Part 42
About the same date he proffered a definition of one of the most difficult of subjects. His mother had been trying to explain the difference between poetry and prose by saying that the former describes beautiful things, when he suddenly interrupted her, exclaiming: “Oh yes, I know, it’s language with ornaments”. But here the diary has, it must be confessed, the look of wishing to display the boy’s accomplishments, a fault from which, on the whole, it is creditably free.
As might be expected, the boy’s reasoning was now much sounder, that is to say, more like our own. Yet now and again the old easy fashion of induction would crop up. Thus one day (towards end of ninth month) he was puzzled by the fact that boys of the same age might be of unequal size. This brought him to the old subject of growth, and he suggested quite seriously that the taller boys had had more sun. On his father saying: ‘The sun makes _plants_ grow,’ he added: “And people too”.
His questionings took about this time the direction of origins or beginnings. As with other children, God did not appear to be the starting-point in the evolution of things, and he once asked quite seriously (end of sixth month): “What was God like in his younger days?” With a like impulse to go back to absolute beginnings he inquired about the same date, after learning that chicken-pox was only caught from other animals: “What was the person or thing that first had chicken-pox?” A little later (beginning of ninth month) he and a boy companion of nearly the same age were talking about the beginnings of human life. C. said “I can’t make out how the first man in the world was able to speak. A word, you know, has a sound, and how did he find out what sound to make?” His friend then said that his puzzle was how the first babies were nursed. This child seems to have set out with the supposition that the history of our race began with the arrival of babies.
Very little is told us in this unfinished chapter of the child’s emotional and moral development. As might be expected from the increase of intellectual activity the movements expressive of the feelings of strain and perplexity which accompany thought grew more distinct. In particular it was noticeable at this time that during the fits of thought the child’s face would take on a quaint old-fashioned look, the eye-brows being puckered up and the eye-lids twitching.
He continued very sensitive about the cruelties of the world, more especially towards animals. One day (at the end of the fifth month) his mother had been reading to him his favourite, _Black Beauty_, in which a war-horse describes to the equine author the horrors of war. C. was deeply affected by the picture, and at length exclaimed with much emphasis, “Oh, ma! why do they do such things? It’s a _beastly_, _beastly_ world,” at the same time bursting into tears and hiding his face in his mother’s lap. “So hard,” writes the father, “did the boy still find it, notwithstanding his increased knowledge, to accept this human world as a right and just one.”
The religious thought and sentiment remained thoroughly childish. He was still puzzled about the relations of heaven and the grave. One day (end of sixth month) his father observed, looking at the Christmas pudding on the table wreathed with violet flame: “Oh, how I should like to be burned after death instead of being buried”. On this C. looking alarmed said: “_I_ won’t be burned. I shouldn’t go to heaven then.” On his father remarking: “’Tisn’t your body that goes to heaven,” he continued: “But my _head_ does”. Here, writes the father, we seem to perceive a transition from the old gross materialism of last year to a more refined form. C. was now, it may be presumed, localising the soul in the head, and clinging to the idea that at least that limited portion of our frame might manage to get away from the dark grave to the bright celestial regions. It may be too, he adds, that this fancy was aided by seeing pictures of detached cherub heads.[330]
Footnote 330:
Compare above, p. 123.
A month or two later (beginning of ninth month) he began to attack the difficult problem of Divine fore-knowledge and free-will. His mother had been remonstrating with him about his naughty ways. He grew very miserable and said: “I can’t make out how it is God doesn’t make us good. I pray to him to make me good.” To this his mother replied that he must help himself to be good. This only drew from C. the following protest: “Then what’s the use of having God if we have to help ourselves”. “Even now,” writes the father, "it looks as if God and heaven were for him institutions, the _raison d’être_ of which was their serviceableness to man."
He brought to the consideration of prayer a childish sense of propriety which sometimes wore a quaint aspect. One day (end of third month) on his return from the Kindergarten he asked his mother: “Does God teach us?” and when bidden explain his question continued: “Because they said that at school” (“Teach us to be good”). He then added: “But anyhow that isn’t a proper way to speak to God”. His notion of what was the proper way was illustrated in his own practice. One evening (end of sixth month) after his bath he was kneeling with his head on his mother’s lap so that she might dry his hair. He began to pray half audibly in this wise: “Please, God, let me find out before my birthday, but at least on my birthday.... So now good-bye!” This ending, obviously borrowed from his sister’s letters, was varied on another occasion in this way: “With my love, good-bye”.[331]
Footnote 331:
Compare above, p. 283.
It seems strange that the diary should break off at a time when there was so much of the quaint and pretty child-traits left to be observed. No explanation of the abrupt termination is offered, and I am only able to conjecture that the father was at this time pressed with other work, and that when he again found the needed leisure he discovered to his chagrin that time, aided by the school-drill, was already doing its work. We know that it is about this time that the artist, Nature, is wont to rub out the characteristic infantile lines in her first crude sketch of a human mind, and to elaborate a fuller and maturer picture. And while the onlooking parent may rejoice in the unfolding of the higher human lineaments, he cannot altogether suppress a pang at the disappearance of what was so delightfully fresh and lovely.
I will close these extracts, following the father’s own fashion, with a word of apology. C.’s doings and sayings have seemed to me worth recording, not because their author was in any sense a remarkable child, but solely because he was a true child. In spite of his habitual association with grown-up people he retained with childish independence his own ways of looking at things. No doubt something of the intellectual fop, of the assertive prig, peeps out now and again. Yet if we consider how much attention was given to his utterances, this is not surprising. For the greater part the sayings appear to me the direct naïve utterance of genuine childish conviction. And it is possible that the inevitable impulse of the parent to show off his child has done C. injustice by making too much, especially in the last chapter of the diary, of what looks smart. Heaven grant that our observations of the little ones may never destroy the delightful simplicity and unconsciousness of their ways, and turn them into disagreeable little performers, all conscious of their _rôle_, and greedy of admiration.
XII. GEORGE SAND’S CHILDHOOD.
_The First Years._
Much has been written about George Sand, but singularly little about her childhood. Yet she herself, when she set to work, between forty and fifty, to write the _Histoire de ma Vie_, thought it worth while to fill the best part of two volumes of that work with early reminiscences; and herein surely she judged wisely. Good descriptions of childish experience are rare enough. George Sand gives us a singularly full story of childhood; and, allowing for the fact of its author being a novelist, one may say that this story reads on the whole like a record of memory. That a narrative at once so charming and so pathetic should have been neglected, by English writers at least, can only be set down to the circumstance that it is not clearly marked off from the tediously full account of ancestors which precedes it.[332]
Footnote 332:
A selection of scenes from the story, with notes, has been prepared for young English students by M. Eugène Joël, under the title, _L’Enfance de George Sand_ (Rivingtons).
The early reminiscences of a great man or woman have a special interest. Schopenhauer has ingeniously traced out the essential similarity of the man of genius and the child. Whatever the value of this analogy, it is certain that the gifted child seems not less but more of a child because of his gifts. This is emphatically true of the little lady with whom we are now concerned, and of whom, since we are interested in her on her own account and not merely as the precursor of the great novelist, we shall speak by her rightful name, Aurore Dupin.
The reader need not be told that the child who was to become the representative among modern women of the daring irregularities of genius was an uncommon child. She would certainly have been set down as strange and as deficient in childish traits by a commonplace observer. Yet close inspection shows that the untamed and untamable ‘oddities’ were, after all, only certain common childish impulses and tendencies exalted, or, if the reader prefers, exaggerated. Herein lies the chief value of the story. To this it may be added that this exaggeration of childish sensibility was set in a _milieu_ admirably fitted to stir and strain it to the utmost. It was a motley turbulent world into which little Aurore was unceremoniously pitched, and makes the chronicle of her experience a thrilling romance. And all this experience, it may be said finally, is set down with the untroubled regard and the patient hand of one of the old chroniclers. The forty years had left the memory tenacious and clear to a remarkable degree—in this respect the story will bear comparison with the childish recallings of Goethe and the other famous self-historians; at the same time these years had brought the woman’s power of quiet retrospect and the artist’s habit of calm complacent envisagement. Herein lies a further element of value. The writer feels her identity with the subject of her memoir: she lives over again the passion-storms and ennuis, the reveries and hoydenish freaks of little Aurore; yet she can detach herself from her heroine too, and discuss her and her surroundings with perfect artistic aloofness.
Aurore—or, to give her her full appellation, Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin—was born in 1804. Her father, a distinguished officer of the Empire, was grandson of Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Poland. Her mother was a daughter of a Parisian bird-seller, and a true child of the people. The student of heredity may, perhaps, find in this commingling of noble and humble blood a key to much of the wild and bizarre in the child as well as in the later woman. However this may be, it is certain that the disparate alliance gave the sombre and almost tragic hue to the child’s destiny. Through the precious years that should be given over to happy play and dreams, she was to hear the harsh and dismal contention of classes, and hear it, too, in the shape of a bawling strife for the possession of herself.
The first home was a humble lodging in Paris. The father was away. The mother, disdained by the father’s family, had to be hard at work, and the baby had its irregular career foreshadowed by being often handed over to a male nurse, one Pierret, an ugly and quarrelsome though really good-natured creature, whom an accident suddenly made a devoted friend of the small family, faithfully dividing his time between the _estaminet_ and the Dupin _ménage_.
Beyond a recollection of an accident, a fall against the corner of the chimney-piece, which shock, she tells us, ‘opened my mind to the sense of life,’ the first three years yield no reminiscences. From that date onwards, however, her memory moves without a hitch, and gives us a series of delightful vignette-like pictures of child-life.
Her mother had a fresh, sweet voice, and the first song she sang to Aurore was the nursery rhyme:—
Allons dans la grange Voir la poule blanche Qui pond un bel œut d’argent Pour ce cher petit enfant.
I was vividly impressed [she writes] with that white hen and that silver egg which was promised me every evening, and for which I never thought of asking the next morning. The promise returned always, and the naïve hope returned with it.
The legend of little Father Christmas, a good old man with a white beard, who came down the chimney exactly at midnight and placed a simple present, a red apple or an orange, in her little shoe, excited the infantile imagination to unusual activity.
Midnight, that fantastic hour which children know not, and which we point out to them as the unattainable limit of their wakefulness! What incredible efforts I made not to fall asleep before the appearance of the little old man. 1 had at once a great desire and a great fear to see him; but I could never keep awake.
The love of sound, so strong in children, found an outlet in playing with some brass wirework on the doors of an alcove near her bed.
My special amusement before going to sleep was to run my fingers over the brass network. The little sounds that I drew thence seemed to me a heavenly music, and I used to hear my mother say, “There’s Aurore playing the wirework.”
Her vivid recollection enables her to describe with a sure touch the oddly mixed and capriciously changeful feeling of children towards their dolls and other simulacra of living creatures. She somehow had presented to her a superb Punch, brilliant with gold and scarlet, of whom she was greatly afraid at first, on account of her doll. Before going to bed she securely shut up this last in a cupboard, and laid the brilliant monster on his back on the stove; but her anxieties were not yet over.
I fell asleep very much preoccupied with the manner of existence of this wicked being who was always laughing, and could pursue me with his eyes into all the corners of the room. In the night I had a frightful dream: Punch had got up, his hump had caught on fire on the stove, and he ran about in all directions, chasing now me, now my doll, which fled distractedly. Just as he was overtaking us with long jets of flame, I awoke my mother with my cries.
Her childish way of looking at dolls is thus described in another place:—
I do not remember to have ever believed that my doll was an animated being; nevertheless, I have felt for some of my dolls a real maternal affection.... Children are between the real and the impossible. They need to care for, to scold, to caress, and to break this fetish of a child or animal that is given them for a plaything, and with which they are wrongly accused of growing disgusted too quickly. It is quite natural, on the contrary, that they should grow disgusted with them. In breaking them they protest against the lie.
She only broke those, she adds, that could not stand the test of being undressed, or that proclaimed their unfleshly substance by falling and breaking their noses. The fluctuations of childish feeling in this matter, and the triumph of faith over doubt in the case of a real favourite, are prettily illustrated in a later story of how she parted from her doll when she was going from home on a long journey.
At the moment of setting out I ran to give it a last look, and when Pierret promised to come and make it take soup every morning, I began to fall into a state of doubt, which children are wont to feel respecting the reality of these creatures, a state truly singular, in which nascent reason on one side and the need of illusion on the other combat in their heart greedy of maternal love. I took the two hands of my doll and joined them over its breast. Pierret remarked that this was the attitude of a dead person. Thereupon I raised the hands, still joined, above the head, in the attitude of despair or of invocation. With this I associated a superstitious idea, thinking that it was an appeal to the good fairy, and that the doll would be protected, remaining in this position all the time of my absence.[333]
Footnote 333:
What George Sand here writes about the intrusion of doubt and disgust into the child’s feeling for the doll does not, I think, contradict what was said above in chapter ii. on the intensity and persistence of his faith. In truth these are illustrated in the very resistance to the occasional attack of the child’s nascent reason, just as they are illustrated in the resistance to others’ sceptical assaults.
The gift of vivid imagination is probably quite as much a torment as a joy to a child, as the story of Punch suggests. Aurore’s finely strung nervous organisation exposed her to a preternatural intensity of fear, and made any clumsy attempt to ‘frighten’ by suggestion of ‘black hole,’ or other childish horror, more than ordinarily cruel. One day she had been with her mother and Pierret on a visit to her aunt. On returning towards the evening she was lazy and wanted the amiable Pierret to carry her. So to spur her on her mother threatened in fun to leave her alone if she did not come on. The child knew it was not meant, and daringly stopped while the others made a feint of moving on. It happened that a little old woman was just then lighting a lamp hard by, and, having overheard the talk, turned to the child and said in a broken voice, ‘Beware of me; it is I who take up the wicked little girls, and I shut them in my lamp all the night’.
It seemed as if the devil had whispered to this good woman the idea that would most terrify me. I do not remember ever experiencing such a terror as she caused me. The lamp, with its glittering reflector, instantly took on fantastic proportions, and I saw myself already shut in this crystal prison consumed by the flame which the Punch in petticoats made to burst forth at her pleasure. I ran towards my mother uttering piercing cries. I heard the old woman laugh, and the grating sound of the lamp as she remounted gave me a nervous shiver.
At bottom Aurore’s nature was a happy one, and if it encountered in the real world the terrors of childhood, it found in the ideal world of fiction its supreme delights. Before she learned to read (about four) she had managed to stock her small brain with an odd jumble of supernatural imagery, the outcome of fairy stories recited to her, and of picture-books setting forth incidents from classical mythology and the lives of the saints; and she soon began to make artistic use of this motley material. Her mother, she tells us, used to shut her within four straw chairs in order to keep her from playing with the fire. She would then amuse herself by pulling out the straws with her hands (she always felt the need of occupying her hands) and composing in a loud voice interminable stories. They were of course modelled on the familiar fairy-tale pattern. The principal characters were a good fairy, a good prince, and a beautiful princess. There were but few wicked beings, and never great misfortunes. ‘All arranged itself under the influence of a thought, smiling and optimistic as childhood.’ These stories, carried on day after day, were the subject of amusing comment. ‘Well, Aurore,’ the aunt used to ask, ‘hasn’t your prince got out of the forest yet?’
To Aurore’s ardent imagination, play, as the story of the doll suggests, was more than the half-hearted make-believe it often is with duller children. She was able to immerse her whole consciousness in the scene, the occupation imagined, so as to lose all account of her actual surroundings. One evening, at dusk, she and her cousin were playing at chasing one another from tree to tree, for which the bed-curtains did duty. The room had disappeared for these little day-dreamers; they were really in a gloomy country at the oncoming of night and when they were called to dinner they heard nothing. Aurore’s mother had finally to carry her to the table, and she could ever after recall the astonishment she felt on seeing the light, the table, and other real objects about her.
Even at this tender age the child came into contact with the large mysterious outer world. At her aunt’s home at Chaillot there was a garden, the one garden she knew, a small square plot, seeming a vast region to Aurore, shut in by walls. At the bottom of this garden, on a green terrace, she and her cousin used to play at fighting battles.
One day we were interrupted in our games by a great commotion outside. There were cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ marchings with quick step, and then retirings, the cries continuing all the while. The emperor was, in fact, passing at some distance, and we heard the tread of the horses and the emotion of the crowd. We could not look over the walls, but the whole thing seemed very beautiful to my fancy, and we cried with all our strength, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ transported by a sympathetic enthusiasm.
She first saw the Emperor in 1807, from the good Pierret’s shoulders, where, being a conspicuous object, she attracted Napoleon’s quick eye. ‘I was, as it were, magnetised for a moment by that clear look, so hard for an instant, and suddenly so benevolent and so sweet.’
The political storm that was then raging on the sea of Europe made itself felt even in the far-off and seemingly sheltered creek of Aurore’s small life. Her father was aide-de-camp to Murat at Madrid, and in 1808 the mother resolved to betake herself to him with her child. It was a singular experience for a girl just completing her fourth year, and the narrative of it is romantic enough. Her imagination was strangely affected by the sight of the great mountains, which seemed to shut them in and to forbid their moving forwards or backwards. Yet she felt no fear at the postillion’s malicious fictions about brigands which quite horrified her mother. In Madrid they found themselves quartered in a large and magnificent palace. The unaccustomed space and splendour at first troubled the child. She was tormented by the huge pictures from which big heads seemed to come out and follow her, and she was further alarmed by a low mirror which gave her the first sight of her whole figure and made her feel how big she was.
Murat was not over well pleased at the arrival of his aide-de-camp’s wife and child, so an attempt was made to propitiate him by decking the little maid in a gay and coquettish uniform. The child, who was no coquette, seems to have cared but little for this performance, though she soon began to find amusement in her new sumptuous dwelling.
As soon as I found myself alone in this large room I placed myself before the low glass, and I tried some theatrical poses. Then I took my white rabbit, and tried to force it to do likewise; or rather I pretended to offer it as a sacrifice to the gods, using a footstool as altar.... I had not the least feeling of coquetry; my pleasure came from the make-believe that I was playing in a quartette scene in which were two little girls and two rabbits. The rabbit and I addressed, in pantomime, salutations, threats, and prayers to the personages of the mirror, and we danced the bolero with them.
It was at Madrid that she first made acquaintance with one of Nature’s most fascinating mysteries, the echo.