Part 3 (1/2)
CHAPTER IV.
LeLIA.--ITALIAN JOURNEY.
It was less than two years since she had come up to the capital, to seek her fortunes there in literature. Aurore Dudevant, hereafter to be spoken of as George Sand (for she made her adopted name more her own than that she had borne hitherto, and became George Sand for her private friends as well as for the public,) found herself raised to eminence among the eminent. And it was at an exceptionally brilliant epoch in French imaginative literature that the distinction had been won. Such a burst of talent as that which signalized the opening years of Louis Philippe's reign is unexampled in French literary history. With Hugo, Dumas, De Musset, Balzac, not to mention lesser stars, the author of _Indiana_ and _Valentine_, although a woman, was acknowledged as worthy to rank. The artist in her, a disturbing element in her inner life which had driven her out of the spiritual bondage and dest.i.tution of a petty provincial environment to secure for herself freedom and expansion, had justified the audacity of the move by a triumphant artistic success.
From this time onward her artistic faculty dominated her life, often, probably, unknown to herself an invincible force of instinct she obeyed, whilst a.s.signing, in all good faith, other motives for her course of action, and for real or apparent inconsequences, that have been constantly misrepresented and misunderstood.
So sudden and abrupt a change would have turned all heads but the strongest. Publishers competed with one another to secure her next work.
Buloz, proprietor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, engaged her to write regularly for his periodical, to which, for the next ten years, she never ceased to be a regular and extensive contributor. Although the scale of remuneration was not then very high she was clearly secure, so long as she allowed nothing to interfere with her literary work, of earning a sufficient income for her own needs. She had learnt the importance of pecuniary independence, and never pretended to despise the reward of her industry. To luxury she was indifferent, but the necessity of strict economy was a burden she was impatient of; she liked to have plenty to give away, and was always excessively liberal to the poor. Her little dwelling on the Quai Malplaquet was no longer the hermitage of an anonymous writer of no account. The great in art and letters, leading critics, such as Sainte-Beuve and Gustave Planche, came eager to seek her acquaintance, and delighting to honor the obscure student of a year ago.
Writing to M. Boucoiran after her return to Paris in December, 1832, she describes her altered position:--
All day long I am beset with visitors, who are not all entertaining. It is a calamity of my profession, which I am partly obliged to bear. But in the evening I shut myself up with my pens and ink, Solange, my piano, and a fire. With all these I pa.s.s some right pleasant hours. No noise but the sounds of a harp, coming I know not whence, and of the playing of a fountain under my window.
This is highly poetical--pray don't make game of me!
There was another side to her success. Fame brought trials and annoyances that fell with double severity on her as a woman. Her door was besieged by a troop of professional beggars, impostors, impertinent idlers, and inquisitive newsmongers. Jealousy and ill-will, inevitably attendant on sudden good fortune such as hers, busied themselves with direct calumny and insidious misrepresentation. No statement so unfounded, so wildly improbable about her, but it obtained circulation and credit. Till the end of her life she remained the centre of a cloud of myths, many, to the present day, accepted as gospel. People insisted on identifying her with the heroines of her novels. Incidents, personal descriptions, nay, whole letters extracted from these novels will be found literally transcribed into alleged biographies of herself and her friends, as her own statement of matters of fact. Now, though the spirit of her life is strongly and faithfully represented by her fiction taken as a whole, those who would read in any special novel the literal record of any of the special events of her existence cannot be too much on their guard. Whatever the material under treatment, George Sand must retouch, embellish, transform, artist-fas.h.i.+on, as her genius shall dictate, till often little resemblance is left between the original and the production it has done no more than suggest. Romance and reality are so fused together in these apparent outpourings of spirit that her nearest friends were at a loss how to separate them. As an actress into many a favorite part, so could she throw herself into her favorite characters; but seldom if ever will much warrant be found in actual fact for identifying these creations with their creatress.
How, indeed, could so many-sided a nature as hers be truly represented in a single novel? Her rare physical and mental energies enabled her to combine a life of masculine intellectual activity with the more highly emotional life of a woman, and with vigilance in her maternal cares.
Maurice was placed in the spring of 1833 at the College Henri IV., at Paris; thus she had now both son and daughter near her, and watched indefatigably over them, their childish illnesses and childish amus.e.m.e.nts, their moral and intellectual training absorbing a large share of her time and attention. Heine, a friendly visitor at her house, says:--
I have often been present for hours whilst she gave her children a lesson in French, and it is a pity that the whole of the French Academy could not have been present too, as it is quite certain that they might have derived great profit from it.
Not all the distractions of fame and work, of pa.s.sionate pleasure or pa.s.sionate sorrow, ever relaxed her active solicitude for the present and future welfare of her two young children. ”They give me the only real joys of my life,” she repeats again and again.
_Lelia_, begun immediately after _Valentine_ was published in the spring of 1833, and created an immense sensation. Hailed by her admirers as a sign of an accession of power, of power exerted in quite a new direction, it brought down on the writer's head a storm of hostile criticism, as a declared enemy of religion and domestic morality--enhancing her celebrity not a little.
_Lelia_, a lyrical novel--an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose, stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions of poetic form, which are the true conditions of so much lat.i.tude.
”Manfred” and ”Alastor” are fables not further removed from real life than is _Lelia_. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a child. There is no action. The interest is not in the characters and what they do, but in what they say. The declamatory style, then so popular, is one the taste for which has so completely waned that _Lelia_ will find comparatively few readers in the present day, fewer who will not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps whose morality, however weak, will be seriously shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering on the perilous confines of the sublime and the ludicrous.
_Lelia_, a female Faust or Manfred, a mysterious muse-like heroine, who one night sleeps on the heathery mountain-side, the next displays the splendor of a queen in palaces and fairy-like villas; her sorely tried and hapless lover, Stenio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his own accompaniment on the harp, and lingers the night long among Alpine precipices brooding over the abyss; Trenmor, the returned gentleman convict and Apostle of the Carbonari, whose soul has been refreshed, made young and regenerated at the galleys; and the mad Irish priest, Magnus, are impossible personages, inviting to easy ridicule, and neither wisdom nor folly from their lips is likely to beguile the ears of the present generation.
It is no novel, but a poetical essay, fantastically conceived and executed with the _sans gene_ of an improvisatore. For those who admire the genius of George Sand its interest as a psychological revelation remains unabated. Into _Lelia_, she owns, she put more of her real self than into any other of her books--of herself, that is, and her state of mind at the dawn of a period of moral disturbance and revolt. All must continue to recognize there an extraordinary exhibition of poetical power and musical style. As a work of art George Sand has herself p.r.o.nounced it absurd, yet she always cherished for it a special predilection, and, as will be seen, took the trouble to rewrite it some years later, when in a happier and healthier frame of mind than that which inspired this unique and most characteristic composition.
The note of despair struck in _Lelia_, the depth of bitter feeling, the capacity for mental and moral speculation and suffering it seemed to disclose, astounded many of her familiar acquaintance. ”_Lelia_ is a fancy-type,” so writes to the author her friend and neighbor in Berry, Jules Neraud, an ardent naturalist, whose botanical and entomological pursuits she had often shared: ”it is not like you--you who are merry, dance the _bourree_, appreciate lepidoptera, do not despise puns, who are not a bad needlewoman, and make very good preserves. Is it possible you should have thought so much, felt so much, without anyone having any idea of it?”
_Lelia_ was certainly the expression of a new phase in her mind's history, a moral crisis she could not escape, which was all the more severe for her having, as she remarks, reached her thirtieth year without having opened her eyes to the realities of life. Till the time of her coming to Paris, for very dearth of outward impressions, she had lived chiefly in dreams, the life of all others most favorable to the prolongation of ignorance and credulity. The liberty and activity she had enjoyed for the last two years were fatal to Utopian theories.
It was not only the bitterness that springs from disenchantment in individuals, the sense of the miserable insufficiency of human love to satisfy her spiritual aspirations producing ”that widely concluding unbelief which,” as her sister in greatness has said, ”we call knowledge of the world, but which is really disappointment in you and in me.”
George Sand was one to whom scepticism was intolerable. Pessimistic doctrines were fatal to her mind's equilibrium, and private experience and outward intellectual influences were driving her to distrust all objects of her previous wors.h.i.+p, human and divine. The moment was one when the most fundamental social and religious principles were being called in question.
”Nothing in my old beliefs,” she writes, ”was sufficiently formulated in me, from a social point of view, to help me to struggle against this cataclysm; and in the religious and socialistic theories of the moment I did not find light enough to contend with the darkness.” The poet's creed, with which her mind had hitherto rested satisfied, was shaken, and appeared to prove a false one. She was staggered by the infinity of evil, misery, and injustice, which dwellers in great cities are not allowed to forget, the problem of humanity, the eternal mystery of suffering and wrong predominant in a world on the beneficence of whose Supreme Power all her faiths were founded.
Her mental revolt and suffering found vent in _Lelia_, which it was an immense relief to her to write. Characteristic as an exhibition of feeling and of mastery of language, it is not in the least typical of her fiction. Yet, but for _Lelia_, and its successor _Jacques_, it is impossible to point to a work of hers that would ever have lastingly stamped her, in the public mind, as an expounder of dangerous theories.
In _Lelia_, however, which is strongly imbued with Byronic coloring, she had chosen to pose somewhat as the proud angel in rebellion; and the immediate effect of hostile criticism was to confirm her in the position taken up. Neither _Lelia_ nor _Jacques_ combined the elements of lasting popularity with those of instant success; but they roused a stir and strife which created an impression of her as a writer systematically inimical to religion and marriage--an impression almost ludicrously at variance with facts, taking her fiction as a whole, but which has only recently begun to give way, in this country, to a juster estimate of its tendencies.
The morality of _Lelia_, which it is rather difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de Feuillide, of the _Europe litteraire_, it was warmly defended by M.
Gustave Planche, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The war of words grew so hot between them that a challenge and encounter were the result--surely unique in the annals of duelling. The swords of the critics fortunately proved more harmless than their words.
From the morbid depression that had tormented her mind and imagination, and has its literary memorial in _Lelia_, she was to find a timely, though but a temporary rescue, in the charm of a new acquaintance--the delighting society of a poetic mind of an order not inferior to her own.