PASTORAL TALES.
"So you thought," wrote Madame Sand to a political friend, in 1849,
"that I was drinking blood out of the skulls of aristocrats. Not I! I am
reading Virgil and learning Latin." And her best propaganda, as by and
by she came to own, was not that carried on in journals such as _La
Vraie Republique_ and _La Cause du Peuple_. Through her works of
imagination she has exercised an influence more powerful and universal,
if indirect.
Among the more than half a hundred romances of George Sand, there stands
out a little group of three, belonging to the period we have now
reached--the _mezzo cammin_ of her life--creations in a special style,
and over which the public voice, whether of fastidious critics or
general readers, in France or abroad, has been and remains unanimous in
praise.
In these, her pastoral tales, she hit on a new and happy vein which she
was peculiarly qualified to work, combining as she did, intimate
knowledge of French peasant life with sympathetic interest in her
subject and lively poetic fancy. Here she affronts no prejudices,
advances no startling theories, handles no subtle, treacherous social
questions, and to these compositions in a perfectly original _genre_ she
brought the freshness of genius which "age cannot wither," together with
the strength and finish of a practiced hand.
Peasants had figured as accessories in her earlier works. The rustic
hermit and philosopher, Patience, and Marcasse the rat-catcher, in
_Mauprat_, are note-worthy examples. In 1844 had appeared _Jeanne_, with
its graceful dedication to Francoise Meillant, the unlettered
peasant-girl who may have suggested the work she could not read--one of
a family of rural proprietors, spoken of by Madame Sand in a letter of
1843 as a fine survival of a type already then fast vanishing--of
patriarchally constituted family-life, embodying all that was grand and
simple in the forms of the olden time.
In _Jeanne_, Madame Sand had first ventured to make a peasant-girl the
central figure of her novel, though still so far deferring to the
received notions of what was essential in order to interest the "gentle"
reader as to surround her simple heroine with personages of rank and
education. Jeanne herself, moreover, is an exceptional and a highly
idealized type--as it were a sister to Joan of Arc, not the inspired
warrior-maid, but the visionary shepherdess of the Vosges. Yet the
creation is sufficiently real. The author had observed how favorable was
the life of solitude and constant communion with nature led by many of
these country children in their scattered homesteads, to the development
of remarkable and tenacious individuality. So with the strange and
poetical Jeanne, too innately refined to prosper in her rough human
environment, yet too fixedly simple to fare much better in more
cultivated circles. She is the victim of a sort of celestial stupidity
we admire and pity at once. In this study of a peasant heroine resides
such charm as the book possesses, and the attempt was to lead on the
author to the productions above alluded to, _La Mareau Diable_,
_Francois le Champi_, and _La Petite Fadette_. Of this popular trio the
first had been published already two years before the Revolution, in
1846; the second was appearing in the Feuilleton of the _Journal des
Debats_ at the very moment of the breaking of the storm, which
interrupted its publication awhile. When those tumultuous months were
over, and Madame Sand, thrown out of the hurly-burly of active politics,
was brought back by the course of events to Nohant, she seems to have
taken up her pen very much where she had laid it down. The break in her
ordinary round of work made by the excitements of active statesmanship
was hardly perceptible, and in 1849 _Le Champi_ was followed by _La
Petite Fadette_.
_La Mare au Diable_, George Sand's first tale of exclusively
peasant-life, is usually considered her masterpiece in this _genre_. It
was suggested to her, she tells us, by Holbein's dismal engraving of
death coming to the husbandman, an old, gaunt, ragged, over-worked
representative of his tribe--grim ending to a life of cheerless poverty
and toil!
Here was the dark and painful side of the laborer's existence--a true
picture, but not the whole truth. There was another and a bright side,
which might just as allowably be represented in art as the dreary one,
and which she had seen and studied. In Berry extreme poverty was the
exception, and the agriculturist's life appeared as it ought to be,
healthy, calm, and simple, its laboriousness compensated by the soothing
influences of nature, and of strong home affections.
This little gem of a work is thoroughly well-known. The ploughing-scene
in the opening--ploughing as she had witnessed it sometimes in her own
neighborhood, fresh, rough ground broken up for tillage, the plough
drawn by four yoke of young white oxen new to their work and but
half-tamed, has a simplicity and grandeur of effect not easy to parallel
in modern art. The _motif_ of the tale is that you often go far to
search for the good fortune that lies close to your door. Never was so
homely an adage more freshly and prettily illustrated; yet how slight
are the materials, how plain is the outline! Germain, the well-to-do,
widowed laborer, in the course of a few miles' ride, a journey
undertaken in order to present himself and his addresses to the rich
widow his father desires him to woo, discovers the real life-companion
he wants in the poor girl-neighbor, whom he patronizingly escorts on her
way to the farm where she is hired for service. It all slowly dawns upon
him, in the most natural manner, as the least incidents of the journey
call out her good qualities of head and heart--her helpfulness in
misadventure, forgetfulness of self, unaffected fondness for children,
instinctively recognized by Germain's little boy, who, with his
unconscious childish influence, is one of the prettiest features in the
book. Germain, by his journey's end, has his heart so well engaged in
the right quarter that he is proof against the dangerous fascinations of
the coquettish widow.
There is a breath of poetry over the picture, but no denaturalization
of the uncultured types. Germain is honest and warm-hearted, but not
bright of understanding; little Marie is wise and affectionate, but as
unsentimentally-minded as the veriest realist could desire. The native
caution and mercenary habit of thought of the French agricultural class
are indicated by many a humorous touch in the pastorals of George Sand.
Equally pleasing, though not aiming at the almost antique simplicity of
the _Mare au Diable_, is the story of _Francois le Champi_, the
foundling, saved from the demoralization to which lack of the softening
influences of home and parental affection predestine such unhappy
children, through the tenderness his forlorn condition inspires in a
single heart--that of Madeline Blanchet, the childless wife, whose own
wrongs, patiently borne, have quickened her commiseration for the wrongs
of others. Her sympathy, little though it lies in her power to manifest
it, he feels, and its incalculable worth to him, which is such that the
gratitude of a whole life cannot do more than repay it.
Part of the narrative is here put into the mouth of a peasant, and told
in peasant language, or something approaching to it. Over the propriety
of this proceeding, adopted also in _Les Maitres Sonneurs_, French
critics are disagreed, though for the most part they regret it. It is
not for a foreigner to decide between them. One would certainly regret
the absence of some of the extremely original and expressive words and
turns of speech current among the rural population, forms which such a
method enabled her to introduce into the narrative as well as into the
dialogue.
_La Petite Fadette_ is not only worthy of its predecessors but by many
will be preferred to either. There is something particularly attractive
in the portraits of the twin brothers--partly estranged by character,
wholly united by affection,--and in the figure of Fanchon Fadet, an
original in humble life, which has made this little work a general
favorite wherever it is known.
These prose-idylls have been called "The Georgics of France." It is
curious that in a country so largely agricultural, and where nature
presents more variety of picturesque aspect than perhaps in any other in
Europe, the poetic side of rural life should have been so sparingly
represented in her imaginative literature. French poets of nature have
mostly sought their inspiration out of their own land, "In France,
especially," observes Theophile Gautier, "all literary people live in
town, that is in Paris the centre, know little of what is unconnected
with it, and most of them cannot tell wheat from barley, potatoes from
beetroot." It was a happy inspiration that prompted Madame Sand to fill
in the blank, in a way all her own, and her task as we have seen was
completed, revolutions notwithstanding. She owns to having then felt the
attraction experienced in all time by those hard hit by public
calamities, "to throw themselves back on pastoral dreams, all the more
naive and childlike for the brutality and darkness triumphant in the
world of activity." Tired of "turning round and round in a false circle
of argument, of accusing the governing minority, but only to be forced
to acknowledge after all that they were put there by the choice of the
majority," she wished to forget it all: and her poetic temperament which
unfitted her for success in politics assisted her in finding consolation
in nature.
Moreover a district like Le Berry, singularly untouched by corruptions
of the civilization, and preserving intact many old and interesting
characteristics, was a field in which she might draw from reality many
an attractive picture. She was as much rallied by town critics about her
shepherdesses as though she had invented them. And yet she saw them
every day, and they may be seen still by any wanderer in those lanes,
and at every turn, Fanchons, Maries, Nanons, as she described them,
tending their flock of from five to a dozen sheep, or a few geese, a
goat and a donkey, all day long between the tall hedgerows, or on the
common, spinning the while, or possibly dreaming. A certain refinement
of cast distinguishes the type. Eugene Delacroix, in a letter describing
a village festival at Nohant, remarks that if positive beauty is rare
among the natives, ugliness is a thing unknown. A gentle, passive cast
of countenance prevails among the women: "They are all St. Annes," as
the artist expresses it. The inevitable changes brought about by
steam-communication, which have as yet only begun to efface the local
habits and peculiarities, must shortly complete their work. George
Sand's pastoral novels will then have additional value, as graphic
studies of a state of things that has passed away.
It does not appear that the merit of these stories was so quickly
recognized as that of _Indiana_ and _Valentine_. The author might
abstract herself awhile from passing events and write idylls, but the
public had probably not yet settled down into the proper state of mind
for fully enjoying them. Moreover Madame Sand's antagonists in politics
and social science, as though under the impression that she could not
write except to advance some theory of which they disapproved,
pre-supposed in these stories a set purpose of exalting the excellence
of rustic as compared with polite life--of exaggerating the virtues of
the poor, to throw into relief the vices of the rich. The romances
themselves do not bear out such a supposition. In them the author
chooses exactly the same virtues to exalt, the same vices to condemn, as
in her novels of refined society. She shows us intolerance, selfishness,
and tyranny of custom marring or endangering individual happiness among
the working-classes, as with their superiors. There are Philistines in
her thatched cottages, as well as in her marble halls. Germain, in _La
Mare au Diable_, has some difficulty to discover for himself, as well as
to convince his family and neighbors, that in espousing the penniless
Marie he is not marrying beneath him in every sense. Francois le Champi
is a pariah, an outcast in the estimation of the rustic world. Fanchon
Fadet, by her disregard of appearances and village etiquette,
scandalizes the conservative minds of farmers and millers very much as
Aurore Dupin scandalized the leaders of society at La Chatre. Most
prominence is given to the more pleasing characters, but the existence
of brutality and cupidity among the peasant classes is nowhere kept out
of sight. Her long practical acquaintance with these classes indeed was
fatal to illusions on the subject. The average son of the soil was as
far removed as any other living creature from her ideal of humanity, and
at the very time when she penned _La Petite Fadette_ she was
experiencing how far the ignorance, ill-will, and stupidity of her
poorer neighbors could go.
Thus she writes from Nohant to Barbes at Vincennes, November 1848:
"Since May, I have shut myself up in prison in my retreat, where, though
without the hardships of yours, I have more to suffer than you from
sadness and dejection, ... and am less in safety." Threatened by the
violence and hatred of the people, she had painfully realized that she
and her party had their most obstinate enemies among those whom they
wished and worked to save and defend.
Her profound discouragement finds expression in many of her letters from
1849 to 1852. The more sanguine hopes of Mazzini and other of her
correspondents she desires, but no longer expects, to see fulfilled. She
compares the moral state of France to the Russian retreat; the soldiers
in the great army of progress seized with vertigo, and seeking death in
fighting with each other.
To her son, who was in Paris at the time of the disturbances in May,
1849, she writes:--
Come back, I implore you. I have only you in the world, and your
death would be mine. I can still be of some small use to the cause
of truth, but if I were to lose you it would be all over with me. I
have not got the stoicism of Barbes and Mazzini. It is true they
are men, and they have no children. Besides, in my opinion it is
not in fight, not by civil war, that we shall win the cause of
humanity in France. We have got universal suffrage. The worse for
us if we do not know how to avail ourselves of it, for that alone
can lastingly emancipate us, and the only thing that would give us
the right to take up arms would be an attempt on their part to take
away our right to vote.
During the two years preceding the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851, life
at Nohant had resumed its wonted cheerfulness of aspect. Madame Sand was
used to surround herself with young people and artistic people; but now,
amid their light-heartedness, she had for a period to battle with an
extreme inward sadness, confirmed by the fresh evidence brought by these
years of the demoralization in all ranks of opinion. "Your head is not
very lucid when your heart is so deeply wounded," she had remarked
already, after the disasters of 1848, "and how can one help suffering
mortally from the spectacle of civil war and the slaughter among the
people?"
To that was now added a loss of faith in the virtues of her own party,
as well as of the masses. It is no wonder if she fell out of love for
awhile with the ideals of romance, with her own art of fiction, and the
types of heroism that were her favorite creations. But if the shadow of
a morbid pessimism crept over her mind, she could view it now as a
spiritual malady which she had yet the will and the strength to live
down; as years before she had surmounted a similar phase of feeling
induced by personal sorrow.
Already, in 1847, she had begun to write her _Memoirs_, and reverting to
them now, she found there work that suited her mood, as dealing with the
past, more agreeable to contemplate just then than the present or the
future.
However, in September, 1850, we find her writing to Mazzini,--after
dwelling on the present shortcomings of the people, and the mixture of
pity and indignation with which they inspired her: "I turn back to
fiction and produce, in art, popular types such as I see no longer; but
as they ought to be and might be." She alludes to a play on which she
was engaged, and continues: "The dramatic form, being new to me, has
revived me a little of late; it is the only kind of work into which I
have been able to throw myself for a year."
The events of December, 1851, surprised her during a brief visit to
Paris. Her hopes for her country had sunk so low, that she owns herself
at the moment not to have regarded the _coup d'etat_ as likely to prove
more disastrous to the cause of progress than any other of the violent
ends which threatened the existing political situation. She left the
capital in the midst of the cannonade, and with her family around her at
Nohant awaited the issue of the new dictatorship.
The wholesale arrests that followed immediately, and filled the country
with stupefaction, made havoc on all sides of her. Among the victims
were comrades of her childhood, numbers of her friends and acquaintance
and their relatives--as well in Berry as in the capital--many arrested
solely on suspicion of hostility to the President's views, yet none the
less exposed to chances of death, or captivity, or exile.
The crisis drove Madame Sand once more to quit the privacy of her
country life, but this time in the capacity of intercessor with the
conqueror for his victims. She came up to Paris, and on January 20,
1852, addressed a letter to the President, imploring his clemency for
the accused generally in an admirably eloquent appeal to his sentiments
as well of justice as of generosity. The plea she so forcibly urged,
that according to his own professions mere opinion was not to be
prosecuted as a crime, whereas the so-called "preventive measures" had
involved in one common ruin with his active opponents those who had been
mere passive spectators of late events, was, of course, unanswerable.
The future Emperor granted her two audiences within a week at the
Elysee, in answer to her request, and he succeeded on the first occasion
in convincing her that the acts of iniquity and intimidation perpetrated
as by his authority were as completely in defiance of his public
intentions as of his private principles. As a personal favor to herself,
he readily offered her the release of any of the political prisoners
that she choose to name, and promised that a general amnesty should
speedily follow. She left him, reassured to some extent as to the fate
in store for her country. The second interview she had solicited in
order to plead the cause of one of her personal friends, condemned to
transportation. The mission was a delicate one, for her client would
engage himself to nothing for the future, and Madame Sand, in
petitioning for his release, saw no better course open to her than as
expressed by herself, frankly to denounce him to the President as his
"incorrigible personal enemy." Upon this the President granted her the
prisoner's full pardon at once. Madame Sand was naturally touched by
this ready response of the generous impulse to which she had trusted. To
those who cast doubts on the sincerity of any good sentiment in such a
quarter, she very properly replied that it was not for her to be the
first to discredit the generosity she had so successfully appealed to.
But between her republican friends, loth to owe their deliverance to the
tender mercies of Louis Napoleon, and her own desire to save their lives
and liberties, and themselves and their families from ruin and despair,
she found her office of mediator a most unthankful one. She persisted
however in unwearying applications for justice and mercy, addressed both
to the dictator directly, and through his cousin, Prince Napoleon
(Jerome), between whom and herself there existed a cordial esteem. She
clung as long as she could to her belief in the public virtue of the
President, or Emperor as he already began to be called here and there.
But the promised clemency limited itself to a number of particular cases
for whom she had specially interceded.
The subsequent conditions of France precluded all free emission of
socialist or republican opinions, but Madame Sand desired nothing better
than to send in her political resignation; and it is impossible to share
the regret of some of her fellow-republicans at finding her again
devoting her best energies to her art of fiction, and in November, 1853,
writing to Mazzini such words of wisdom as these:--
You are surprised that I can work at literature. For my part, I
thank God that he has let me preserve this faculty; for an honest
and clear conscience like mine still finds, apart from all debate,
a work of moralization to pursue. What should I do if I relinquish
my task, humble though it be? Conspire? It is not my vocation; I
should make nothing of it. Pamphlets? I have neither the wit nor
the wormwood required for that. Theories? We have made too many,
and have fallen to disputing, which is the grave of all truth and
all strength. I am, and always have been, artist before everything
else. I know that mere politicians look on artists, with great
contempt, judging them by some of those mountebank-types which are
a disgrace to art. But you, my friend, you well know that a real
artist is as useful as the _priest_ and the _warrior_, and that
when he respects what is true and what is good, he is in the right
path where the divine blessing will attend him. Art belongs to all
countries and to all time, and its special good is to live on when
all else seems to be dying. That is why Providence delivers it from
passions too personal or too general, and has given to its
organization patience and persistence, an enduring sensibility, and
that contemplative sense upon which rests invincible faith.
Her novel, _Les Maitres Sonneurs_, the first-fruits of the year 1853, is
what most will consider a very good equivalent for party pamphlets and
political diatribes.
When composing _La Mare au Diable_, in 1846, Madame Sand looked forward
to writing a series of such peasant tales, to be collectively entitled
_Les Veillees du Chanvreur_, the hemp-beaters being, as will be
recollected, the Scheherazades of each village. Their number was never
to be thus augmented, but the idea is recalled by the chapter-headings
of _Les Maitres Sonneurs_, in which Etienne Despardieu, or Tiennet, the
rustic narrator, tells, in the successive _veillees_ of a month, the
romance of his youth. It is a work of a very different type to the rural
tales that had preceded it, and should be regarded apart from them. It
is longer, more complex in form and sentiment, more of an ideal
composition. _Les Maitres Sonneurs_, is a delightful pastoral, woodland
fantasy, standing by itself among romances much as stands a kindred work
of imagination, "As You Like It," among plays, yet thoroughly
characteristic of George Sand, the nature-lover, the seer into the
mysteries of human character, and the imaginative artist. The agreeable
preponderates in the story, but it has its tragic features and its
serious import. A picturesque and uncommon setting adds materially to
its charm. Every thread tells in this delicate piece of fancy-work, and
the weaver's art is indescribable. But one may note the ingenuity with
which four or five interesting yet perfectly natural types are brought
into a group and contrasted; improbable incidents so handled as not to
strike a discordant note, the characteristics of the past introduced
without ever losing hold of the links, the points of identity between
past and present. The scene is the hamlet of Nohant itself; the time is
a century ago, when the country, half covered with forest, was wilder,
the customs rougher, the local coloring stronger than even Madame Sand
in her childhood had known them. The personages belong to the rural
proprietor class. The leading characters are all somewhat out of the
common, but such exist in equal proportions in all classes of society,
and there is ample evidence besides George Sand's of notable examples
among the French peasantry. The plot and its interest lie in the
development of character and the fine tracing of the manner in which the
different characters are influenced by circumstances and by each other.
If the beauty of rustic maidens, and of rustic songs and dance-music, as
here described, seem to transcend probability, it must be remembered it
is a peasant who speaks of these wonders, and as wonders they might
appear to his limited experience. As a musical novel, it has the
ingenious distinction of being told from the point of view of the sturdy
and honest, but unartistic and non-musical Tiennet; a typical
Berrichon. Madame Sand was of opinion that during the long occupation of
Berry by the English the two races had blended extensively, and she
would thus account for some of the heavier, more inexpansive qualities
of our nation having become characteristic of this French province.
More than one English reader of _Les Maitres Sonneurs_ may have been
struck by the picture there presented of peasant-folk in a state of
peace and comfort, such as we do not suppose to have been common in
France before the Revolution. Madame Sand has elsewhere explained how,
as a fact, Nohant, and other estates in the region round about, had
enjoyed some immunity from the worst abuses of the _ancien regime_.
Several of these properties, as it happened, had fallen to women or
minors--widows, elderly maiden ladies, who, and their agents, spared the
holders and cultivators of the soil the exactions which, by right or by
might, its lords were used to levy. "So the peasants," she writes, "were
accustomed not to put themselves to any inconvenience; and when came the
Revolution they were already so well relieved virtually from feudal
bonds that they took revenge on nobody." A new _seigneur_ of Nohant,
coming to take possession, and thinking to levy his utmost dues, in
cash and in kind, found his rustic tenants turn a deaf ear to his
summons. Ere he could insist the storm burst, but it brought no
convulsion, and merely confirmed an independence already existing.
_Les Maitres Sonneurs_, whilst illustrating some of the most striking
merits of George Sand, is free from the defects often laid to her
charge; and although of all her pastorals it must suffer the most when
rendered in any language but the original, it is much to be regretted
that some good translation of this work should not put it within the
reach of all English readers.