Part 6 (1/2)
CHAPTER VII.
CONSUELO--HOME LIFE AT NOHANT.
CONSUELO first appeared in the _Revue Independante_, 1842-43. This n.o.ble book might not be inaptly described as,
--a whole which, irregular in parts, Yet left a grand impression on the mind.
Its reckless proportions naturally ”shocked the connoisseurs” among literary critics, especially in her own land; but nevertheless it became, and deservedly, one of her most popular productions, and did more than any other single novel she ever wrote to spread her popularity abroad. If _Indiana_, _Valentine_, and _Lelia_ had never been written to create the fame of George Sand, _Consuelo_ would have done so, and may be said to have established it over again, on a better and more lasting basis. Upon so well-known a work lengthened comment here would be superfluous. Originally intended for a novelette,--the opening chapters appear in the _Revue_ under the modest heading, _Consuelo_, _conte_,--the beginning was so successful that the author was urged to extend her plan beyond its first proposed limits. The novel is an ephemeral form of art, no doubt, but it is difficult to conceive of a stage of social and intellectual progress when the first part of _Consuelo_ will cease to be read with interest and delight.
The heroine once transported from the lagunes of Venice to the frontier of Bohemia and the castle of Rudolstadt, the character of the story becomes less naturalistic; the storyteller loses herself somewhat in subterranean pa.s.sages and the mazes of adventure generally. She wrote on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new horizons which the artistic and historical researches her work required kept opening to her view. But the powerful contrast between the two pictures,--of bright, suns.h.i.+ny, free, sensuous, careless Venetian folk-life, and of the stern gloom of the mediaeval castle, where the more spiritual consolations of existence come into prominence--is singularly effective and original. So also is the charming way in which an incident in the boyhood of young Joseph Haydn is treated by her fancy, in the episode of Consuelo's flight from the castle, when he becomes her fellow-traveller, and their adventures across country are told with such zest and _entrain_, in pages where life-sketches of character, such as the good-natured, self-indulgent canon, the violent, abandoned Corilla, make us forget the wildest improbabilities of the fiction itself. The concluding portion of the book, again entirely different in frame, with its delineation of art-life in a fas.h.i.+onable capital, Vienna, is as true as it is brilliant. It teems with suggestive ideas on the subject of musical and dramatic art, and with excellently drawn types. The relations of professional and amateur, the contradictions and contentions to which, in a woman's nature, the rival forces of love and of an artistic vocation may give rise, have never been better portrayed in any novel. The heroine, Consuelo, is of course an ideal character: her achievements partake of the marvellous; and there are digressions in the book which are diffuse in the extreme; but nowhere is the author's imagination more attractively displayed and her style more engaging. The tone throughout is n.o.ble and pure. To look on _Consuelo_ as an agreeable story merely is to overlook the elevation of the moral standard of the book, in which much of its power resides. It marks more strongly than _Mauprat_ the change that had come over the spirit of George Sand's compositions.
In the continuation, _La Comtesse de Rodolstadt_, which followed immediately in the _Revue Independante_, 1843, the novelist strays further and further from reality--the _terra firma_ on which her fancy improvises such charming dances. Here she only touches the ground now and then, and between whiles her imagination asks ours to accompany it on the most extraordinary flights. As a novel of adventure, it is written with unflagging spirit; and in the rites and doctrines of the _Illuminati_, an idealization of the feature of the secret sects of the last century, she found a new medium of expression for her sentiments regarding the present abuses of society and the need of thorough renovation. Secret societies, at that time, were extremely numerous and active among the Republican workers in France. Madame Sand seems thoroughly to have appreciated their dangers, and has expressly stated that she was no advocate of such sects; that though under a tyranny, such as that which oppressed Germany in the times of which she wrote, they may be a necessity, elsewhere they are an abuse if not a crime.
”The custom indeed I have never regarded as applicable for good in our time and our country; I have never believed that it can bring forth anything in future but a dictators.h.i.+p, and the dictatorial principle is one I have never accepted.” (_Histoire de ma Vie._)
But the romance of the subject was irresistibly tempting to her inventive faculty. ”Tell Leroux to send me some more books on freemasonry, if he can find any,” she writes to a correspondent at Paris whilst working at the _Comtesse de Rudolstadt_ at Nohant; ”I am plunged into it over head and ears. Tell him also that he has there thrown me into an abyss of follies and absurdities, but that I am dabbling about courageously though prepared to extract nothing but nonsense.”
For the musical miracles which it is given to Madame Sand's heroes and heroines to perform at a trifling cost, she may well at this time have come to regard them as almost in the natural order. She had received her second, and her best musical education through the contemplation of original musical genius, of the rarest quality, among her most intimate friends, her constant guests at Paris and Nohant. The vocal and instrumental feats of Consuelo and Count Albert themselves are not more astonis.h.i.+ng than the actual recorded achievements of Liszt, p.r.o.nounced a perfect _virtuoso_ at twelve years old--and no wonder! The boy had so carried away his accompanyists, the band of the Italian opera at Paris, by his performance of the solo in an orchestral piece, that when the moment came for them to strike in, one and all forgot to do so, but remained silent, petrified with amazement. And Liszt when in the full development of his genius, had, as we have seen, been the art-comrade of George Sand; he had spent the whole of the summer season of 1837 at Nohant, transcribing Beethoven's symphonies for the piano-forte whilst she wrote her romances; she was familiar with his marvellous improvisations. In her ”Trip to Chamounix” (_Lettres d'un Voyageur_, No.
VI.) she has drawn a vivid picture of their extraordinary effect, describing his unrehea.r.s.ed organ recital in the Cathedral of Freibourg to his little party of travelling companions. Nor was the charm of Chopin's gift less magical. The well-known anecdotes related on this subject are like so many glimpses into a musical paradise. Madame Sand has given us an amusing one herself. It is evening in her _salon_ at Paris. At the piano is Chopin; and she, her son, Eugene Delacroix, and the Polish poet Mickiewicz sit listening whilst the composer, in an inspired mood, is extemporizing in the sublimest manner to the little circle. All are in silent raptures; when the servant breaks in with the alarm--the house is on fire. They rush to the room where the flames are, and succeed after a time in extinguis.h.i.+ng them. Then they perceive that the poet Mickiewicz is missing. On returning to the _salon_ they find him as they left him, rapt, entranced, unconscious of the stir around him, of the scare that had driven all the rest from the room. ”He did not even know we had gone and left him alone. He was listening to Chopin, he had continued to hear him.” Nor could the bewitched poet be brought down from the clouds that evening. He remained deaf to their banter, to Madame Sand's laughing admonition, ”Next time I am with you when the house takes fire, I must begin by putting you into a safe place, for I see you would get burnt like a mere f.a.ggot, before you knew what was going on.”
Eugene Delacroix, one of Madame Sand's earliest and most valued friends in the artist-world, and one of the many with whom she enjoyed along and unclouded friends.h.i.+p, gives in his letters some agreeable pictures of life at Nohant, during his visits there in the successive summers of 1845 and 1846:--
When not a.s.sembled together with the rest for dinner, breakfast, a game of billiards, or a walk, you are in your room reading, or lounging on your sofa. Every moment there come in through the window open on the garden, ”puffs of music” from Chopin, working away on one side, which mingle with the song of nightingales and the scent of the roses.
He describes a quiet, monastic-like existence, simple and studious: ”We have not even the distraction of neighbors and friends around. In this country everybody stays at home, to look after his oxen and his land.
One would become a fossil in a very short time.”
The greatest event for the visitor was a village-festival--a wedding or a Saint's day--when the rustic dances went on under the tall elms to the roaring of the bagpipes. Peasant youths and peasant maids joined hands in the _bourree_, the characteristic dance of the country; now, we fear, surviving in tradition only, but then still popular. The great artist was fired to paint a ”Ste. Anne,” patron-saint of Nohant, in honor of the place, but his work progressed but slowly. He writes in August, 1846:--”I am frightfully lazy, I can do nothing, I hardly read; and yet the days pa.s.s too quickly, for I must soon renounce this _vie de chanoine_, and return into the furnace of stirring ideas, good and bad.
In Berry they have very few ideas, but they do just as well without.”
Then he adds, ”Chopin has been playing Beethoven to me divinely well.
That is worth all aestheticism.”
Little theatrical entertainments of an original kind, presided over by Madame Sand, and carried out by herself, her children, and their young friends, became in time a prominent feature of life at Nohant. She thus describes their nature and commencements:--
During the long evenings I took it into my head to devise for my family theatricals on the old Italian pattern--_commedia dell'arte_--plays in which the dialogue, itself extemporized, yet follows the outlines of a written plan, placarded behind the scenes. It is something like the charades acted in society, the development of which depends on the talent contributed by the actors. It was with these that we began, but little by little the word of the charade disappeared. We acted wild _saynetes_, afterwards comedies of plot and intrigue, finally dramas of event and emotion.
All began with pantomime; and this was Chopin's invention. He sat at the piano and extemporized, whilst the young people acted scenes in dumb show and danced comic ballets. These charming improvisations turned the children's heads and made their legs nimble. He led them just as he chose, making them pa.s.s, according to his fancy, from the amusing to the severe, from burlesque to solemnity--now graceful, now impa.s.sioned. We invented all kinds of costumes, so as to play different characters in succession. No sooner did the artist see them appear than he adapted his theme and rhythm to the parts wonderfully. This would be repeated for two or three evenings; after which the _maestro_, departing for Paris, would leave us quite excited, exalted, determined not to let the spark be lost with which he had electrified us.
Chopin was possessed of much dramatic talent himself, and was an admirable mimic. When a boy it had been said of him that he was born to be a great actor. His capacity for facial expressions was something extraordinary; he often amused his friends by imitations of fellow-musicians, reproducing their manner and gestures to the life; so well as actually on more than one occasion to take in the spectator.
Madame Sand thus gives account of the even tenor of her way, in a letter of September, 1845:--
I have been in Paris till June, and since then am at Nohant until the winter, as usual; for henceforward my life is ruled as regularly as music paper. I have written two or three novels, one of which is just going to appear.
My son is still thin and delicate, but otherwise well. He is the best being, the gentlest, most equable, industrious, simple-minded, and straightforward ever seen. Our characters, like our hearts, agree so well that we can hardly live a day apart. He is entering his twenty-third year, Solange her eighteenth. We have our ways of merriment, not noisy, but sustained, which bring our ages nearer together, and when we have been working hard all the week we allow ourselves, by way of a grand holiday, to go and eat our cake out of doors some way off, in a wood or an old ruin, with my brother, who is like a st.u.r.dy peasant, full of fun and good nature, and who dines with us every day, seeing that he lives not two miles off.
Such are our grand pranks.