Part 29

There occurred a sharp, decisive change, a change, however, not consistently maintained, in George Sand's quality of production. From producing novels of social ferment, she turned to producing the quietest, most quieting, idyllic little stories in the world. There is a long list of such. "La Petite Fadette," "Francois le Champi," "Les Maitres Sonneurs," are among the best of them. From this last, consummately well translated by our countrywoman, Miss Katharine Prescott Wormeley, who has Messrs. Roberts Brothers for her publishers, we shall offer a very short extract in specimen. But first a short passage from one of her earlier books, in order that our readers may get a sense of the change that she underwent, or rather--for no doubt the change was voluntary and calculated on her part--the change that she chose to make, in her manner. It is simply her two contrasted manners that we aim to illustrate--not at all, in either case, the matter or doctrine set forth. To illustrate this last we should have no room, had we the inclination.

From "Lelia," we translate a passage descriptive of Alpine scenery, or rather of the effect on the mind of Alpine scenery. After lighting upon this passage for our choice we found that Mr. Saintsbury too, in his "Specimens of French Literature," had made the same selection, at double length, for his sole exemplification of George Sand. We are thus confirmed in trusting that we shall show our author, if far too briefly, still at her best:

"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 Maitres Sonneurs," or "The Bagpipers," as Miss Wormeley renders the title. Brulette is a charming peasant girl, who, brought up in the same house with Jose, 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 Jose 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 Jose. "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, Jose, the mad man; Jose, the idiot; Jose, 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.

5. MUSSET.

Alfred de Musset makes a melancholy figure in literary history. Few men ever had a more brilliant morning than he; few men ever had an evening more somber. And Musset's evening fell at mid-day. Heine, with that bitterness which was his, could say of the still youthful poet, "A young man with a very fine future--behind him!"

What this writer accomplished, he accomplished by the pure felicity of genius--genius, flushed and quickened with the warm blood of youth. He did nothing in the way of self-tasking, but all in the way of self-indulging. He obeyed whim, and not will. When the whim failed, he failed. Will indeed he seemed not to have, but only willfulness. He died at forty-seven, but he had already ceased living at forty.

It is generally agreed that in what makes genius for the poet, namely, capacity of poetic feeling, propensity to poetic rhythm, command of poetic phrase, and power to see with the imagination, Musset belongs among the foremost singers of France. What he lacked was moral equipment to match. We mean not moral goodness, though this, too, he missed, but moral strength. He might have soared like the eagle, for he had eagle's pinions; but he had not the eagle's heart, and after a few daring upward flights he fluttered ignobly downward, and thereafter, except at intervals too rare, kept the ground. Some charge this lamentable failure on Musset's part to the ill influence over him of George Sand, with whom in the fresh splendor of his young fame he entered into an unhappy "relation"--a "relation" sought by the woman in the case, who of the two was the older. She, as some think, sucked Musset's heart out of him like a vampire. But what a confession to make on the man's behalf of flaccid moral fiber in him! Such a man, one would say, was certain to fall in due time prey to some one; in default of other hunter, then prey to himself. It is one of the things least consistent with a favorable view of George Sand's fundamental character that, two years after Musset's death, and some twenty years after the time of her "relation" with him, she should publish, thinly veiled under the form of fiction, a story of that relation, in which she herself appeared vindicated, and the unhappy dead was held up to the laughter and contempt of Europe. Paul de Musset, Alfred's brother, replied in a book which claimed to set the facts in their true light before the world. Wretched wrangle! A little more of dull conformity on her part to things as she found them, and a little less of passionate protest against them in literature and in life, would have helped George Sand shun scandals that happily limit her influence as they deservedly darken her fame. There is too much reason to fear that this woman, in whom genius was certainly greater than was conscience, made, after the manner of Goethe, a deliberate study of Musset in quest of material to be worked up in literary product.

Musset was greatest as poet, but he wrote admirable prose in novels and in comedies. He singularly combined capacity of hard and brilliant wit in prose dialogue with capacity of the softest, most dewy sentiment in musical verse. Some of his comedies are established classics of the French stage.

We confine ourselves here to brief exhibition by specimen of what Musset accomplished in that species of literary work in which he was greatest, namely, poetry. A quaternion of pieces called "The Nights" will supply us perhaps with our best single extract, at once practicable and characteristic. These pieces are entitled respectively "Night of May," "Night of August," "Night of October," "Night of December." They are couched in the form of dialogue between the poet and his muse. Of course they are highly charged with autobiographic quality. The poet poses in them very pensively before the public. The Byronic melancholy, without the Byronic passion, pervades them. Our extract we take, condensing it, from the "Night of December." In it, the poet's muse talks to the poet in what might easily pass for an almost pious vein. We could make extracts in which the piety would be far, very far, less edifying, would in fact take on the characteristic dissolute French type of moral sentiment. His muse's talk to the poet is somewhat such as might be imagined to be a confidential consolatory strain of condescension from the goddess-mother Venus to her son, the Virgilian "pious" AEneas. We make our translation closely line for line, almost word for word. The rhyme we sacrifice for the sake of what we trust may seem to wise judges a fairly good approximation, otherwise impossible in a literal rendering, to the spirit and rhythm of the original:

Is it aimlessly, then, that Providence works, And absent, then, deem'st thou the God that thee smote? The stroke thou complainest of saved thee perchance, My poor child, for 'twas then that was opened thy heart. An apprentice is man, and his master is pain, And none knows himself until he has grieved. It is a stern law, but a law that's supreme, As old as the world and as ancient as doom, That the baptism we of misfortune must take, And that all at this sorrowful price must be bought. The harvest to ripen has need of the dew, To live and to feel man has need of his tears, Joy has for its symbol a plant that is bruised Yet is wet with the rain and covered with flowers. Wast not saying that thou of thy folly wast cured? Art not young, art not happy, and everywhere hailed? And those airy-light pleasures which make life beloved, If thou never hadst wept, what worth to thee they?

* * * * *

Wouldst thou feel the ineffable peace of the skies, The hush of the nights, the moan of the waves, If somewhere down here fret and failure of sleep Had not brought to thy dream the eternal repose?

* * * * *

Of what then complainest? The unquenchable hope Is rekindled in thee 'neath the hand of mischance. Why choose to abhor thy vanished young years, And an evil detest that thee better has made?

Imagine the foregoing in its own original music, and invested with that hovering, wavering atmosphere of pathos which Musset knew so well how to throw over his verse, and you will partly understand what the charm is of this French poet to his countrymen.

Musset exhibits something of the wit that he was, in the following bit of rhymed epigram, which, breaking up two stanzas for the purpose, we take from his poem entitled "Namouna." The rhymes were necessary here to convey the effect of smartness belonging to the original, and we accordingly preserve them:

Lord Byron for model has served me, say you, You know not then Byron set Pulci in view? Read up the Italians, you'll see if he stole. Nothing is any one's, every one's all. Dunce deep as a schoolmaster surely were he Who should dream left for him one word there could be That no man before him had hit upon yet; They somebody copy who cabbage-plants set.

This self-vindicating epigram of Musset's may be pronounced clever rather than satisfactory.

Musset--the juxtaposition and contrast of the two men irresistibly provokes the reflection--was as much less than Balzac by inferiority of will as he was greater by superiority of genius.

Already, such is the pace of progress in these last days of the nineteenth century, the "men of 1830" are beginning to seem a generation long gone by. The future will see whether their successors of the present time enjoy a more protracted supremacy.

XXIV.

JOUBERT: 1754-1824; Madame Swetchine: 1782-1859; Amiel: 1821-1881.

We come now to that nineteenth-century group, foreshadowed on an earlier page, of French _pensee_-writers.

The longer lapse of time in JOUBERT'S case, constantly confirming his claim to be a true classic, justifies us in placing, as we do, his name not only first but principal in the title to the present chapter.

Joseph Joubert presents the singular case of a man of letters living to a good old age, whose published literary work, and, therefore, whose literary fame, are wholly posthumous. He left behind him more than two hundred blank books filled with notes of thoughts which were to constitute after he died his title to enduring remembrance.

Everything important surviving from his pen exists in the form of what the French call _pensees_. The sense of this word one of Joubert's own _pensees_ very well expresses:

I should like to convert wisdom into coin, that is, mint it into _maxims_, into _proverbs_, into _sentences_, easy to keep and to circulate.

Another of his _pensees_ confesses, perhaps we should say rather, professes, what the ambition was that this most patient of writers indulged with reference to the literary form of his work:

If there exists a man tormented by the accursed ambition of putting a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and that phrase into a word, that man is myself.

Joubert was a natural unchangeable classicist in taste and spirit. The Periclean age of Greece, the Augustan age of Rome, the "great age" of France, that of Louis XIV., supplied Joubert with most of the books that fed his mind. He remained distinctively Christian in creed, though not nicely orthodox according to any accepted standard. Like so many of his literary compatriots, Joubert owed a great debt, for intellectual quickening, shaping, and refining, to brilliant and beautiful women.

We show a few, too few, specimens that may indicate this gifted Frenchman's rare and precious quality:

Religion is a fire to which example furnishes fuel, and which goes out if it does not spread.

The Bible is to the religions [of mankind], what the Iliad is to poetry.

A comparison, the latter foregoing, however faulty by defect we may justly esteem it, loyally designed, of course, by the author to render profound homage to the Bible.

Only just the right proportion of wit should be put into a book; in conversation a little too much is allowable.

We may convince others by our arguments; but we can persuade them only by their own.

Frankness is a natural quality; constant veracity is a virtue.

In pondering such golden sentences, one is constantly incited to make maxims one's self; which, indeed, is a part of the value of this kind of literature.

Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative rind.

The foregoing happy English rendering of the French maxim we borrow from Mr. Henry Attwell, who has published a selection of Joubert's _pensees_ translated, the translation being accompanied with the original text.

Children have more need of patterns than of critics.

Children should be made reasonable, but they should not be made reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey and unreasonable for them to dispute. Without that, education would waste itself in bandying arguments, and every thing would be lost if all teachers were not clever cavillers.

In a poem there should be not only poetry of images, but poetry of ideas.

Words, like lenses, darken whatever they do not help us see.

Buffon says that genius is but the aptitude for being patient. The aptitude for a long-continued and unwearying effort of attention is indeed, the genius of observation; but there is another genius, that of invention, which is aptitude for a quick, prompt, and ever-active energy of penetration.

Buffon's is a good working definition, to say the least--for genius of any sort.

The end of a production should always call to mind its beginning.

This may be compared to the law in musical composition requiring that a piece end in the key in which it began.

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

"Artistic," instead of "literary," Joubert might have widened his "thought" by saying.

When there is born in a nation a man capable of producing a great thought, another is born there capable of understanding it and of admiring it.

That which astonishes, astonishes once; but that which is admirable is more and more admired.

Fully to understand a great and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.

A few individual literary judgments now, and we shall have shown from Joubert all that our room will admit:

Seek in Plato forms and ideas only. These are what he himself sought. There is in him more light to see by than objects to see, more form than substance. We should breathe him and not feed on him.

Homer wrote to be sung, Sophocles to be declaimed, Herodotus to be recited, and Xenophon to be read. From these different destinations of their works, there could not but spring a multitude of differences in their style.

Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a stylus of bronze.

In Plato the spirit of poetry gives life to the languors of dialectics.

Plato loses himself in the void; but one sees the play of his wings; one hears the noise of their motion.

Cicero is, in philosophy, a kind of moon. His teaching sheds a light, very soft, but borrowed, a light altogether Greek, which the Roman has softened and enfeebled.

Horace pleases the intellect, but he does not charm the taste. Virgil satisfies the taste no less than the reflective faculty. It is as delightful to remember his verses as to read them.

There is not in Horace a single turn, one might almost say a single word, that Virgil would have used, so different are their styles.

Behind the thought of Pascal, we see the attitude of that firm and passionless intellect. This it is, more than all else, which makes him so imposing.

Fenelon knows how to pray, but he does not know how to instruct We have in him a philosopher almost divine, and a theologian almost without knowledge.

M. de Bausset says of Fenelon: "He loved men better than he knew them." Charmingly spoken; it is impossible to praise more wittily what one blames, or better to praise in the very act of blaming.

The plan of Massillon's sermons is insignificant, but their bas-reliefs are superb.

Montesquieu appears to teach the art of making empires; you seem to yourself to be learning it when you listen to him, and every time you read him you are tempted to go to work and construct one.

Voltaire's judgment was correct, his imagination rich, his intellect agile, his taste lively, and his moral sense ruined.

It is impossible for Voltaire to satisfy, and impossible for him not to please.

In Voltaire, as in the monkey, the movements are charming and the features hideous. One always sees in him, at the end of a clever hand, an ugly face.

That oratorical "authority" [weight of personal character] of which the ancients speak--you feel it in Bossuet more than in any other man; after him, in Pascal, in La Bruyere, in J. J. Rousseau even, but never in Voltaire.

The style of Rousseau makes upon the soul the impression which the flesh of a lovely woman would make in touching us. There is something of the woman in his style.

Racine and Boileau are not fountain-heads. A fine choice in imitation constitutes their merit. It is their books that imitate books, not their souls that imitate souls. Racine is the Virgil of the unlettered.

Moliere is comic in cold blood. He provokes laughter and does not laugh. Herein lies his excellence.

Bernardin [St. Pierre] writes by moonlight, Chateaubriand by sunlight.

The quality of both writers is such that we seem simply to be making the transition from masculine to feminine in going, as now we do, from Joubert to Madame Swetchine.

Madame SWETCHINE lives, and deserves to live, in French literature--for, though Russian, she wrote in French--by the incomparable exquisiteness of her personal, expressing itself in her literary, quality. Purest of pure was she, as in what she wrote, so in what she was. Through sympathetic contemporary description she makes an impression as of one of Fra Angelico's female saints released for a life from the fixed canonization of the canvas.