“So you thought,” wrote
Madame Sand to a political friend, in 1849, “that
I was drinking blood out of the skulls of aristocrats.
Not I! I am reading Virgil and learning Latin.”
And her best propaganda, as by and by she came to
own, was not that carried on in journals such as La
Vraie Republique and La Cause du Peuple.
Through her works of imagination she has exercised
an influence more powerful and universal, if indirect.
Among the more than half a hundred
romances of George Sand, there stands out a little
group of three, belonging to the period we have now
reached the mezzo cammin of her life creations
in a special style, and over which the public voice,
whether of fastidious critics or general readers,
in France or abroad, has been and remains unanimous
in praise.
In these, her pastoral tales, she
hit on a new and happy vein which she was peculiarly
qualified to work, combining as she did, intimate
knowledge of French peasant life with sympathetic interest
in her subject and lively poetic fancy. Here
she affronts no prejudices, advances no startling
theories, handles no subtle, treacherous social questions,
and to these compositions in a perfectly original genre
she brought the freshness of genius which “age
cannot wither,” together with the strength and
finish of a practiced hand.
Peasants had figured as accessories
in her earlier works. The rustic hermit and philosopher,
Patience, and Marcasse the rat-catcher, in Mauprat,
are note-worthy examples. In 1844 had appeared
Jeanne, with its graceful dedication to Francoise
Meillant, the unlettered peasant-girl who may have
suggested the work she could not read one
of a family of rural proprietors, spoken of by Madame
Sand in a letter of 1843 as a fine survival of a type
already then fast vanishing of patriarchally
constituted family-life, embodying all that was grand
and simple in the forms of the olden time.
In Jeanne, Madame Sand had
first ventured to make a peasant-girl the central
figure of her novel, though still so far deferring
to the received notions of what was essential in order
to interest the “gentle” reader as to
surround her simple heroine with personages of rank
and education. Jeanne herself, moreover, is an
exceptional and a highly idealized type as
it were a sister to Joan of Arc, not the inspired
warrior-maid, but the visionary shepherdess of the
Vosges. Yet the creation is sufficiently real.
The author had observed how favorable was the life
of solitude and constant communion with nature led
by many of these country children in their scattered
homesteads, to the development of remarkable and tenacious
individuality. So with the strange and poetical
Jeanne, too innately refined to prosper in her rough
human environment, yet too fixedly simple to fare
much better in more cultivated circles. She is
the victim of a sort of celestial stupidity we admire
and pity at once. In this study of a peasant heroine
resides such charm as the book possesses, and the
attempt was to lead on the author to the productions
above alluded to, La Mareau Diable, Francois
le Champi, and La Petite Fadette. Of
this popular trio the first had been published already
two years before the Revolution, in 1846; the second
was appearing in the Feuilleton of the Journal des
Debats at the very moment of the breaking of the
storm, which interrupted its publication awhile.
When those tumultuous months were over, and Madame
Sand, thrown out of the hurly-burly of active politics,
was brought back by the course of events to Nohant,
she seems to have taken up her pen very much where
she had laid it down. The break in her ordinary
round of work made by the excitements of active statesmanship
was hardly perceptible, and in 1849 Le Champi
was followed by La Petite Fadette.
La Mare au Diable, George Sand’s
first tale of exclusively peasant-life, is usually
considered her masterpiece in this genre.
It was suggested to her, she tells us, by Holbein’s
dismal engraving of death coming to the husbandman,
an old, gaunt, ragged, over-worked representative
of his tribe grim ending to a life of cheerless
poverty and toil!
Here was the dark and painful side
of the laborer’s existence a true
picture, but not the whole truth. There was another
and a bright side, which might just as allowably be
represented in art as the dreary one, and which she
had seen and studied. In Berry extreme poverty
was the exception, and the agriculturist’s life
appeared as it ought to be, healthy, calm, and simple,
its laboriousness compensated by the soothing influences
of nature, and of strong home affections.
This little gem of a work is thoroughly
well-known. The ploughing-scene in the opening ploughing
as she had witnessed it sometimes in her own neighborhood,
fresh, rough ground broken up for tillage, the plough
drawn by four yoke of young white oxen new to their
work and but half-tamed, has a simplicity and grandeur
of effect not easy to parallel in modern art.
The motif of the tale is that you often go far
to search for the good fortune that lies close to
your door. Never was so homely an adage more
freshly and prettily illustrated; yet how slight are
the materials, how plain is the outline! Germain,
the well-to-do, widowed laborer, in the course of
a few miles’ ride, a journey undertaken in order
to present himself and his addresses to the rich widow
his father desires him to woo, discovers the real life-companion
he wants in the poor girl-neighbor, whom he patronizingly
escorts on her way to the farm where she is hired
for service. It all slowly dawns upon him, in
the most natural manner, as the least incidents of
the journey call out her good qualities of head and
heart her helpfulness in misadventure,
forgetfulness of self, unaffected fondness for children,
instinctively recognized by Germain’s little
boy, who, with his unconscious childish influence,
is one of the prettiest features in the book.
Germain, by his journey’s end, has his heart
so well engaged in the right quarter that he is proof
against the dangerous fascinations of the coquettish
widow.
There is a breath of poetry over the
picture, but no denaturalization of the uncultured
types. Germain is honest and warm-hearted, but
not bright of understanding; little Marie is wise
and affectionate, but as unsentimentally-minded as
the veriest realist could desire. The native
caution and mercenary habit of thought of the French
agricultural class are indicated by many a humorous
touch in the pastorals of George Sand.
Equally pleasing, though not aiming
at the almost antique simplicity of the Mare au
Diable, is the story of Francois le Champi,
the foundling, saved from the demoralization to which
lack of the softening influences of home and parental
affection predestine such unhappy children, through
the tenderness his forlorn condition inspires in a
single heart that of Madeline Blanchet,
the childless wife, whose own wrongs, patiently borne,
have quickened her commiseration for the wrongs of
others. Her sympathy, little though it lies in
her power to manifest it, he feels, and its incalculable
worth to him, which is such that the gratitude of
a whole life cannot do more than repay it.
Part of the narrative is here put
into the mouth of a peasant, and told in peasant language,
or something approaching to it. Over the propriety
of this proceeding, adopted also in Les Maitres
Sonneurs, French critics are disagreed, though
for the most part they regret it. It is not for
a foreigner to decide between them. One would
certainly regret the absence of some of the extremely
original and expressive words and turns of speech
current among the rural population, forms which such
a method enabled her to introduce into the narrative
as well as into the dialogue.
La Petite Fadette is not only
worthy of its predecessors but by many will be preferred
to either. There is something particularly attractive
in the portraits of the twin brothers partly
estranged by character, wholly united by affection, and
in the figure of Fanchon Fadet, an original in humble
life, which has made this little work a general favorite
wherever it is known.
These prose-idylls have been called
“The Georgics of France.” It is curious
that in a country so largely agricultural, and where
nature presents more variety of picturesque aspect
than perhaps in any other in Europe, the poetic side
of rural life should have been so sparingly represented
in her imaginative literature. French poets of
nature have mostly sought their inspiration out of
their own land, “In France, especially,”
observes Theophile Gautier, “all literary people
live in town, that is in Paris the centre, know little
of what is unconnected with it, and most of them cannot
tell wheat from barley, potatoes from beetroot.”
It was a happy inspiration that prompted Madame Sand
to fill in the blank, in a way all her own, and her
task as we have seen was completed, revolutions notwithstanding.
She owns to having then felt the attraction experienced
in all time by those hard hit by public calamities,
“to throw themselves back on pastoral dreams,
all the more naïve and childlike for the brutality
and darkness triumphant in the world of activity.”
Tired of “turning round and round in a false
circle of argument, of accusing the governing minority,
but only to be forced to acknowledge after all that
they were put there by the choice of the majority,”
she wished to forget it all: and her poetic temperament
which unfitted her for success in politics assisted
her in finding consolation in nature.
Moreover a district like Le Berry,
singularly untouched by corruptions of the civilization,
and preserving intact many old and interesting characteristics,
was a field in which she might draw from reality many
an attractive picture. She was as much rallied
by town critics about her shepherdesses as though
she had invented them. And yet she saw them every
day, and they may be seen still by any wanderer in
those lanes, and at every turn, Fanchons, Maries,
Nanons, as she described them, tending their flock
of from five to a dozen sheep, or a few geese, a goat
and a donkey, all day long between the tall hedgerows,
or on the common, spinning the while, or possibly
dreaming. A certain refinement of cast distinguishes
the type. Eugene Delacroix, in a letter describing
a village festival at Nohant, remarks that if positive
beauty is rare among the natives, ugliness is a thing
unknown. A gentle, passive cast of countenance
prevails among the women: “They are all
St. Annes,” as the artist expresses it.
The inevitable changes brought about by steam-communication,
which have as yet only begun to efface the local habits
and peculiarities, must shortly complete their work.
George Sand’s pastoral novels will then have
additional value, as graphic studies of a state of
things that has passed away.
It does not appear that the merit
of these stories was so quickly recognized as that
of Indiana and Valentine. The author
might abstract herself awhile from passing events
and write idylls, but the public had probably not
yet settled down into the proper state of mind for
fully enjoying them. Moreover Madame Sand’s
antagonists in politics and social science, as though
under the impression that she could not write except
to advance some theory of which they disapproved,
pre-supposed in these stories a set purpose of exalting
the excellence of rustic as compared with polite life of
exaggerating the virtues of the poor, to throw into
relief the vices of the rich. The romances themselves
do not bear out such a supposition. In them the
author chooses exactly the same virtues to exalt,
the same vices to condemn, as in her novels of refined
society. She shows us intolerance, selfishness,
and tyranny of custom marring or endangering individual
happiness among the working-classes, as with their
superiors. There are Philistines in her thatched
cottages, as well as in her marble halls. Germain,
in La Mare au Diable, has some difficulty to
discover for himself, as well as to convince his family
and neighbors, that in espousing the penniless Marie
he is not marrying beneath him in every sense.
Francois le Champi is a pariah, an outcast
in the estimation of the rustic world. Fanchon
Fadet, by her disregard of appearances and village
etiquette, scandalizes the conservative minds of farmers
and millers very much as Aurore Dupin scandalized
the leaders of society at La Châtre.
Most prominence is given to the more pleasing characters,
but the existence of brutality and cupidity among
the peasant classes is nowhere kept out of sight.
Her long practical acquaintance with these classes
indeed was fatal to illusions on the subject.
The average son of the soil was as far removed as
any other living creature from her ideal of humanity,
and at the very time when she penned La Petite
Fadette she was experiencing how far the ignorance,
ill-will, and stupidity of her poorer neighbors could
go.
Thus she writes from Nohant to Barbes
at Vincennes, November 1848: “Since May,
I have shut myself up in prison in my retreat, where,
though without the hardships of yours, I have more
to suffer than you from sadness and dejection, ...
and am less in safety.” Threatened by the
violence and hatred of the people, she had painfully
realized that she and her party had their most obstinate
enemies among those whom they wished and worked to
save and defend.
Her profound discouragement finds
expression in many of her letters from 1849 to 1852.
The more sanguine hopes of Mazzini and other of her
correspondents she desires, but no longer expects,
to see fulfilled. She compares the moral state
of France to the Russian retreat; the soldiers in
the great army of progress seized with vertigo, and
seeking death in fighting with each other.
To her son, who was in Paris at the time of the disturbances in May, 1849,
she writes:
Come back, I implore you. I have
only you in the world, and your death would be
mine. I can still be of some small use to the
cause of truth, but if I were to lose you it
would be all over with me. I have not got
the stoicism of Barbes and Mazzini. It is
true they are men, and they have no children.
Besides, in my opinion it is not in fight, not
by civil war, that we shall win the cause of humanity
in France. We have got universal suffrage.
The worse for us if we do not know how to avail
ourselves of it, for that alone can lastingly
emancipate us, and the only thing that would give us
the right to take up arms would be an attempt
on their part to take away our right to vote.
During the two years preceding the
coup d’etat of December, 1851, life at
Nohant had resumed its wonted cheerfulness of aspect.
Madame Sand was used to surround herself with young
people and artistic people; but now, amid their light-heartedness,
she had for a period to battle with an extreme inward
sadness, confirmed by the fresh evidence brought by
these years of the demoralization in all ranks of
opinion. “Your head is not very lucid when
your heart is so deeply wounded,” she had remarked
already, after the disasters of 1848, “and how
can one help suffering mortally from the spectacle
of civil war and the slaughter among the people?”
To that was now added a loss of faith
in the virtues of her own party, as well as of the
masses. It is no wonder if she fell out of love
for awhile with the ideals of romance, with her own
art of fiction, and the types of heroism that were
her favorite creations. But if the shadow of
a morbid pessimism crept over her mind, she could view
it now as a spiritual malady which she had yet the
will and the strength to live down; as years before
she had surmounted a similar phase of feeling induced
by personal sorrow.
Already, in 1847, she had begun to
write her Memoirs, and reverting to them now,
she found there work that suited her mood, as dealing
with the past, more agreeable to contemplate just
then than the present or the future.
However, in September, 1850, we find
her writing to Mazzini, after dwelling
on the present shortcomings of the people, and the
mixture of pity and indignation with which they inspired
her: “I turn back to fiction and produce,
in art, popular types such as I see no longer; but
as they ought to be and might be.” She alludes
to a play on which she was engaged, and continues:
“The dramatic form, being new to me, has revived
me a little of late; it is the only kind of work into
which I have been able to throw myself for a year.”
The events of December, 1851, surprised
her during a brief visit to Paris. Her hopes
for her country had sunk so low, that she owns herself
at the moment not to have regarded the coup d’etat
as likely to prove more disastrous to the cause of
progress than any other of the violent ends which
threatened the existing political situation. She
left the capital in the midst of the cannonade, and
with her family around her at Nohant awaited the issue
of the new dictatorship.
The wholesale arrests that followed
immediately, and filled the country with stupefaction,
made havoc on all sides of her. Among the victims
were comrades of her childhood, numbers of her friends
and acquaintance and their relatives as
well in Berry as in the capital many arrested
solely on suspicion of hostility to the President’s
views, yet none the less exposed to chances of death,
or captivity, or exile.
The crisis drove Madame Sand once
more to quit the privacy of her country life, but
this time in the capacity of intercessor with the
conqueror for his victims. She came up to Paris,
and on January 20, 1852, addressed a letter to the
President, imploring his clemency for the accused
generally in an admirably eloquent appeal to his sentiments
as well of justice as of generosity. The plea
she so forcibly urged, that according to his own professions
mere opinion was not to be prosecuted as a crime,
whereas the so-called “preventive measures”
had involved in one common ruin with his active opponents
those who had been mere passive spectators of late
events, was, of course, unanswerable. The future
Emperor granted her two audiences within a week at
the Elysee, in answer to her request, and he succeeded
on the first occasion in convincing her that the acts
of iniquity and intimidation perpetrated as by his
authority were as completely in defiance of his public
intentions as of his private principles. As a
personal favor to herself, he readily offered her
the release of any of the political prisoners that
she choose to name, and promised that a general amnesty
should speedily follow. She left him, reassured
to some extent as to the fate in store for her country.
The second interview she had solicited in order to
plead the cause of one of her personal friends, condemned
to transportation. The mission was a delicate
one, for her client would engage himself to nothing
for the future, and Madame Sand, in petitioning for
his release, saw no better course open to her than
as expressed by herself, frankly to denounce him to
the President as his “incorrigible personal
enemy.” Upon this the President granted
her the prisoner’s full pardon at once.
Madame Sand was naturally touched by this ready response
of the generous impulse to which she had trusted.
To those who cast doubts on the sincerity of any good
sentiment in such a quarter, she very properly replied
that it was not for her to be the first to discredit
the generosity she had so successfully appealed to.
But between her republican friends,
loth to owe their deliverance to the tender mercies
of Louis Napoleon, and her own desire to save their
lives and liberties, and themselves and their families
from ruin and despair, she found her office of mediator
a most unthankful one. She persisted however
in unwearying applications for justice and mercy, addressed
both to the dictator directly, and through his cousin,
Prince Napoleon (Jerome), between whom and herself
there existed a cordial esteem. She clung as
long as she could to her belief in the public virtue
of the President, or Emperor as he already began to
be called here and there. But the promised clemency
limited itself to a number of particular cases for
whom she had specially interceded.
The subsequent conditions of France precluded all free emission of socialist
or republican opinions, but Madame Sand desired nothing better than to send in
her political resignation; and it is impossible to share the regret of some of
her fellow-republicans at finding her again devoting her best energies to her
art of fiction, and in November, 1853, writing to Mazzini such words of wisdom
as these:
You are surprised that I can work at
literature. For my part, I thank God that
he has let me preserve this faculty; for an honest
and clear conscience like mine still finds, apart
from all debate, a work of moralization to pursue.
What should I do if I relinquish my task, humble
though it be? Conspire? It is not my vocation;
I should make nothing of it. Pamphlets?
I have neither the wit nor the wormwood required
for that. Theories? We have made too many,
and have fallen to disputing, which is the grave
of all truth and all strength. I am, and
always have been, artist before everything else.
I know that mere politicians look on artists, with
great contempt, judging them by some of those
mountebank-types which are a disgrace to art.
But you, my friend, you well know that a real artist
is as useful as the priest and the warrior,
and that when he respects what is true and what
is good, he is in the right path where the divine
blessing will attend him. Art belongs to all
countries and to all time, and its special good
is to live on when all else seems to be dying.
That is why Providence delivers it from passions
too personal or too general, and has given to its
organization patience and persistence, an enduring
sensibility, and that contemplative sense upon
which rests invincible faith.
Her novel, Les Maitres Sonneurs,
the first-fruits of the year 1853, is what most will
consider a very good equivalent for party pamphlets
and political diatribes.
When composing La Mare au Diable,
in 1846, Madame Sand looked forward to writing a series
of such peasant tales, to be collectively entitled
Les Veillees du Chanvreur, the hemp-beaters
being, as will be recollected, the Scheherazades of
each village. Their number was never to be thus
augmented, but the idea is recalled by the chapter-headings
of Les Maitres Sonneurs, in which Etienne Despardieu,
or Tiennet, the rustic narrator, tells, in the successive
veillees of a month, the romance of his youth.
It is a work of a very different type to the rural
tales that had preceded it, and should be regarded
apart from them. It is longer, more complex in
form and sentiment, more of an ideal composition.
Les Maitres Sonneurs, is a delightful pastoral,
woodland fantasy, standing by itself among romances
much as stands a kindred work of imagination, “As
You Like It,” among plays, yet thoroughly characteristic
of George Sand, the nature-lover, the seer into the
mysteries of human character, and the imaginative artist.
The agreeable preponderates in the story, but it has
its tragic features and its serious import. A
picturesque and uncommon setting adds materially to
its charm. Every thread tells in this delicate
piece of fancy-work, and the weaver’s art is
indescribable. But one may note the ingenuity
with which four or five interesting yet perfectly
natural types are brought into a group and contrasted;
improbable incidents so handled as not to strike a
discordant note, the characteristics of the past introduced
without ever losing hold of the links, the points of
identity between past and present. The scene
is the hamlet of Nohant itself; the time is a century
ago, when the country, half covered with forest, was
wilder, the customs rougher, the local coloring stronger
than even Madame Sand in her childhood had known them.
The personages belong to the rural proprietor class.
The leading characters are all somewhat out of the
common, but such exist in equal proportions in all
classes of society, and there is ample evidence besides
George Sand’s of notable examples among the
French peasantry. The plot and its interest lie
in the development of character and the fine tracing
of the manner in which the different characters are
influenced by circumstances and by each other.
If the beauty of rustic maidens, and of rustic songs
and dance-music, as here described, seem to transcend
probability, it must be remembered it is a peasant
who speaks of these wonders, and as wonders they might
appear to his limited experience. As a musical
novel, it has the ingenious distinction of being told
from the point of view of the sturdy and honest, but
unartistic and non-musical Tiennet; a typical Berrichon.
Madame Sand was of opinion that during the long occupation
of Berry by the English the two races had blended
extensively, and she would thus account for some of
the heavier, more inexpansive qualities of our nation
having become characteristic of this French province.
More than one English reader of Les
Maitres Sonneurs may have been struck by the picture
there presented of peasant-folk in a state of peace
and comfort, such as we do not suppose to have been
common in France before the Revolution. Madame
Sand has elsewhere explained how, as a fact, Nohant,
and other estates in the region round about, had enjoyed
some immunity from the worst abuses of the ancien
regime. Several of these properties, as it
happened, had fallen to women or minors widows,
elderly maiden ladies, who, and their agents, spared
the holders and cultivators of the soil the exactions
which, by right or by might, its lords were used to
levy. “So the peasants,” she writes,
“were accustomed not to put themselves to any
inconvenience; and when came the Revolution they were
already so well relieved virtually from feudal bonds
that they took revenge on nobody.” A new
seigneur of Nohant, coming to take possession,
and thinking to levy his utmost dues, in cash and
in kind, found his rustic tenants turn a deaf ear to
his summons. Ere he could insist the storm burst,
but it brought no convulsion, and merely confirmed
an independence already existing.
Les Maitres Sonneurs, whilst
illustrating some of the most striking merits of George
Sand, is free from the defects often laid to her charge;
and although of all her pastorals it must suffer
the most when rendered in any language but the original,
it is much to be regretted that some good translation
of this work should not put it within the reach of
all English readers.