Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold Part 13

we get at the same moment a good specimen both of the conventional and of the Greek way of handling nature. But from our own poetry we may get specimens of the Greek way of handling nature, as well as of the conventional: for instance, Keats's:--

"What little town by river or seash.o.r.e, Or mountain-built with quiet citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?"[284]

is Greek, as Greek as a thing from Homer or Theocritus; it is composed with the eye on the object, a radiancy and light clearness being added.

German poetry abounds in specimens of the faithful way of handling nature; an excellent example is to be found in the stanzas called _Zueignung_[285], prefixed to Goethe's poems; the morning walk, the mist, the dew, the sun, are as faithful as they can be, they are given with the eye on the object, but there the merit of the work, as a handling of nature, stops; neither Greek radiance nor Celtic magic is added; the power of these is not what gives the poem in question its merit, but a power of quite another kind, a power of moral and spiritual emotion. But the power of Greek radiance Goethe could give to his handling of nature, and n.o.bly too, as any one who will read his _Wanderer_,--the poem in which a wanderer falls in with a peasant woman and her child by their hut, built out of the ruins of a temple near c.u.ma,--may see. Only the power of natural magic Goethe does not, I think, give; whereas Keats pa.s.ses at will from the Greek power to that power which is, as I say, Celtic; from his

"What little town, by river or seash.o.r.e--"

to his

"White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine, Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves--"[286]

or his

"... magic cas.e.m.e.nts, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn--"[287]

in which the very same note is struck as in those extracts which I quoted from Celtic romance, and struck with authentic and unmistakable power.

Shakespeare, in handling nature, touches this Celtic note so exquisitely, that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking for the Celtic note in him, and not to recognize his Greek note when it comes.

But if one attends well to the difference between the two notes, and bears in mind, to guide one, such things as Virgil's "moss-grown springs and gra.s.s softer than sleep:"--

"Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba--"[288]

as his charming flower-gatherer, who--

"Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi--"[289]

as his quinces and chestnuts:--

" ... cana legam tenera lanugine mala Castaneasque nuces ..."[290]

then, I think, we shall be disposed to say that in Shakespeare's

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine--"[291]

it is mainly a Greek note which is struck. Then, again in his

" ... look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!"[292]

we are at the very point of transition from the Greek note to the Celtic; there is the Greek clearness and brightness, with the Celtic aerialness and magic coming in. Then we have the sheer, inimitable Celtic note in pa.s.sages like this:--

"Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea--"[293]

or this, the last I will quote:--

"The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise, in such a night Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls--

... in such a night Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew-- ... in such a night _Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand, Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love To come again to Carthage._"[294]

And those last lines of all are so drenched and intoxicated with the fairy-dew of that natural magic which is our theme, that I cannot do better than end with them.

And now, with the pieces of evidence in our hand, let us go to those who say it is vain to look for Celtic elements in any Englishman, and let us ask them, first, if they seize what we mean by the power of natural magic in Celtic poetry: secondly, if English poetry does not eminently exhibit this power; and, thirdly, where they suppose English poetry got it from?

GEORGE SAND[295]

The months go round, and anniversaries return; on the ninth of June George Sand will have been dead just one year. She was born in 1804; she was almost seventy-two years old when she died. She came to Paris after the revolution of 1830, with her _Indiana_[296] written, and began her life of independence, her life of authorship, her life as _George Sand_.

She continued at work till she died. For forty-five years she was writing and publishing, and filled Europe with her name.

It seems to me but the other day that I saw her, yet it was in the August of 1846, more than thirty years ago. I saw her in her own Berry, at Nohant,[297] where her childhood and youth were pa.s.sed, where she returned to live after she became famous, where she died and has now her grave. There must be many who, after reading her books, have felt the same desire which in those days of my youth, in 1846, took me to Nohant, --the desire to see the country and the places of which the books that so charmed us were full. Those old provinces of the centre of France, primitive and slumbering,--Berry, La Marche, Bourbonnais; those sites and streams in them, of name once so indifferent to us, but to which George Sand gave such a music for our ear,--La Chatre, Ste. Severe, the _Vallee Noire_, the Indre, the Creuse; how many a reader of George Sand must have desired, as I did, after frequenting them so much in thought, fairly to set eyes upon them!

I had been reading _Jeanne_.[298] I made up my mind to go and see Toulx Ste. Croix, Boussac, and the Druidical stones on Mont Barlot, the _Pierres Jaunatres_.[299]

I remember looking out Toulx in Ca.s.sini's great map[300] at the Bodleian Library. The railway through the centre of France went in those days no farther than Vierzon. From Vierzon to Chateauroux one travelled by an ordinary diligence, from Chateauroux to La Chatre by a humbler diligence, from La Chatre to Boussac by the humblest diligence of all.

At Boussac diligence ended, and _patache_[301] began. Between Chateauroux and La Chatre, a mile or two before reaching the latter place, the road pa.s.ses by the village of Nohant. The Chateau of Nohant, in which Madame Sand lived, is a plain house by the road-side, with a walled garden. Down in the meadows, not far off, flows the Indre, bordered by trees. I pa.s.sed Nohant without stopping, at La Chatre I dined and changed diligence, and went on by night up the valley of the Indre, the _Vallee Noire_, past Ste. Severe to Boussac. At Ste. Severe the Indre is quite a small stream. In the darkness we quitted its valley, and when day broke we were in the wilder and barer country of La Marche, with Boussac before us, and its high castle on a precipitous rock over the Little Creuse.

That day and the next I wandered through a silent country of heathy and ferny _landes_,[302] a region of granite boulders, holly, and broom, of copsewood and great chestnut trees; a region of broad light, and fresh breezes and wide horizons. I visited the _Pierres Jaunatres._ I stood at sunset on the platform of Toulx Ste. Croix, by the scrawled and almost effaced stone lions,--a relic, it is said, of the English rule,--and gazed on the blue mountains of Auvergne filling the distance, and southeastward of them, in a still further and fainter distance, on what seemed to be the mountains over Le Puy and the high valley of the Loire.

From Boussac I addressed to Madame Sand the sort of letter of which she must in her lifetime have had scores, a letter conveying to her, in bad French, the homage of a youthful and enthusiastic foreigner who had read her works with delight. She received the infliction good-naturedly, for on my return to La Chatre I found a message left at the inn by a servant from Nohant that Madame Sand would be glad to see me if I called. The mid-day breakfast at Nohant was not yet over when I reached the house, and I found a large party a.s.sembled. I entered with some trepidation, as well I might, considering how I had got there; but the simplicity of Madame Sand's manner put me at ease in a moment. She named some of those present; amongst them were her son and daughter, the Maurice and Solange [303] so familiar to us from her books, and Chopin[304] with his wonderful eyes. There was at that time nothing astonishing in Madame Sand's appearance. She was not in man's clothes, she wore a sort of costume not impossible, I should think (although on these matters I speak with hesitation), to members of the fair s.e.x at this hour amongst ourselves, as an outdoor dress for the country or for Scotland. She made me sit by her and poured out for me the insipid and depressing beverage, _boisson fade et melancolique_, as Balzac called it, for which English people are thought abroad to be always thirsting,--tea. She conversed of the country through which I had been wandering, of the Berry peasants and their mode of life, of Switzerland, whither I was going; she touched politely, by a few questions and remarks, upon England and things and persons English,--upon Oxford and Cambridge, Byron, Bulwer. As she spoke, her eyes, head, bearing, were all of them striking; but the main impression she made was an impression of what I have already mentioned, --of _simplicity_, frank, cordial simplicity. After breakfast she led the way into the garden, asked me a few kind questions about myself and my plans, gathered a flower or two and gave them to me, shook hands heartily at the gate, and I saw her no more. In 1859 M. Michelet[305]

gave me a letter to her, which would have enabled me to present myself in more regular fashion. Madame Sand was then in Paris. But a day or two pa.s.sed before I could call, and when I called, Madame Sand had left Paris and had gone back to Nohant. The impression of 1846 has remained my single impression of her.

Of her gaze, form, and speech, that one impression is enough; better perhaps than a mixed impression from seeing her at sundry times and after successive changes. But as the first anniversary of her death [306] draws near, there arises again a desire which I felt when she died, the desire, not indeed to take a critical survey of her,--very far from it. I feel no inclination at all to go regularly through her productions, to cla.s.sify and value them one by one, to pick out from them what the English public may most like, or to present to that public, for the most part ignorant of George Sand and for the most part indifferent to her, a full history and a judicial estimate of the woman and of her writings. But I desire to recall to my own mind, before the occasion offered by her death pa.s.ses quite away,--to recall and collect the elements of that powerful total-impression which, as a writer, she made upon me; to recall and collect them, to bring them distinctly into view, to feel them in all their depth and power once more. What I here attempt is not for the benefit of the indifferent; it is for my own satisfaction, it is for myself. But perhaps those for whom George Sand has been a friend and a power will find an interest in following me.

_Le sentiment de la vie ideale, qui n'est autre que la vie normale telle que nous sommes appeles a la connaitre_;[307]--"the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall some day know it,"--those words from one of her last publications give the ruling thought of George Sand, the ground-_motive_, as they say in music, of all her strain. It is as a personage inspired by this motive that she interests us.

The English public conceives of her as of a novel-writer who wrote stories more or less interesting; the earlier ones objectionable and dangerous, the later ones, some of them, unexceptionable and fit to be put into the hands of the youth of both s.e.xes. With such a conception of George Sand, a story of hers like _Consuelo_[308] comes to be elevated in England into quite an undue relative importance, and to pa.s.s with very many people for her typical work, displaying all that is really valuable and significant in the author. _Consuelo_ is a charming story.

But George Sand is something more than a maker of charming stories, and only a portion of her is shown in _Consuelo_. She is more, likewise, than a creator of characters. She has created, with admirable truth to nature, characters most attractive and attaching, such as Edmee, Genevieve, Germain.[309] But she is not adequately expressed by them.

We do not know her unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.

In order to feel this spirit it is not, indeed, necessary to read all that she ever produced. Even three or four only out of her many books might suffice to show her to us, if they were well chosen; let us say, the _Lettres d'un Voyageur, Mauprat, Francois le Champi_,[310] and a story which I was glad to see Mr. Myers,[311] in his appreciative notice of Madame Sand, single out for praise,--_Valvedre_.[312] In these may be found all the princ.i.p.al elements of their author's strain: the cry of agony and revolt, the trust in nature and beauty, the aspiration towards a purged and renewed human society.

Of George Sand's strain, during forty years, these are the grand elements. Now it is one of them which appears most prominently, now it is another. The cry of agony and revolt is in her earlier work only, and pa.s.ses away in her later. But in the evolution of these three elements, --the pa.s.sion of agony and revolt, the consolation from nature and from beauty, the ideas of social renewal,--in the evolution of these is George Sand and George Sand's life and power. Through their evolution her constant motive declares and unfolds itself, that motive which we have set forth above: "the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it." This is the motive, and through these elements is its evolution: an evolution pursued, moreover, with the most unfailing resolve, the most absolute sincerity.

The hour of agony and revolt pa.s.sed away for George Sand, as it pa.s.sed away for Goethe, as it pa.s.ses away for their readers likewise. It pa.s.ses away and does not return; yet those who, amid the agitations, more or less stormy, of their youth, betook themselves to the early works of George Sand, may in later life cease to read them, indeed, but they can no more forget them than they can forget _Werther_[313]. George Sand speaks somewhere of her "days of _Corinne_."[314] Days of _Valentine_, many of us may in like manner say,--days of _Valentine_, days of _Lelia_[315], days never to return! They are gone, we shall read the books no more, and yet how ineffaceable is their impression! How the sentences from George Sand's works of that period still linger in our memory and haunt the ear with their cadences! Grandiose and moving, they come, those cadences, like the sighing of the wind through the forest, like the breaking of the waves on the seash.o.r.e. Lelia in her cell on the mountain of the Camaldoli--

"Sibyl, Sibyl forsaken; spirit of the days of old, joined to a brain which rebels against the divine inspiration; broken lyre, mute instrument, whose tones the world of to-day, if it heard them, could not understand, but yet in whose depth the eternal harmony murmurs imprisoned; priestess of death, I, I who feel and know that before now I have been Pythia, have wept before now, before now have spoken, but who cannot recollect, alas, cannot utter the word of healing! Yes, yes! I remember the cavern of truth and the access of revelation; but the word of human destiny, I have forgotten it; but the talisman of deliverance, it is lost from my hand. And yet, indeed, much, much have I seen! and when suffering presses me sore, when indignation takes hold of me, when I feel Prometheus wake up in my heart and beat his puissant wings against the stone which confines him,--oh! then, in prey to a frenzy without a name, to a despair without bounds, I invoke the unknown master and friend who might illumine my spirit and set free my tongue; but I grope in darkness, and my tired arms grasp nothing save delusive shadows. And for ten thousand years, as the sole answer to my cries, as the sole comfort in my agony, I hear astir, over this earth accurst, the despairing sob of impotent agony. For ten thousand years I have cried in infinite s.p.a.ce: _Truth! Truth!_ For ten thousand years infinite s.p.a.ce keeps answering me: _Desire, Desire_. O Sibyl forsaken! O mute Pythia!

dash then thy head against the rocks of thy cavern, and mingle thy raging blood with the foam of the sea; for thou deemest thyself to have possessed the almighty Word, and these ten thousand years thou art seeking him in vain."[316]

Or Sylvia's cry over Jacques[317] by his glacier in the Tyrol--

"When such a man as thou art is born into a world where he can do no true service; when, with the soul of an apostle and the courage of a martyr, he has simply to push his way among the heartless and aimless crowds which vegetate without living; the atmosphere suffocates him and he dies. Hated by sinners, the mock of fools, disliked by the envious, abandoned by the weak, what can he do but return to G.o.d, weary with having labored in vain, in sorrow at having accomplished nothing? The world remains in all its vileness and in all its hatefulness; this is what men call, 'the triumph of good sense over enthusiasm.'"[318]

Or Jacques himself, and his doctrine--

"Life is arid and terrible, repose is a dream, prudence is useless; mere reason alone serves simply to dry up the heart; there is but one virtue, the eternal sacrifice of oneself."