Mary s.e.xton, Who pleased many a man and never vexed one,[175]
she did fulfil the primal duty of her s.e.x, 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 _Beatrix_ 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 pa.s.sion, 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 s.e.xual revolt, ill.u.s.trated by such novels as _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lelia_, and _Jacques_. The second is that of _illumine_ mysticism and semi-political theorising, to which _Spiridion_, _Consuelo_, _La Comtesse de Rudolstadt_, and others belong. The third, one of a certain _apais.e.m.e.nt_, when the author had finally settled at her country-house of Nohant in Berry, turns to studies of rural life: _La Pet.i.te Fadette_, _Francois 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-Dore_, _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 _Lelia_, and the "period of appeas.e.m.e.nt" 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 _Lelia_ 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-Dore_ 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 circ.u.mstance 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, pa.s.sably 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 n.o.body in _Indiana_ except perhaps for the husband, who has the sense to die early.
[Sidenote: _Lelia._]
_Lelia_, 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 Lelia--a _femme incomprise_, if not incomprehensible; Stenio, 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-n.o.bility 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 prost.i.tutes." 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-gla.s.s 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 G.o.dwin 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 Lelia, 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 Lelia, with a carbonaro att.i.tude of political revolutionary and free-thinking _illumine_. 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 Stenio 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 Stenio, 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. Lelia has a sister, Pulcherie, 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 Lelia is--as her plain-spoken sister points out after the catastrophe--herself really responsible, Stenio is induced, during the excitement of an _al fresco_ fete 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_. Lelia reproaches him (which she has not the least right to do), and he devotes himself entirely to Pulcherie (La Zinzolina is her professional name) and her group of n.o.ble 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.
Lelia becomes an abbess, Stenio 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 dest.i.tute of the eas.e.m.e.nts 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 s.e.x ages before). Counter-jumpers like Thackeray"s own Pogson worshipped "the n.o.ble poet"; boys of n.o.bler 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.s 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 _Lelia_.
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 pa.s.ses 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, Amelie, 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 Amelie (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 Amelie--_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 cla.s.sed 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 Stenio and Trenmor.
Stenio 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, Sh.e.l.ley, the best of Lamennais and the best of Hugo excite in me nothing but a pa.s.sionate 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 k.o.c.k, 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-Levy 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 c.o.xcombical 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 n.o.ble 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 t.i.tle 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 grat.i.tude 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, Pollnitz, 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 Amelie 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 _ma.s.sacrant_ 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 pa.s.ses 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 a.n.a.lysis of these books, but is also so soft-hearted as to feel slightly _froisse_ 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 a.s.sisted.
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 Stenio; 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 f.a.n.n.y Burney, or else, like the other "George" and Charlotte Bronte, 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 cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sages 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 tete_ 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 _fiancee_. 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 a.s.sists; 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 _cure_; 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.e.xual 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 Stenio 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 Pet.i.te Fadette_.]
The most popular of these, the prettiest again, the most of a _bergerie-berquinade-conte-de-fees_, is no doubt _La Pet.i.te 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 t.i.tania"s lower-cla.s.s 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 exact.i.tude 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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-t.i.tles, might have caused the book to be named _La Pet.i.te 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 _precis_--it is nothing but the story of a journey in which the travellers get benighted, and which ends in a marriage. Speaking a.n.a.lytically, 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.