Kitabı oku: «Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885», sayfa 21

MISCELLANY

Some Personal Recollections of George Sand. – The recent unveiling of George Sand's statue at La Châtre has set people thinking about her afresh. At no time since “Indiana” and “Lelia” first revealed the existence of a new writer of transcendent power, has her place in French literature, and her influence on the social problems of the time, and the question whether her artistic creations will or will not live, been canvassed with more energy than during the past few weeks. Some personal recollections of George Sand given by Mrs. Ellis, the authoress of “Sylvestra,” may therefore be of interest: “Above twenty years ago,” writes Mrs. Ellis, “I spent three days in a French hotel (at Tours) with George Sand, without knowing who she was. She puzzled me all the time, and had in person something of the same effect on me that her character – attractive and repulsive – has still. She sat opposite me at a narrow table d'hôte– a tall, large, strongly-built woman, with features in proportion to her size. Her eyes were fine, but her force of appearance was rather physical than intellectual. It must have been the brain beneath the strong features which teased me as it did, to make out to myself who she could be. She was mature, but in no decline of force, massive, grave, and restful, with nothing Gallic about her. The dark hair, eyes, and tint might have belonged to Italy or Spain, quite as well as to France, and the bearing, better. Her dress might have been called 'dowdy.' It was of the type of the travelling Englishwoman, as French eyes see it, rather than French. I think her 'robe' was brown, which did not become her at all. Crimson would have suited her. She wore an ugly, large-brimmed, straw hat, with broad lace falling over the brim, at a time when Frenchwomen had hardly begun to wear hats, and – if my memory does not err – she wore it at dinner. Her companion was an elderly and feeble man, seemingly more than seventy. There was nothing in the appearance of the couple (viewing them as married folk) unlike that of many other French pairs, when, as is so often the case, the man 'ranges' himself at forty by the side of a young lady of half his years. My perplexing neighbor understood what I said to my husband in English, and offered me some little courteous attentions. There was no real speech between us. If I had known it was George Sand, I believe that I should not have spoken more, as I had not long before read some unpleasing remarks in her autobiography on the way in which she was annoyed by 'les Anglaises,' and on the 'étranges sifflements' which they introduced into the fine French tongue! She and I were the only two women in the hotel who ever went into a sort of reading-room adjoining the house to look at the newspapers. I had nearly settled with myself that she was a lady country squire, such as I used to see drive into Tours on market days, when one morning, on going, as I used to do, to the Imperial library, to draw from old illuminated MSS., my friend, the librarian, M. d'Orange, said to me, 'Madame, do you know that you have George Sand in your hotel?' When I went back, she had just gone with the gentleman who had lent her his name to travel with, for she was entered as his 'Comtesse' in the book of the hotel. He was a Radical Deputy. I told my lively landlady, who declared that M. d'Orange 'n'en savait rien,' and opened her book to show me the names of M. le Comte and Madame la Comtesse So-and-So. Then she said, 'If it was George Sand,' her books, 'ma foi,' of which she had read one or two – instancing a couple of the best – were not 'grande chose.' When I got back to England, I looked at a fine lithographed portrait of George Sand, and saw it was the woman. Perhaps it was for the best that I had not known who she was, as my impression, which is still vivid, remains of her as she seemed, and not such as my fancy would at once have set to work to make her out. Thinking of her afterward, I was reminded of that passage in her autobiography in which she tells how, in a moment of misery, she tested her own strength by lifting a large heavy stone, and said to herself in despair, 'And I may have to live forty years!' Also I thought of Alfred de Musset's taunting her – she never forgot it – with having no esprit. Of 'esprit Gallois' she seems to have had little. The Northern races had the uppermost in her making, I should say. I have a notion that the Königsmarks were Pomeranian – of the Bismarck build – and had she not the blood of the Counts Horn? I forget. However, Marshal Saxe spoke for himself in her. Mr. Hamerton says that an intense desire to study character had its strong share in her illicit liaisons with poets, musicians, lawyers, novelists, etc., all being men above the common run. But here, again, I cannot help thinking that race descent from Augustus II. of Saxony and Aurore de Königsmark counted for much. Her genuine feeling for the poor, and a sort of homely motherliness, seem to have made her greatly loved by the Berry people.“ —Spectator.

The American Senate. – It is amusing to see discussions on the possible abolition of the American Senate, in which the disputants on one side do not seem to see that what they are proposing is the abolition of the federal system altogether. It has been explained over and over again – yet, as long as some seem not to understand so plain a matter, it must be explained once more – that a proposal to abolish the American Senate is quite a different matter from a proposal to abolish the French Senate. With regard to the French Senate the question is simply whether the business of the nation is likely to be best done by one House or by two. With regard to the American Senate we have to go much deeper. The House of Representatives represents the nation formed by the union of all the separate States; the Senate represents the separate States themselves. The federal nation is formed by the union of States differing widely in size and power, but equal in rights and dignity, each of which still keeps all such attributes of independent commonwealths as it has not formally given up to the federal power. To hinder alike the federal nation from being swamped by the States and the States from being swamped by the federal nation, it is needful to have one assembly in which each State has only that amount of voice to which it is entitled by its population, and another assembly in which each State, great and small, has an equal voice. If any party in the United States wishes altogether to get rid of the federal system, if they wish to get rid of the independence of the several States, if they wish the great names of Massachusetts and Virginia to mean no more than an English county or a French department, then let them propose the abolition of the Senate of the United States, and not otherwise. Yet even under a system where the Second Chamber is absolutely necessary, we see the comparative weakness of Second Chambers; its abolition can be discussed. And herein comes the wonderful wisdom of the founders of the American Constitution in strengthening the Senate with those powers of other kinds which make it something more than a Second Chamber or Upper House. And mark further that the Swiss Ständerath or Conseil des États, formed after the model of the American Senate, like it absolutely necessary if Switzerland is to remain a federal commonwealth, is far from holding the same position in the country which the American Senate holds. For it is a mere partner with the Nationalrath, and has not those special powers in and by itself which the American Senate has. But mark again that the great position of the American Senate is something which cannot exist along with our form of executive government. A President may be asked formally to submit his acts to be confirmed by one branch of the Legislature; a King can hardly be asked to do so. —Contemporary Review.

Shakespeare and Balzac. – Yacht life gives ample leisure. I had employed part of mine in making sketches. One laughs at one's extraordinary performances a day or two after one has completed them. Yet the attempt is worth making. It teaches one to admire less grudgingly the work of real artists who have conquered the difficulties. Books are less trying to vanity, for one is producing nothing of one's own, and submitting only to be interested or amused, if the author can succeed in either. One's appetite is generally good on these occasions, and one can devour anything; but in the pure primitive element of sea, and mountains, and unprogressive peasantry, I had become somehow fastidious. I tried a dozen novels one after the other without success; at last, perhaps the morning we left Elversdale, I found on the library shelves ”Le Père Goriot.” I had read a certain quantity of “Balzac” at other times, in deference to the high opinion entertained of him. N – , a fellow of Oriel, and once Member for Oxford, I remembered insisting to me that there was more knowledge of human nature in “Balzac” than in Shakespeare. I had myself observed in him a knowledge of a certain kind of human nature which Shakespeare let alone – a nature in which healthy vigor had been corrupted into a caricature by highly seasoned artificial civilization. Hothouse plants, in which the flowers had lost their grace of form and natural beauty, and had gained instead a poison-loaded and perfumed luxuriance, did not exist in Shakespeare's time, and if they had they would probably not have interested him. However, I had not read “Le Père Goriot,” and as I had been assured that it was the finest of Balzac's works, I sat down to it and deliberately read it through. My first impulse after it was over was to plunge into the sea to wash myself. As we were going ten knots, there were objections to this method of ablution, but I felt that I had been in abominable company. The book seemed to be the very worst ever written by a clever man. But it, and N – 's reference to Shakespeare, led me into a train of reflections. Le Père Goriot, like King Lear, has two daughters. Like Lear, he strips himself of his own fortune to provide for them in a distinguished manner. He is left to poverty and misery while his daughters live in splendor. Why is Lear so grand? Why is Le Père Goriot detestable? In the first place, all the company in Balzac are bad. Le Père Goriot is so wrapped up in his delightful children, that their very vices charm him, and their scented boudoirs seem a kind of Paradise. Lear, in the first scene of the play, acts and talks like an idiot, but still an idiot with a moral soul in him. Take Lear's own noble nature from him, take Kent away, and Edgar, and the fool, and Cordelia – and the actors in the play, it must be admitted, are abominable specimens of humanity – yet even so, leaving the story as it might have been if Marlowe had written it instead of Shakespeare, Goneril and Regan would still have been terrible, while the Paris dames of fashion are merely loathsome. What is the explanation of the difference? Partly, I suppose, it arises from the comparative intellectual stature of the two sets of women. Strong natures and weak may be equally wicked. The strong are interesting, because they have daring and force. You fear them as you fear panthers and tigers. You hate, but you admire. M. Balzac's heroines have no intellectual nature at all. They are female swine out of Circe's sty; as selfish, as unscrupulous as any daughter of Adam could conveniently be, but soft, and corrupt, and cowardly, and sensual; so base and low that it would be a compliment to call them devils. I object to being brought into the society of people in a book whom I would shut my eyes rather than see in real life. Goneril and Regan would be worth looking at in a cage in the Zoological Gardens. One would have no curiosity to stare at a couple of dames caught out of Coventry Street or the Quadrant. From Shakespeare to Balzac, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, we have been progressing to considerable purpose. If the state of literature remains as it has hitherto been, the measure of our moral condition, Europe has been going ahead with a vengeance. I put out the taste of “Le Père Goriot” with “Persuasion.” Afterwards I found a book really worth reading, with the uninviting title of “Adventures in Sport and War,” the author of it a young Marquis de Compiègne, a ruined representative of the old French noblesse, who appears first as a penniless adventurer seeking his fortune in America as a birdstuffer, and tempted by an advertisement into the swamps of Florida in search of specimens, a beggarly experience, yet told with naïveté and simplicity, truth and honor surviving by the side of absolute helplessness. Afterwards we find him in France again, fighting as a private in the war with Germany, and taken prisoner at Sedan; and again in the campaign against the Commune, at the taking of Paris, and the burning of the Tuileries – a tragic picture, drawn, too, with entire unconsciousness of the condition to which Balzac, Madame Sand, and the rest of the fraternity had dragged down the French nation. —Longman's Magazine.

The Dread of Old Age. – We all of us, or at least all of us who are slipping past fifty, secretly dread old age, and regard with aversion its usual, or traditionally usual, conditions; and the sight of a man about whose years there can be no question, who has passed by thirty years the average limit of human life, and by ten years an extreme limit, and yet talks well, hears fairly well, sees perfectly well and could walk like another but for weakness, is pleasantly reassuring. If the man of a century can be like Sir Moses Montefiore, the man of ninety may be only a little indolent, the man of eighty hale and hearty, and the man of seventy retain “the fullest vigor of his faculties.” That is one secret, we are convinced, of the decided popularity of very old statesmen, and especially old statesmen of great vigor, a sense among the middle-aged that if they who are so visible can be so strong and active and full brilliancy, old age cannot be so dreadful after all. An apprehension has been removed or lessened, and a very keen one. Some of the dread no doubt is traditional, founded upon boyish recollections, and even upon books, Shakespeare in particular having expressed, in lines which have stuck in the national memory, an unusually strong sense of the infirmities of age. His celebrated lines were probably accurate at the time, for they are accurate now when applied to certain classes of the very poor; but they no longer describe the majority of the aged well-to-do. Whatever the cause, whether improved sanitary appliances, or greater temperance, or, as we should ourselves believe, an increase of the habit of persistently using the mind, and consistently taking interest in events, it is certain that the disease called senility is among the fully-fed much rarer than it used to be. The old lose their hearing, and their activity, and part of the keenness of their sight, and are supposed to be grown duller alike to pleasure and to pain; but they much seldomer become totally blind, or fatuous, or unable to control their features, or incapable of guiding themselves about. Men of eighty-four or five, who, in the early part of the century, would have fallen into second childhood – then a disease recognized not only by doctors, but by all men, and regarded as a sort of idiotcy – now talk easily, and glide over little deficiencies of memory, and are, apart from a not ungraceful physical weakness, truly men. The younger generation has, however, scarcely realised the change in its full extent, and fears age, therefore, unconsciously a little more acutely than it should, though it has reason for some of its fear. The lot of the old is not the happiest, even if they are fortunately placed. They suffer from the certainty that such physical ills as they have cannot be cured, and a fear that they will become worse, from a deficiency, not so much of occupation as of imperative occupation, the business occupation of middle-age and from that unconscious insolence of the babbling youth around them, which is, perhaps, most felt by the aged when youth is most loving and considerate. One does not want to be “considered” by a baby. They suffer from a jar between their own impression of their own wisdom, as a necessary product of their long experience, and a secret doubt whether the young, who evidently think so differently, can be all wrong, not to mention that actual disrespect which the peculiar conceit of the young always appears to indicate even when it is not intended. They suffer from their keen memory for disappointments, which sometimes in the reflections of the old exaggerate their bulk till life seems made up of little else – a phenomenon constantly observable in the monologues of the uneducated and ill-restrained. And they suffer most of all from the loss, ever-increasing as time slips along, not only of those dearest to them, but of accustomed intimates, and especially of friends who grow fewer not only from deaths, but from departures, alienations, and changes of condition and feeling. The very old, as far as our experience serves, are fortunate if, outside the circle of blood relations, they retain even one or two close friends: and this to some men and women, especially to those much dependent on conversation to stimulate their natures and “put them in spirits,” is the most irremediable of losses. They feel as if life had altered, and the very sunlight were less inspiring. Add that all the indulgences of hope, including day dreaming, become vapid – reason showing the unreality – and gradually cease, and we may admit that even under favorable circumstances old age is not an enviable condition, more especially among Englishmen and Americans, who feel little of that instinctive reverence for age, and belief in its nearness to the divine, which characterises all Asia and a large portion of Southern Europe. The Teutons think allusions to gray hairs, which Southerners regard as solemn, and will accept even in a theatre with applause, a little rhetorical or artificial. The respect for the old is not gone, but a certain reverence is, if it ever existed among us, which, remembering Shakespeare's lines and our own workhouse arrangements, we half incline to doubt. —Spectator.

A True Critic. – He who has the genuine pictorial sense, of which not even the idea can be given to those who have not got it, is quickly discovered by those who have the same gift. They will detect him in the gallery by many signs. He is guided by instinct to stand at the right distance from the picture, which is not a mere matter of taste as most folk think, but the distance at which the picture has the same expanse to the eye as the real object replaced by it would have. A little nearer or a little farther he feels the picture bearing falsely. Falsely when things are represented which in the real view would alter (as the picture objects cannot) in their mutual effects by advancing towards or retreating from them. His eye goes right to the heart of the picture; the spot made to be such by the artifice of the painter. He is in no hurry to look elsewhere. He looks towards one point, but he sees the rest sufficiently without peeping about. His consciousness takes in the whole simultaneously, and for a while he examines nothing; forgets that he sees a picture, and feels the quickening within of the thoughts which such a scene might stir up. He can presently put aside all this and criticise if he cares to do so, just as the musician can cease from his tune and look to the strings or stops. For he is curious about the mechanism of the delightful delusion as the musician or the most enraptured of his audience may care to look into the arrangement of a musical instrument. But the picture like the violin, is not in operation at all while it is being examined. —Art Journal.