French Classics Part 33

Suddenly the dying man raised himself by his wrists and cast on his frightened children a look which struck like lightning; the hairs that fringed the bald head stirred, the wrinkles quivered, the features were illumined with spiritual fires, a breath pa.s.sed across that face and rendered it sublime; he raised a hand, clenched in fury, and uttered with a piercing cry the famous words of Archimedes, "EUREKA!"--"I have found."

He fell back upon his bed with the dull sound of an inert body, and died, uttering an awful moan, his convulsed eyes expressing to the last, when the doctor closed them, the regret of not bequeathing to science the secret of an enigma whose veil was rent away--too late--by the fleshless fingers of death.

The reader there has Balzac at his highest and best.

Those desirous of acquainting themselves with some integral work of this author's will choose wisely if they choose any one of these four: "Pere Goriot," "Cesar Birotteau," "Modeste Mignon," "The Alkahest" ("The Search for the Absolute"). Mr. Saintsbury, a competent hand, edits a series of translations from Balzac, including the novels just named, together with everything else worth possessing from his industrious pen.

4. GEORGE SAND.

In virile quality, Madame de Stael seemed _rediviva_, or should we keep the more familiar masculine gender, and say _redivivus_? in George Sand.

"It only happened that she was a woman," said some one, of the latter personage; and indeed the chance that made her such seemed half on the point of being reversed by the choice of the subject herself. For, besides that she has her fame permanently under a pseudonym naturally betokening a man as its owner, it is a fact that she did, at one time, in order to greater freedom of the world, wear man's clothes and otherwise play the man among her Parisian fellows. This episode in her experience doubtless helped give her that great advantage over other women, which her genius enabled her to use to effect so surpa.s.sing, in describing the male human being such as he himself recognizes himself to be.

The episode, however, was short, and George Sand is thought by her admirers--and her admirers include some very grave and self-respecting persons, the late Mr. Matthew Arnold being one example--never to have parted with a certain paradoxical womanly reserve and delicacy which ought logically to have been quite lost out of her nature through the coa.r.s.e and soiled contacts to which she herself willingly, and even willfully, subjected it.

But, poor George Sand! Let us never, in judging her, forget how ill-bestead a childhood was hers, and how unhappy a marriage was provided for her warm and pa.s.sionate youth. Her life began in protest, and protest was the early strength of her genius and her endeavor. She protested against things as they were, and, according to her light--a light sadly confused with misguiding cross-lights from many quarters besides her own eager self-will--fought, and pleaded, and wept, aspiring, hoping, believing, for an ideal world in which love should be law; or rather an ideal world in which law should have ceased, and love should be all. From one of the last of her innumerable books, perhaps from the very last, Mr. Matthew Arnold translates this expression, which he repeats as summing up the motive of her work--"the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it."

The word "love" does not occur in this expression, but that word and that thought make the luminous legend over everything hers by the light of which everything hers is to be read and interpreted.

Of course, George Sand's "love" is not the sentiment which the apostle Paul sings in that prose canticle of his found in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. But neither is it the purely animal pa.s.sion that base souls might understand it. The peculiar affection natural between the s.e.xes it indeed includes, but it includes much more. It includes all domestic, all social affections. In short, it is love in the largest sense. The largest sense, but not the highest. For it is love, the indulgence, the appet.i.te; not love, the duty, the principle. George Sand's gospel is that you may love and indulge yourself; Paul's gospel is that you must love and deny yourself. Paul says love is the fulfilling of the law; George Sand virtually says love is the annulling of the law.

Because in many pa.s.sionate and powerful novels, read everywhere in Europe and not only in France, read also in America, George Sand has preached this gospel of love as the virtual solvent of existing society, Mr. Justin Macarthy p.r.o.nounces the opinion that she is on the whole incomparably the greatest force in literature of her generation. He probably would attribute to her as a chief motor the portentous movements in human society which we of to-day feel, like tides of the sea, bearing us on, no one knows whither. It is no doubt true that George Sand has contributed what mechanicians call a "moment," not sufficiently considered, to make up the urgency that is pus.h.i.+ng us all in the direction toward uncalculated social solutions and social reconstructions. This const.i.tutes her a notable social force working by literature; a force, however, that has already chiefly spent itself, or that persists, so far as it does persist, translated indistinguishably into other forms.

For George Sand is no longer read as she formerly was, her fas.h.i.+on having already to a great extent pa.s.sed away. It is a common testimony that, as she wrote like one improvising, so her writing is to be read once and not returned to. Her "Consuelo," in its time such a rage, and still often spoken of as her masterpiece, is now even a little hard to get through. You yawn, you feel like skipping, you do skip, and you finally shut up the book wondering why such bright writing should make such dull reading.

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 Pet.i.te 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 pa.s.sage 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 ill.u.s.trate--not at all, in either case, the matter or doctrine set forth. To ill.u.s.trate this last we should have no room, had we the inclination.

From "Lelia," we translate a pa.s.sage descriptive of Alpine scenery, or rather of the effect on the mind of Alpine scenery. After lighting upon this pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d? 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sionate, the breeze singing and laughing among the heather, the vultures screaming like frightened women; and those other noises, strange, mysterious, indescribable, rumbling m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sage done in her later manner.

This we take from "Les Maitres Sonneurs," or "The Bagpipers," as Miss Wormeley renders the t.i.tle. 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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s. 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 ant.i.thesis 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 ign.o.bly 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 pa.s.sionate 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 cla.s.sics 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 ent.i.tled 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.ddess-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 G.o.d 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 ent.i.tled "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 p.r.o.nounced 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.