A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century

CHAPTER V

GEORGE SAND

George Sand – generalities about her.

There is a Scotch proverb (not, I think, among those most generally known), "Never tell your foe when your foot sleeps"; and some have held that this applies specially to the revelation, by an author, of his own weak points. I do not agree with them, having always had a fancy for playing and seeing cards on table – except at cards themselves, where a dummy seems to me only to spoil the game. Therefore I admit, in coming to George Sand, that this famous novelist has not, as a novelist, ever been a favourite of mine – that I have generally experienced some, and occasionally great, difficulty in reading her. Even the "purged considerate mind" (without, I venture to hope, much dulling of the literary palate) which I have brought to the last readings necessary for this book, has but partially removed this difficulty. The causes of it, and their soundness or unsoundness as reasons, must be postponed for a little – till, as usual, sufficient survey and analysis of at least specimens (for here as elsewhere the immense bulk of the total work defies anything more than "sampling") have supplied due evidence. But it may be said at once that no kind of prejudice or dislike, arising from the pretty notorious history and character of Amantine (Amandine? Armandine?) Lucile Aurore Dupin or Dudevant, commonly called George Sand, has anything to do with my want of affection or admiration for her work. I do not recommend her conduct in her earlier days for imitation, and I am bound to say that I do not think it was ever excused by what one may call real love. But she seems to have been an extremely good fellow in her age, and not by any means a very bad fellow in her youth. She was at one time pretty, or at least good-looking;174 she was at all times clever; and if she did not quite deserve that almost superhuman eulogy awarded in the Devonshire epitaph to

she did fulfil the primal duty of her sex, and win its greatest triumph, by complying with the first half of the line, while, if she failed as to the second, it was perhaps not entirely her fault.176 Finally, Balzac's supposed picture of her as Camille in Béatrix has the almost unique peculiarity, among its author's sketches of women, of being positively attractive – attractive, that is to say, not merely to the critic as a powerful study and work of art; not perhaps at all to the sentimentalist as a victim or an adorable piece of candeur; not to the lover of physical beauty or passion, but to the reader – "sensible" in the old sense as well as in the new – who feels that here is a woman he should like to have known, even if he feels likewise that his weather-eye would have had to be kept open during the knowledge.

Phases of her work.

It has been customary – and though these customary things are sometimes delusive and too often mechanical, there is also occasionally, and, I think, here, her work, something not negligible in them, if they be not applied too rigidly – to divide George Sand's long period (nearly half a century) of novel-production into four sub-periods, corresponding roughly with the four whole decades of the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties.177 The first, sometimes called, but, I think, misleadingly, "Romantic," is the period of definite and mainly sexual revolt, illustrated by such novels as Indiana, Valentine, Lélia, and Jacques. The second is that of illuminé mysticism and semi-political theorising, to which Spiridion, Consuelo, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, and others belong. The third, one of a certain apaisement, when the author had finally settled at her country-house of Nohant in Berry, turns to studies of rural life: La Petite Fadette, François le Champi, La Mare au Diable, etc. The last is represented by novels of no one particular, or at least single, scope or bent, Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré, Le Marquis de Villemer, Mademoiselle La Quintinie, etc., reaching to Flamarande and its sequel shortly before her death. The thing, as has been hinted already, is one of those first rough sketches of the ground which, if not too closely adhered to, are often useful. As a matter of fact, the divisions often – as one might be sure they would – run cross. There is a lot of occult or semi-occult stuff in Lélia, and the "period of appeasement" did not show much reconciliation and forgiveness of injury in Elle et Lui, whether we take this as by the injured or as by her who had done the wrong. But if we take the two first novels briefly and Lélia itself more fully for Period I.; Consuelo and its sequel (Spiridion has been "done and done thoroughly"178 by Thackeray in the Paris Sketch-book) for II.; the three above-mentioned berquinades for the Third, with Lucrezia Floriani thrown between as an all-important outsider, and Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré for IV., giving each some detailed criticism, with a few remarks on others, it ought to suffice as a fairly solid groundwork for a general summing-up.

Indiana.

To understand the furore with which Indiana and Valentine were received, one must remember the time and the circumstance with even more care than is usually desirable. They were – if not quite so well written as they seemed even to Thackeray – written very well; they expressed the full outburst of the French Sturm und Drang movement; there was nothing like them either in French or in any other literature, though Bulwer was beginning similar things with us. Essentially, and when taken sub specie aeternitatis, they are very nearly rubbish. The frail (extremely frail) and gentle Indiana, with her terrible husband, whose crimes against her and nature even reach the abominable pitch of declaring himself ready to shoot expected poachers and possible burglars; her creole maid and foster-sister "Noun," who disguises herself in Indiana's garments and occupies her room, receives there a lover who is afterwards her mistress's, but soon commits suicide; the lover himself, a most appalling "tiger," as his own time would have called him; and the enigmatic English cousin, indifferently designated as "Sir Rodolphe Brown," "Sir Ralph," "Sir Brown," and "M. Brown," with whom Indiana makes a third trial of hitherto "incomprised" and unattained happiness – are all inhabitants of a sort of toy doll's-house partaking of the lunatic-asylum. But the author's three prefaces, written at intervals of exactly ten years, passably inconsistent in detail, but all agreeing in contempt of critics and lofty anarchist sentiment, are great fun, and are almost a reward for reading the book.

Valentine.

Valentine has more of the really admirable description of her beloved Berry with which the author so often honeys her drugs; but the novel-part of it is largely composed of the same sort of violent bosh which almost monopolises Indiana. In fact, the peasant-bourgeois hero Benedict, whom every woman loves; who is a conceited and ill-mannered mixture of clown and prig; who is angry with his mistress Valentine (Madame de Lansac) for "not knowing how to prefer him to her honour," though one would have said she had given ample proofs of this preference; and who finally appeases the reader by tumbling on the points of a pitchfork placed in his way by an (as it happens) unduly jealous husband, is a more offensive creature than any one in the earlier book.179 One is, on the other hand, a little sorry for Valentine, while one is sorry for nobody in Indiana except perhaps for the husband, who has the sense to die early.

Lélia.

Lélia, some years younger than these and later than the Musset tragedy, is a good deal better, or at least less childish. It is beyond all question an extraordinary book, though it may be well to keep the hyphen in the adjective to prevent confusion of sense. It opens, and to a large extent continues, with a twist of the old epistolary style which, if nothing else, is ingeniously novel. George Sand was in truth a "well of ingenuity" as D'Artagnan was a puits de sagesse, and this accounts, to some extent, for her popularity. You have not only no dates and no places, but no indication who writes the letters or to whom they are written, though, unless you are very stupid, you soon find out. The personae are Lélia – a femme incomprise, if not incomprehensible; Sténio, a young poet, who is, in the profoundest and saddest sense of the adverb, hopelessly in love with her; and a mysterious personage – a sort of Solomon-Socrates-Senancour – who bears the Ossianesque name of Trenmor, with a later and less provincially poetical alias of "Valmarina."180 The history of the preuves of Trenmor's novel-nobility are soon laid before the reader. They are not, in their earlier stages, engaging to the old-fashioned believer in "good form."

Trenmor is the sort of exaggeration of Childe Harold which a lively but rather vulgar mind might conceive. "He was born great; but they developed the animal in him." The greatness postponed its appearance, but the animality did credit to the development. "He used to love to beat his dogs; before long he beat his prostitutes." This harmless diversion accentuated itself in details, for which, till the acme, the reader must be referred to the original. The climacteric moment came. He had a mistress called "La Mantovana," whom he rather preferred to the others, because she was beautiful and impudent. "In a night of noise and wine" he struck her, and she drew a dagger. This made him love her for a moment; but unfortunately she made an improper observation; thereupon he tore off her pearl necklace and trod it under his feet. She wept. This annoyed Trenmor very much. "She had wished revenge for a personal insult, and she cried for a toy!" Accordingly he had a "crispation of nerves," which obliged him to take a large cut-glass decanter and hit her on the head with it. According to the natural perversity on such occasions of such persons, she died. The brutal justice of mankind – so hateful to Godwin and George Sand and Victor Hugo – sent Trenmor, not, indeed, to the gallows, as it should have done, but to the galleys. Yet the incident made Lélia, who (she must have had a sweet set of friends) somehow knew him, very fond of Trenmor, though she certainly told him that he might as well repent of what he had done, which seems inconsistent.

They let him out after five years (why, Heaven or the other place knows!) and he became a reformed character – the Solomon-Socrates-Senancour above mentioned plus a sort of lay "director" to Lélia, with a carbonaro attitude of political revolutionary and free-thinking illuminé. Now corruptio pessimi is seldom optima.

The main interest, however, shifts (with apparitions of Trenmor-Valmarina) to the loves (if they may be called so) of the pitiable Sténio and the intolerable heroine. She is unable to love anybody, and knows it; she can talk – ye Demons, how she can talk! – but she can never behave like a woman of this world. She alternately hugs Sténio, so that she nearly squeezes his breath out, and, when he draws natural conclusions from this process, pushes him away. But worse and more preposterous things happen. Lélia has a sister, Pulchérie, who is very like her (they are of course both impossibly beautiful) in body, and so far resembles her in mind and soul as to be unable to behave decently or sensibly. But her want of decency and sense takes the more commonplace line of becoming an actual courtesan of the "Imperia" kind in Italy. By a series of muddles for which Lélia is – as her plain-spoken sister points out after the catastrophe – herself really responsible, Sténio is induced, during the excitement of an al fresco fête at night in the grounds of a sort of fairy palace, to take the "coming" sister for the recalcitrant one, and avail himself of her complaisance, usque ad finem. Lélia reproaches him (which she has not the least right to do), and he devotes himself entirely to Pulchérie (La Zinzolina is her professional name) and her group of noble paramours. He gets, however, generally drunk and behaves with a brutal rudeness, which would, in the Italy of tradition, have finished things up very soon by a stiletto thrust, and in honest England by a kicking into the street. There are mysterious plots, cardinals, and anything else you like or don't like. Lélia becomes an abbess, Sténio a suicide, the above-mentioned priest, Magnus, being much concerned in this. She admits her unfortunate lover to burial, and is degraded and imprisoned for it – or for having saved Trenmor-Valmarina from the law. Everybody else now dies, and the nightmare comes to an end.

The moral of the group and its tragi-comedy.

The beauties of style which softened the savage breast of Thackeray himself in the notice above mentioned, and which, such as they are, appear even in George Sand's earliest work, will receive attention when that work comes to be discussed as a whole. Meanwhile, at the risk of any charge of Philistinism, I confess that this part of it seems to me, after fifty years and more of "corrected impression," almost worthless au fond. It is, being in prose, and therefore destitute of the easements or at least masquerades which poetry provides for nonsense, the most conspicuous and considerable example – despite the undoubted talent of the writer – of the mischief which Byronism did on the Continent. With us, though it made a great stir, it really did little harm except to some "silly women" (as the apostle, in unkindly and uncourtly, but truly apostolic fashion, had called similar persons of the angelic sex ages before). Counter-jumpers like Thackeray's own Pogson worshipped "the noble poet"; boys of nobler stamp like Tennyson thought they worshipped him, but if they were going to become men of affairs forgot all about him; if they were to be poets took to Keats and Shelley as models, not to him. Critics hardly took him seriously, except for non-literary reasons. There was, as I think somebody (perhaps Thackeray himself) says upon something, "too much roast beef about" for us to fill our bellies with this worse than east wind of Sensibility gone rotten. But abroad, for reasons which would be easy but irrelevant to dwell upon, Byron hit the many-winged bird of popular favour on nearly all its pinions. He ran strikingly and delightfully contrary to the accepted Anglais, whether of the philosophical or the caricature type; he was noble, but revolutionary; he looked (he never was, except in non-essentials) Romantic; he was new, naughty, nice, all at once. And they went mad over him, and to a large extent and for a long time remained so; indeed, Continental criticism, whether Latin, Teutonic, Scandinavian, or Slav, has never reached "the centre" about Byron. Now George Sand was at no time exactly a silly woman, but she was for a long time a woman off her balance. Byronism was exactly the – ism with which she could execute the wildest feats of half-voluntary and half-involuntary acrobatics, saltimbanquery, and chucking of her bonnet over all conceivable and inconceivable mills. Childe Harold, Manfred, Conrad, Lara, Don Juan, Sardanapalus – the shades of these caught her and waltzed with her and reversed and figured and gesticulated,

With their Sentimentalibus lacrimae rorum, and pathos and bathos delightful to see,

– or perhaps not so very delightful?

But let us pass to the next stage.

Consuelo.

Those persons (I think, without tempting Nemesis too much, I might say those fortunate persons) to whom the world of books is almost as real as the other two worlds of life and of dream, may or must have observed that the conditions and sensations of the individual in all three are very much the same. In particular, the change from a state of discomfort to one of comfort – or vice versa unluckily, but with that we have nothing immediately to do – applies to all. In actual life you are hot, tired, bored, headachy, "spited with fools," what not. A change of atmosphere, a bath, a draught of some not unfermented liquor, the sight of a face, what not again, nay, sometimes a mere shift of clothing, will make you cool, satisfied, at peace. In dreams you have generally to wake, to shake off the "fierce vexation," and to realise that it is a dream; but the relief comes sooner or later. If anybody wants to experience this change from discomfort to comfort in the book-world of a single author, I cannot commend anything better than the perusal, with a short interval – but there should be some – of Consuelo after Lélia. We may have some things to say against the later novel; but that does not matter.

Much better in parts.

It opens with no tricks or tours de force; in no atmosphere of darkened footlights and smell of sawdust; but in frank and free novel-fashion, with a Venetian church, a famous maestro (Porpora), a choir of mostly Italian girls, and the little Spanish gipsy Consuelo, the poorest, humblest, plainest (as most people think) of all the bevy, but the possessor of the rarest vocal faculties and the most happiness-producing-and-diffusing temper. There is nothing in the least milk-soppy or prudish about Consuelo, though she is perfectly "pure"; nor is there anything tractified about her, though she is pious and generous. The contrast between her and her betrothed, the handsome but worthless Anzoleto, also a singer, is, at first, not overworked; and one scene – that in which, when Consuelo has got over the "scraggy" age and is developing actual beauty, she and Anzoleto debate, in the most natural manner, whether she is pretty or not – is quite capital, one of the things that stick in one's memory and stamp the writer's genius, or, at any rate, consummate talent.

The degeneration.

This happy state of affairs continues without much deterioration, though perhaps with some warnings to the experienced, for some two hundred pages. The situations and the other characters – the Professor Porpora himself; Count Zustiniani, dilettante, impresario and of course gallant; his prima donna and (in the story at least) first mistress, La Corilla; her extravagances and seduction of the handsome Anzoleto; his irresolution between his still existing affection for Consuelo, who passes through all these things (and Zustiniani's siege of her) "in maiden meditation, fancy-free" – all discharge themselves or play their parts quite as they ought to do. But this comparatively quiet, though by no means emotionless or unincidented, part of the story "ends in a blow-up," or rather in a sink-down, for Anzoleto, on a stolen gondola trip with Clorinda, third cantatrice and interim mistress of Zustiniani (beautiful, but stupid, and a bad singer), meets the Count in another gondola with Corilla herself, and in his fury rams his rival and the perfidious one. Consuelo, who has at last had her eyes opened, quits Venice and flees, with a testimonial from Porpora, to Germany. Even then one hopes for the best, and acknowledges that at any rate something not far from the best, something really good, has been given one for two hundred well-filled pages – more than the equivalent of the first deck of one of our old average "three-deckers."

But in the mind of experience such hopes are always accompanied by fears, and alas! in this instance "the fears have it." There is on the border of Bohemia a "Castle of the Giants"; and oh! how one wishes that my Uncle Toby had allowed the sea to execute the ravages he deprecated and sweep that castle into nothingness! When we get there Byronism is back – nay, its papa and mamma, Lewisism and Radcliffism, are back also – with their cardboard turrets and precipices and grottos; their pine-woods reminding one of the little bristly green things, on round cinnamon-coloured bases, of one's youth; their floods and falls so obviously supplied at so much a thousand gallons by the nearest water company, and their mystery-men and dwarfs and catalepsies and all the rest of the weary old "tremblement." Count Christian of Rudolstadt is indeed a gentleman and an almost too affectionate father; his brother, Baron Frederick, a not disagreeable sportsman and bon vivant; their sister, the Canoness, a not too theatrical old maid; and Frederick's daughter, Amélie, though pert and not too good-natured, the most human creature of them all, albeit with the humanities of a soubrette rather than of a great lady. But what shall one say of Albert of Rudolstadt, the heir, the betrothed of Amélie (this fact excusing much in her), and, when Consuelo has joined the circle at Porpora's recommendation as music-mistress and companion in the higher kind to Amélie —her slave, conqueror, tormentor, and in the long-run husband? He is perhaps the most intolerable hero181 ever designed as a gentleman by a novelist who has been classed as great, and who certainly has some qualities necessary to greatness. In reading about him vague compunctions even come over the mind at having spoken harshly of Sténio and Trenmor. Sténio was always a fool and latterly a cad; Trenmor first a brute and then a bore. Albert is none of these (except perhaps the last), but he is madder than the Mad Hatter and the March Hare put together, and as depressing as they are delightful. He has hallucinations which obliterate the sense of time in him; he thinks himself one of his ancestors of the days of Ziska; he has second sight; he speaks Spanish to Consuelo and calls her by her name when he first sees her, though he has not the faintest sane idea who she is or whence she comes; and he reduces his family to abject misery by ensconcing himself for days in a grotto which can be isolated by means of a torrent turned on and off at pleasure by a dwarf gipsy called Zdenko, who is almost a greater nuisance than Albert himself. Consuelo discovers his retreat at the risk of being drowned; and various nightmarish scenes occur, resulting in the slight return to sanity on Albert's part involved in falling in love with her, and a very considerable advance towards insanity on hers by falling in love with him. But perhaps this give-and-take of lovers may seem attractive to some. And when after a time we get into mere hocus-pocus, and it seems to Consuelo that Albert's violin "speaks and utters words as through the mouth of Satan," the same persons may think it fine. For myself, I believe that without fatuity I may claim to be, if not a visionnaire (perhaps that also), at least a lover of visions, and of Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Revelation. Dante, Blake, Shelley, the best of Lamennais and the best of Hugo excite in me nothing but a passionate reverence. I can walk day-long and night-long by Ulai and Chebar and Lethe-Eunoe and have no thought of sneer or slumber, shrug or satiety. But when you ask me to be agitated at Count Albert of Rudolstadt's violin ventriloquising Satan I really must decline. I do even remember the poor creature Paul de Kock, and would fain turn to one of the things he was writing at this very time.

Recovery; but not maintained quite to the end.

Consuelo is a very long book – it fills three of the tightly printed volumes of the old Michel-Calmann-Lévy collection, with some three or four hundred pages in each; and we have not got, in the above survey, to more than the middle of the second. But in its afternoon and evening there is some light. The creature Anzoleto recurs; but his immediate effect is good,182 for it starts the heroine on a fresh elopement of an innocent kind, and we get back to reality. The better side of George Sand's Bohemianism revives in Bohemia itself; and she takes Consuelo to the road, where she adopts male dress (a fancy with her creatress likewise), and falls in with no less a person than the composer Haydn in his youth. They meet some Prussian crimps, and escape them by help of a coxcombical but not wholly objectionable Austrian Count Hoditz and the better (Prussian) Trenck. They get to Vienna (meeting La Corilla in an odd but not badly managed maternity-scene half-way) and rejoin old Porpora there. There are interviews with Kaunitz and Maria Theresa:183 and a recrudescence of the Venetian musical jealousies. Consuelo endeavours to reopen communications with the Rudolstadts, but Porpora – chiefly out of his desire to retain her on the stage, but partly also from an honest and not wholly unsound belief that a union between a gipsy girl and a German noble would itself be madness – plays false with the letters. She accepts a professional invitation from Hoditz to his castle in Moravia, meets there no less a person than Frederic the Second incognito, and by his order (after she has saved his life from the vengeance of the re-crimped deserter rescued with her by Hoditz and Trenck) is invited to sing at Berlin. The carrying out of the invitation, which has its Fredericianities184 (as one may perhaps be allowed to call them), is, however, interrupted. The mysterious Albert, who has mysteriously turned up in time to prevent an attempt of the other and worse (Austrian) Trenck on Consuelo, is taken with an apparently mortal illness at home, and Consuelo is implored to return there. She does so, and a marriage in articulo mortis follows, the supposed dead Zdenko (whom we did not at all want) turning up alive after his master's death. Consuelo, fully if not cheerfully adopted by the family, is offered all the heirloom jewels and promised succession to the estates. She refuses, and the book ends – with fair warning that it is no ending.