Part 19

In the Meunier d'Angibault it is a working locksmith, Henri Lemor, who falls in love with Marcelle de Blanchemont. Born to wealth, she regrets that she is not the daughter or the mother of workingmen. Finally, however, she loses her fortune, and rejoices in this event. The personage who stands out in relief in this novel is the miller, Grand Louis. He is always gay and contented, with a smile on his lips, singing lively songs and giving advice to every one.

In the Peche de M. Antoine, the role of Grand Louis falls to Jean the carpenter. In this story all the people are communists, with the exception of the owner of the factory, who, in consequence, is treated with contempt. His son Emile marries the daughter of Monsieur Antoine. Her name is Gilberte, and a silly old man, the Marquis de Boisguilbaut, leaves her all his money, on condition that the young couple found a colony of agriculturists in which there shall be absolute communism. All these stories, full of eloquence and dissertations on the misfortune of being rich and the corrupting influence of wealth, would be insufferable, if it were not for the fact that the Angibault mill were in the Black Valley, and the crumbling chateau, belonging to Monsieur Antoine, on the banks of the Creuse.

They are very poor novels, and it would be a waste of time to attempt to defend them. They are not to be despised, though, as regards their influence on the rest of George Sand's work, and also as regards the history of the French novel. They rendered great service to George Sand, inasmuch as they helped her to come out of herself and to turn her attention to the miseries of other people, instead of dwelling all the time on her own. The miseries she now saw were more general ones, and consequently more worthy of interest. In the history of the novel they are of capital importance, as they are the first ones to bring into notice, by making them play a part, people of whom novelists had never spoken. Before Eugene Sue and before Victor Hugo, George Sand gives a role to a mason, a carpenter and a joiner. We see the working-class come into literature in these novels, and this marks an era.

As to their socialistic influence, it is supposed by many people that they had none. The kind of socialism that consists of making tinkers marry marchionesses, and duchesses marry zinc-workers, seems very childish and very feminine. It is just an attempt at bringing about the marriage of classes. This socialistic preaching, by means of literature, cannot be treated so lightly, though, as it is by no means harmless. It is, on the contrary, a powerful means of diffusing doctrines to which it lends the colouring of imagination, and for which it appeals to the feelings. George Sand propagated the humanitarian dream among a whole category of men and women who read her books. But for her, they would probably have turned a deaf ear to the inducements held out to them with regard to this Utopia. Lamartine with his Girondins reconciled the bourgeois classes to the idea of the Revolution. In both cases the effect was the same, and it is just this which literature does in affairs of this kind. Its role consists here in creating a sort of snobbism, and this snobbism, created by literature in favour of all the elements of social destruction, continues to rage at present. We still see men smiling indulgently and stupidly at doctrines of revolt and anarchy, which they ought to repudiate, not because of their own interest, but because it is their duty to repudiate them with all the strength of their own common sense and rectitude. Instead of any arguments, we have facts to offer. All this was in 1846, and the time was now drawing near when George Sand was to see those novels of hers actually taking place in the street, so that she could throw down to the rioters the bulletins that she wrote in their honour.

VIII

1848

GEORGE SAND AND THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT--HER PASTORAL NOVELS

IN 1846, George Sand published Le Peche de M. Antoine. It was a very dull story of a sin, for sins are not always amusing. The same year, though, she published La Mare au Diable. People are apt to say, when comparing the socialistic novels and the pastoral novels by George Sand, that the latter are superb, because they are the result of a conception of art that was quite disinterested, as the author had given up her preaching mania, and devoted herself to depicting people that she knew and things that she liked, without any other care than that of painting them well. Personally, I think that this was not so. George Sand's pastoral style is not essentially different from her socialistic style. The difference is only in the success of the execution, but the ideas and the intentions are the same. George Sand is continuing her mission in them, she is going on with her humanitarian dream, that dream which she dreamed when awake.

We have a proof of this in the preface of the author to the reader with which the Mare au Diable begins. This preface would be disconcerting to any one who does not remember the intellectual atmosphere in which it was written.

People have wondered by what fit of imagination George Sand, when telling such a wholesome story of country life, should evoke the ghastly vision of Holbein's Dance of Death. It is the close of day, the horses are thin and exhausted, there is an old peasant, and, skipping about in the furrows near the team, is Death, the only lively, careless, nimble being in this scene of "sweat and weariness." She gives us the explanation of it herself. She wanted to show up the ideal of the new order of things, as opposed to the old ideal, as translated by the ghastly dance.

"We have nothing more to do with death," she writes, "but with life. We no longer believe in the neant of the tomb, nor in salvation bought by enforced renunciation. We want life to be good, because we want it to be fertile. . . . Every one must be happy, so that the happiness of a few may not be criminal and cursed by God." This note we recognize as the common feature of all the socialistic Utopias. It consists in taking the opposite basis to that on which the Christian idea is founded. Whilst Christianity puts off, until after death, the possession of happiness, transfiguring death by its eternal hopes, Socialism places its Paradise on earth. It thus runs the risk of leaving all those without any recourse who do not find this earth a paradise, and it has no answer to give to the lamentations of incurable human misery.

George Sand goes on to expose to us the object of art, as she understands it. She believes that it is for pleading the cause of the people.

She does not consider that her confreres in novel-writing and in Socialism set about their work in the best way. They paint poverty that is ugly and vile, and sometimes even vicious and criminal. How is it to be expected that the bad, rich man will take pity on the sorrows of the poor man, if this poor man is always presented to him as an escaped convict or a night loafer? It is very evident that the people, as presented to us in the Mysteres de Paris, are not particularly congenial to us, and we should have no wish to make the acquaintance of the "Chourineur." In order to bring about conversions, George Sand has more faith in gentle, agreeable people, and, in conclusion, she tells us: "We believe that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and of love, and that the novel of to-day ought to take the place of the parable and the apologue of more primitive times." The object of the artist, she tells us, "is to make people appreciate what he presents to them." With that end in view, he has a right to embellish his subjects a little. "Art," we are told, "is not a study of positive reality; it is the seeking for ideal truth." Such is the point of view of the author of La Mare au Diable, which we are invited to consider as a parable and an apologue.

The parable is clear enough, and the apologue is eloquent. The novel commences with that fine picture of the ploughing of the fields, so rich in description and so broadly treated that there seems to be nothing in French literature to compare with it except the episode of the Labourers in Jocelyn. When Jocelyn was published, George Sand was severe in her criticism of it, treating it as poor work, false in sentiment and careless in style. "In the midst of all this, though," she adds, "there are certain pages and chapters such as do not exist in any language, pages that I read seven times over, crying all the time like a donkey." I fancy that she must have cried over the episode of the Labourers. Whether she remembered it or not when writing her own book little matters. My only reason for mentioning it is to point out the affinity of genius between Lamartine and George Sand, both of them so admirable in imagining idylls and in throwing the colours of their idyllic imagination on to reality.

I have ventured, to analyze the Comtesse de Rudolstadt and even Consuelo, but I shall not be guilty of the bad taste of telling the story of La Mare au Diable, as all the people of that neighbourhood are well known to us, and have been our friends for a long time. We are all acquainted with Germain, the clever farm-labourer, with Marie, the shepherdess, and with little Pierre. We remember how they climbed the Grise, lost their way in the mist, and were obliged to spend the night under the great oak-trees. When we were only about fifteen years of age, with what delight we read this book, and how we loved that sweet Marie for her simple grace and her affection, which all seemed so maternal. How much better we liked her than the Widow Guerin, who was so snobbish with her three lovers. And how glad we were to be present at that wedding, celebrated according to the custom in Berry from time immemorial.

It is easy to see the meaning of all these things. They show us how natural kindliness is to the heart of man. If we try to find out why Germain and Marie appear so delightful to us, we shall discover that it is because they are simple-hearted, and follow the dictates of Nature. Nature must not be deformed, therefore, by constraint nor transformed by convention, as it leads straight to virtue.

We have heard the tune of this song before, and we have seen the blossoming of some very fine pastoral poems and a veritable invasion of sentimental literature. In those days tears were shed plentifully over poetry, novels and plays. We have had Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sedaine, Florian and Berquin. The Revolution, brutal and sanguinary as it was, did not interrupt the course of these romantic effusions. Never were so many tender epithets used as during the years of the Reign of Terror, and in official processions Robespierre was adorned with flowers like a village bride.

This taste for pastoral things, at the time of the Revolution, was not a mere coincidence. The same principles led up to the idyll in literature and to the Revolution in history. Man was supposed to be naturally good, and the idea was to take away from him all the restraints which had been invented for curbing his nature. Political and religious authority, moral discipline and the prestige of tradition had all formed a kind of network of impediments, by which man had been imprisoned by legislators who were inclined to pessimism. By doing away with all these fetters, the Golden Age was to be restored and universal happiness was to be established. Such was the faith of the believers in the millennium of 1789, and of 1848. The same dream began over and over again, from Diderot to Lamartine and from Jean-Jacques to George Sand. The same state of mind which we see reflected in La Mare au Diable was to make of George Sand the revolutionary writer of 1848. We can now understand the role which the novelist played in the second Republic. It is one of the most surprising pages in the history of this extraordinary character.

The joy with which George Sand welcomed the Republic can readily be imagined. She had been a Republican ever since the days of Michel of Bourges, and a democrat since the time when, as a little girl, she took the side of her plebeian mother against "the old Countesses." For a long time she had been wishing for and expecting a change of government. She would not have been satisfied with less than this. She was not much moved by the Thiers-Guizot duel, and it would have given her no pleasure to be killed for the sake of Odilon Barrot. She was a disciple of Romanticism, and she wanted a storm. When the storm broke, carrying all before it, a throne, a whole society with its institutions, she hurried away from her peaceful Nohant. She wanted to breathe the atmosphere of a revolution, and she was soon intoxicated by it.

"Long live the Republic," she wrote in her letters. "What a dream and what enthusiasm, and then, too, what behaviour, what order in Paris. I have just arrived, and I saw the last of the barricades. The people are great, sublime, simple and generous, the most admirable people in the universe. I spent nights without any sleep and days without sitting down. Every one was wild and intoxicated with delight, for after going to sleep in the mire they have awakened in heaven."(39)

(39) Correspondance: To Ch. Poncy, March 9, 1848.

She goes on dreaming thus of the stars. Everything she hears, everything she sees enchants her. The most absurd measures delight her. She either thinks they are most noble, liberal steps to have taken, or else they are very good jokes.

"Rothschild," she writes, "expresses very fine sentiments about liberty at present. The Provisional Government is keeping him in sight, as it does not wish him to make off with his money, and so will put some of the troops on his track. The most amusing things are happening." A little later on she writes: "The Government and the people expect to have bad deputies, but they have agreed to put them through the window. You must come, and we will go and see all this and have fun."(40)

(40) Correspondance: To Maurice Sand, March 24, 1848.

She was thoroughly entertained, and that is very significant. We must not forget the famous phrase that sounded the death-knell of the July monarchy, "La France s'ennuie." France had gone in for a revolution by way of being entertained.

George Sand was entertained, then, by what was taking place. She went down into the street where there was plenty to see. In the mornings there were the various coloured posters to be read. These had been put up in the night, and they were in prose and in verse.

Processions were also organized, and men, women and children, with banners unfurled, marched along to music to the Hotel de Ville, carrying baskets decorated with ribbons and flowers. Every corporation and every profession considered itself bound in honour to congratulate the Government and to encourage it in its well-doing. One day the procession would be of the women who made waistcoats or breeches, another day of the water-carriers, or of those who had been decorated in July or wounded in February; then there were the pavement-layers, the washerwomen, the delegates from the Paris night-soil men. There were delegates, too, from the Germans, Italians, Poles, and most of the inhabitants of Montmartre and of Batignolles. We must not forget the trees of Liberty, as George Sand speaks of meeting with three of these in one day. "Immense pines," she writes, "carried on the shoulders of fifty working-men. A drum went first, then the flag, followed by bands of these fine tillers of the ground, strong-looking, serious men with wreaths of leaves on their head, and a spade, pick-axe or hatchet over their shoulder. It was magnificent; finer than all the Roberts in the world."(41) Such was the tone of her letters.

(41) Correspondance.