GEORGE SAND
[Sidenote: George Sand--generalities about her.]
There is a Scotch proverb (not, I think, among those most generally
known), "Never tell your foe when your foot sleeps"; and some have held
that this applies specially to the revelation, by an author, of his own
weak points. I do not agree with them, having always had a fancy for
playing and seeing cards on table--except at cards themselves, where a
dummy seems to me only to spoil the game. Therefore I admit, in coming
to George Sand, that this famous novelist has not, _as_ a novelist, ever
been a favourite of mine--that I have generally experienced some, and
occasionally great, difficulty in reading her. Even the "purged
considerate mind" (without, I venture to hope, much dulling of the
literary palate) which I have brought to the last readings necessary for
this book, has but partially removed this difficulty. The causes of it,
and their soundness or unsoundness as reasons, must be postponed for a
little--till, as usual, sufficient survey and analysis of at least
specimens (for here as elsewhere the immense bulk of the total work
defies anything more than "sampling") have supplied due evidence. But it
may be said at once that no kind of prejudice or dislike, arising from
the pretty notorious history and character of Amantine (Amandine?
Armandine?) Lucile Aurore Dupin or Dudevant, commonly called George
Sand, has anything to do with my want of affection or admiration for her
work. I do not recommend her conduct in her earlier days for imitation,
and I am bound to say that I do not think it was ever excused by what
one may call real love. But she seems to have been an extremely good
fellow in her age, and not by any means a very bad fellow in her youth.
She was at one time pretty, or at least good-looking;[174] she was at
all times clever; and if she did not quite deserve that almost
superhuman eulogy awarded in the Devonshire epitaph to
Mary Sexton,
Who pleased many a man and never vexed one,[175]
she did fulfil the primal duty of her sex, and win its greatest triumph,
by complying with the first half of the line, while, if she failed as to
the second, it was perhaps not entirely her fault.[176] Finally,
Balzac's supposed picture of her as Camille in _Béatrix_ has the almost
unique peculiarity, among its author's sketches of women, of being
positively attractive--attractive, that is to say, not merely to the
critic as a powerful study and work of art; not perhaps at all to the
sentimentalist as a victim or an adorable piece of _candeur_; not to the
lover of physical beauty or passion, but to the reader--"sensible" in
the old sense as well as in the new--who feels that here is a woman he
should like to have known, even if he feels likewise that his
weather-eye would have had to be kept open during the knowledge.
[Sidenote: Phases of her work.]
It has been customary--and though these customary things are sometimes
delusive and too often mechanical, there is also occasionally, and, I
think, here, her work, something not negligible in them, if they be not
applied too rigidly--to divide George Sand's long period (nearly half a
century) of novel-production into four sub-periods, corresponding
roughly with the four whole decades of the thirties, forties, fifties,
and sixties.[177] The first, sometimes called, but, I think,
misleadingly, "Romantic," is the period of definite and mainly sexual
revolt, illustrated by such novels as _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lélia_,
and _Jacques_. The second is that of _illuminé_ mysticism and
semi-political theorising, to which _Spiridion_, _Consuelo_, _La
Comtesse de Rudolstadt_, and others belong. The third, one of a certain
_apaisement_, when the author had finally settled at her country-house
of Nohant in Berry, turns to studies of rural life: _La Petite Fadette_,
_François le Champi_, _La Mare au Diable_, etc. The last is represented
by novels of no one particular, or at least single, scope or bent, _Les
Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré_, _Le Marquis de Villemer_, _Mademoiselle
La Quintinie,_ etc., reaching to _Flamarande_ and its sequel shortly
before her death. The thing, as has been hinted already, is one of those
first rough sketches of the ground which, if not too closely adhered to,
are often useful. As a matter of fact, the divisions often--as one might
be sure they would--run cross. There is a lot of occult or semi-occult
stuff in _Lélia_, and the "period of appeasement" did not show much
reconciliation and forgiveness of injury in _Elle et Lui_, whether we
take this as by the injured or as by her who had done the wrong. But if
we take the two first novels briefly and _Lélia_ itself more fully for
Period I.; _Consuelo_ and its sequel (_Spiridion_ has been "done and
done thoroughly"[178] by Thackeray in the _Paris Sketch-book_) for II.;
the three above-mentioned _berquinades_ for the Third, with _Lucrezia
Floriani_ thrown between as an all-important outsider, and _Les Beaux
Messieurs de Bois-Doré_ for IV., giving each some detailed criticism,
with a few remarks on others, it ought to suffice as a fairly solid
groundwork for a general summing-up.
[Sidenote: _Indiana_.]
To understand the _furore_ with which _Indiana_ and _Valentine_ were
received, one must remember the time and the circumstance with even more
care than is usually desirable. They were--if not quite so well written
as they seemed even to Thackeray--written very well; they expressed the
full outburst of the French _Sturm und Drang_ movement; there was
nothing like them either in French or in any other literature, though
Bulwer was beginning similar things with us. Essentially, and when taken
_sub specie aeternitatis_, they are very nearly rubbish. The frail
(extremely frail) and gentle Indiana, with her terrible husband, whose
crimes against her and nature even reach the abominable pitch of
declaring himself ready to shoot expected poachers and possible
burglars; her creole maid and foster-sister "Noun," who disguises
herself in Indiana's garments and occupies her room, receives there a
lover who is afterwards her mistress's, but soon commits suicide; the
lover himself, a most appalling "tiger," as his own time would have
called him; and the enigmatic English cousin, indifferently designated
as "Sir Rodolphe Brown," "Sir Ralph," "Sir Brown," and "M. Brown," with
whom Indiana makes a third trial of hitherto "incomprised" and
unattained happiness--are all inhabitants of a sort of toy doll's-house
partaking of the lunatic-asylum. But the author's three prefaces,
written at intervals of exactly ten years, passably inconsistent in
detail, but all agreeing in contempt of critics and lofty anarchist
sentiment, are great fun, and are almost a reward for reading the book.
[Sidenote: _Valentine._]
_Valentine_ has more of the really admirable description of her beloved
Berry with which the author so often honeys her drugs; but the
novel-part of it is largely composed of the same sort of violent bosh
which almost monopolises _Indiana_. In fact, the peasant-_bourgeois_
hero Benedict, whom every woman loves; who is a conceited and
ill-mannered mixture of clown and prig; who is angry with his mistress
Valentine (Madame de Lansac) for "not knowing how to prefer him to her
honour," though one would have said she had given ample proofs of this
preference; and who finally appeases the reader by tumbling on the
points of a pitchfork placed in his way by an (as it happens) unduly
jealous husband, is a more offensive creature than any one in the
earlier book.[179] One is, on the other hand, a little sorry for
Valentine, while one is sorry for nobody in _Indiana_ except perhaps for
the husband, who has the sense to die early.
[Sidenote: _Lélia._]
_Lélia_, some years younger than these and later than the Musset
tragedy, is a good deal better, or at least less childish. It is beyond
all question an extraordinary book, though it may be well to keep the
hyphen in the adjective to prevent confusion of sense. It opens, and to
a large extent continues, with a twist of the old epistolary style
which, if nothing else, is ingeniously novel. George Sand was in truth a
"well of ingenuity" as D'Artagnan was a _puits de sagesse_, and this
accounts, to some extent, for her popularity. You have not only no dates
and no places, but no indication who writes the letters or to whom they
are written, though, unless you are very stupid, you soon find out. The
_personae_ are Lélia--a _femme incomprise_, if not incomprehensible;
Sténio, a young poet, who is, in the profoundest and saddest sense of
the adverb, hopelessly in love with her; and a mysterious personage--a
sort of Solomon-Socrates-Senancour--who bears the Ossianesque name of
Trenmor, with a later and less provincially poetical _alias_ of
"Valmarina."[180] The history of the _preuves_ of Trenmor's
novel-nobility are soon laid before the reader. They are not, in their
earlier stages, engaging to the old-fashioned believer in "good form."
Trenmor is the sort of exaggeration of Childe Harold which a lively but
rather vulgar mind might conceive. "He was born great; but they
developed the animal in him." The greatness postponed its appearance,
but the animality did credit to the development. "He used to love to
beat his dogs; before long he beat his prostitutes." This harmless
diversion accentuated itself in details, for which, till the acme, the
reader must be referred to the original. The climacteric moment came. He
had a mistress called "La Mantovana," whom he rather preferred to the
others, because she was beautiful and impudent. "In a night of noise and
wine" he struck her, and she drew a dagger. This made him love her for a
moment; but unfortunately she made an improper observation; thereupon he
tore off her pearl necklace and trod it under his feet. She wept. This
annoyed Trenmor very much. "She had wished revenge for a personal
insult, and she cried for a toy!" Accordingly he had a "crispation of
nerves," which obliged him to take a large cut-glass decanter and hit
her on the head with it. According to the natural perversity on such
occasions of such persons, she died. The brutal justice of mankind--so
hateful to Godwin and George Sand and Victor Hugo--sent Trenmor, not,
indeed, to the gallows, as it should have done, but to the galleys. Yet
the incident made Lélia, who (she must have had a sweet set of friends)
somehow knew him, very fond of Trenmor, though she certainly told him
that he might as well repent of what he had done, which seems
inconsistent.
They let him out after five years (why, Heaven or the other
place knows!) and he became a reformed character--the
Solomon-Socrates-Senancour above mentioned _plus_ a sort of lay
"director" to Lélia, with a carbonaro attitude of political
revolutionary and free-thinking _illuminé_. Now _corruptio pessimi_ is
seldom _optima_.
The main interest, however, shifts (with apparitions of
Trenmor-Valmarina) to the loves (if they may be called so) of the
pitiable Sténio and the intolerable heroine. She is unable to love
anybody, and knows it; she can talk--ye Demons, how she can talk!--but
she can never behave like a woman of this world. She alternately hugs
Sténio, so that she nearly squeezes his breath out, and, when he draws
natural conclusions from this process, pushes him away. But worse and
more preposterous things happen. Lélia has a sister, Pulchérie, who is
very like her (they are of course both impossibly beautiful) in body,
and so far resembles her in mind and soul as to be unable to behave
decently or sensibly. But her want of decency and sense takes the more
commonplace line of becoming an actual courtesan of the "Imperia" kind
in Italy. By a series of muddles for which Lélia is--as her plain-spoken
sister points out after the catastrophe--herself really responsible,
Sténio is induced, during the excitement of an _al fresco_ fête at night
in the grounds of a sort of fairy palace, to take the "coming" sister
for the recalcitrant one, and avail himself of her complaisance, _usque
ad finem_. Lélia reproaches him (which she has not the least right to
do), and he devotes himself entirely to Pulchérie (La Zinzolina is her
professional name) and her group of noble paramours. He gets, however,
generally drunk and behaves with a brutal rudeness, which would, in the
Italy of tradition, have finished things up very soon by a stiletto
thrust, and in honest England by a kicking into the street. There are
mysterious plots, cardinals, and anything else you like or don't like.
Lélia becomes an abbess, Sténio a suicide, the above-mentioned priest,
Magnus, being much concerned in this. She admits her unfortunate lover
to burial, and is degraded and imprisoned for it--or for having saved
Trenmor-Valmarina from the law. Everybody else now dies, and the
nightmare comes to an end.
[Sidenote: The moral of the group and its tragi-comedy.]
The beauties of style which softened the savage breast of Thackeray
himself in the notice above mentioned, and which, such as they are,
appear even in George Sand's earliest work, will receive attention when
that work comes to be discussed as a whole. Meanwhile, at the risk of
any charge of Philistinism, I confess that this part of it seems to me,
after fifty years and more of "corrected impression," almost worthless
_au fond_. It is, being in prose, and therefore destitute of the
easements or at least masquerades which poetry provides for nonsense,
the most conspicuous and considerable example--despite the undoubted
talent of the writer--of the mischief which Byronism did on the
Continent. With us, though it made a great stir, it really did little
harm except to some "silly women" (as the apostle, in unkindly and
uncourtly, but truly apostolic fashion, had called similar persons of
the angelic sex ages before). Counter-jumpers like Thackeray's own
Pogson worshipped "the noble poet"; boys of nobler stamp like Tennyson
_thought_ they worshipped him, but if they were going to become men of
affairs forgot all about him; if they were to be poets took to Keats and
Shelley as models, not to him. Critics hardly took him seriously, except
for non-literary reasons. There was, as I think somebody (perhaps
Thackeray himself) says upon something, "too much roast beef about" for
us to fill our bellies with this worse than east wind of Sensibility
gone rotten. But abroad, for reasons which would be easy but irrelevant
to dwell upon, Byron hit the many-winged bird of popular favour on
nearly all its pinions. He ran strikingly and delightfully contrary to
the accepted _Anglais_, whether of the philosophical or the caricature
type; he was noble, but revolutionary; he looked (he never was, except
in non-essentials) Romantic; he was new, naughty, nice, all at once. And
they went mad over him, and to a large extent and for a long time
remained so; indeed, Continental criticism, whether Latin, Teutonic,
Scandinavian, or Slav, has never reached "the centre" about Byron. Now
George Sand was at no time exactly a silly woman, but she was for a long
time a woman off her balance. Byronism was exactly the -ism with which
she could execute the wildest feats of half-voluntary and
half-involuntary acrobatics, saltimbanquery, and chucking of her bonnet
over all conceivable and inconceivable mills. Childe Harold, Manfred,
Conrad, Lara, Don Juan, Sardanapalus--the shades of these caught her
and waltzed with her and reversed and figured and gesticulated,
With their Sentimentalibus lacrimae rorum, and pathos and
bathos delightful to see,
--or perhaps _not_ so very delightful?
But let us pass to the next stage.
[Sidenote: _Consuelo._]
Those persons (I think, without tempting Nemesis too much, I might say
those fortunate persons) to whom the world of books is almost as real as
the other two worlds of life and of dream, may or must have observed
that the conditions and sensations of the individual in all three are
very much the same. In particular, the change from a state of discomfort
to one of comfort--or _vice versa_ unluckily, but with that we have
nothing immediately to do--applies to all. In actual life you are hot,
tired, bored, headachy, "spited with fools," what not. A change of
atmosphere, a bath, a draught of some not unfermented liquor, the sight
of a face, what not again, nay, sometimes a mere shift of clothing, will
make you cool, satisfied, at peace. In dreams you have generally to
wake, to shake off the "fierce vexation," and to realise that it _is_ a
dream; but the relief comes sooner or later. If anybody wants to
experience this change from discomfort to comfort in the book-world of a
single author, I cannot commend anything better than the perusal, with a
short interval--but there should be some--of _Consuelo_ after _Lélia_.
We may have some things to say against the later novel; but that does
not matter.
[Sidenote: Much better in parts.]
It opens with no tricks or _tours de force_; in no atmosphere of
darkened footlights and smell of sawdust; but in frank and free
novel-fashion, with a Venetian church, a famous maestro (Porpora), a
choir of mostly Italian girls, and the little Spanish gipsy Consuelo,
the poorest, humblest, plainest (as most people think) of all the bevy,
but the possessor of the rarest vocal faculties and the most
happiness-producing-and-diffusing temper. There is nothing in the least
milk-soppy or prudish about Consuelo, though she is perfectly "pure";
nor is there anything tractified about her, though she is pious and
generous. The contrast between her and her betrothed, the handsome but
worthless Anzoleto, also a singer, is, at first, not overworked; and one
scene--that in which, when Consuelo has got over the "scraggy" age and
is developing actual beauty, she and Anzoleto debate, in the most
natural manner, whether she _is_ pretty or not--is quite capital, one of
the things that stick in one's memory and stamp the writer's genius, or,
at any rate, consummate talent.
[Sidenote: The degeneration.]
This happy state of affairs continues without much deterioration, though
perhaps with some warnings to the experienced, for some two hundred
pages. The situations and the other characters--the Professor Porpora
himself; Count Zustiniani, _dilettante_, _impresario_ and of course
gallant; his _prima donna_ and (in the story at least) first mistress,
La Corilla; her extravagances and seduction of the handsome Anzoleto;
his irresolution between his still existing affection for Consuelo, who
passes through all these things (and Zustiniani's siege of her) "in
maiden meditation, fancy-free"--all discharge themselves or play their
parts quite as they ought to do. But this comparatively quiet, though by
no means emotionless or unincidented, part of the story "ends in a
blow-up," or rather in a sink-down, for Anzoleto, on a stolen gondola
trip with Clorinda, third cantatrice and interim mistress of Zustiniani
(beautiful, but stupid, and a bad singer), meets the Count in another
gondola with Corilla herself, and in his fury rams his rival and the
perfidious one. Consuelo, who has at last had her eyes opened, quits
Venice and flees, with a testimonial from Porpora, to Germany. Even then
one hopes for the best, and acknowledges that at any rate something not
far from the best, something really good, has been given one for two
hundred well-filled pages--more than the equivalent of the first deck of
one of our old average "three-deckers."
But in the mind of experience such hopes are always accompanied by
fears, and alas! in this instance "the fears have it." There is on the
border of Bohemia a "Castle of the Giants"; and oh! how one wishes that
my Uncle Toby had allowed the sea to execute the ravages he deprecated
and sweep that castle into nothingness! When we get there Byronism is
back--nay, its papa and mamma, Lewisism and Radcliffism, are back
also--with their cardboard turrets and precipices and grottos; their
pine-woods reminding one of the little bristly green things, on round
cinnamon-coloured bases, of one's youth; their floods and falls so
obviously supplied at so much a thousand gallons by the nearest water
company, and their mystery-men and dwarfs and catalepsies and all the
rest of the weary old "tremblement." Count Christian of Rudolstadt is
indeed a gentleman and an almost too affectionate father; his brother,
Baron Frederick, a not disagreeable sportsman and _bon vivant_; their
sister, the Canoness, a not too theatrical old maid; and Frederick's
daughter, Amélie, though pert and not too good-natured, the most human
creature of them all, albeit with the humanities of a soubrette rather
than of a great lady. But what shall one say of Albert of Rudolstadt,
the heir, the betrothed of Amélie (this fact excusing much in her), and,
when Consuelo has joined the circle at Porpora's recommendation as
music-mistress and companion in the higher kind to Amélie--_her_ slave,
conqueror, tormentor, and in the long-run husband? He is perhaps the
most intolerable hero[181] ever designed as a gentleman by a novelist
who has been classed as great, and who certainly has some qualities
necessary to greatness. In reading about him vague compunctions even
come over the mind at having spoken harshly of Sténio and Trenmor.
Sténio was always a fool and latterly a cad; Trenmor first a brute and
then a bore. Albert is none of these (except perhaps the last), but he
is madder than the Mad Hatter and the March Hare put together, and as
depressing as they are delightful. He has hallucinations which
obliterate the sense of time in him; he thinks himself one of his
ancestors of the days of Ziska; he has second sight; he speaks Spanish
to Consuelo and calls her by her name when he first sees her, though he
has not the faintest _sane_ idea who she is or whence she comes; and he
reduces his family to abject misery by ensconcing himself for days in a
grotto which can be isolated by means of a torrent turned on and off at
pleasure by a dwarf gipsy called Zdenko, who is almost a greater
nuisance than Albert himself. Consuelo discovers his retreat at the risk
of being drowned; and various nightmarish scenes occur, resulting in the
slight return to sanity on Albert's part involved in falling in love
with her, and a very considerable advance towards _in_sanity on hers by
falling in love with him. But perhaps this give-and-take of lovers may
seem attractive to some. And when after a time we get into mere
hocus-pocus, and it seems to Consuelo that Albert's violin "speaks and
utters words as through the mouth of Satan," the same persons may think
it fine. For myself, I believe that without fatuity I may claim to be,
if not a _visionnaire_ (perhaps that also), at least a lover of visions,
and of Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Revelation. Dante, Blake, Shelley, the
best of Lamennais and the best of Hugo excite in me nothing but a
passionate reverence. I can walk day-long and night-long by Ulai and
Chebar and Lethe-Eunoe and have no thought of sneer or slumber, shrug or
satiety. But when you ask me to be agitated at Count Albert of
Rudolstadt's violin ventriloquising Satan I really must decline. I do
even remember the poor creature Paul de Kock, and would fain turn to one
of the things he was writing at this very time.
[Sidenote: Recovery; but not maintained quite to the end.]
_Consuelo_ is a very long book--it fills three of the tightly printed
volumes of the old Michel-Calmann-Lévy collection, with some three or
four hundred pages in each; and we have not got, in the above survey, to
more than the middle of the second. But in its afternoon and evening
there is some light. The creature Anzoleto recurs; but his immediate
effect is good,[182] for it starts the heroine on a fresh elopement of
an innocent kind, and we get back to reality. The better side of George
Sand's Bohemianism revives in Bohemia itself; and she takes Consuelo to
the road, where she adopts male dress (a fancy with her creatress
likewise), and falls in with no less a person than the composer Haydn in
his youth. They meet some Prussian crimps, and escape them by help of a
coxcombical but not wholly objectionable Austrian Count Hoditz and the
better (Prussian) Trenck. They get to Vienna (meeting La Corilla in an
odd but not badly managed maternity-scene half-way) and rejoin old
Porpora there. There are interviews with Kaunitz and Maria Theresa:[183]
and a recrudescence of the Venetian musical jealousies. Consuelo
endeavours to reopen communications with the Rudolstadts, but
Porpora--chiefly out of his desire to retain her on the stage, but
partly also from an honest and not wholly unsound belief that a union
between a gipsy girl and a German noble would itself be madness--plays
false with the letters. She accepts a professional invitation from
Hoditz to his castle in Moravia, meets there no less a person than
Frederic the Second _incognito_, and by his order (after she has saved
his life from the vengeance of the re-crimped deserter rescued with her
by Hoditz and Trenck) is invited to sing at Berlin. The carrying out of
the invitation, which has its Fredericianities[184] (as one may perhaps
be allowed to call them), is, however, interrupted. The mysterious
Albert, who has mysteriously turned up in time to prevent an attempt of
the other and worse (Austrian) Trenck on Consuelo, is taken with an
apparently mortal illness at home, and Consuelo is implored to return
there. She does so, and a marriage _in articulo mortis_ follows, the
supposed dead Zdenko (whom we did not at all want) turning up alive
after his master's death. Consuelo, fully if not cheerfully adopted by
the family, is offered all the heirloom jewels and promised succession
to the estates. She refuses, and the book ends--with fair warning that
it is no ending.
[Sidenote: _La Comtesse de Rudolstadt._]
When her history begins again under the title she has "reneged," the
reader may for no short time think that the curse of the sequel--a curse
only too common, but not universal--is going to be averted. She is in
Berlin alone (see note above); is successful, but not at all
happy--perhaps least of all happy because the king, partly out of
gratitude for his safety, partly out of something like a more natural
kind of affection than most authors have credited him with, pays her
marked attentions. For a time things are not unlively; and even the very
dangerous experiment of a supper--one of those at which Frederic's
guests were supposed to have perfectly "free elbows" and availed
themselves of the supposition at their peril--a supper with Voltaire, La
Mettrie, Algarotti, D'Argens, Pöllnitz, and "Quintus Icilius"
present--comes off not so badly. One of the reasons of this is that
George Sand has the sense to make Voltaire ill and silent, and puts the
bulk of the "business" on La Mettrie--a person much cleverer than most
people who have only read book-notices of him may think, but not
dangerously brilliant. Then Consuelo, or "La Porporina," as her stage
name is, gets mixed up--owing to no fault of her own in the first place
at any rate--with the intrigues of the Princess Amélie of Prussia and
her lover, the less bad Trenck. This has two awkward results--for
herself an imprisonment at Spandau, into which she is cast by Frederic's
half jealous, half purely tyrannical wrath, and for us a revival of all
the _massacrant_ illuminism in which the Princess herself is dabbling.
So we have on the scene not only (as the reader sees at once, though
some rather clumsy efforts are made to hide it) the resuscitated Albert,
who passes as a certain Trismegistus, not only the historical charlatan
Saint-Germain, but another charlatan at this time not at all historical
(seeing that the whole story ends in 1760, and he never left Palermo
till nine years later), Cagliostro. Even at Spandau Consuelo herself is
not quite uninteresting; but the Illuminati determine to rescue her, and
for the latter part of the first volume and the whole of the second the
entire thing is, once more, Bosh. The most absurd "double-gangings" take
place between an _inconnu_ named Liverani, whom Consuelo cannot help
loving, and Albert himself, who _is_ Liverani, as everybody but herself
sees at once, interspersed between endless tracts of the usual rubbish
about underground tribunals, and judges in red cloaks, and skeletons,
and museums of torture-implements, and all the Weishauptian trumpery of
mixed occultism and revolutionary sentiment. The author has even the
insufferable audacity to fling at us _another_ resuscitation--that of
the Countess Wanda, Albert's mother, who appears to have transmitted to
him her abominable habit of catalepsy. So ends, unsatisfactorily
enough--unless anybody is satisfied by the fact that two solid children
result from the still mystifying married life of the pair--the story
which had begun so well in the first volume of _Consuelo_, and which in
the major part of _Consuelo_ itself, though not throughout, maintains
the satisfaction fairly.
[Sidenote: The "making good" of _Lucrezia Floriani_.]
If any reader, in two ways gentle, has been good enough to take some
interest in the analysis of these books, but is also so soft-hearted as
to feel slightly _froissé_ by it, as showing a disqualifying inability
to sympathise with the author, I hope I may put myself right by what I
am going to say of another. _Lucrezia Floriani_ is to me the most
remarkable book that George Sand ever wrote; and the nearest to a great
one, if it be not actually that. I have read it, with no diminution of
interest and no abatement of esteem, at very different times of my life,
and I think that it is on the whole not only the most perfect revelation
of what at any rate the author would have liked to be her own
temperament, but--a much greater thing--a presentment in possible and
human form of a real temperament, and almost of a real character.
Further, it is much the most achieved example of that peculiar style of
which more will be said in a general way presently, and it contains
comparatively few blots. One always smiles, of course, at the picture of
Lucrezia swinging in a hammock in the centre of a large room, the four
corners of which are occupied by four bedsteads containing four
children, in the production of whom not exactly _four_ fathers, as they
ought for perfect symmetry, but as a compromise _three_, have assisted.
One always shudders at her notion of restoring a patient, suffering
under a nervous ailment, by surrounding his couch with the cherubic
countenances and the balmy breaths of these infants.[185] Prince Karol,
the hero (such as there is), is a poor creature, though not such a cad
as Sténio; but then, according to Madame Dudevant, men as a rule _were_
poor creatures, unless they were convicts or conjurors, so the
presentation is _ex hypothesi_ or _secundum hypothesin_ correct. And the
whole is firmly drawn and well, but neither gaudily nor pitchily,
coloured. It ought to be remembered that, with the possible exception of
Jane Austen, who has no peer or second among lady novelists, these
either confine themselves to representation of manners, external
character, _ton_, as was said of Fanny Burney, or else, like the other
"George" and Charlotte Brontë, endeavour to represent themselves as they
are or as they would like to be on the canvas. They never create; if
they "imitate" not in the degraded modern but the original classical
sense, and do it well, _punctum ferunt_--_suum_ if not _omne_.
[Sidenote: The story.]
_Lucrezia Floriani_ does this higher imitation well--almost, if not
quite, greatly. Had George Sand been more of a blue-stocking and of an
affected creature than she was, she might have called the book
_Anteros-Nemesis_. The heroine, by her real name Antonietta Menapace, is
the daughter of a fisherman on the Lago d'Iseo, and in her earliest
girlhood the servant-maid of a rich neighbour's wife. As her father, a
close-fisted peasant, wants her to marry a well-to-do churl of her own
rank, she elopes with her employer's son and has two children by him;
but develops a magnificent voice, with no small acting and managing
capacity. So she makes a fortune by the time she is thirty, acquiring
the two other children by two other lovers, and having so many more who
do not leave permanent memorials of their love and necessitate polygonal
rooms, that, as she observes, "she cannot count them."[186] At the
above-mentioned age, however, she becomes weary of this sort of life,
retires to her native district, buys the very house in which she had
been a servant, and with the heir of which (now dead) she had eloped,
and settles down to be a model mother, a Lady Bountiful, and a sort of
recluse. No more "love" for her. In fact, in one of the most remarkable
passages of the book she gives a story of her chief attachments, showing
that, with brief accesses of physical excitement, it has always been
_amour de tête_ and never _amour de coeur_.
Things being so, there arrive one evening, at the only inn on the lake,
a young German Prince, Karol von Roswald, and his friend the Italian
Count Salvator Albani. They are travelling for the Prince's health, he
being a sort of spoilt child, pitiably nervous, imperfectly educated,
and half paralysed by the recent death of his mother and the earlier one
of a _fiancée_. The inn is good to eat in (or rather out of), but for
nothing else; and Salvator, hearing of Lucrezia, whose friend, though
not her lover, he has formerly been, determines to ask a hospitality
which she very cheerfully gives them. _Cetera quis nescit_, as George
Sand herself in other but often-repeated words admits.[187] Karol falls
in love at first sight, though he is horrified at his hostess's past. He
also falls ill, and she nurses him. Salvator leaves them for a time,
and though Lucrezia plays quite the reverse of the part of temptress,
the inevitable does not fail to happen.
That they were _not_ married and that they did _not_ live happy ever
after, everybody will of course be certain, though it is not Karol's
fault that actual marriage does not take place. There is, however, an
almost literal, if unsanctified and irregular honeymoon; but long before
Salvator's[188] return, it has "reddened" more than ominously. Karol is
insanely jealous, and it may be admitted that a more manly and less
childishly selfish creature might be somewhat upset by the arrival of
Lucrezia's last lover, the father of her youngest child, though it is
quite evident that she has not a spark of love for this one left. But he
is also jealous of Salvator; of an old artist named Beccaferri whom she
assists; of a bagman who calls to sell to her eldest boy a gun; of the
aged peasant whom she had refused to marry, but whose death-bed she
visits; of the _curé_; of everybody. And his jealousy takes the form not
merely of rage, which is bad enough for Lucrezia's desire of peace, but
of cold insult, which revolts her never extinguished independence and
pride. He has, as noted, begged her to marry him in the time of
intoxication, but she has refused, and persists in the refusal. After
one or two "scenes" she rows herself over to an olive wood on the other
side of the lake, and makes it a kind of "place of sacrifice"--of the
sacrifice, that is to say, of all hopes of happiness with him or any one
thenceforward. But she neither dismisses nor leaves him; on the
contrary, they live together, unmarried, but with no public scandal, for
ten years, his own passion for her in its peculiar kind never ceasing,
while hers gradually dies under the stress of the various torments he
inflicts, unintentionally if not quite unconsciously, upon her. At last
it is too much, and she dies of heart-failure at forty years of age.
[Sidenote: Its balance of power.]
One might make a few cavils at this. The exact reason of what has been
called the "sacrifice" is not made clear, despite Lucrezia's soliloquy
in the olive wood. If it were meant as an atonement for her ill-spent
youth it would be intelligible. But there is no sign of this, and it
would not be in George Sand's way. Lucrezia merely resolves that she
will try to make everybody happy without trying or expecting to be happy
herself. But she must know more and more that she is _not_ making Karol
happy, and that the cohabitation cannot, even in Italy, but be
prejudicial to her children; though, to do him the very scanty justice
he deserves, he does not behave ill to them, little as he likes them.
Again, this long self-martyrdom would need no explanation if she
continued to love Karol. But it is very doubtful whether she had not
ceased to do so (she was admittedly good at "ceasing to love") when she
left the Wood of Olives, and the cessation admittedly took place long
before the ten years' torture came to an end. One is therefore,
from more than one point of view, left with a sort of Fakir
self-mortification, undertaken and "dreed" neither to atone for
anything, nor to propitiate any Power, nor really to benefit any man.
After all, however, such a thing is quite humanly possible. And these
_aporiae_ hardly touch knots--only very small spots--in a reed of
admirable strength and beauty. We know that George Sand did _not_
sacrifice herself for her lovers--very much the reverse. But we know
also that in her youth and early middle age she was very much of a
Lucrezia Floriani, something of a genius, if not so great a one as she
made her creature, something of a beauty, entirely negligent of ordinary
sexual morality, but thoroughly, if somewhat heartlessly, good-natured,
and (not merely at the times mentioned, but to the end of her life) an
affectionate mother, a delightful hostess, and a very satisfactory
friend. No imaginary Sténio or Karol, no actual Sandeau or Musset or
Chopin could have caused her at any time of her life the misery which
the Prince caused Lucrezia, because she would simply have "sent him
walking," as the vigorous French idiom has it. But it pleased her to
graft upon her actual nature something else that it lacked, and a
life-like and tragical story resulted.
It is not a bad "turn over of the leaf" from this, the strongest, and in
the best sense most faultless, of George Sand's novels of analysis, to
the "idyllic" group of her later middle and later period--the
"prettiest" division, and in another grade of faultlessness the most
free from faults, in ordinary estimation, of her entire production.
[Sidenote: The "Idylls"--_La Petite Fadette_.]
The most popular of these, the prettiest again, the most of a
_bergerie-berquinade-conte-de-fées_, is no doubt _La Petite Fadette_,
the history of two twin-boys and a little girl--this last, of course,
the heroine. The boys are devoted to each other and as like as two peas
in person, but very different in character, one being manly, and the
other, if not exactly effeminate, something like it. As for Fadette,
she, though never exactly like the other girl of the saying "horrid,"
but only (and with very considerable excuses) naughty and untidy and
rude, becomes "so very, very good when she is good" as to awake slight
recalcitrances in those who have acquired the questionable knowledge of
good and evil in actual life. But one does not want to cavil. It _is_ a
pretty book, and when the not exactly wicked but somewhat ill-famed
grandmother's stocking yields several thousand francs and facilitates
the marriage of Landry, the manly brother, and Fadette, one can be very
cheerfully cheerful, and anticipate a real ever-after happiness for
both. No doubt, too, the army did knock the girlishness out of the other
brother, Sylvinet, and we hope that one of the village gossips was wrong
when she said that he would never love any girl but one. For it is
hardly necessary to say that his agreement with his twin extends to love
for Fadette--love which is quite honourable, and quite kindly
extinguished by that agreeable materialisation of one of Titania's
lower-class maids-of-honour.
Only one slight piece of _malice_ (in the mitigated French sense) may be
permitted. We are told that Sylvinet, after the marriage, served for ten
years "in the Emperor Napoleon's glorious campaigns." This will hardly
admit of a later date for that marriage itself than the breach of the
Peace of Amiens. And this, even if Landry was no more than eighteen or
nineteen at that time (he could hardly be less), will throw the date of
his and his brother's birth well before the Revolution. Now, to insist
on chronological exactitude and draw inferences from its absence is--one
admits most cheerfully, and more than admits--a mere curmudgeonly
pedantry in most cases of great or good fiction, prose or verse. One
knows what to think of people who make crimes of these things in
Shakespeare or Scott, in Dumas or Thackeray. But when a writer makes a
great point of Purpose and sets a high value on Questions, it is not
unfair to expect him or her to mind their P's and Q's in other matters.
George Sand is never tired, in other books, of insisting on the
blessedness of the Revolution itself, on the immense and glorious
emancipation from feudal tyranny, etc. But how does it come about that
there is not the very slightest sign of that tyranny in the earlier part
of the story, or of any general disturbance in the middle and later
part? _Glissons; n'appuyons pas_ on this point, but it may be permitted
to put it.
[Sidenote: _La Mare au Diable._]
In another book of this group--I think chronologically the earliest,
also very popular, and quite "on the side of the angels"--the heroine,
another divine little peasant-girl--who, if George Sand had been fond of
series-titles, might have caused the book to be named _La Petite
Marie_--omits any, however slightly, "horrid" stage altogether. She is,
if not "the whole" good--which, as Empedocles said long ago, few can
boast to find,--good, and nothing but good, except pretty, and other
things which are parts or forms of goodness. The piece really is, in the
proper sense which so few people know, or at least use, an idyll, a
little picture of Arcadian life. Speaking precisely--that is to say in
_précis_--it is nothing but the story of a journey in which the
travellers get benighted, and which ends in a marriage. Speaking
analytically, it consists of a prologue--one of the best examples of
George Sand's style and of her power of description, dealing with the
ploughlands of Berry and the ways of their population; of the
proposition to a young widower that he shall undertake re-marriage with
a young widow, well-to-do, of another parish; of his going a-wooing with
the rather incongruous adjuncts of a pretty young servant girl, who is
going to a "place," and his own truant elder sonlet; of the benighting
of them as above by the side of a mere or marsh of evil repute; of the
insult offered to Marie on the arrival at her new place; of the
discomfiture of Germain, the hero, at finding that the young widow keeps
a sort of court of pretenders dangling about her; of his retirement and
vengeance on Marie's insulter; and of the proper marriage-bells. There
is also a rather unnecessary appendix, doubtless dear to the folklorist,
of Berrichon wedding customs.
Once more, to cavil at this would be contemptibly easy. To quote _La
Terre_ against it would be uncritical, for, as may be seen later,
whatever M. Zola's books are, they are not evidence that can negative
anything. It would be as sensible to set against the night scene in the
wood by the Devil's Pool the history of the amiable Dumollard, who, as
far as fifty years' memory serves me, used, some years before George
Sand's death, sometimes to escort and sometimes to lie in wait for
servant-girls on the way to or from places, violate, murder, and rob
them, in another country district of France. Nor would it be quite
critical, though a little more so, to compare George Sand's own friend,
contemporary, and in some sort counterpart, Balzac's peasant scenes
against her. If, at this time, she viewed all such things _en rose_,
Balzac viewed them, at this and almost all times, _en noir_. Perhaps
everybody (except the wicked farmer, who insults Marie) is a little too
good, and it seems rather surprising that somebody did not say something
about Germain and Marie arriving next morning instead of overnight. But
never mind this. The scenery and the writing of the book have real
charm. The long conversation by the watch-fire in the wood, where
Germain tries to break off his suit to the widow already and transfer
himself to Marie, with Marie's cool and (for she has loved him already)
self-denying refusal on the most atrociously rational and business-like
principles, is first-rate. It may rank, with the above-mentioned
discussion about Consuelo's beauty between herself and her lover, as one
of the best examples of George Sand's gift for the novel.
[Sidenote: _François le Champi._]
The third in the order of mention of what is usually considered her
trilogy of idylls, _François le Champi_, if not the prettiest, is the
strongest, and the most varied in interest, of the three. The shadier
side of human character lifts itself and says, _Et in Arcadia ego_,[189]
much more decidedly than in the childish petulances of _La Petite
Fadette_ and the merely "Third Murderer" appearance of the unprincipled
farmer in _La Mare au Diable_. Even the mostly blameless hero is
allowed, towards the close, to exhibit the well-known _rusé_ or _madré_
characteristics of the French peasant to the extent of more than one not
quite white lie; the husband of the heroine is unfaithful, tyrannical as
far as he dare be, and a waster of his family's goods before his
fortunately rather early death; his pretty young sister, Mariette, is a
selfish and spiteful minx; and his paramour (sarcastically named "La
Sevère") is unchaste, malignant, and dishonest all at once--a
combination which may be said to exclude any possible goodness in woman.
The only thoroughly white sheep--though the "Champi" or foundling (his
cradle being the genial fields and not the steps of stone) has but the
grey patches noticed above, and those acquired with the best
intentions--is Madeleine Blanchet, his protectress for many years, and
finally, after difficulties and her widowhood, his wife. That she is
some twelve years older than he is is a detail which need not in itself
be of much importance. It lends itself to that combination of maternal
and sexual affection of which George Sand is so fond, and of which we
may have to speak some harsh words elsewhere. But here it matters
little. Arcady is a kind of Saturnian realm, and "mixtures" elsewhere
"held a stain" may pass there.
[Sidenote: Others--_Mauprat_.]
We may make a further _glissade_ (to return to some remarks made above),
though of a different kind, over a few of the very large number of
novels that we cannot discuss in detail. But _Mauprat_ adds just a
little support to the remarks there made. For this (which is a sort of
crime-and-detection novel, and therefore appeals to some readers more
than to the present historian) turns wholly on the atrocious deeds of a
seignorial family of the most melodramatic kind. Yet it is questionable
whether the wickedest of them ever did anything worse than the action of
their last and renegade member, who actually, when he comes into the
property, ruins his ancestral castle because naughty things have been
done there. Now, when Milton said, "As well kill a man as kill a good
book," though it was no doubt an intentional hyperbole, there was much
sound sense in what he said. Still, except in the case of such a book as
has been produced only a few times in the world's history, it may be
urged that probably something as good might be written by somebody else
among the numerous men that were not killed. But, on the same principle,
one would be justified in saying, "Better kill a hundred men than ruin a
castle with hundreds of years of memories, bad or good." You can never
replace _it_, while the hundred men will, at the very moment they are
killed, be replaced, just as good on the average, by the ordinary
operations of nature. Besides, by partially ruining the castle, you give
an opening to the sin of the restorer, for which there is, we know, _no_
pardon, here or hereafter.[190]
[Sidenote: _La Daniella._]
_La Daniella_ is a rather long book and a rather dull one. There is a
good deal of talkee-talkee of the _Corinne_ kind in it: the heroine is
an angelic Italian soubrette; the hero is one of the coxcombish heroes
of French novels, who seem to have set themselves to confirm the most
unjust ideas of their nation entertained in foreign climes; there is a
"Miss Medora," who, as the hero informs us, "plays the coquette
clumsily, as English girls generally do," etc. _Passons outre_, without
inquiring how much George Sand knew about English girls.
[Sidenote: _Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré._]
One of the best of her books to read, though it has neither the human
interest of _Lucrezia Floriani_, nor the prettiness of the Idylls, nor
the style-colour of some other books, is _Les Beaux Messieurs de
Bois-Doré_. It is all the more agreeable that we may even "begin with a
little aversion." It suggests itself as a sort of interloper in the
great business of Dumas and Co.: it opens, indeed, only a few years
before D'Artagnan rode up to the inn on the buttercup-coloured pony.
And, in manner, it may look at first as if the writer were following
another but much inferior example--our own G. P. R. James; for there are
"two cavaliers," and one tells the other a tale fit to make him fall
asleep and off his saddle. But it improves remarkably, and before you
have read a hundred pages you are very fairly "enfisted." The figure of
the old Marquis de Bois-Doré--an aged dandy with divers absurdities
about him,[191] but a gentleman to his by no means yet stiffened or
stooping backbone; a heart of gold, and a wrist with a good core of
steel left in it--might easily have been a failure. It is a success. His
first guest and then adversary, the wicked Spaniard, Sciarra d'Alvimar
or de Villareal, whom the old marquis runs through the body in a
moonlight duel for very sufficient reason,[192] may not be thought quite
equally successful. Scoundrel as he is, George Sand has unwisely thrown
over him a touch of _guignon_--of shadowing and resistless fate--which
creates a certain sympathy; and she neglects the good old rule that your
villain should always be allowed a certain run for his money--a
temporary exercise of his villainy. Alvimar, though he does not feel the
marquis's rapier till nearly the end of the first half, as it were, of
the book, is "marked down" from the start, and never kills anything
within those limits except a poor little tame wolf-cub which is going
(very sensibly) to fly at him. He is altogether too much in appearance
and too little in effectuality of the stage Spaniard--black garments,
black upturned moustache, hook-nose, _navaja_, and all the rest of it.
But he does not spoil the thing, though he hardly does it much good; and
if he is badly treated he has his revenge on the author.
For the book becomes very dull after his supposed death (he _does_ die,
but not at once), and only revives when, some way into the second
volume, an elaborate attempt to revenge him is made by his servant,
Sanche, _âme damnée_ and also _damnante_ (if one may coin this variant),
who is, as it turns out, his irregular father. This again rather stagy
character organises a formidable body of wandering _reîtres_, gipsies,
and miscellaneous ruffians to attack and sack the marquis's house--a
plan which, though ultimately foiled, brings about a very refreshing
series of hurly-burlys and hullabaloos for some hundred and fifty pages.
The narrative is full of improbable impossibilities, and contrasts
singularly with the fashion in which Dumas, throughout all his great
books (and not a few of his not so great ones), manages to _escamoter_
the difficulty. The boy Mario,[193] orphan of the murdered brother, left
unknown for many years, recognised by his uncle, avenger of his father
on Sanche, as Bois-Doré himself had been on Alvimar, is altogether too
clever and effective for his age; and the conduct of Bellinde,
Bois-Doré's cashiered _gouvernante_, is almost preposterous throughout.
But it is what a schoolboy of the old days would have called a "jolly
good scrimmage," and restores the interest of the book for most of the
second volume. The end--scarcely, one would think, very interesting to
any one--is quite spoilt for some by another example of George Sand's
inveterate passion for "maternal" love-making and matches where the lady
is nearly double the age of her husband. Others--or the same--may not be
propitiated for this by the "horrors"[194] which the author has
liberally thrown in. But the larger part of the book, like the larger
part of _Consuelo_, is quite good stuff.
[Sidenote: _Le Marquis de Villemer._]
It is, indeed, a really lively book. Two duller ones than the first two
allotted, at the beginning of this notice, to her last period I have
seldom read. They are both instances (and one at least contains an
elaborate vindication) of the "novel of purpose," and they are by
themselves almost enough to damn it. M. le Marquis de Villemer is an
appalling prig--virtuous, in the Devil-and-his-grandmother style, to the
_n_th--who devotes his energies to writing a _History of the Patriciate
since the Christian Era_, the object being to reveal the sins of
aristocracy. He has a rather nice half-brother spend-thrift, Duque
d'Aleria (Madame de Villemer the elder has first married a Spaniard),
whose debts he virtuously pays, and after a great deal of scandal he
marries a poor but noble and noble-minded damsel, Caroline de
Saint-Geneix, who has taken the position of companion to his mother in
order to help her widowed and four-childed sister. For the virtue of
George Sand's virtuous people _is_ virtue and no mistake. The lively and
amiable duke is fortunately fitted with a lively and amiable duchess,
and they show a little light in the darkness of copy-book morality and
republican principles.
[Sidenote: _Mlle. La Quintinie._]
This kindly light is altogether wanting in _Mademoiselle La Quintinie_,
where the purpose passes from politics to religion. The book is rather
famous, and was, at the time, much read, because it is not merely a
novel of purpose, but an instance of the duello fought, not with sword
or pistol, not with quarter-staves or sand-bags, but with _feuilletons_
of fiction. It, and Octave Feuillet's _Sibylle_, to which it is the
countercheck-quarrelsome, both appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.
It should be seen at a further stage of this volume that I do not think
_Sibylle_ a masterpiece, either of tale-telling or of argumentation,
though it is more on my side than the reply is. But Feuillet, though not
a genius, as some people would have George Sand to be, nor yet
possessing anything like the talent which no sane criticism can deny
her, was a much better craftsman in the art of novel-writing.
[Sidenote: _Flamarande._]
For a final notice--dealing also with the last, or almost the last, of
all her books--we may take _Flamarande_ and its sequel, _Les Deux
Frères_. They give the history of the unfounded jealousy of a husband in
regard to his wife--a jealousy which is backed up by an equally
unfounded suspicion (supported by the most outrageous proceedings of
espionage and something like burglary) on the part of a confidential
servant, who, as we are informed at last, has himself had a secret
passion for his innocent mistress. It is more like a Feuillet book than
a George Sand, and in this respect shows the curious faculty--possessed
also by some lady novelists of our own--of adapting itself to the change
of novel-fashion. But to me at least it appeals not.
So turn we from particulars (for individual notice of the hundred books
is impossible) to generals.
[Sidenote: Summary and judgment.]
[Sidenote: Style.]
It may be difficult to sum up the characteristics of such a writer as
George Sand shortly, but it has to be done. There is to be allowed
her--of course and at once--an extraordinary fertility, and a hardly
less extraordinary escape from absolute sinking into the trivial. She is
preposterous early, somewhat facile and "journalistic" later, but she is
never exactly commonplace. She belongs to the school of immense and
almost mechanical producers who are represented in English by Anthony
Trollope as their "prior" and by Mrs. Oliphant[195] and Miss Braddon as
commandresses of the order. (I think she runs a good deal below the
Prior but a good deal above the Commandresses.[196]) But, if she does so
belong, it is very mainly due, not to any pre-eminence of narrative
faculty, but to that gift of style which has been for nearly a hundred
years admitted. Now I have in this _History_ more than once, and by no
means with tongue in cheek, expressed a diffidence about giving opinions
on this point. I have, it is true, read French for more than sixty
years, and I have been accustomed to "read for style" in it, and in
divers other languages, for at least fifty. But I see such extraordinary
blunders made by foreigners in regard to this side of our own
literature, that I can never be sure--being less conceited than the
pious originator of the phrase--that even the Grace of God has prevented
me from going the same way. Still, if I have any right to publish this
book, I must have a little--I will not say "right," but _venia_ or
licence--to say what seems to me to be the fact of the matter. That
fact--or that seeming of fact--is that George Sand's style is _too_
facile to be first-rate. By this I do not mean that it is too plain. On
the contrary, it is sometimes, especially in her early books, ornate to
gorgeousness, and even to gaudiness. And it was a curious mistake of the
late Mr. Pater, in a quite honorific reference to me, to imply that I
preferred the plain style--a mistake all the more curious that he knew
and acknowledged (and was almost unduly grateful for) my admiration of
his own. I like both forms: but for style--putting meaning out of the
question--I would rather read Browne than Swift, and Lamennais than
Fénelon.
George Sand has both the plain and the ornate styles (and various shades
of "middle" between them) at command. But it seems to me that she has
them--to use a financial phrase recently familiar--too much "on tap."
You see that the current of agreeable and, so to speak, faultless
language is running, and might run volubly for any period of life that
might be allotted to her. In fact it did so. Now no doubt there was
something of Edmond de Goncourt's bad-blooded fatuity in his claim that
his and his brother's epithets were "personal," while Flaubert's were
not. Research for more personal "out-of-the-wayness" in style will
rarely result in anything but jargon. But, on the other hand, Gautier's
great injunction:
Sculpte, lime, cisèle!
is sound. You cannot reach the first class in any art by turning a tap
and letting it run.
[Sidenote: Conversation and description.]
The one point of what we may call the "furniture" of novels, in which
she seems to me to have, occasionally at least, touched supremacy, is
conversation. It has been observed by those capable of making the
induction that, close as drama and novel are in some ways, the
distinction between dramatic and non-dramatic talk is, though narrow,
deeper than the very deepest Alpine crevasse from Dauphiné to Carinthia.
Such specimens as those already more than once dwelt on--Consuelo's and
Anzoleto's debate about her looks, and that of Germain and Marie in the
midnight wood by the Devil's Mere--are first-rate, and there is no more
to say. Some of her descriptions, again, such as the opening of the book
last quoted (the wide, treeless, communal plain with its various
labouring teams), or as some of the Lake touches in _Lucrezia Floriani_,
or as the relieving patches in the otherwise monotonous grumble of _Un
Hiver à Majorque_, are unsurpassable. Nor is this gift limited to mere
_paysage_. The famous account of Chopin's playing already mentioned for
praise is only first among many. But whether these things are supported
by sufficient strength of character, plot, incident, "thought," and the
rest; whether that strange narrative power, so hard to define and so
impossible to mistake or to fail to distinguish from these other
elements, is present--these are great questions and not easy to answer.
I am, as will have been seen throughout, rather inclined to answer them
in the unfavourable way.
In fact--impertinent, insolent, anything else as it may seem--I venture
to ask the question, "Was George Sand a very great craftswoman in the
novel?" and, what is more, to answer it in the negative. I understand
that an ingenious critic of her own sex has recently described her
method as "rolling through the book, locked in the embraces of her
subject," as distinguished from the aloofness and elaboration of a more
recent school. So far, perhaps, so good; but I could wish to find "the
intricacies of Diego and Julia" more interesting to me than as a rule
they are. And it must be remembered that she is constantly detaching
herself from the forlorn "subject," leaving it _un_embraced and
shivering, in order to sermonise it and her readers. I do not make the
very facile and somewhat futile criticism that she would have written
better if she had written half or a quarter as much as she did. She
could not have written little; it is as natural and suitable for Tweed
to "rin wi' speed" as for Till to "rin slaw," though perhaps the
result--parallel to but more cheerful than that recorded in the old
rhyme--may be that Till has the power not of drowning but of
intoxicating two men, where Tweed can only manage one. But this
engrained fecundity and facundity of hers inevitably make her work
novel-journalism rather than novel-literature in all points but in that
of style, which has been discussed already.[197]
FOOTNOTES:
[174] It is attested by the well-known story, more excusable in a man
than creditable to a gentleman, of her earliest or earliest known lover,
Jules Sandeau (_v. inf._), seeing a photograph of her in later days,
turning to a companion and saying, "Et je l'ai connue _belle_!"
[175] It is possible that some readers may not know the delightfully
unexpected, and not improbably "more-expressive-than-volumes" _third_
line--
"Not like the woman who lies under the next stone."
But tradition has, I believe, mercifully omitted to identify this
neighbouring antipode.
[176] Details of personal scandal seldom claim notice here. But it may
be urged with some show of reason that _this_ scandal is too closely
connected with the substance and the spirit of the novelist's whole
work, from _Indiana_ to _Flamarande_, to permit total ignoring of it.
_Lucrezia Floriani_, though perhaps more suggestive of Chopin than of
Musset, but with "tangency" on both, will be discussed in the text. That
most self-accusing of excuses, _Elle et Lui_, with its counterblast Paul
de Musset's _Lui et Elle_, and a few remarks on _Un Hiver à Majorque_
(conjoined for a purpose, which will be indicated) may be despatched in
a note of some length.
[Sidenote: Note on _Elle et Lui_, etc.,]
The rival novel-_plaidoyers_ on the subject of the loves and strifes of
George Sand and Alfred de Musset are sufficiently disgusting, and if
they be considered as novels, the evil effect of purpose--and
particularly of personal purpose--receives from them texts for a whole
series of sermons. Reading them with the experience of a lifetime, not
merely in literary criticism, but (for large parts of that lifetime) in
study of evidence on historical, political, and even directly legal
matters, I cannot help coming to the conclusion that, though there is no
doubt a certain amount of _suggestio falsi_ in both, the _suppressio
veri_ is infinitely greater in _Elle et Lui_. If the letters given in
Paul de Musset's book were not written by George Sand they were written
by Diabolus. And there is one retort made towards the finale by "Édouard
de Falconey" (Musset) to "William Caze" (George Sand) which stigmatises
like the lash of a whip, if not even like a hot iron, the whole face of
the lady's novels.
"Ma chère," lui dit-il, "vous parlez si souvent de chasteté que cela
devient indécent. Votre amitié n'est pas plus 'sainte' que celle des
autres." [If he had added "maternité" the stigma would have been
completer still.] And there is also a startling verisimilitude in the
reply assigned to her:
"Mon cher, trouvez bon que je console mes amis selon ma méthode. Vous
voyez qu'elle leur plaît assez, puisqu'ils y reviennent."
It was true: they did so, rather to their own discredit and wholly to
their discomfort. But she and her "method" must have pleased them enough
for them to do it. It is not so pleasing a method for an outsider to
contemplate. He sees too much of the game, and has none of the pleasure
of playing or the occasional winnings. Since I read Hélisenne de Crenne
(_v. sup._ Vol. I, pp. 150-1) there has seemed to me to be some likeness
between the earlier stage of her heroine (if not of herself) and that of
George Sand in her "friendships." They both display a good deal of mere
sensuality, and both seem to me to have been quite ignorant of passion.
Hélisenne did not reach the stage of "maternal" affection, and perhaps
it was well for her lover and not entirely bad for her readers. But the
best face that can be put on the "method" will be seen in _Lucrezia
Floriani_.
[Sidenote: and on _Un Hiver à Majorque_.]
The bluntness of taste and the intense concentration on self, which were
shown most disagreeably in _Elle et Lui_, appear on a different side in
another book which is not a novel at all--not even a novel as far as
masque and domino are concerned,--though indirectly it touches another
of George Sand's curious personal experiences--that with Chopin. _Un
Hiver à Majorque_ is perhaps the most ill-tempered book of travel,
except Smollett's too famous production, ever written by a novelist of
talent or genius. The Majorcans certainly did not ask George Sand to
visit them. They did not advertise the advantages of Majorca, as is the
fashion with "health resorts" nowadays. She went there of her own
accord; she found magnificent scenery; she flouted the sentiments of
what she herself describes as the most priest-ridden country in Europe
by never going to church, though and while she actually lived in a
disestablished and disendowed monastery. To punish them for which (the
_non sequitur_ is intentional) she does little but talk of dirt,
discomfort, bad food, extortion, foul-smelling oil and garlic, varying
the talk only to foul-smelling oil and garlic, extortion, bad food,
discomfort, or dirt. The book no doubt yields some of her finest
passages of descriptive prose, both as regards landscape, and in the
famous record of Chopin's playing; but otherwise it is hardly worth
reading.
[177] She survived into the next decade and worked till the last with no
distinct declension, but she did not complete it, dying in 1876. Her
famous direction about her grave, _Laissez la verdure_, is
characteristic of her odd mixture if theatricality and true nature. But
if any one wishes to come to her work with a comfortable preoccupation
in favor of herself, he should begin with her _Letters_. Those of her
old age especially are charming.
[178] Cf. Mr. Alfred Lammle on his unpoetical justice to Mr. Fledgeby in
_Our Mutual Friend_.
[179] Valentine has an elder sister who has a son, irregularily
existent, but is as much in love with Benedict as if she were a girl and
he were a gentleman; and this son marries the much older Athenais, a
lovely peasant girl who has been the unwilling _fiancée_ and wife of the
ingenious pitchforker. You have seldom to go far in George Sand for an
unmarried lady with a child for chastity, and a widow who marries a boy
for maternal affection.
[180] There is also an Irish priest called Magnus, who, like everybody
else, is deeply and (in the proper sense of _sans espoir_) desperately
in love with Lélia. He is, on the whole, quite the maddest--and perhaps
the most despicable--of the lot.
[181] If any one says, "So, then, there are several 'most
intolerables,'" let me point out that intolerableness is a more than
"twy-peaked" hill or range. Julien Sorel and Marius were not designed to
be gentlemen.
[182] It is bad for Amélie, who, in a not unnatural revulsion from her
_fiancé's_ neglects and eccentricities, lets herself be fooled by the
handsome Italian.
[183] George Sand's treatment of the great Empress, Marie Antoinette's
mother, is a curious mixture of half-reluctant admiration and Republican
bad-bloodedness.
[184] Porpora is included, but the amiable monarch, who has heard that
the old _maestro_ speaks freely of him, gives private orders that he
shall be stopped at the frontier.
[185] _Cow's_ breath has, I believe, been prescribed in such cases by
the faculty; hardly children's.
[186] She does not make the delicate distinction once drawn by another
of her sex: "I can tell you how many people I have kissed, but I cannot
tell you how many have kissed _me_."
[187] She is rather fond of taking her readers into confidence this way.
I have no particular objection to it; but those who object to
Thackeray's _parabases_ ought to think this is a still more
objectionable thing.
[188] The Count Albani plays his difficult part of thirdsman very well
throughout, though just at first he would make an advance on "auld lang
syne" if Lucrezia would let him. But later he is on strict honour, and
quarrels with the Prince for his tyranny.
[189] It is very pleasing to see, as I have seen, this famous phrase
quoted as if it had reference to the _joys_ of Arcadia.
[190] If any among my congregation be offended by apparent flippancy in
this notice of a book which, to my profound astonishment, some people
have taken as the author's masterpiece, I apologise. But if I spoke more
seriously I should also speak more severely.
[191] He is a frantic devotee of the _Astrée_, and George Sand brings in
a good deal about the most agreeable book, without, however, showing
very intimate or accurate knowledge of it.
[192] The Spaniard (rather his servant with his connivance) has murdered
and robbed Bois-Doré's brother.
[193] He is also very handsome, and so makes up for the plurality of the
title.
[194] Alvimar lies dying for hours with the infidel Bohemians and
roistering Protestant _reîtres_ not only disturbing his death-bed, but
interfering with the "consolation of religion"; the worst of the said
Bohemians is buried alive (or rather stifled after he has been
_half_-buried alive) by the little gipsy girl, Pilar, whom he has
tormented; and Pilar herself is burnt alive on the last page but one,
after she has poisoned Bellinde.
[195] Taking her work on the whole. The earlier part of it ran even
Trollope hard.
[196] Her points of likeness to her self-naming name-child, "George
Eliot," are too obvious to need discussion. But it is a question whether
the main points of _un_likeness--the facility and extreme fecundity of
the French George, as contrasted with the laborious book-bearing of the
English--are not more important than the numerous but superficial and to
a large extent non-literary resemblances.
[197] I have said little or nothing of the short stories. They are
fairly numerous, but I do not think that her _forte_ lay in them.