We have no desire to pursue this view of George Sand's writings to its ultimate consequences. It is enough for our present purpose to indicate the source and nature of the influence she exercises. Taking her life and her works together, their action and re-action upon each other, it may be observed that such a writer could be produced and fostered only in such a state of society as that of Paris. With all her genius she would perish in London. The moral atmosphere of France is necessary alike to its culture and reception—the volcanic soil—the perpetual excitement—the instability of the people and the government—the eternal turmoil, caprice, and transition—a society agitated and polluted to its core. These elements of fanaticism and confusion, to which she has administered so skillfully, have made her what she is. In such a country as England, calm, orderly, and conservative, her social philosophy would lack earth for its roots and air for its blossoms. The very institutions of France, upon which no man can count for an hour, are essential to her existence as a writer.
But time that mellows all things has not been idle with George Sand. After having written "Indiana," "Lelie," "Valentine," and sundry other of her most conspicuous works, she found it necessary to defend herself against the charge of advocating conjugal infidelity. The defense, to be sure, was pre-eminently sophistical, and rested on a complete evasion of the real question; but it was a concession to the feelings and decorum of society which could not fail in some measure to operate as a restraint in future labors. Her subsequent works were not quite so decisive on these topics; and in some of them marriage was even treated with a respectful recognition, and love was suffered to run its course in purity and tranquillity, without any of those terrible struggles with duty and conscience which were previously considered indispensable to bring out its intensity.
And now comes an entirely new phase in the development of George Sand's mind. Perhaps about this time the influences immediately acting upon her may have undergone a modification that will partly help to explain the miracle. Her daughter, the fair Solange, is grown up and about to be married; and the household thoughts and cares, and the tenderness of a serious and unselfish cast, which creep to a mother's heart on such occasions, may have shed their sweetness upon this wayward soul, and inspired it with congenial utterances. This is mere speculation, more or less corroborated by time and circumstance; but whatever may have been the agencies by which the charm was wrought, certain it is that George Sand has recently produced a work which, we will not say flippantly in the words of the song,
"Has for once a moral,"
but which is in the highest degree chaste in conception, and full of simplicity and truthfulness in the execution. This work is in the form of a three-act comedy, and is called "François le Champi." (For the benefit of the country gentlemen, we may as well at once explain that the word champi means a foundling of the fields.)
The domestic morality, the quiet nature, the home feeling of this comedy may be described as something wonderful for George Sand; not that her genius was not felt to be plastic enough for such a display, but that nobody suspected she could have accomplished it with so slight an appearance of artifice or false sentiment, or with so much geniality and faith in its truth. But this is not the only wonder connected with "François le Champi." Its reception by the Paris audience was something yet more wonderful. We witnessed a few weeks ago at the Odeon its hundred and fourth or fifth representation—and it was a sight not readily forgotten. The acting, exquisite as it was through the minutest articulation of the scene, was infinitely less striking than the stillness and patience of the spectators. It was a strange and curious thing to see these mercurial people pouring in from their gay cafés and restaurants, and sitting down to the representation of this dramatic pastoral with much the same close and motionless attention as a studious audience might be expected to give to a scientific lecture. And it was more curious still to contrast what was doing at that moment in different places with a like satisfaction to other crowds of listeners; and to consider what an odd compound that people must be who can equally enjoy the rustic virtues of the Odeon, and the grossnesses and prurient humors of the Variétés. Paris and the Parisians will, probably, forever remain an enigma to the moral philosopher. One never can see one's way through their surprising contradictions, or calculate upon what will happen next, or what turn any given state of affairs will take. In this sensuous, sentimental, volatile, and dismal Paris, any body who may think it worth while to cross the water for such a spectacle, may see reproduced together, side by side, the innocence of the golden age, and the worst vices of the last stage of a high civilization.
At the bottom of all this, no doubt, will be found a constitutional melancholy that goes a great way to account for the opposite excesses into which the national character runs. A Frenchman is at heart the saddest man in the universe; but his nature is of great compass at both ends, being deficient only in the repose of the middle notes. And this constitutional melancholy opposed to the habitual frivolity (it never deserved to be called mirth) of the French is now more palpable than ever. Commercial depression has brought it out in its darkest colors. The people having got what they wanted, begin now to discover that they want every thing else. The shops are empty—the Palais Royal is as triste as the suburb of a country town—and the drive in the Champs Elysées, in spite of its display of horsemen and private carriages, mixed up in motley cavalcade with hack cabriolets and omnibuses, is as different from what it used to be in the old days of the monarchy, as the castle of Dublin will be by-and-by, when the viceregal pageant is removed to London. The sparkling butterflies that used to flirt about in the gardens of the Tuileries, may now be seen pacing moodily along, their eyes fixed on the ground, and their hands in their pockets, sometimes with an old umbrella (which seems to be received by common assent as the emblem of broken-down fortunes), and sometimes with a brown paper parcel under their arms. The animal spirits of the Parisians are very much perplexed under these circumstances; and hence it is that they alternately try to drown their melancholy in draughts of fierce excitement, or to solace it by gentle sedatives.
George Sand has done herself great honor by this charming little drama. That she should have chosen such a turbulent moment for such an experiment upon the public, is not the least remarkable incident connected with it. Only a few months before we heard of her midnight revels with the heads of the Repulican party in the midst of the fury and bloodshed of an emeute; and then follows close upon the blazing track of revolution, a picture of household virtues so sweet and tranquil, so full of tenderness and love, that it is difficult to believe it to be the production of the same hand that had recently flung flaming addresses, like brands, into the streets to set the town on fire. But we must be surprised at nothing that happens in France, where truth is so much stranger than fiction, as to extinguish the last fragment of an excuse for credulity and wonder.