[327]. Compare above, p. [283] f.
[328]. On children’s attempts to understand about being buried and going to heaven, see above, p. [120] ff.
[329]. According to Professor Baldwin’s observations the infant shows a decided right-handedness, that is, a disposition to reach out with the right hand rather than with the left, by the seventh or eighth month (quoted by Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, p. 55). But of course this is a long way from a definite intuition and idea of the right and the left hand. Mr. E. Kratz finds that more than one-fourth of children of five coming to a primary school cannot distinguish the right hand from the left.
[330]. Compare above, p. [123].
[331]. Compare above, p. [283].
XII.
GEORGE SAND’S CHILDHOOD.
The First Years.
Much has been written about George Sand, but singularly little about her childhood. Yet she herself, when she set to work, between forty and fifty, to write the Histoire de ma Vie, thought it worth while to fill the best part of two volumes of that work with early reminiscences; and herein surely she judged wisely. Good descriptions of childish experience are rare enough. George Sand gives us a singularly full story of childhood; and, allowing for the fact of its author being a novelist, one may say that this story reads on the whole like a record of memory. That a narrative at once so charming and so pathetic should have been neglected, by English writers at least, can only be set down to the circumstance that it is not clearly marked off from the tediously full account of ancestors which precedes it.[[332]]
The early reminiscences of a great man or woman have a special interest. Schopenhauer has ingeniously traced out the essential similarity of the man of genius and the child. Whatever the value of this analogy, it is certain that the gifted child seems not less but more of a child because of his gifts. This is emphatically true of the little lady with whom we are now concerned, and of whom, since we are interested in her on her own account and not merely as the precursor of the great novelist, we shall speak by her rightful name, Aurore Dupin.
The reader need not be told that the child who was to become the representative among modern women of the daring irregularities of genius was an uncommon child. She would certainly have been set down as strange and as deficient in childish traits by a commonplace observer. Yet close inspection shows that the untamed and untamable ‘oddities’ were, after all, only certain common childish impulses and tendencies exalted, or, if the reader prefers, exaggerated. Herein lies the chief value of the story. To this it may be added that this exaggeration of childish sensibility was set in a milieu admirably fitted to stir and strain it to the utmost. It was a motley turbulent world into which little Aurore was unceremoniously pitched, and makes the chronicle of her experience a thrilling romance. And all this experience, it may be said finally, is set down with the untroubled regard and the patient hand of one of the old chroniclers. The forty years had left the memory tenacious and clear to a remarkable degree—in this respect the story will bear comparison with the childish recallings of Goethe and the other famous self-historians; at the same time these years had brought the woman’s power of quiet retrospect and the artist’s habit of calm complacent envisagement. Herein lies a further element of value. The writer feels her identity with the subject of her memoir: she lives over again the passion-storms and ennuis, the reveries and hoydenish freaks of little Aurore; yet she can detach herself from her heroine too, and discuss her and her surroundings with perfect artistic aloofness.