Part 5 (2/2)

Madame Sand repeatedly contemplated settling herself entirely in the country. She had no love for Paris. ”Parisian life strains our nerves and kills us in the long run,” she writes from Nohant to one of her correspondents. ”Ah, how I hate it, that centre of light! I would never set foot in it again, if the people I like would make the same resolution.” And again, speaking of her ”Black Valley, so good and so stupid,” she adds, ”Here I am always more myself than at Paris, where I am always ill, in body and in spirit.”

Paris, however, afforded greater facilities for her children's education. She had a strong desire to see her son an artist, and he was already studying painting in Delacroix's studio. Also her income at this moment did not suffice to enable her to live continuously at Nohant where, she frankly confessed, she had not yet found out how to live economically, expected as she was to keep open house, regarded as grudging and unneighborly if she did not maintain her establishment on a scale to which her resources as yet were unequal. Her expenses in the country she calculated as double those in Paris, where, as she writes to M. Chatiron,--

Everyone's independence is admirable. You invite whom you like, and when you don't wish to receive anyone you let the porter know you are not at home. Yet I hate Paris in all other respects. There I grow stout, and my mind grows thin. You know how quiet and retired my life there is, and I do not understand why you tell me, as they say in the provinces, that glory keeps me there. I have no glory, I have never sought for it, and I don't care a cigarette for it. I want to breath fresh air and live in peace. I am succeeding, but you see and you know on what conditions.

Her Paris residence, a few seasons later, she fixed in the Cour d'Orleans Rue St. Lazare, in a block of buildings one-third of which was occupied by herself and her family; another belonged to her friend, Madame Marliani, wife of the Spanish Consul, the third to Frederic Chopin.

With respect to Chopin's long and deep attachment to Madame Sand, and its requital, concerning which so much has been written, there can surely be no greater misstatement than to speak of her as having blighted his life. This last part of his life was indeed blighted, but by ill-health and consequent nervous irritability and suffering; but such mitigation as was possible he found for eight years in the womanly devotion and genial society of Madame Sand--real benefits to one whose strange and delicate individuality it was not easy to befriend--and which the breach that took place between them shortly before his death should not allow us to forget.

”Chopin,” observes Eugene Delacroix, ”belongs to the small number of those whom one can both esteem and love.” Madame Sand joined a sympathetic appreciation of the refinement of his nature, and an enthusiastic admiration of his genius--feelings she shared with his numberless female wors.h.i.+ppers--to a strength of character that lent the support no other could perhaps so fully have given, or that he would accept from no other, to the fragile, nervous, suffering tone-poet. Her sentiments towards him seem to resolve themselves into a great tenderness rather than a pa.s.sionate fervor--a placid affection for himself, and an adoration for his music.

All the time their existences, so far from having been united, flowed in different, nay divergent channels. Chopin, the idol of Paris society, moved constantly in the aristocratic and fas.h.i.+onable world, from which Madame Sand lived aloof. She for her part had heavy domestic cares and anxieties that did not touch him, and with the political party which was absorbing more and more of her energies he had no sympathy whatever.

Whether the cause were the false start she had made at the outset by her marriage, forbidding her the realization of a woman's ideal, the non-separation of the gift of her heart from that of her whole life, or whether that her masculine strength of intellect created for her serious public interests and occupations, beside which personal pleasures and pains are apt to become of secondary moment, certain it appears that with George Sand, as with many an eminent artist of the opposite s.e.x, such _affaires de coeur_ were but ripples on the sea of a large and active existence.

The year after her return from Majorca was marked by her first appearance before the public as a dramatic author. Although it was a line in which she afterwards obtained successes, as will be seen in a future chapter, the result of this initial effort, _Cosima_, a five-act drama, was not encouraging. It was acted at the Theatre Francais in the spring of 1840, and proved a failure. It betrays no insufficient sense of dramatic effect, nor lack of the means for producing it, but decided clumsiness in the adaptation of these means to that end. The plot and personages recall those of _Indiana_, with the important differences that the _beau role_ of the piece falls to the husband, and that the scene is transported back to Florence in the Middle Ages--an undoubted error, as giving to a play essentially modern and French in its complexities of sentiment and motive a strong local coloring of a past time and another people, making the whole seem unreal. It has a psychological subject which Emile Augier or Dumas _fils_ would know how to handle dramatically; but as treated by George Sand, we are perpetually being led to antic.i.p.ate too much in the way of action, to have our expectations dissipated the next moment. A wet blanket of disappointment on this head dampens any other satisfaction that the merits of the play might otherwise afford.

Hitherto she had continued to write regularly for the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. As her revolutionary opinions became more p.r.o.nounced, they began to find utterance in her romances. Her conversion by Michel had not only been complete, but the disciple had outstripped the master. The study of the communistic theories of Pierre Leroux had familiarized her with the speculations in social science of those who at this time were devoting their attention to criticising the existing social organization, and seeking, and sometimes imagining they had found, the secret of creating a better. George Sand's strong admiration for the writings of Leroux, always praised by her in the highest terms, strikes us now as extravagant, but was shared to some extent by not a few leading men of the time, such as Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine. Her intellect had eagerly followed this bold and earnest pioneer in new-discovered worlds of thought; ”I do not say it is the last word of humanity, but, so far, it is its most advanced expression,” she states of his philosophy. The study of it had brought a clearness into her own views, due, probably, much more to the action of her own mind upon the novel ideas suggested than to the lucidity of a system of social science as yet undetermined in some of its main points.

She writes, when looking back on this period from a long distance of time,--

After the despairs of my youth, I was governed by too many illusions. Morbid scepticism was succeeded in me by too much kindliness and ingenuousness. A thousand times over I was duped by dreams of an archangelic fusion of the opposing forces in the great strife of ideas.

Her novel _Horace_, written for the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, was rejected--as subversive of law and order--by the editor, except on condition of alterations which she declined to make.

After this temporary rupture with Buloz, Madame Sand's services were largely appropriated by the _Revue Independante_, a new journal founded in 1840 by her friends Pierre Leroux and Louis Viardot, in conjunction with whose names hers appears on the t.i.tle page as leading contributor.

For this periodical no theories could be too advanced, no fict.i.tious ill.u.s.trations too audacious, and to its pages accordingly was _Horace_ transferred. Among the secondary characters in this novel figure a young couple, immaculate otherwise in principle and in conduct, but who as converts to St. Simonism have dispensed with the ordinary legal sanction to their union. Perhaps a more solid objection to its insertion in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ was the picture introduced of the _emcute_ of June 1832, painted in heroic colors. Both these features, however, are purely incidental. The main interest and the real strength of the book lie in a remarkable study of character-development--that of the chief personage, Horace. It is a cleverly painted portrait of a type that reappears, with slight modifications, in all ages; a moral charlatan, who half imposes on himself, and entirely for a while on other people. A would-be hero, genius, and chivalrous lover, he has none of the genuine qualities needed for sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of temperament, he is capable of nothing beyond a short course of successful affectation. The imposition breaking down at last, he sinks helplessly into the unheroic mediocrity of position and pretension for which alone he is fit.

A veritable attempt at a Socialist novel is the _Compagnon du Tour de France_ written in the course of 1840, which must surely be ranked as one of the weakest of George Sand's productions. Exactly the converse of _Horace_ may be said of this book. In the former, those most repelled by the revolutionary doctrines flas.h.i.+ng out here and there, will yet be struck and interested by the masterly piece of character-painting that makes of the novel a success. The utmost fanaticism for the ideas ventilated in the _Compagnon du Tour de France_ can reconcile no reader to the dullness and unreality of the story which make of it a failure.

For her socialism itself, as set forth in her writings, dispa.s.sionate examination of what she actually inculcated, leaves but little warrant, in the state of progress now reached, for echoing the mighty outcry raised against it at the time. No doubt she thought that a complete reorganization of society on a new basis was eminently to be desired.

But what she definitely advocated was, first, free education for the poor, and secondly, some fairer adjustment of the relations to each other of capital and labor. As to the first, authority has already sanctioned her opinion; the second question, if unsettled, has become a first preoccupation with statesmen and philosophers of all denominations in the present day.

With regard to the complete solution of the problem, she leaves her socialist heroes, as she herself felt, in doubt and perplexity. There was something in the schemes and doctrines she conscientiously approved, irreconcilable with her artist-nature--a materialistic tendency which clashed with her poetical instincts. When the stern demagogue Michel denounced the whole tribe of artists as a corrupting influence, enervating to the courage and will of a nation, she rose up energetically in defense of the confraternity to which she was born:--

Will you tell me, pray, what you mean, with your declamations against artists? Cry out against them as much as you please, but respect art. Oh, you Vandal! I like that stern sectarian who wants to dress Taglioni in a stuff-gown and _sabots_, and set Liszt's hands to turn the machinery of a wine-press, and who yet, as he lies on the gra.s.s, finds the tears come into his eyes at the least linnet's song, and who makes a disturbance in the theatre to stop Oth.e.l.lo from murdering Malibran! The austere citizen would suppress artists as social excrescences that absorb too much of the sap; but this gentleman is fond of vocal music, and so will spare the singers. Let us hope that painters will find one among your strong heads who appreciates painting, and won't wall up all studio windows. And as for the poets, they are your cousins; and you don't despise their forms of language and their rhythmical mechanism when you want to make an impression on the idle crowd. You will go to them to take lessons in metaphor, and how to make use of it.

Unfortunately for the cause of the superiority of antiquity, whenever you go to hear Berlioz's _Funeral March_, the least that can happen to you will be to confess that this music is rather better than what they used to give us in Sparta, when we served under Lycurgus; you will think that Apollo, displeased to see us sacrificing to Pallas exclusively, has played us a trick in giving lessons to that _Babylonian_, so that by the exercise of a magnetic and disastrous power over us, he may lead our spirits astray.

And she would prove to the demagogue, out of his own mouth, that everything cannot be reduced to ”bread and shoes all round,” as the grand desideratum. Give these to men, it will not suffice. The eloquent orator instinctively seeks besides to impart ”hallowed emotions and mystic enthusiasm to those who toil and sweat--he teaches them to hope, to dream of G.o.d, to take courage and lift themselves above the sickening miseries of human conditions by the thought of a future, chimerical it may be, but strengthening and sublime.”

For a period, however, she was too fascinated by the new ideas to judge them, and she straightway sought in her art a means of popularizing them. ”These ideas,” she writes in a later preface to her socialist novel, _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, ”at which, as yet but a small number of conservative spirits had taken alarm, had, as yet, only really begun to sprout in a small number of attentive, laborious minds. The government, so long as no actual form of political application was a.s.sumed, was not to be disquieted by theories, and let every man make his own, put forth his dream, and innocently construct his city of the future, by his own fire-side, in the garden of his imagination.”

She was aware that her readers thought her novels getting more and more tedious, in proportion as she communicated to her fict.i.tious heroes and heroines the pre-occupations of her brain, and that she was thus stepping out of the domain of art. But she affirmed she could never help writing of whatever was absorbing her thoughts and feelings at the moment, and must take her chance of boring the public. Fortunately for _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, nature and human nature are here allowed to claim the larger share of our attention, and philosophy is a secondary feature. The scene is laid in the picturesque Marche country on the confines of Berry, a day's journey from Nohant, and we are glad to linger with her along the rocky banks of the Creuse, or among the ruined castles of Crozant and Chateaubrun. The novel contains much that is original and admirable in the drawing of characters of the most opposite cla.s.ses.

Finally, in _Le Meunier d'Angibault_,[C] written as was the last-mentioned work some four or five years later (1844-45), but which may be named here, as making up with _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_ the trio of ”socialist” novels, the _Tendenz_ does not interfere to the detriment of the artistic plan of the book. In it the romantic elements of the remote country nook she inhabited are cleverly brought together, without departing too widely from probability. The dilapidated castle, the picturesque mill, the traditions of brigandage two generations ago, all these were realities familiar to her notice. The painting of the country and country people is masterly; and there is not a pa.s.sage in the book to offend the taste of the most scrupulous reader. Nor can it be justly impugned on the ground of inculcating disturbing political principles. The personages, in their preference of poverty and obscurity to rank and wealth, may, in the judgment of some, think and conduct themselves like chimerical dreamers, but their actions, however quixotic, concern themselves alone.

But, previous to either of the two novels last named, she had presented the world with a more ambitious work, whose merit was to compel universal acknowledgment--the most important, in fact, she had produced for eight years.

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