Part 3 (2/2)

It was in August, 1833, at a dinner given by Buloz to the staff of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, that George Sand first made the personal acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his twenty-third year, and already famous through his just published poem, _Rolla_, and his earlier dramas, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Les Caprices de Marianne_. He rapidly became enamored of the author of _Lelia_, who for her part felt powerfully the attraction of his many admirable qualities, mutual enchantment leading them so far as to believe they could be the hero and heroine of a happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, addressed to her friend and correspondent Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the confidant of her previous depression and strange moods of gloom, she writes of herself as lifted out of such dangers by a happiness beyond any she had imagined, restoring youth to her heart--the happiness accorded her by the poet's society and his preference for her own. De Musset, at this time, would have given the world to have been able to make her his wife.

The story of their short-lived infatuation and of the swift-following mutual disenchantment,--a story which, says Sainte-Beuve, has become part of the romance of the nineteenth century,--is perhaps of less consequence here than in the life of De Musset,[A] in whom the over-sensitiveness of genius was not allied with the extraordinary healthy vitality which enabled George Sand to come out of the most terrible mental experiences unembittered, with the balance of her mind unshaken, and her powers unimpaired. Yet that he acquired an empire over her no other ever acquired there is much to indicate. It took her from France for a while, from her children, her friends--and the breaking of the spell set her at war, not only with him, but for a while with herself, with life, and her fellow creatures.

In the last days of 1833, she and the author of _Rolla_ started on a journey to Italy, where George Sand spent six months, and where she has laid the scene of a number of her novels: the first and best part of _Consuelo_, _La Derniere Aldini_, _Leone_, _Leoni_, _La Daniella_, and others. The spirit of that land she has caught and reproduced perhaps more successfully than any other of the many novelists who have chosen it for a frame--of Italy as the artist's native country, that is--not the Italy of political history, nor of the Medici, but the Italy that is the second home of painters, poets, and musicians. Can anything be more enjoyable, and at the same time more vividly true, than George Sand's delineations of Venice; and, in the first of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_, the pictures given of her wanderings on the sh.o.r.es of the Brenta, of Ba.s.sano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, a delicious land, till quite recently as little tourist-trodden as in 1834? What a contrast to the purely imaginary descriptions in _Lelia_, written before those beauties had appeared to her except in dreams!

From Genoa the travellers journeyed to Pisa, Florence, and thence to Venice, where first George Sand felt herself really at home in Italy.

The architecture, the simplicity of Venetian life and manners, the theatres--from the opera-houses, where Pasta and Donzelli were singing, down to the national drama of Pulchinello--the pictures, the sea, the climate, combined to make of it a place of residence so perfectly to her mind, that again and again in her letters she expresses her wish that she could bring over her children and there fix her abode.

”It is the only town I can love for its own sake,” she says of it.

”Other cities are like prisons, which you put up with for the sake of your fellow-prisoners.” This Italian journey marks a fresh stage in her artistic development, quite apart from the attendant romantic circ.u.mstances, the alleged disastrous consequences to a child of genius less wise and fortunate than herself, which has given an otherwise disproportionate notoriety to this brief episode.

George Sand was no doubt fatally in error when she persuaded herself, and even succeeded in persuading the poet's anxious mother, that she had it in her to be his guardian angel, and reform him miraculously in a short s.p.a.ce of time; and that because he had fallen in love with her she would know how to make him alter a way of life he had no abiding desire to abandon. Such a task demands a readiness not merely for self-sacrifice, but for self-suppression; and her individuality was far too p.r.o.nounced to merge itself for long in ministering to another's. She never seems to have possessed the slightest moral ascendancy over him, beyond the power of wounding him very deeply by the change in her sentiments, however much he might feel himself to blame for it.

The history of the separation of the lovers--of De Musset's illness, jealousy, and departure from Venice alone--is a thrice-told tale. Like the subject of ”The Ring and the Book,” it has been set forth, by various persons, variously interested, with correspondingly various coloring. The story, as told by George Sand in her later novel, _Elle et Lui_, is substantially the same as one related by De Musset in his _Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, published two years after these events, and in which, if it is to be regarded as reflecting personal idiosyncrasies in the slightest degree, the poet certainly makes himself out as the most insupportable of human companions. None the less did the publication of _Elle et Lui_, a quarter of a century later, provoke a savage retort from the deceased poet's brother, in _Lui et Elle_.

Finally, in _Lui_, a third novelist, Madame Colet, presented the world with a separate version of the affair from one who imagined she could have made up to the poet for what he had lost.

But it needs no deep study of human nature, or yet of these novels, to understand the impracticability of two such minds long remaining together in unity. Genius, in private life, is apt to be a torment--its foibles demanding infinite patience, forbearance, nay, affectionate blindness, in those who would minister to its happiness, and mitigate the worst results of those foibles themselves. Certainly George Sand, for a genius, was a wonderfully equable character; her ”satanic” moods showed themselves chiefly in pen and ink; her nerves were very strong, the balance of her physical and mental organization was splendidly even, as one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But the very vigor of her character, its force of self-a.s.sertion, unfitted her to be the complement to any but a very yielding nature. The direct influence a pa.s.sive, merely receptive spirit would have accepted, and gratefully, was soon felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in many ways different from her own, but with the same imperious instinct of freedom, and as little capable of playing anvil to another mind for long. He rebelled against her ascendancy, but suffered from the spell. She was no Countess Guiccioli, content to adore and be adored, and exercise an indirect power for good on a capricious lover. Her logical mind, energetic and independent, grew impatient of the seeming inconsistencies of her gifted companion; and when at last she began to perceive in them the fatal conditions of those gifts themselves, only compa.s.sion survived in her, as she thought, and compa.s.sion was cold.

How could De Musset, with such an excellent example of prudence, regular hours, good sense, calm self-possession, and ceaseless literary industry as hers before his eyes, not be stirred up to emulate such admirable qualities? But her reason made him unreasonable; the indefatigability of her pen irritated his nerves, and made him idle out of contradiction; her homilies provoked only fresh imprudences--as though he wanted to make proof of his independence whilst secretly feeling her dominion--a phenomenon with which highly nervous people will sympathize not a little, but which was perfectly inexplicable to George Sand.

His genius was of a more delicate essence than hers; he has struck, at times, a deeper note. But his nature was frailer, his muse not so easily within call, his character as intolerant of restraint as her own, but less self-sufficing; and the morbid taint of thought then prevalent, and which her natural optimism and better balanced faculties enabled her to throw off very shortly, had entered into him ineffaceably. Whether or not she brought a fresh blight on his mind, she certaintly failed to cure it.

The spring had hardly begun when De Musset was struck down by fever.

George Sand, who had previously been very ill herself, nursed him through his attack with great devotion; and in six weeks' time he was restored to health, if not to happiness. Theirs was at an end, as they recognized, and agreed to part--”for a time, perhaps, or perhaps for ever,” she wrote,--with their attachment broken but not destroyed.

It was early in April that De Musset started on his homeward journey.

George Sand saw him on his way as far as Vicenza, and ere returning to Venice, made a little excursion in the Alps, along the course of the Brenta. ”I have walked as much as four-and-twenty miles a day,” she writes to M. Boucoiran, ”and found out that this sort of exercise is very good for me, both morally and physically. Tell Buloz I will write some letters for the _Revue_, upon my pedestrian tours. I came back into Venice with only seven centimes in my pocket, otherwise I should have gone as far as the Tyrol; but the want of baggage and money obliged me to return. In a few days I shall start again, and cross over the Alps by the gorges of the Piave.”

And the spring's delights on the Alpine borders of Lombardy are described by her _con amore_, in the promised letters:--

The country was not yet in its full splendor; the fields were of a faint green, verging on yellow, and the leaves only coming into bud on the trees. But here and there the almonds and peaches in flower mixed their garlands of pink and white with the dark clumps of cypress. Through the midst of this far-spreading garden the Brenta flowed swiftly and silently over her sandy bed, between two large banks of pebbles, and the rocky _debris_ which she tears out of the heart of the Alps, and with which she furrows the plains in her days of anger. A semi-circle of fertile hills, overspread with those long festoons of twisting vine that suspend themselves from all the trees in Venetia, made a near frame to the picture; and the snowy mountain-heights, sparkling in the first rays of suns.h.i.+ne, formed an immense second border, standing, as if cut out in silver, against the solid blue of the sky.

None of these excursions, however, were ever carried very far. For the next three months she remained almost entirely stationary at Venice, her head-quarters. She had taken apartments for herself in the interior of the city, in a little low-built house, along the narrow, green, and yet limpid ca.n.a.l, close to the Ponte dei Barcaroli. ”There,” she tells us, ”alone all the afternoon, never going out except in the evening for a breath of air, working at night as well, to the song of the tame nightingales that people all Venetian balconies, I wrote _Andre_, _Jacques_, _Mattea_, and the first _Lettres d'un Voyageur_.”

None can read the latter and suppose that the suffering of the recent parting was all on one side. The poet continued to correspond with her, and the consciousness of the pain she had inflicted she was clearly not sufficiently indifferent herself to support. But neither De Musset nor any other in whom, through the ”prism of enthusiasm,” she may have seen awhile a hero of romance, was ever a primary influence on her life.

These were two. Firstly, her children, who although at a distance were seldom absent from her thoughts. Of their well-being at school and at home respectively, she was careful to keep herself informed, down to the minutest particulars, by correspondents in Paris and at Nohant, whence no opposition whatever was raised by its occupier to her prolonged absence abroad. Secondly, her art-vocation. She wrote incessantly; and independently of the pecuniary obligations to do so which she put forward, it is obvious that she had become wedded to this habit of work.

”The habit has become a faculty--the faculty a need. I have thus come to working for thirteen hours at a time without making myself ill; seven or eight a day on an average, be the task done better or worse,” she writes to M. Chatiron, from Venice, in March. Sometimes, as with _Leone Leoni_, she would complete a novel in a week; a few weeks later it was in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Such haste she afterward deprecated, and, like all other workers, she aspired to a year's holiday in which to devote herself to the study of the masterpieces of modern literature; but the convenient season for such suspension of her own productive activity never came. And whilst at Venice she found herself literally in want of money to leave it. Buloz had arranged with her that she should contribute thirty-two pages every six weeks to his periodical for a yearly stipend of 160. She had antic.i.p.ated her salary for the expenses of her Italian journey, and must acquit herself of the arrears due before she could take wing.

_Jacques_, the longest of the novels written at Venice, afforded fresh grounds to those who taxed her works with hostility to social inst.i.tutions. Without entering into the vexed question of the right of the artist in search of variety to exercise his power on any theme that may invite to its display, and of the precise bearing of ethical rules on works of imagination, it is permissible to doubt that _Jacques_, however bitter the sentiments of the author at that time regarding the marriage tie, ever seriously disturbed the felicity of any domestic household in the past or present day. It is too lengthy and too melancholy to attract modern readers, who care little to revel in the luxuries of woe, so relished by those of a former age. We cannot do better than quote the judgment p.r.o.nounced by Madame Sand herself, thirty years later, on this work of pure sentimentalism--generated by an epoch thrown into commotion by the pa.s.sionate views of romanticism--the epoch of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life weary, but by no means weary of talking. ”_Jacques_,” she observes, ”belonged to this large family of disillusioned thinkers; they had their _raison d'etre_, historical and social. He comes on the scene in the novel, already worn by deceptions; he thought to revive through his love, and he does not revive. Marriage was for him only the drop of bitterness that made the cup overflow. He killed himself to bequeath to others the happiness for which he cared not, and in which he believed not.”

_Jacques_, taken as a _plaidoyer_ against domestic inst.i.tutions, singularly misses its aim. As critics have remarked, some of the most eloquent pages are those that treat of married bliss. Our sympathies are entirely with the wronged husband against his silly little wife. It is a kindred work to _Lelia_, and its faults are the same; but whilst dealing ostensibly with real life and possible human beings it cannot, like _Lelia_, be placed apart, and retain interest as a literary curiosity.

_Andre_ is a very different piece of work and a little masterpiece of its kind. The author, in her preface, tells us how, whilst mechanically listening to the incessant chatter of the Venetian sempstresses in the next room to her own, she was struck by the resemblance between the mode of life and thought their talk betrayed, and that of the same cla.s.s of girls at La Chatre; and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of the rippling waters stirred by the gondolier's oar, of guitar and serenade, and within sight of the marble palaces, her thoughts flew back to the dark and dirty streets, the dilapidated houses, the wretched moss-grown roofs, the shrill concerts of the c.o.c.ks, cats, and children of the little French provincial town. She dreamt also of the lovely meadows, the scented hay, the little running streams, and the floral researches she had been fond of. This tenacity of her instincts was a safeguard she may have sometimes rebelled against as a chain; it was with her an essential feature, and, despite all vagaries, gave a great unity to her life.

”Venice,” she writes to M. Chatiron in June, ”with her marble staircases and her wonderful climate, does not make me forget anything that has been dear to me. Be sure that nothing in me dies. My life has its agitations; destiny pushes me different ways, but my heart does not repudiate the past. Old memories have a power none can ignore, and myself less than another. I love on the contrary to recall them, and we shall soon find ourselves together again in the old nest at Nohant.”

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