging on your sofa. Every moment there come in through the
window open on the garden, "puffs of music" from Chopin, working
away on one side, which mingle with the song of nightingales and
the scent of the roses.
He describes a quiet, monastic-like existence, simple and studious: "We
have not even the distraction of neighbors and friends around. In this
country everybody stays at home, to look after his oxen and his land.
One would become a fossil in a very short time."
The greatest event for the visitor was a village-festival--a wedding or
a Saint's day--when the rustic dances went on under the tall elms to the
roaring of the bagpipes. Peasant youths and peasant maids joined hands
in the _bourree_, the characteristic dance of the country; now, we fear,
surviving in tradition only, but then still popular. The great artist
was fired to paint a "Ste. Anne," patron-saint of Nohant, in honor of
the place, but his work progressed but slowly. He writes in August,
1846:--"I am frightfully lazy, I can do nothing, I hardly read; and yet
the days pass too quickly, for I must soon renounce this _vie de
chanoine_, and return into the furnace of stirring ideas, good and bad.
In Berry they have very few ideas, but they do just as well without."
Then he adds, "Chopin has been playing Beethoven to me divinely well.
That is worth all aestheticism."
Little theatrical entertainments of an original kind, presided over by
Madame Sand, and carried out by herself, her children, and their young
friends, became in time a prominent feature of life at Nohant. She thus
describes their nature and commencements:--
During the long evenings I took it into my head to devise for my
family theatricals on the old Italian pattern--_commedia
dell'arte_--plays in which the dialogue, itself extemporized, yet
follows the outlines of a written plan, placarded behind the
scenes. It is something like the charades acted in society, the
development of which depends on the talent contributed by the
actors. It was with these that we began, but little by little the
word of the charade disappeared. We acted wild _saynetes_,
afterwards comedies of plot and intrigue, finally dramas of event
and emotion.
All began with pantomime; and this was Chopin's invention. He sat
at the piano and extemporized, whilst the young people acted scenes
in dumb show and danced comic ballets. These charming
improvisations turned the children's heads and made their legs
nimble. He led them just as he chose, making them pass, according
to his fancy, from the amusing to the severe, from burlesque to
solemnity--now graceful, now impassioned. We invented all kinds of
costumes, so as to play different characters in succession. No
sooner did the artist see them appear than he adapted his theme and
rhythm to the parts wonderfully. This would be repeated for two or
three evenings; after which the _maestro_, departing for Paris,
would leave us quite excited, exalted, determined not to let the
spark be lost with which he had electrified us.
Chopin was possessed of much dramatic talent himself, and was an
admirable mimic. When a boy it had been said of him that he was born to
be a great actor. His capacity for facial expressions was something
extraordinary; he often amused his friends by imitations of
fellow-musicians, reproducing their manner and gestures to the life; so
well as actually on more than one occasion to take in the spectator.
Madame Sand thus gives account of the even tenor of her way, in a letter
of September, 1845:--
I have been in Paris till June, and since then am at Nohant until
the winter, as usual; for henceforward my life is ruled as
regularly as music paper. I have written two or three novels, one
of which is just going to appear.
My son is still thin and delicate, but otherwise well. He is the
best being, the gentlest, most equable, industrious, simple-minded,
and straightforward ever seen. Our characters, like our hearts,
agree so well that we can hardly live a day apart. He is entering
his twenty-third year, Solange her eighteenth. We have our ways of
merriment, not noisy, but sustained, which bring our ages nearer
together, and when we have been working hard all the week we allow
ourselves, by way of a grand holiday, to go and eat our cake out of
doors some way off, in a wood or an old ruin, with my brother, who
is like a sturdy peasant, full of fun and good nature, and who
dines with us every day, seeing that he lives not two miles off.
Such are our grand pranks.
Sometimes these little outings would originate a novel, as with the
_Meunier d'Angibault_, which she ascribes to "a walk, a discovery, a day
of leisure, an hour of idleness." On a ramble with her children she came
upon what she calls "a nook in a wild paradise;" a mill, whose owner
had allowed everything to grow around the sluices that chose to spring
up, briar and alder, oaks and rushes. The stream, left to follow its
devices, had forced its way through the sand and the grass in a network
of little waterfalls, covered below in the summer time with thick tufts
of aquatic plants.
It was enough; the seed was sown and the fruit resulted. "The apple
falling from the tree led Newton to the discovery of one of the grand
laws of the universe.... In scientific works of genius, reflection
derives the causes of things from a single fact. In art's humbler
fancies, that isolated fact is dressed and completed in a dream."
The picture given by Madame Sand and her guests of these years of her
life is charming enough, and in certain ways seems an ideal kind of
existence, amid beloved children, friends, pleasant and calm
surroundings, and the sweets of successful literary activity. But if it
had its bright lights, it had also its deep shadows. For every fresh
pleasure and interest crowded into her existence, there entered a fresh
source of anxiety and trouble. Age, in bringing her more power of
endurance, had not blunted her sensibilities. As usual with the
strongest natures in their hours of depression--and none so strong as
to escape these--she could then look for no help except from herself.
Those accustomed, like her, to shirk no responsibility, no burden, to
invite others to lean on them, and to ask no support, if their fortitude
gives way find the allowance, help and sympathy so easily accorded to
their weaker fellow-creatures nowhere ready for them. The exclamation
wrung from one of the characters in a later work of Madame Sand's, may
be but a faithful echo of the cry of her own nature in some moment of
mental torment. "Let me be weak; I have been seeming to be strong for so
long a time!"
Chopin, though the study of his genius had freshly inspired her own, and
greatly extended her comprehension of musical art, was a being to whom
the burden of his own life was too painful to allow him to lighten the
troubles of another; a partial invalid, a prey to nervous irritation, he
was dependent on her to soothe and cheer him at the best of times, and
to be nurse and secretary besides when he was prostrated by illness or
despondency. One is loth to call selfish a nature so attractive in its
refinement, so unhappy in its over-susceptibility. But it is obvious
that such a one might easily become a trial to those he loved. With all
its vigor her nervous system could not escape the exhaustion and
disturbance that attend on incessant brain-work. "Those who have nothing
to do," she remarks, "when they see artists produce with facility, are
ready to wonder at how few hours, how few instants, these can reserve
for themselves. For such do not know how these gymnastics of the
imagination, if they do not affect your health, yet leave an excitation
of your nerves, an obsession of mental pictures, a languor of spirit,
that forbid you to carry on any other kind of work."
Although her constitution was even stronger than in her youth, she had
for some years been subject to severe attacks of neuralgia. "Madame Sand
suffers terribly from violent headaches and pain in her eyes," remarks
Delacroix, in one of the letters above quoted, "which she takes upon
herself to surmount as far as possible, with a great effort, so as not
to distress us by what she goes through." Her habit of writing
principally at night and contenting herself with the least possible
allowance of repose, few could have persisted in for so long without
breaking down. For many years she never took more than four hours sleep.
The strain began to tell on her eye-sight at last, and already in a
letter of 1842 she speaks of being temporarily compelled to suspend this
practice of night-work, to her great regret, as in the daylight hours
she was never secure from interruption. Only her abnormal power of
activity and of bearing fatigue could have enabled her to fulfill so
strenuously the responsibilities she had undertaken to her children, her
private friends, and the public. The pressure of literary work was
incessant, and whatever her dislike to accounts and arithmetic she is
said to have fulfilled her engagements to editors and publishers with
the regularity and punctuality of a notary. Her large acquaintance,
relations with various classes, various projects, literary, political,
and philanthropical, involved an immense amount of serious
correspondence in addition to that arising from the postal persecution
from which no celebrity escapes. Ladies wrote to consult her on
sentimental subjects--to inquire of her, as of an oracle, whether they
should bestow their heart, their hand, or both, upon their suitors;
poets, to solicit her patronage and criticism. In the course of a single
half-year, 153 manuscripts were sent her for perusal! She replied when
it seemed fit, conscientiously and ungrudgingly; but experience had made
her less expansive than formerly to those whose overtures she felt to be
prompted by curiosity or some such idle motive, in the absence of any
sympathy for her ways of thinking. "I am not to be caught in my words
with indifferent persons," she writes to M. Charles Duvernet,
describing how, when in her friend Madame Marliani's _salon_ in Paris
she heard herself and her political allies or their opinions attacked,
she was not to be provoked into argument or indignant denial, but went
on quietly with her work of hemming pocket-handkerchiefs. "To such
people one speaks through the medium of the Press. If they will not
attend, no matter."
Her sex, her anomalous position, her freedom of expression and action,
exposed her to an extent quite exceptional, even for a public character,
to the shafts of malice and slander. Accustomed to have to brave the
worst from such attacks, she might and did arrive at treating them with
an indifference that was not, however, in her nature, which shrank from
the observation and personal criticism of the vulgar.
To a young poet of promise in whose welfare she took interest, she
writes, August, 1842:--
Never show my letters except to your mother, your wife, or your
greatest friend. It is a shy habit, a mania I have to the last
degree. The idea that I am not writing for those alone to whom I
write, or for those who love them thoroughly, would freeze my heart
and my hand directly. Everyone has a fault. Mine is a misanthropy
in my outward habits--for all that I have no passion left in me but
the love of my fellow-creatures; but with the small services that
my heart and my faith can render in this world, my personality has
nothing to do. Some people have grieved me very much,
unconsciously, by talking and writing about me personally and my
doings, even though favorably, and meaning well. Respect this
malady of spirit.
Madame Sand, being naturally undemonstrative, was commonly more or less
tongue-tied and chilled in the presence of a stranger, and she had a
frank dread of introductions and first interviews, even when the
acquaintance was one she desired to make. Sometimes she asks her friends
to prepare such new comers for receiving an unfavorable first
impression, and to beg them not to be unduly prejudiced thereby. Such a
one would find the persecution of lion-hunters intolerable, and now and
then this drove her to extremities. Great must, indeed, have been the
wrath of one of these irrepressibles, who, more obstinate than the rest,
failing by fair means to get an introduction to George Sand, calmly
pushed his way into Nohant unauthorized by anyone, whereupon her friends
conspired to serve him the trick it must be owned he deserved; and which
we give in the words of Madame Sand, writing to the Comtesse d'Agoult.
The story is told also by Liszt in his letters:--
M. X. is ushered into my room. A respectable-looking person there
receives him. She was about forty years of age, but you might give
her sixty at a pinch. She had had beautiful teeth, but had got
none left. All passes away! She had been rather good-looking, but
was so no longer. All changes! Her figure was corpulent, and her
hands were soiled. Nothing is perfect!
She was clad in a gray woolen gown spotted with black, and lined
with scarlet. A silk handkerchief was negligently twisted round her
black hair. Her shoes were faulty, but she was thoroughly
dignified. Now and then she seemed on the point of putting an _s_
or a _t_ in the wrong place, but she corrected herself gracefully,
talked of her literary works, of her excellent friend M. Rollinat,
of the talents of her visitor which had not failed to reach her
ears, though she lived in complete retirement, overwhelmed with
work. M. G. brought her a foot-stool, the children called her
mamma, the servants Madame.
She had a gracious smile, and much more distinguished manners than
that fellow George Sand. In a word X. was happy and proud of his
visit. Perched in a big chair, with beaming aspect, arm extended,
speech abundant, there he stayed for a full quarter of an hour in
ecstasies, and then took leave, bowing down to the ground
to--Sophie!
It was the maid that had thus been successfully passed off as the
mistress, who with her whole household enjoyed a long and hearty laugh
at the expense of the departed unbidden guest. "M. X. has gone off to
Chateauroux," she concludes, "on purpose to give an account of his
interview with me, and to describe me personally in all the _cafes_."
This anecdote however belongs to a much earlier period of her life, the
year 1837. Of her cordiality and kindliness to those who approached her
in a right spirit of sincerity and simplicity, many have spoken. For
English readers we cannot do better than quote Mr. Matthew Arnold's
interesting account, given in the _Fortnightly_, 1877, of his visit to
her in August, 1846. Desirous of seeing the green lanes of Berry, the
rocky heaths of Bourbonnais, the descriptions of which in _Valentine_
and _Jeanne_ had charmed him so strongly, the traveller chose a route
that brought him to within a few miles of her home:--"I addressed to
Madame Sand," he tells us, "the sort of letter of which she must in her
lifetime have had scores--a letter conveying to her, in bad French, the
youthful and enthusiastic homage of a foreigner who had read her works
with delight." She responded by inviting him to call at Nohant. He came
and joined a breakfast-party that included Madame Sand and her son and
daughter, Chopin, and other friends--Mr. Arnold being placed next to the
hostess. He says of her:--
As she spoke, her eyes, head, bearing were all of them striking,
but the main impression she made was one of simplicity, frank,
cordial simplicity. After breakfast she led the way into the
garden, asked me a few kind questions about myself and my plans,
gathered a flower or two and gave them to me, shook hands heartily
at the gate, and I saw her no more.
During the eight years of successful literary activity, lying between
Madame Sand's return from Majorca and the Revolution of February, 1848,
the profits of her work had, after the first, enabled her freely to
spend the greater part of the year at Nohant, and to provide a
substantial dowry for her daughter. But the amassing of wealth suited
neither her taste nor her principles. She writes to her poet-protege M.
Poncy, in September, 1845:--
We are in easy circumstances, which enables us to do away with
poverty in our own neighborhood, and if we feel the sorrow of being
unable to do away with that which desolates the world--a deep
sorrow, especially at my age, when life has no intoxicating
personality left, and one sees plainly the spectacle of society in
its injustices and frightful disorder--at least we know nothing of
_ennui_, of restless ambition and selfish passions. We have a sort
of relative happiness, and my children enjoy it with the simplicity
of their age.
As for me, I only accept it in trembling, for all happiness is like
a theft in this ill-regulated world of men, where you cannot enjoy
your ease or your liberty, except to the detriment of your
fellow-creatures--by the force of things, the law of inequality,
that odious law, those odious combinations, the thought of which
poisons my sweetest domestic joys and revolts me against myself at
every moment. I can only find consolation in vowing to go on
writing as long as I have a breath of life left in me, against the
infamous maxim, "_Chacun chez soi, chacun pour soi_." Since all I
can do is to make this protest, make it I shall, in every key.
Her republican friends in Berry had founded in 1844 a local journal for
the spread of liberal ideas--such as Lamartine at the time was
supporting at Macon. Madame Sand readily contributed her services to a
cause where she labored for the enlightenment of the masses on all
subjects--truth, justice, religion, liberty, fraternity, duties, and
rights. The government of Louis Philippe, so long as such utterances
attacked no definite institution, allowed an almost illimitable freedom
in expression of opinion. The result was that thought had advanced so
far ahead of action that social philosophers had grown to argue as
though practical obstacles had no existence--to be rudely reminded of
their consequence, when brought to the front in 1848, and acting
somewhat too much as if on that supposition.
It is impossible not to make concerning Madame Sand, the reflection made
on other foremost workers in the same cause of organic social
reform--namely, that her character and her instincts were in curious
opposition to her ideas. What was said by Madame d'Agoult of Louis Blanc
applies with even greater force to George Sand: "The sentiment of
personality was never stronger than in this opposer of individualism,
communist theories had for their champion one most unfit to be absorbed
into the community." For no length of time was the idea of "communism"
accepted, and never was it advocated by her except in the most
restricted sense. The land-hunger, or rather land-greed, of the small
proprietors in her neighborhood had, it is true, given her a certain
disgust for these contested possessions. But from the preference of a
small child for a garden of its own however small, to another's however
large, she characteristically infers the instinct of property as a law
of nature it were preposterous to disallow, and furthermore she lays
down as an axiom that, "in treating the communistic idea it is necessary
first to distinguish what is essential in liberty and work to the
complete existence of the individual, from what is collective." When
forced by actual experience to point out what she holds to be the
rightful application of the idea, she limits it to voluntary
association; and she hoped great things from the co-operative principle,
as tending to eliminate the ills of extreme inequalities in the social
structure, and to preserve everything in it that is worth preserving.