French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

“Look where we are; is it not sublime, and can you think of aught else than God? Sit down upon this moss, virgin of human steps, and see at your feet the desert unrolling its mighty depths. Did ever you contemplate anything more wild and yet more full of life? See what vigor in this free and vagabond vegetation; what movement in those woods which the wind bows and sways, in those great flocks of eagles hovering incessantly around the misty summits and passing in moving circles like great black rings over the sheet, white and watery, of the glacier. Do you hear the noise that rises and falls on every side? The torrents weeping and sobbing like unhappy souls; the stags moaning with voices plaintive and passionate, the breeze singing and laughing among the heather, the vultures screaming like frightened women; and those other noises, strange, mysterious, indescribable, rumbling muffled in the mountains; those colossal icebergs cracking in their very heart; those snows, sucking and drawing down the sand; those great roots of trees grappling incessantly with the entrails of the earth and toiling to heave the rock and to rive the shale; those unknown voices, those vague sighs, which the soil, always a prey to the pains of travail, here expires through her gaping loins; do you not find all this more splendid, more harmonious, than the church or the theater?”

With our utmost effort to convey, through close fidelity, the feeling of George Sand’s style, the delicious music of it, its sweet opulence of diction, its warmth of color, its easy spontaneity, its lubricity, its flow, we must ask our readers to imagine all twice as charming as they could possibly find it in any translation. As to the substance of what is said in the foregoing sentences? Other travelers may have been more fortunate, but the present writer is obliged to admit that he never saw “great flocks,” or any flocks at all, of eagles “incessantly hovering around the summits” of the Alps. Indeed, the eagle is generally supposed to be a solitary bird, not inclined to fly in flocks. Also, he has never happened to meet with “stags” in the Alps, much less to hear them moan passionately or otherwise. “The vultures screaming,” etc.? In short, he would be quite unable to verify in its details George Sand’s beautiful description, which he thinks must have been written from the heart of the writer, much more than from either her eye or her ear.

Successive generations of readers are not apt to be satisfied with merely subjective truth in what is offered them to read. There must be fact of some sort to correspond with statement, in order permanently to secure the future for an author. But feeling, rather than fact, at least in her earlier work, is the substance to which George Sand’s magical style gave such exquisite form.

Now for a specimen passage done in her later manner.

This we take from “Les Maîtres Sonneurs,” or “The Bagpipers,” as Miss Wormeley renders the title. Brulette is a charming peasant girl, who, brought up in the same house with José, has known him only as a shy, recluse, silent, sullen, even downright stupid boy, if not indeed almost a “natural.” He has cultivated music secretly, and he now makes trial of his art for the first time before Brulette. She turns away, and he is in despair, till he sees that she turned away to hide her fast-coming tears. He then demands to know what she thought of while he was playing. Brulette replies, and José in his turn expresses his mind:

“I did not think of any thing,” said Brulette, “but a thousand recollections of old times came into my mind. I seemed not to see you playing, though I heard you clearly enough; you appeared to be no older than when we lived together, and I felt as if you and I were driven by a strong wind, sometimes through the ripe wheat, sometimes into the long grass, at other times upon the running streams; and I saw the fields, the woods, the springs, the flowery meadows, and the birds in the sky among the clouds. I saw, too, in my dream, your mother and my grandfather sitting before the fire, and talking of things I could not understand; and all the while you were in the corner on your knees saying your prayers, and I thought I was asleep in my little bed. Then again I saw the ground covered with snow, and the willows full of larks, and the night full of falling stars; and we looked at each other, sitting on a hillock, while the sheep made their little noise of nibbling the grass. In short I dreamed so many things that they are all jumbled up in my head; and if they made me cry it was not for grief, but because my mind was shaken in a way I can’t at all explain to you.”

“It is all right,” said José. “What I saw and what I dreamed as I played, you saw too! Thank you, Brulette; through you I know now that I am not crazy, and that there is a truth in what we hear within us, as there is in what we see. Yes, yes,” he said, taking long strides up and down the room, and holding his flute above his head, “it speaks!—that miserable bit of reed! It says what we think; it shows what we see; it tells a tale as if with words; it loves like the heart; it lives; it has a being! And now, José, the mad man; José, the idiot; José, the starer, go back to your imbecility; you can afford to do so, for you are as powerful, and as wise, and as happy as others.”

So saying, he sat down and paid no further attention to any thing about him.

Little speeches like the foregoing make up what, throughout the whole story of “The Bagpipers” does duty for dialogue between the characters. Charming, but in no proper sense of the word natural or verisimilar.

George Sand and Balzac are often set in antithesis to each other as respectively idealistic and realistic writers. Different enough, indeed, they are, but the difference is that of temperament, of genius, and not that of method. Balzac is all conscience (his sort of conscience), will, work; George Sand is all freedom, improvisation, play—around her everywhere a nameless exquisite charm.