interpretation of nature; since it is this which constitutes the special
charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for
this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar aptitude. But the
matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here
in our criticism. In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become
more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of
merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever aptitude or
felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the
others, and thus tends to become the common property of all. Therefore
anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking
of, is sure, nowadays, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or
of the English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the
Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will be a
stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures
where it is native, which it will not have in the literatures where it
is not native. Novalis[275] or Rückert,[276] for instance, have their
eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a
rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the
Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her secret;
but the question is whether the strokes in the German's picture of
nature[277] have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of
the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakespeare's
touch in his daffodil,[278] Wordsworth's in his cuckoo,[279] Keats's in
his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy
among the Swiss farms.[280] To decide where the gift for natural magic
originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must
decide this question.
In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we are
here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic
imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled at all,
and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her.
But these modes are many; I will mention four of them now: there is the
conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of
handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the
magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on
the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling
nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the
Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added;
in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.
In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the
object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our
eighteenth-century poetry:--
"As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night--"[281]
to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of
instances too; if we put this from Propertius's _Hylas_:--
"... manus heroum ...
Mollia composita litora fronde tegit--"[282]
side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:--
[Greek: leimon gar sphin ekeito megas, stibadessin oneiar--][283]
we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional and
of the Greek way of handling nature. But from our own poetry we may get
specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the
conventional: for instance, Keats's:--
"What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain-built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"[284]
is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed
with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added.
German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling
nature; an excellent example is to be found in the stanzas called
_Zueignung_[285], prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning walk, the
mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given
with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the work, as a
handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is
added; the power of these is not what gives the poem in question its
merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual
emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his
handling of nature, and nobly too, as any one who will read his
_Wanderer_,--the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a peasant woman
and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple near
Cuma,--may see. Only the power of natural magic Goethe does not, I
think, give; whereas Keats passes at will from the Greek power to that
power which is, as I say, Celtic; from his
"What little town, by river or seashore--"
to his
"White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves--"[286]
or his
"... magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn--"[287]
in which the very same note is struck as in those extracts which I
quoted from Celtic romance, and struck with authentic and unmistakable
power.
Shakespeare, in handling nature, touches this Celtic note so
exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking for the
Celtic note in him, and not to recognize his Greek note when it comes.
But if one attends well to the difference between the two notes, and
bears in mind, to guide one, such things as Virgil's "moss-grown springs
and grass softer than sleep:"--
"Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba--"[288]
as his charming flower-gatherer, who--
"Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi--"[289]
as his quinces and chestnuts:--
" ... cana legam tenera lanugine mala
Castaneasque nuces ..."[290]
then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in Shakespeare's
"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine--"[291]
it is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, again in his
" ... look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!"[292]
we are at the very point of transition from the Greek note to the
Celtic; there is the Greek clearness and brightness, with the Celtic
aërialness and magic coming in. Then we have the sheer, inimitable
Celtic note in passages like this:--
"Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea--"[293]
or this, the last I will quote:--
"The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls--
... in such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew--
... in such a night
_Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand,
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage._"[294]
And those last lines of all are so drenched and intoxicated with the
fairy-dew of that natural magic which is our theme, that I cannot do
better than end with them.
And now, with the pieces of evidence in our hand, let us go to those who
say it is vain to look for Celtic elements in any Englishman, and let us
ask them, first, if they seize what we mean by the power of natural
magic in Celtic poetry: secondly, if English poetry does not eminently
exhibit this power; and, thirdly, where they suppose English poetry got
it from?
GEORGE SAND[295]
The months go round, and anniversaries return; on the ninth of June
George Sand will have been dead just one year. She was born in 1804; she
was almost seventy-two years old when she died. She came to Paris after
the revolution of 1830, with her _Indiana_[296] written, and began her
life of independence, her life of authorship, her life as _George Sand_.
She continued at work till she died. For forty-five years she was
writing and publishing, and filled Europe with her name.
It seems to me but the other day that I saw her, yet it was in the
August of 1846, more than thirty years ago. I saw her in her own Berry,
at Nohant,[297] where her childhood and youth were passed, where she
returned to live after she became famous, where she died and has now her
grave. There must be many who, after reading her books, have felt the
same desire which in those days of my youth, in 1846, took me to Nohant,
--the desire to see the country and the places of which the books that
so charmed us were full. Those old provinces of the centre of France,
primitive and slumbering,--Berry, La Marche, Bourbonnais; those sites
and streams in them, of name once so indifferent to us, but to which
George Sand gave such a music for our ear,--La Châtre, Ste. Sévère, the
_Vallée Noire_, the Indre, the Creuse; how many a reader of George Sand
must have desired, as I did, after frequenting them so much in thought,
fairly to set eyes upon them!
I had been reading _Jeanne_.[298] I made up my mind to go and see Toulx
Ste. Croix, Boussac, and the Druidical stones on Mont Barlot, the
_Pierres Jaunâtres_.[299]
I remember looking out Toulx in Cassini's great map[300] at the
Bodleian Library. The railway through the centre of France went in those
days no farther than Vierzon. From Vierzon to Châteauroux one travelled
by an ordinary diligence, from Châteauroux to La Châtre by a humbler
diligence, from La Châtre to Boussac by the humblest diligence of all.
At Boussac diligence ended, and _patache_[301] began. Between
Châteauroux and La Châtre, a mile or two before reaching the latter
place, the road passes by the village of Nohant. The Château of Nohant,
in which Madame Sand lived, is a plain house by the road-side, with a
walled garden. Down in the meadows, not far off, flows the Indre,
bordered by trees. I passed Nohant without stopping, at La Châtre I
dined and changed diligence, and went on by night up the valley of the
Indre, the _Vallée Noire_, past Ste. Sévère to Boussac. At Ste. Sévère
the Indre is quite a small stream. In the darkness we quitted its
valley, and when day broke we were in the wilder and barer country of La
Marche, with Boussac before us, and its high castle on a precipitous
rock over the Little Creuse.
That day and the next I wandered through a silent country of heathy and
ferny _landes_,[302] a region of granite boulders, holly, and broom, of
copsewood and great chestnut trees; a region of broad light, and fresh
breezes and wide horizons. I visited the _Pierres Jaunâtres._ I stood at
sunset on the platform of Toulx Ste. Croix, by the scrawled and almost
effaced stone lions,--a relic, it is said, of the English rule,--and
gazed on the blue mountains of Auvergne filling the distance, and
southeastward of them, in a still further and fainter distance, on what
seemed to be the mountains over Le Puy and the high valley of the Loire.
From Boussac I addressed to Madame Sand the sort of letter of which she
must in her lifetime have had scores, a letter conveying to her, in bad
French, the homage of a youthful and enthusiastic foreigner who had read
her works with delight. She received the infliction good-naturedly, for
on my return to La Châtre I found a message left at the inn by a servant
from Nohant that Madame Sand would be glad to see me if I called. The
mid-day breakfast at Nohant was not yet over when I reached the house,
and I found a large party assembled. I entered with some trepidation, as
well I might, considering how I had got there; but the simplicity of
Madame Sand's manner put me at ease in a moment. She named some of those
present; amongst them were her son and daughter, the Maurice and Solange
[303] so familiar to us from her books, and Chopin[304] with his
wonderful eyes. There was at that time nothing astonishing in Madame
Sand's appearance. She was not in man's clothes, she wore a sort of
costume not impossible, I should think (although on these matters I
speak with hesitation), to members of the fair sex at this hour amongst
ourselves, as an outdoor dress for the country or for Scotland. She made
me sit by her and poured out for me the insipid and depressing beverage,
_boisson fade et mélancolique_, as Balzac called it, for which English
people are thought abroad to be always thirsting,--tea. She conversed of
the country through which I had been wandering, of the Berry peasants
and their mode of life, of Switzerland, whither I was going; she touched
politely, by a few questions and remarks, upon England and things and
persons English,--upon Oxford and Cambridge, Byron, Bulwer. As she
spoke, her eyes, head, bearing, were all of them striking; but the main
impression she made was an impression of what I have already mentioned,
--of _simplicity_, frank, cordial simplicity. After breakfast she led
the way into the garden, asked me a few kind questions about myself and
my plans, gathered a flower or two and gave them to me, shook hands
heartily at the gate, and I saw her no more. In 1859 M. Michelet[305]
gave me a letter to her, which would have enabled me to present myself
in more regular fashion. Madame Sand was then in Paris. But a day or two
passed before I could call, and when I called, Madame Sand had left
Paris and had gone back to Nohant. The impression of 1846 has remained
my single impression of her.
Of her gaze, form, and speech, that one impression is enough; better
perhaps than a mixed impression from seeing her at sundry times and
after successive changes. But as the first anniversary of her death
[306] draws near, there arises again a desire which I felt when she
died, the desire, not indeed to take a critical survey of her,--very far
from it. I feel no inclination at all to go regularly through her
productions, to classify and value them one by one, to pick out from
them what the English public may most like, or to present to that
public, for the most part ignorant of George Sand and for the most part
indifferent to her, a full history and a judicial estimate of the woman
and of her writings. But I desire to recall to my own mind, before the
occasion offered by her death passes quite away,--to recall and collect
the elements of that powerful total-impression which, as a writer, she
made upon me; to recall and collect them, to bring them distinctly into
view, to feel them in all their depth and power once more. What I here
attempt is not for the benefit of the indifferent; it is for my own
satisfaction, it is for myself. But perhaps those for whom George Sand
has been a friend and a power will find an interest in following me.
_Le sentiment de la vie idéale, qui n'est autre que la vie normale telle
que nous sommes appelés à la connaître_;[307]--"the sentiment of the
ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall some
day know it,"--those words from one of her last publications give the
ruling thought of George Sand, the ground-_motive_, as they say in
music, of all her strain. It is as a personage inspired by this motive
that she interests us.
The English public conceives of her as of a novel-writer who wrote
stories more or less interesting; the earlier ones objectionable and
dangerous, the later ones, some of them, unexceptionable and fit to be
put into the hands of the youth of both sexes. With such a conception of
George Sand, a story of hers like _Consuelo_[308] comes to be elevated
in England into quite an undue relative importance, and to pass with
very many people for her typical work, displaying all that is really
valuable and significant in the author. _Consuelo_ is a charming story.
But George Sand is something more than a maker of charming stories, and
only a portion of her is shown in _Consuelo_. She is more, likewise,
than a creator of characters. She has created, with admirable truth to
nature, characters most attractive and attaching, such as Edmee,
Genevieve, Germain.[309] But she is not adequately expressed by them.
We do not know her unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work
as a whole.
In order to feel this spirit it is not, indeed, necessary to read all
that she ever produced. Even three or four only out of her many books
might suffice to show her to us, if they were well chosen; let us say,
the _Lettres d'un Voyageur, Mauprat, François le Champi_,[310] and a
story which I was glad to see Mr. Myers,[311] in his appreciative
notice of Madame Sand, single out for praise,--_Valvèdre_.[312] In these
may be found all the principal elements of their author's strain: the
cry of agony and revolt, the trust in nature and beauty, the aspiration
towards a purged and renewed human society.
Of George Sand's strain, during forty years, these are the grand
elements. Now it is one of them which appears most prominently, now it
is another. The cry of agony and revolt is in her earlier work only, and
passes away in her later. But in the evolution of these three elements,
--the passion of agony and revolt, the consolation from nature and from
beauty, the ideas of social renewal,--in the evolution of these is
George Sand and George Sand's life and power. Through their evolution
her constant motive declares and unfolds itself, that motive which we
have set forth above: "the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none
other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it." This is the
motive, and through these elements is its evolution: an evolution
pursued, moreover, with the most unfailing resolve, the most absolute
sincerity.
The hour of agony and revolt passed away for George Sand, as it passed
away for Goethe, as it passes away for their readers likewise. It passes
away and does not return; yet those who, amid the agitations, more or
less stormy, of their youth, betook themselves to the early works of
George Sand, may in later life cease to read them, indeed, but they can
no more forget them than they can forget _Werther_[313]. George Sand
speaks somewhere of her "days of _Corinne_."[314] Days of _Valentine_,
many of us may in like manner say,--days of _Valentine_, days of
_Lélia_[315], days never to return! They are gone, we shall read the
books no more, and yet how ineffaceable is their impression! How the
sentences from George Sand's works of that period still linger in our
memory and haunt the ear with their cadences! Grandiose and moving, they
come, those cadences, like the sighing of the wind through the forest,
like the breaking of the waves on the seashore. Lélia in her cell on the
mountain of the Camaldoli--
"Sibyl, Sibyl forsaken; spirit of the days of old, joined to a brain
which rebels against the divine inspiration; broken lyre, mute
instrument, whose tones the world of to-day, if it heard them, could not
understand, but yet in whose depth the eternal harmony murmurs
imprisoned; priestess of death, I, I who feel and know that before now I
have been Pythia, have wept before now, before now have spoken, but who
cannot recollect, alas, cannot utter the word of healing! Yes, yes! I
remember the cavern of truth and the access of revelation; but the word
of human destiny, I have forgotten it; but the talisman of deliverance,
it is lost from my hand. And yet, indeed, much, much have I seen! and
when suffering presses me sore, when indignation takes hold of me, when
I feel Prometheus wake up in my heart and beat his puissant wings
against the stone which confines him,--oh! then, in prey to a frenzy
without a name, to a despair without bounds, I invoke the unknown master
and friend who might illumine my spirit and set free my tongue; but I
grope in darkness, and my tired arms grasp nothing save delusive
shadows. And for ten thousand years, as the sole answer to my cries, as
the sole comfort in my agony, I hear astir, over this earth accurst, the
despairing sob of impotent agony. For ten thousand years I have cried in
infinite space: _Truth! Truth!_ For ten thousand years infinite space
keeps answering me: _Desire, Desire_. O Sibyl forsaken! O mute Pythia!
dash then thy head against the rocks of thy cavern, and mingle thy
raging blood with the foam of the sea; for thou deemest thyself to have
possessed the almighty Word, and these ten thousand years thou art
seeking him in vain."[316]
Or Sylvia's cry over Jacques[317] by his glacier in the Tyrol--
"When such a man as thou art is born into a world where he can do no
true service; when, with the soul of an apostle and the courage of a
martyr, he has simply to push his way among the heartless and aimless
crowds which vegetate without living; the atmosphere suffocates him and
he dies. Hated by sinners, the mock of fools, disliked by the envious,
abandoned by the weak, what can he do but return to God, weary with
having labored in vain, in sorrow at having accomplished nothing? The
world remains in all its vileness and in all its hatefulness; this is
what men call, 'the triumph of good sense over enthusiasm.'"[318]
Or Jacques himself, and his doctrine--
"Life is arid and terrible, repose is a dream, prudence is useless; mere
reason alone serves simply to dry up the heart; there is but one virtue,
the eternal sacrifice of oneself."
Or George Sand speaking in her own person, in the _Lettres d'un
Voyageur_--
"Ah, no, I was not born to be a poet, I was born to love. It is the
misfortune of my destiny, it is the enmity of others, which have made me
a wanderer and an artist. What I wanted was to live a human life; I had
a heart, it has been torn violently from my breast. All that has been
left me is a head, a head full of noise and pain, of horrible memories,
of images of woe, of scenes of outrage. And because in writing stories
to earn my bread I could not help remembering my sorrows, because I had
the audacity to say that in married life there were to be found
miserable beings, by reason of the weakness which is enjoined upon the
woman, by reason of the brutality which is permitted to the man, by
reason of the turpitudes which society covers and protects with a veil,
I am pronounced immoral, I am treated as if I were the enemy of the
human race."[319]
If only, alas, together with her honesty and her courage, she could feel
within herself that she had also light and hope and power; that she was
able to lead those whom she loved, and who looked to her for guidance!
But no; her very own children, witnesses of her suffering, her
uncertainty, her struggles, her evil report, may come to doubt her:--
"My poor children, my own flesh and blood, will perhaps turn upon me and
say: 'You are leading us wrong, you mean to ruin us as well as yourself.
Are you not unhappy, reprobated, evil spoken of? What have you gained by
these unequal struggles, by these much trumpeted duels of yours with
custom and belief? Let us do as others do; let us get what is to be got
out of this easy and tolerant world.'
"This is what they will say to me. Or at best, if, out of tenderness for
me, or from their own natural disposition, they give ear to my words and
believe me, whither shall I guide them? Into what abysses shall we go
and plunge ourselves, we three?--for we shall be our own three upon
earth, and not one soul with us. What shall I reply to them if they come
and say to me; 'Yes, life is unbearable in a world like this. Let us die
together. Show us the path of Bernica, or the lake of Sténio, or the
glaciers of Jacques.'"[320]
Nevertheless the failure of the impassioned seekers of a new and better
world proves nothing, George Sand maintains, for the world as it is.
Ineffectual they may be, but the world is still more ineffectual, and it
is the world's course which is doomed to ruin, not theirs. "What has it
done," exclaims George Sand in her preface to Guérin's _Centaure_, "what
has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for our
children, this society shielded with such care?" Nothing. Those whom it
calls vain complainers and rebels and madmen, may reply:--