From the instant that other feet than mine had trodden his sanctuary, Corambé ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted it, and it seemed to me as if my ceremonies and my sacrifices were from this time only childishness, that I had not in truth been in earnest. I destroyed the temple with as much care as I had built it; I dug a hole at the foot of the tree, where I buried the garlands, the shells, and all the rustic ornaments, under the ruins of the altar.
This story of Aurore’s religious experiment cannot fail to remind the reader of biography of the child Goethe’s well-known essays in the same direction. The boy’s mind, it will be remembered, had been greatly exercised with the religious problem, first of all under the impression of horror caused by the earthquake at Lisbon, and later from having to listen to accounts of the new sects—Separatists, Moravians, and the rest—who sought a closer communion with the deity than was possible through the somewhat cold ritual of the established religion. Stirred by their example, he tried also to realise a closer approach to the Divine Being. He conceived him, he tells us, as standing in immediate connexion with Nature. So he invented a form of worship in which natural products were to represent the world, and a flame burning over these to symbolise the aspirations of man’s heart. A handsome pyramid-shaped music-stand was chosen for altar, and on the shelves of this the successive stages in the evolution of Nature were to be indicated. The rite was to be carried out at sunrise, the altar-flame to be secured by means of fumigating pastils and a burning-glass. The first performance was a success, but in trying to repeat it the boy-priest omitted to put the pastils into a cup, so the lacquered stand, with its beautiful gold flowers, was disastrously burnt—a contretemps which took away all spirit for new offerings.
In comparing these two instances of childish worship, one is struck perhaps more by their contrast than by their similarity. Each of the two incidents illustrates, no doubt, a true childish aspiration towards the great Unseen, and also an impulse to invent a form of worship which should harmonise with and express the little worshipper’s individual thoughts. But here the resemblance ceases. The boy-priest felt, apparently, nothing of the human side of religion: he was the true precursor of Goethe, the large-eyed man of science and the poet of pantheism, and found his delight in symbolising the orderliness of Nature’s work as a whole, and its Divine purpose and control. Aurore Dupin, on the other hand, approached religion on the human and emotional side, the side which seems more appropriate to her sex. She thought of her deity as intently occupied with humanity and its humble kinsfolk in the sentient world; and she endowed him above all other qualities with generosity and pitifulness, even to excess. Goethe seems to represent the speculative, Aurore the humanitarian, element in the religious impulse of the child.
To follow Aurore into her later religious experiences in the ‘Couvent des Anglaises’ would be clearly to go beyond the limits of these studies of childhood. I hope I may have quoted enough from the first chapters of the autobiography to illustrate not only their deep human and literary interest, but their special value to the psychological student.
[332]. A selection of scenes from the story, with notes, has been prepared for young English students by M. Eugène Joël, under the title, L’Enfance de George Sand (Rivingtons).
[333]. What George Sand here writes about the intrusion of doubt and disgust into the child’s feeling for the doll does not, I think, contradict what was said above in chapter ii. on the intensity and persistence of his faith. In truth these are illustrated in the very resistance to the occasional attack of the child’s nascent reason, just as they are illustrated in the resistance to others’ sceptical assaults.
[334]. Compare above, p. [113].
[335]. Compare this with other accounts of the first impression of death given above, p. [237] f.
[336]. A blue rose was for a long time the favourite dream of Balzac.