"But what the theatre can never reproduce," laments Madame Sand, "is the majesty of the frame—the mountain of sheaves solemnly approaching, drawn by three pairs of enormous oxen, the whole adorned with flowers, with fruit, and with fine little children perched upon the top of the last sheaves."
Henceforward a good deal of her time and interest continued to be absorbed by these dramatic compositions. But though mostly eliciting during her lifetime a gratifying amount of public favor and applause, the best of them cannot for an instant be placed in the same high rank as her novels. For with all her wide grasp of the value of dramatic art and her exact appreciation of the strength and weakness of the acting world, her plays remain, to great expectations, uniformly disappointing. Her specialty in fiction lies in her favorite art of analyzing and putting before us, with extreme clearness, the subtlest ramifications, the most delicate intricacies of feeling and thought. A stage audience has its eyes and ears too busy to give its full attention to the finer complications of sentiment and motive; or, at least, in order to keep its interest alive and its understanding clear, an accentuation of outline is needed, which she neglects even to seek.
Her assertion, that the niceties of emotion are sufficient to found a good play upon, no one now will dream of disputing. But for this an art of execution is needed of which she had not the instinct. The action is insufficient, or rather, the sense of action is not conveyed. The slightness of plot—a mere thread in most instances—requires that the thread shall at least be never allowed to drop. But she cuts or slackens it perpetually, long arguments and digressions intervening, and the dialogue, whose monotony is unrelieved by wit, nowhere compensates for the limited interest of the action. Awkward treatment is but half felt when subject and situations are dramatically strong; but plays with so airy and impalpable a basis as these need to be sustained by the utmost perfection of construction, concision and polish of dialogue.
Her novel Mauprat has many dramatic points, and she received a score of applications for leave to adapt it to the stage. She preferred to prepare the version herself, and it was played in the winter of 1853-4, with moderate success. But it suffers fatally from comparison with its original. An extreme instance is Flaminio (1854), a protracted drama, drawn by Madame Sand from her novelette Teverino. This is a fantasy-piece whose audacity is redeemed, as are certain other blemishes, by the poetic suggestiveness of the figure of Madeline, the bird-charmer; whilst the picturesque sketch of Teverino, the idealized Italian bohemian, too indolent to turn his high natural gifts to any account, has proved invaluable to the race of novelists, who are not yet tired of reproducing it in large. The work is one addressed mainly to the imagination.
In the play we come down from the clouds; the poetry is gone, taste is shocked, fancy uncharmed, the improbabilities become grotesque, and the whole is distorted and tedious. Madame Sand's personages are never weary of analyzing their sentiments. Her flowing style, so pleasant to read, carries us swiftly and easily through her dissertations in print, before we have time to tire of them. On the stage such colloquies soon appear lengthy and unnatural. The climax of absurdity is reached in Flaminio, where we find the adventurer expatiating to the man of the world on "the divinity of his essence."
There is scarcely a department of theatrical literature in which Madame Sand does not appear as an aspirant. She was a worshipper of Shakespeare, acknowledging him as the king of dramatic writers. For her attempt to adapt "As You Like It" to suit the tastes of a Parisian audience, she disarms criticism by a preface in the form of a letter to M. Régnier, of the Comédie Française, prefixed to the printed play. Here she says plainly that to resolve to alter Shakespeare is to resolve to murder, and that she aims at nothing more than at giving the French public some idea of the original. In "As You Like It" the license of fancy taken is too wide for the piece to be safely represented to her countrymen, since it must jar terribly on "that French reason which," remarks Madame Sand, "we are so vain of, and which deprives us of so many originalities quite as precious as itself." The fantastic, which had so much attraction for her (possibly a result of her part German origin), is a growth that has hard work to flourish on French soil. The reader will remember the fate of Weber's Freischütz, outrageously hissed when first produced at Paris in its original form. Nine days later it was reproduced, having been taken to pieces and put together again by M. Castil-Blaze, and thus as Robin des Bois it ran for 357 nights. The reckless imagination that distinguishes the Shakespearian comedy and does not shrink before the introduction of a lion and a serpent into the forest of Arden, and the miraculous and instantaneous conversion of the wretch Oliver into a worthy suitor for Celia, needed to be toned down for acceptance by the Parisians. But Madame Sand was less fortunate than M. Castil-Blaze. Her version, produced at the Théâtre Français, in 1856, failed to please, although supported by such actors as Delaunay, Arnold-Plessy, and Favart. Macready, who had made Madame Sand's acquaintance in 1845, when he was giving Shakespearian performances in Paris, and whom she greatly admired, dedicating to him her little theatrical romance Le Château des Désertes, was present at this representation and records it as a failure. But of her works for the stage, which number over a score, few like her Comme il vous plaira missed making some mark at the time, the prestige of her name and the exceptionally favorable circumstances under which they were produced securing more than justice for their intrinsic merit. It was natural that she should over-estimate their value and continue to add to their number. These pieces would be carefully rehearsed on the little stage in the house at Nohant, often with the aid of leading professional actors; and there, at least, the success was unqualified.
Her ingenious novel Les Beaux Messieurs Bois Doré, dramatized with the aid of Paul Meurice and acted in 1862, was a triumph for Madame Sand and her friend Bocage. The form and spirit of this novel seem inspired by Sir Walter Scott, and though far from perfect, it is a striking instance of the versatility of her imaginative powers. The leading character of the septuagenarian Marquis, with his many amiable virtues, and his one amiable weakness, a longing to preserve intact his youthfulness of appearance as he has really preserved his youthfulness of heart, is both natural and original, comic and half pathetic withal. The part in the play seemed made for Bocage, and his heart was set upon undertaking it. But his health was failing at the time, and the manager hesitated about giving him the rôle. "Take care, my friend," wrote Bocage to Madame Sand; "perhaps I shall die if I play the part; but if I play it not, I shall die of that, to a certainty." She insisted, and play it he did, to perfection, she tells us. "He did not act the Marquis de Bois Doré; he was the personage himself, as the author had dreamt him." It was to be his last achievement, and he knew it. "It is my end," he said one night, "but I shall die like a soldier on the field of honor." And so he did, continuing to play the rôle up till a few days before his death.
More lasting success has attended Madame Sand in two of the lightest of society comedies, Le Mariage de Victorine and Le Marquis de Villemer, which seem likely to take a permanent place in the répertoire of the French stage. The first, a continuation that had suggested itself to her of Sedaine's century-old comedy, Le Philosophe sans le savoir, escapes the ill fate that seems to attend sequels in general. It is of the slightest materials, but holds together, and is gracefully conceived and executed. First produced at the Gymnase in 1851, it was revived during the last year of Madame Sand's life in a manner very gratifying to her, being brought out with great applause at the Comédie Française, preceded on each occasion by Sedaine's play, and the same artists appearing in both.
The excellent dramatic version of her popular novel Le Marquis de Villemer, first acted in 1864, is free from the defects that weaken most of her stage compositions. It is said that in preparing it she accepted some hints from Alexander Dumas the younger. Whatever the cause, the result is a play where characters, composition and dialogue leave little to be desired.
L'autre, her latest notable stage success, brings us down to 1870, when it was acted at the Gymnase, Madame Sarah Bernhardt impersonating the heroine. This not very agreeable play is derived, with material alterations, from Madame Sand's agreeable novel La Confession d'une jeune Fille, published in 1864.