"Listen to a tale and weep! There was once an excellent artist, by name Watelet, who etched better than any other man of his day. He loved Marguerite Le Conte, and taught her to etch as well as himself. She left her husband, her home, and everything she possessed, to live with Watelet. The world condemned them, but, as they were poor and modest, it forgot them. Forty years later an idle wanderer in the neighbourhood of Paris found, in a little house called Moulin-Joli, an old man who etched and an old woman whom he called his 'meunière,' and who etched too, seated at the same table. The idler who made the wonderful discovery told others, and the fashionable world flocked to see this marvellous phenomenon—a love which had lasted for forty years; an occupation which had been pursued all that time with the same industry and the same devotion; two admirable twin talents. The thing made a great sensation. Fortunately the couple died of old age a few days later; the prying crowd would have spoilt everything. The last thing they etched was a drawing of Moulin-Joli, Marguerite's house.... It hangs in my room, above the portrait of a person whom no one here has ever seen. For a whole year he who left me this portrait sat working with me every night at a little table.... At daybreak each examined the other's work and criticised it, and we supped at the same little table, talking of art, of thoughts and feelings, and of the future. The future has broken its promise to us. Pray for me, O Marguerite Le Conte!"
This is perhaps the only occasion on which George Sand writes as if she owed anything to Alfred de Musset in her capacity as authoress.[4] I have already indicated the nature of his influence upon her. It was purely critical; it sharpened her aesthetic sense. His artistic method was powerless to affect her. To any direct influence upon her style George Sand was completely unreceptive. Madame Girardin's witty hit at her: "It is especially when the works of women authors are in question that we may say with Buffon, 'Le style, c'est l'homme,'" is as incorrect as it is amusing. For though it is, almost without exception, the case that each of George Sand's most important novels bears marks of the influence of a different man, yet the influence never extends to the style. Again and again she makes herself the organ of another's ideas, but never does she imitate another's style. Her talent was too independent for this, and she was moreover too little of the artist. She who was so silent, and, when she did speak, so laconic, was the improvisatrice when she wrote. She let her pen run over the paper without making preparatory studies, without thought of models, without conscious artistic aim; she never treated a given theme, or elaborated and completed a stylistic suggestion thrown out by another;—in short, she submitted to none of the conditions upon which purely technical progress in any art depends. In this she forms a marked contrast to De Musset. He was, at first, inspired by a spirit of revolt against conventions and rules in art, which was always incomprehensible to her. He intentionally spoiled the rhymes in his first poems, to make sure of annoying the Classicists. (In the first sketch of L'Andalouse, the Marchioness was called Amaémoni, which in French rhymes correctly with "bruni," but in the final version she received the name of Amaégui, which hardly rhymes.) When his creative capacity was on the wane, he calmly employed seven pages of Carmontelle's Proverbe, Le Distrait, in the manufacture of his weak little comedy, On ne saurait penser à tout. In his best period he was a master of the art of delicate plagiarism. I may mention, as an example, that I have found in the Prince de Ligne's works his stylistic model for the beautiful poem, "Après une lecture," quoted in a previous chapter.[5] A similar discovery in connection with George Sand would be an impossibility. She is incapable of polishing the rough diamonds of others into brilliants for the adornment of her own muse; she presents us that muse clad in simple white, with a wild flower in her hair.
Nowhere is the peculiar beauty of George Sand's style more fascinating than in the above quoted letter to Rollinat. The profound understanding of nature acquired in her youth by this revolutionary woman of genius, blends in marvellous unison with her restless, endless longing; and through both the longing for nature and the longing for happiness runs the undertone of a loving heart's lamentation over the disappointments it has caused and the disappointments it has suffered. And in this letter and the following one to Everard, we see how George Sand's political, republican, faith springs from the ruins of her youthful, erotic, castles-in-the-air. At first she is weak in the faith, too much engrossed with herself. The poor poetess undoubtedly "feels ill at ease under the umbrella of the monarchy," but all the same her thoughts are more occupied with the forms of violet and jasmine petals than with the institutions of society or forms of government. Yet one sees the spark of enthusiasm gradually beginning to glow in her breast. She envies her men friends their faith and the energy it begets, she, "who is only a poet, only une femmelette!" They, in the event of a revolution, would go forth to fight with the steadfast hope of winning liberty for their fellow-men; she could do nothing but let herself be killed in the hope of being useful for once, were it only by raising a barricade the height of her dead body. But she concludes thus: "Can any of you find a use for my present and future life? So long as I am employed in the service of an idea, and not of a passion, I consent to be bound by your laws. But, alas! I warn you that all I am fit for is to execute an order bravely and faithfully. I can act, but not plan; for I know nothing and am sure of nothing. I can only obey when I shut my eyes and stop my ears so as to see nothing and hear nothing which may make me doubtful; I can march with my friends like the dog who, seeing his master sailing away, jumps into the water and swims after the ship until he dies of fatigue. The ocean is wide, my friends, and I am weak. I am fit for nothing but to be a soldier—and I am not five feet high!
"But what of that! Dwarf as I am, I am yours. I am yours because I love you and esteem you. Truth dwells not among men; the kingdom of God is not of this world. But as much as man can steal from divinity of the ray of light which illumines the world, you, ye sons of Prometheus, ye lovers of naked truth and inflexible justice, have stolen. Forward, then! no matter what the shade of your banner, so long as your troops are marching in the direction of the republican future! Forward, in the name of Jesus, who has only one true apostle left on earth (Lamennais); in the name of Washington and of Franklin, who were unable to accomplish enough, and have left us their task to finish; in the name of Saint-Simon, whose sons—God be with them!—are attempting to solve the great and terrible social problem! Forward, so long as good is done, and those who believe prove that they do so! I am only a poor daughter of the regiment—take me with you!"
There are few such pure and heartfelt feminine outbursts of enthusiasm in literature. German literature presents something in the nature of a counterpart to it in Bettina's Goethes Correspondence with a Child (published the same year), which is the outcome of an equally exuberant enthusiasm; but in Bettina's case we do not receive the same impression of sincerity, and the feeling expressed is in itself narrower—it is purely aesthetic, the cult of one great genius. Bettina is a clever woman; her style is brilliant, with polished, and here and there pointed facets; but even in the feminine weakness of George Sand's enthusiasm there is greatness.
It was some years before the feelings, the birth of which we have witnessed, display themselves in her works. To these later works we shall come presently. We must first consider for a moment the more tranquil, purely poetic tales of the second period of her literary career.
Regarding these from the artistic standpoint, the little tale entitled La Marquise is, in my estimation, undoubtedly the best; indeed, taking nothing but art into consideration, it is possibly her most perfect work. I fancy it must have been inspired by the memory of her kind-hearted, dignified grandmother. It fascinates by its combination of the spirit and customs of the eighteenth century with the timid, more spiritually enthusiastic amatory passion of the nineteenth. It is a simple story of a high-born lady of the ancien régime, who has married as they married in those days, and has accepted a lover as they accepted lovers then, but whose lover bores her to death because he was not the choice of her heart, but simply the man whom the whole of good society conspired to force upon her. Young, inexperienced, beautiful, and innocent in so far that she does not know what love is, she falls in love with a poor, half-starving, dissipated actor, who on the stage appears to her an incarnation of manliness and poetry. She sees him, when he is not aware of her presence, off the stage, and is dismayed by the difference in his appearance. He has become aware of her interest in him, and now plays to her alone, and dreams of her alone. They hold their first and last rendezvous late one evening after the play. The Marquise, having been cupped in the morning, is fatigued. The actor has not had time to take off the costume of his part; the ideality of the stage still clings to him, and he is inspired, beautified, ennobled by his love, which raises him high above the ordinary conditions of his life. She is modest, he reverential; she is in love, enraptured by a poetical illusion; he loves her as she is, loves her longingly, passionately, but chivalrously; and, after a tempest of passionate words, they part, without any caress but the kiss she imprints on his brow as he kneels at her feet.
The old Marquise, who tells the story, is silent for a moment after concluding it, and then says: "Well, will you believe now in the virtue of the eighteenth century?" "Madame," replies the person addressed, "I have not the slightest desire to doubt it; nevertheless, if I were not so touched by your story, I might allow myself to observe that it was very wise of you to have yourself cupped that day." "You wretched men!" said the Marquise, "you are quite incapable of understanding the story of the heart."
George Sand has written nothing more graceful. The sly sarcasm in this conclusion, a quality which also distinguishes the equally charming and equally suggestive little tale, Teverino, but which is not frequently met with in her writings, is quite in the spirit of the eighteenth century; and the style has that conciseness which is, as a rule, an indispensable quality in a work destined to descend to future generations. La Marquise has a rightful claim to a place in every anthology of French masterpieces.
Amongst the works which George Sand now proceeds to write is a whole series in which she represents her conception of woman's nature when it is uncorrupted. The women she draws are chaste and proud and energetic, susceptible to the passion of love, but remaining on the plane above it, or retaining their purity even when they yield to it. She inclines to attribute to woman a moral superiority over man. But the natures of her heroes, too, are essentially fine, though in the ruling classes tainted by the inherited tendency to tyrannise over woman and the lower classes. Rousseau's conviction of the original goodness of nature and of the depravity of society lies at the foundation of all these works. Women like Fiamma in Simon, Edmée in Mauprat, Consuelo in the novel of the same name (of whom Madame Viardot was to a certain extent the original), are fine specimens of George Sand's typical young girl. Her rôle is to inspire, to heal, or to discipline the man. She knows not vacillation; resolution is the essence of her character; she is the priestess of patriotism, of liberty, of art, or of civilisation. Of the novels named, Consuelo is the longest and most famous; it begins in masterly fashion, but, like many of Balzac's, not to speak of Dumas', longer works, degenerates into romantic fantasticalness. The artistic theories of the day led in the direction of exaggeration and extravagance. It was not Victor Hugo alone who was apt to relapse into the formless.