forlorn singers, well versed in the causes of their misery and of our
own. You do not comprehend the malady which killed them; they themselves
did not comprehend it. If one or two of us at the present day open our
eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange and unaccountable good
Providence; and have we not to seek our grain of faith in storm and
darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the absence of all sympathy, all
example, all brotherly aid, all protection and countenance in high
places? Try yourselves to speak to your brethren heart to heart,
conscience to conscience! Try it!--but you cannot, busied as you are
with watching and patching up in all directions your dykes which the
flood is invading. The material existence of this society of yours
absorbs all your care, and requires more than all your efforts.
Meanwhile the powers of human thought are growing into strength, and
rise on all sides around you. Amongst these threatening apparitions,
there are some which fade away and reënter the darkness, because the
hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened
them could strive no longer with the horrors of this present chaos; but
there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you,
up and alive, to say: 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and
we, we do not mean to die.'"
She did not, indeed. How should she faint and fail before her time,
because of a world out of joint, because of the reign of stupidity,
because of the passions of youth, because of the difficulties and
disgusts of married life in the native seats of the _homme sensuel
moyen_, the average sensual man, she who could feel so well the power of
those eternal consolers, nature and beauty? From the very first they
introduce a note of suavity in her strain of grief and passion. Who can
forget the lanes and meadows of _Valentine_?
George Sand is one of the few French writers who keep us closely and
truly intimate with rural nature. She gives us the wild-flowers by their
actual names,--snowdrop, primrose, columbine, iris, scabious. Nowhere
has she touched her native Berry and its little-known landscape, its
_campagnes ignorées_, with a lovelier charm than in _Valentine_. The
winding and deep lanes running out of the high road on either side, the
fresh and calm spots they take us to, "meadows of a tender green,
plaintive brooks, clumps of alder and mountain ash, a whole world of
suave and pastoral nature,"--how delicious it all is! The grave and
silent peasant whose very dog will hardly deign to bark at you, the
great white ox, "the unfailing dean of these pastures," staring solemnly
at you from the thicket; the farmhouse "with its avenue of maples, and
the Indre, here hardly more than a bright rivulet, stealing along
through rushes and yellow iris, in the field below,"--who, I say, can
forget them? And that one lane in especial, the lane where Athenais puts
her arm out of the side window of the rustic carriage and gathers May
from the overarching hedge,--that lane with its startled blackbirds, and
humming insects, and limpid water, and swaying water-plants, and
shelving gravel, and yellow wagtails hopping, half-pert,
half-frightened, on the sand,--that lane with its rushes, cresses, and
mint below, its honeysuckle and traveller's-joy above,--how gladly might
one give all that strangely English picture in English, if the charm of
Madame Sand's language did not here defy translation! Let us try
something less difficult, and yet something where we may still have her
in this her beloved world of "simplicity, and sky, and fields and trees,
and peasant life,--peasant life looked at, by preference, on its good
and sound side." _Voyez donc la simplicité, vous autres, voyez le ciel
et les champs, et les arbres, et les paysans, surtout dans ce qu'ils ont
de bon et de vrai._
The introduction to _La Mare au Diable_ will give us what we want.
George Sand has been looking at an engraving of Holbein's _Laborer._
[321] An old thick-set peasant, in rags, is driving his plough in the
midst of a field. All around spreads a wild landscape, dotted with a few
poor huts. The sun is setting behind a hill; the day of toil is nearly
over. It has been a hard one; the ground is rugged and stony, the
laborer's horses are but skin and bone, weak and exhausted. There is but
one alert figure, the skeleton Death, who with a whip skips nimbly along
at the horses' side and urges the team. Under the picture is a quotation
in old French, to the effect that after the laborer's life of travail
and service, in which he has to gain his bread by the sweat of his brow,
here comes Death to fetch him away. And from so rude a life does Death
take him, says George Sand, that Death is hardly unwelcome; and in
another composition by Holbein, where men of almost every condition,--
popes, sovereigns, lovers, gamblers, monks, soldiers,--are taunted with
their fear of Death and do indeed see his approach with terror, Lazarus
alone is easy and composed, and sitting on his dunghill at the rich
man's door, tells Death that he does not dread him.
With her thoughts full of Holbein's mournful picture, George Sand goes
out into the fields of her own Berry:--
"My walk was by the border of a field which some peasants were getting
ready for being sown presently. The space to be ploughed was wide, as in
Holbein's picture. The landscape was vast also; the great lines of green
which it contained were just touched with russet by the approach of
autumn; on the rich brown soil recent rain had left, in a good many
furrows, lines of water, which shone in the sun like silver threads. The
day was clear and soft, and the earth gave out a light smoke where it
had been freshly laid open by the ploughshare. At the top of the field
an old man, whose broad back and severe face were like those of the old
peasant of Holbein, but whose clothes told no tale of poverty, was
gravely driving his plough of an antique shape, drawn by two tranquil
oxen, with coats of a pale buff, real patriarchs of the fallow, tall of
make, somewhat thin, with long and backward-sloping horns, the kind of
old workmen who by habit have got to be _brothers_ to one another, as
throughout our country-side they are called, and who, if one loses the
other, refuse to work with a new comrade, and fret themselves to death.
People unacquainted with the country will not believe in this affection
of the ox for his yoke-fellow. They should come and see one of the poor
beasts in a corner of his stable, thin, wasted, lashing with his
restless tail his lean flanks, blowing uneasily and fastidiously on the
provender offered to him, his eyes forever turned towards the stable
door, scratching with his foot the empty place left at his side,
sniffing the yokes and bands which his companion has worn, and
incessantly calling for him with piteous lowings. The ox-herd will tell
you: There is a pair of oxen done for! his _brother_ is dead, and this
one will work no more. He ought to be fattened for killing; but we
cannot get him to eat, and in a short time he will have starved himself
to death."[322]
How faithful and close it is, this contact of George Sand with country
things, with the life of nature in its vast plenitude and pathos! And
always in the end the human interest, as is right, emerges and
predominates. What is the central figure in the fresh and calm rural
world of George Sand? It is the peasant. And what is the peasant? He is
France, life, the future. And this is the strength of George Sand, and
of her second movement, after the first movement of energy and revolt
was over, towards nature and beauty, towards the country, towards
primitive life, the peasant. She regarded nature and beauty, not with
the selfish and solitary joy of the artist who but seeks to appropriate
them for his own purposes, she regarded them as a treasure of immense
and hitherto unknown application, as a vast power of healing and delight
for all, and for the peasant first and foremost. Yes she cries, the
simple life is the true one! but the peasant, the great organ of that
life, "the minister in that vast temple which only the sky is vast
enough to embrace," the peasant is not doomed to toil and moil in it
forever, overdone and unawakened, like Holbein's laborer, and to have
for his best comfort the thought that death will set him free. _Non,
nous n'avons plus affaire à la mort, mais à la vie._[323] "Our business
henceforth is not with death, but with life."
Joy is the great lifter of men, the great unfolder. _Il faut que la vie
soit bonne afin qu'elle soit féconde._ "For life to be fruitful, life
must be felt as a blessing":--
"Nature is eternally young, beautiful, bountiful. She pours out beauty
and poetry for all that live, she pours it out on all plants, and the
plants are permitted to expand in it freely. She possesses the secret of
happiness, and no man has been able to take it away from her. The
happiest of men would be he who possessing the science of his labor and
working with his hands, earning his comfort and his freedom by the
exercise of his intelligent force, found time to live by the heart and
by the brain, to understand his own work and to love the work of God.
The artist has satisfactions of this kind in the contemplation and
reproduction of nature's beauty; but when he sees the affliction of
those who people this paradise of earth, the upright and human-hearted
artist feels a trouble in the midst of his enjoyment. The happy day will
be when mind, heart, and hands shall be alive together, shall work in
concert; when there shall be a harmony between God's munificence and
man's delight in it. Then, instead of the piteous and frightful figure
of Death, skipping along whip in hand by the peasant's side in the
field, the allegorical painter will place there a radiant angel, sowing
with full hands the blessed grain in the smoking furrow.
"And the dream of a kindly, free, poetic, laborious, simple existence
for the tiller of the field is not so hard to realize that it must be
banished into the world of chimæras. Virgil's sweet and sad cry: 'O
happy peasants, if they but knew their own blessings!' is a regret; but
like all regrets, it is at the same time a prediction. The day will come
when the laborer may be also an artist;--not in the sense of rendering
nature's beauty, a matter which will be then of much less importance,
but in the sense of feeling it. Does not this mysterious intuition of
poetic beauty exist in him already in the form of instinct and of vague
reverie?"[324]
It exists in him, too, adds Madame Sand, in the form of that
_nostalgia_, that homesickness, which forever pursues the genuine French
peasant if you transplant him. The peasant has here, then, the elements
of the poetic sense, and of its high and pure satisfactions.
"But one part of the enjoyment which we possess is wanting to him, a
pure and lofty pleasure which is surely his due, minister that he is in
that vast temple which only the sky is vast enough to embrace. He has
not the conscious knowledge of his sentiment. Those who have sentenced
him to servitude from his mother's womb, not being able to debar him
from reverie, have debarred him from reflection.
"Well, for all that, taking the peasant as he is, incomplete and
seemingly condemned to an eternal childhood, I yet find him a more
beautiful object than the man in whom his acquisition of knowledge has
stifled sentiment. Do not rate yourselves so high above him, many of you
who imagine that you have an imprescriptible right to his obedience; for
you yourselves are the most incomplete and the least seeing of men. That
simplicity of his soul is more to be loved than the false lights of
yours."[325]
In all this we are passing from the second element in George Sand to the
third,--her aspiration for a social new-birth, a _renaissance sociale_.
It is eminently the ideal of France; it was hers. Her religion connected
itself with this ideal. In the convent where she was brought up, she had
in youth had an awakening of fervent mystical piety in the Catholic
form. That form she could not keep. Popular religion of all kinds, with
its deep internal impossibilities, its "heaven and hell serving to cover
the illogical manifestations of the Divinity's apparent designs
respecting us," its "God made in our image, silly and malicious, vain
and puerile, irritable or tender, after our fashion," lost all sort of
hold upon her:--
"Communion with such a God is impossible to me, I confess it. He is
wiped out from my memory: there is no corner where I can find him any
more. Nor do I find such a God out of doors either; he is not in the
fields and waters, he is not in the starry sky. No, nor yet in the
churches where men bow themselves; it is an extinct message, a dead
letter, a thought that has done its day. Nothing of this belief, nothing
of this God, subsists in me any longer."[326]
She refused to lament over the loss, to esteem it other than a
benefit:--
"It is an addition to our stock of light, this detachment from the
idolatrous conception of religion. It is no loss of the religious sense,
as the persisters in idolatry maintain. It is quite the contrary, it is
a restitution of allegiance to the true Divinity. It is a step made in
the direction of this Divinity, it is an abjuration of the dogmas which
did him dishonor."[327]
She does not attempt to give of this Divinity an account much more
precise than that which we have in Wordsworth,--"_a presence that
disturbs me with the joy of animating thoughts_."[328]
"Everything is divine (she says), even matter; everything is superhuman,
even man. God is everywhere; he is in me in a measure proportioned to
the little that I am. My present life separates me from him just in the
degree determined by the actual state of childhood of our race. Let me
content myself, in all my seeking, to feel after him, and to possess of
him as much as this imperfect soul can take in with the intellectual
sense I have."[329]
And she concludes:--
"The day will come when we shall no longer talk about God idly, nay,
when we shall talk about him as little as possible. We shall cease to
set him forth dogmatically, to dispute about his nature. We shall put
compulsion on no one to pray to him, we shall leave the whole business
of worship within the sanctuary of each man's conscience. And this will
happen when we are really religious."[330]
Meanwhile the sense of this spirit or presence which animates us, the
sense of the divine, is our stronghold and our consolation. A man may
say of it: "It comes not by my desert, but the atom of divine sense
given to me nothing can rob me of." _Divine sense_,--the phrase is a
vague one; but it stands to Madame Sand for that to which are to be
referred "all the best thoughts and the best actions of life, suffering
endured, duty achieved, whatever purifies our existence, whatever
vivifies our love."
Madame Sand is a Frenchwoman, and her religion is therefore, as we might
expect, with peculiar fervency social. Always she has before her mind
"the natural law which _will have it_ (the italics are her own) that the
species _man_ cannot subsist and prosper but by _association_." Whatever
else we may be in creation, we are, first and foremost, "at the head of
the species which are called by instinct, and led by necessity, to the
life of _association_." The word _love_--the great word, as she justly
says, of the New Testament--acquires from her social enthusiasm a
peculiar significance to her:--
"The word is a great one, because it involves infinite consequences. To
love means to help one another, to have joint aspirations, to act in
concert, to labor for the same end, to develop to its ideal consummation
the fraternal instinct, thanks to which mankind have brought the earth
under their dominion. Every time that he has been false to this instinct
which is his law of life, his natural destiny, man has seen his temples
crumble, his societies dissolve, his intellectual sense go wrong, his
moral sense die out. The future is founded on love."[331]
So long as love is thus spoken of in the general, the ordinary serious
Englishman will have no difficulty in inclining himself with respect
while Madame Sand speaks of it. But when he finds that love implies,
with her, social equality, he will begin to be staggered. And in truth
for almost every Englishman Madame Sand's strong language about
equality, and about France as the chosen vessel for exhibiting it, will
sound exaggerated. "The human ideal," she says, "as well as the social
ideal, is to achieve equality."[332] France, which has made equality its
rallying cry, is therefore "the nation which loves and is loved," _la
nation qui aime et qu'on aime_. The republic of equality is in her eyes
"an ideal, a philosophy, a religion." She invokes the "holy doctrine of
social liberty and fraternal equality, ever reappearing as a ray of love
and truth amidst the storm." She calls it "the goal of man and the law
of the future." She thinks it the secret of the civilization of France,
the most civilized of nations. Amid the disasters of the late war she
cannot forbear a cry of astonishment at the neutral nations,
_insensibles à l'égorgement d'une civilisation comme la nôtre_, "looking
on with insensibility while a civilization such as ours has its throat
cut." Germany, with its stupid ideal of corporalism and _Kruppism_, is
contrasted with France, full of social dreams, too civilized for war,
incapable of planning and preparing war for twenty years, she is so
incapable of hatred;--_nous sommes si incapables de haïr!_ We seem to be
listening, not to George Sand, but to M. Victor Hugo, half genius, half
charlatan; to M. Victor Hugo, or even to one of those French declaimers
in whom we come down to no genius and all charlatan.
The form of such outbursts as we have quoted will always be distasteful
to an Englishman. It is to be remembered that they came from Madame Sand
under the pressure and anguish of the terrible calamities of 1870. But
what we are most concerned with, and what Englishmen in general regard
too little, is the degree of truth contained in these allegations that
France is the most civilized of nations, and that she is so, above all,
by her "holy doctrine of equality." How comes the idea to be so current;
and to be passionately believed in, as we have seen, by such a woman as
George Sand? It was so passionately believed in by her, that when one
seeks, as I am now seeking, to recall her image, the image is incomplete
if the passionate belief is kept from appearing.
I will not, with my scanty space, now discuss the belief; but I will
seek to indicate how it must have commended itself, I think, to George
Sand. I have somewhere called France "the country of Europe where _the
people_ is most alive."[333] _The people_ is what interested George
Sand. And in France _the people_ is, above all, the peasant. The workman
in Paris or in other great towns of France may afford material for such
pictures as those which M. Zola[334] has lately given us in
_L'Assommoir_--pictures of a kind long ago labelled by Madame Sand as
"_the literature of mysteries of iniquity_, which men of talent and
imagination try to bring into fashion." But the real _people_ in France,
the foundation of things there, both in George Sand's eyes and in
reality, is the peasant. The peasant was the object of Madame Sand's
fondest predilections in the present, and happiest hopes in the future.
The Revolution and its doctrine of equality had made the French peasant.
What wonder, then, if she saluted the doctrine as a holy and paramount
one?
And the French peasant is really, so far as I can see, the largest and
strongest element of soundness which the body social of any European
nation possesses. To him is due that astonishing recovery which France
has made since her defeat, and which George Sand predicted in the very
hour of ruin. Yes, in 1870 she predicted _ce reveil général qui va
suivre, à la grande surprise des autres nations, l'espèce d'agonie où
elles nous voient tombés_,[335] "the general re-arising which, to the
astonishment of other nations, is about to follow the sort of agony in
which they now see us lying." To the condition, character, and qualities
of the French peasant this recovery is in the main due. His material
well-being is known to all of us. M. de Laveleye,[336] the well-known
economist, a Belgian and a Protestant, says that France, being the
country of Europe where the soil is more divided than anywhere except in
Switzerland and Norway, is at the same time the country where well-being
is most widely spread, where wealth has of late years increased most,
and where population is least outrunning the limits which, for the
comfort and progress of the working classes themselves, seem necessary.
George Sand could see, of course, the well-being of the French peasant,
for we can all see it.
But there is more. George Sand was a woman, with a woman's ideal of
gentleness, of "the charm of good manners," as essential to
civilization. She has somewhere spoken admirably of the variety and
balance of forces which go to make up true civilization; "certain forces
of weakness, docility, attractiveness, suavity, are here just as real
forces as forces of vigor, encroachment, violence, or brutality." Yes,
as real _forces_, although Prince Bismarck cannot see it; because human
nature requires them, and, often as they may be baffled, and slow as may
be the process of their asserting themselves, mankind is not satisfied
with its own civilization, and keeps fidgeting at it and altering it
again and again, until room is made for them. George Sand thought the
French people,--meaning principally, again, by the French people the
_people_ properly so called, the peasant,--she thought it "the most
kindly, the most amiable, of all peoples." Nothing is more touching than
to read in her _Journal_, written in 1870, while she was witnessing what
seemed to be "the agony of the Latin races," and undergoing what seemed
to be the process of "dying in a general death of one's family, one's
country, and one's nation," how constant is her defence of the people,
the peasant, against her Republican friends. Her Republican friends were
furious with the peasant; accused him of stolidity, cowardice, want of
patriotism; accused him of having given them the Empire, with all its
vileness; wanted to take away from him the suffrage. Again and again
does George Sand take up his defence, and warn her friends of the folly
and danger of their false estimate of him. "The contempt of the masses,
there," she cries, "is the misfortune and crime of the present
moment!"[337] "To execrate the people," she exclaims again, "is real
blasphemy; the people is worth more than we are."
If the peasant gave us the Empire, says Madame Sand, it was because he
saw the parties of liberals disputing, gesticulating, and threatening to
tear one another asunder and France too; he was told _the Empire is
peace_, and he accepted the Empire. The peasant was deceived, he is
uninstructed, he moves slowly; but he moves, he has admirable virtues,
and in him, says George Sand, is our life:--
"Poor Jacques Bonhomme! accuse thee and despise thee who will; for my
part I pity thee, and in spite of thy faults I shall always love thee.
Never will I forget how, a child, I was carried asleep on thy shoulders,
how I was given over to thy care and followed thee everywhere, to the
field, the stall, the cottage. They are all dead, those good old people
who have borne me in their arms; but I remember them well, and I
appreciate at this hour, to the minutest detail, the pureness, the
kindness, the patience, the good humor, the poetry, which presided over
that rustic education amidst disasters of like kind with those which we
are undergoing now. Why should I quarrel with the peasant because on
certain points he feels and thinks differently from what I do? There are
other essential points on which we may feel eternally at one with him,--
probity and charity."[338]
Another generation of peasants had grown up since that first
revolutionary generation of her youth, and equality, as its reign
proceeded, had not deteriorated but improved them.
"They have advanced greatly in self-respect and well-being, these
peasants from twenty years old to forty: they never ask for anything.
When one meets them they no longer take off their hat. If they know you
they come up to you and hold out their hand. All foreigners who stay
with us are struck with their good bearing, with their amenity, and the
simple, friendly, and polite ease of their behavior. In presence of
people whom they esteem they are, like their fathers, models of tact and
politeness; but they have more than that mere _sentiment_ of equality
which was all that their fathers had,--they have the _idea_ of equality,
and the determination to maintain it. This step upwards they owe to
their having the franchise. Those who would fain treat them as creatures
of a lower order dare not now show this disposition to their face; it
would not be pleasant."[339]