Le sentiment de la vie idéale, qui n'est autre que la vie normale telle que nous sommes appelés à la connaître;[307]—"the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall some day know it,"—those words from one of her last publications give the ruling thought of George Sand, the ground-motive, as they say in music, of all her strain. It is as a personage inspired by this motive that she interests us.
The English public conceives of her as of a novel-writer who wrote stories more or less interesting; the earlier ones objectionable and dangerous, the later ones, some of them, unexceptionable and fit to be put into the hands of the youth of both sexes. With such a conception of George Sand, a story of hers like Consuelo[308] comes to be elevated in England into quite an undue relative importance, and to pass with very many people for her typical work, displaying all that is really valuable and significant in the author. Consuelo is a charming story. But George Sand is something more than a maker of charming stories, and only a portion of her is shown in Consuelo. She is more, likewise, than a creator of characters. She has created, with admirable truth to nature, characters most attractive and attaching, such as Edmee, Genevieve, Germain.[309] But she is not adequately expressed by them. We do not know her unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.
In order to feel this spirit it is not, indeed, necessary to read all that she ever produced. Even three or four only out of her many books might suffice to show her to us, if they were well chosen; let us say, the Lettres d'un Voyageur, Mauprat, François le Champi,[310] and a story which I was glad to see Mr. Myers,[311] in his appreciative notice of Madame Sand, single out for praise,—Valvèdre.[312] In these may be found all the principal elements of their author's strain: the cry of agony and revolt, the trust in nature and beauty, the aspiration towards a purged and renewed human society.
Of George Sand's strain, during forty years, these are the grand elements. Now it is one of them which appears most prominently, now it is another. The cry of agony and revolt is in her earlier work only, and passes away in her later. But in the evolution of these three elements, —the passion of agony and revolt, the consolation from nature and from beauty, the ideas of social renewal,—in the evolution of these is George Sand and George Sand's life and power. Through their evolution her constant motive declares and unfolds itself, that motive which we have set forth above: "the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it." This is the motive, and through these elements is its evolution: an evolution pursued, moreover, with the most unfailing resolve, the most absolute sincerity.
The hour of agony and revolt passed away for George Sand, as it passed away for Goethe, as it passes away for their readers likewise. It passes away and does not return; yet those who, amid the agitations, more or less stormy, of their youth, betook themselves to the early works of George Sand, may in later life cease to read them, indeed, but they can no more forget them than they can forget Werther[313]. George Sand speaks somewhere of her "days of Corinne."[314] Days of Valentine, many of us may in like manner say,—days of Valentine, days of Lélia[315], days never to return! They are gone, we shall read the books no more, and yet how ineffaceable is their impression! How the sentences from George Sand's works of that period still linger in our memory and haunt the ear with their cadences! Grandiose and moving, they come, those cadences, like the sighing of the wind through the forest, like the breaking of the waves on the seashore. Lélia in her cell on the mountain of the Camaldoli—
"Sibyl, Sibyl forsaken; spirit of the days of old, joined to a brain which rebels against the divine inspiration; broken lyre, mute instrument, whose tones the world of to-day, if it heard them, could not understand, but yet in whose depth the eternal harmony murmurs imprisoned; priestess of death, I, I who feel and know that before now I have been Pythia, have wept before now, before now have spoken, but who cannot recollect, alas, cannot utter the word of healing! Yes, yes! I remember the cavern of truth and the access of revelation; but the word of human destiny, I have forgotten it; but the talisman of deliverance, it is lost from my hand. And yet, indeed, much, much have I seen! and when suffering presses me sore, when indignation takes hold of me, when I feel Prometheus wake up in my heart and beat his puissant wings against the stone which confines him,—oh! then, in prey to a frenzy without a name, to a despair without bounds, I invoke the unknown master and friend who might illumine my spirit and set free my tongue; but I grope in darkness, and my tired arms grasp nothing save delusive shadows. And for ten thousand years, as the sole answer to my cries, as the sole comfort in my agony, I hear astir, over this earth accurst, the despairing sob of impotent agony. For ten thousand years I have cried in infinite space: Truth! Truth! For ten thousand years infinite space keeps answering me: Desire, Desire. O Sibyl forsaken! O mute Pythia! dash then thy head against the rocks of thy cavern, and mingle thy raging blood with the foam of the sea; for thou deemest thyself to have possessed the almighty Word, and these ten thousand years thou art seeking him in vain."[316]
Or Sylvia's cry over Jacques[317] by his glacier in the Tyrol—
"When such a man as thou art is born into a world where he can do no true service; when, with the soul of an apostle and the courage of a martyr, he has simply to push his way among the heartless and aimless crowds which vegetate without living; the atmosphere suffocates him and he dies. Hated by sinners, the mock of fools, disliked by the envious, abandoned by the weak, what can he do but return to God, weary with having labored in vain, in sorrow at having accomplished nothing? The world remains in all its vileness and in all its hatefulness; this is what men call, 'the triumph of good sense over enthusiasm.'"[318]
Or Jacques himself, and his doctrine—
"Life is arid and terrible, repose is a dream, prudence is useless; mere reason alone serves simply to dry up the heart; there is but one virtue, the eternal sacrifice of oneself."