Section 16 of 19 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER VII.
Madame Sand--Lelia--Visit to Majorca--Exclusive Ideals.
In 1836 Madame Sand had not only published INDIANA, VALENTINE,
and JACQUES, but also LELIA, that prose poem of which she
afterwards said: "If I regret having written it, it is because I
could not now write it. Were I in the same state of mind now as
when it was written, it would indeed be a great consolation to me
to be able to commence it." The mere painting of romances in cold
water colors must have seemed, without doubt, dull to Madame
Sand, after having handled the hammer and chisel of the sculptor
so boldly, in modeling the grand lines of that semi-colossal
statue, in cutting those sinewy muscles, which even in their
statuesque immobility, are full of bewildering and seductive
charm. Should we continue long to gaze upon it, it excites the
most painful emotion. In strong contrast to the miracle of
Pygmalion, Lelia seems a living Galatea, rich in feeling, full of
love, whom the deeply enamored artist has tried to bury alive in
his exquisitely sculptured marble, stifling the palpitating
breath, and congealing the warm blood in the vain hope of
elevating and immortalizing the beauty he adores. In the presence
of this vivid nature petrified by art, we cannot feel that
admiration is kindled into love, but, saddened and chilled, we
are forced to acknowledge that love may be frozen into mere
admiration.
Brown and olive-hued Lelia! Dark as Lara, despairing as Manfred,
rebellious as Cain, thou hast ranged through the depths of
solitude! But thou art more ferocious, more savage, more
inconsolable than they, because thou hast never found a man's
heart sufficiently feminine to love thee as they were loved, to
pay the homage of a confiding and blind submission to thy virile
charms, to offer thee a mute yet ardent devotion, to suffer its
obedience to be protected by thy Amazonian force! Woman-hero!
Like the Amazons, thou hast been valiant and eager for combats;
like them thou hast not feared to expose the exquisite loveliness
of thy face to the fierceness of the summer's sun, or the sharp
blasts of winter! Thou hast hardened thy fragile limbs by the
endurance of fatigue, thus robbing them of the subtle power of
their weakness! Thou hast covered thy palpitating breast with a
heavy cuirass, which has pressed and torn it, dyeing its snow in
blood;--that gentle woman's bosom, charming as life, discreet as
the grave, which is always adored by man when his heart is
permitted to form its sole, its impenetrable buckler!
After having blunted her chisel in polishing this statue, which,
by its majesty, its haughty disdain, its look of hopeless
anguish, shadowed by the frowning of the pure brows and by the
long loose locks shivering with electric life, reminds us of
those antique cameos on which we still admire the perfect
features, the beautiful yet fatal brow, the haughty smile of the
Medusa, whose gaze paralyzed and stopped the pulses of the human
heart;--Madame Sand in vain sought another form for the
expression of the emotions which tortured her insatiate soul.
After having draped this figure with the highest art,
accumulating every species of masculine greatness upon it in
order to compensate for the highest of all qualities which she
repudiated for it, the grandeur of, "utter self-abnegation for
love," which the many-sided poet has placed in the empyrean and
called "the Eternal Feminine," (DAS EWIGWEIBLICHE,)--a greatness
which is love existing before any of its joys, surviving all its
sorrows;--after having caused Don Juan to be cursed, and a divine
hymn to be chanted to Desire by Lelia, who, as well as Don Juan,
had repulsed the only delight which crowns desire, the luxury of
self-abnegation,--after having fully revenged Elvira by the
creation of Stenio,--after having scorned man more than Don Juan
had degraded woman,--Madame Sand, in her LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR,
depicts the shivering palsy, the painful lethargy which seizes
the artist, when, having incorporated the emotion which inspired
him in his work, his imagination still remains under the
domination of the insatiate idea without being able to find
another form in which to incarnate it. Such poetic sufferings
were well understood by Byron, when he makes Tasso shed his most
bitter tears, not for his chains, not for his physical
sufferings, not for the ignominy heaped upon him, but for his
finished Epic, for the ideal world created by his thought and now
about to close its doors upon him, and by thus expelling him from
its enchanted realm, rendering him at last sensible of the gloomy
realities around him:--
"But this is o'er--my pleasant task is done:--
My long-sustaining friend of many years:
If I do blot thy final page with tears,
Know that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
And woo'd me from myself with thy sweet sight,
Thou too art gone--and so is my delight."
LAMENT OF TASSO.--BYRON.
At this epoch, Madame Sand often heard a musician, one of the
friends who had greeted Chopin with the most enthusiastic joy
upon his arrival at Paris, speak of him. She heard him praise his
poetic genius even more than his artistic talent. She was
acquainted with his compositions, and admired their graceful
tenderness. She was struck by the amount of emotion displayed in
his poems, with the effusions of a heart so noble and dignified.
Some of the countrymen of Chopin spoke to her of the women of
their country, with the enthusiasm natural to them upon that
subject, an enthusiasm then very much increased by a remembrance
of the sublime sacrifices made by them during the last war.
Through their recitals and the poetic inspiration of the Polish
artist, she perceived an ideal of love which took the form of
worship for woman. She thought that guaranteed from dependence,
preserved from inferiority, her role might be like the fairy
power of the Peri, that ethereal intelligence and friend of man.
Perhaps she did not fully understand what innumerable links of
suffering, of silence, of patience, of gentleness, of indulgence,
of courageous perseverance, had been necessary for the formation
of the worship for this imperious but resigned ideal, beautiful
indeed, but sad to behold, like those plants with the rose-
colored corollas, whose stems, intertwining and interlacing in a
network of long and numerous branches, give life to ruins;
destined ever to embellish decay, growing upon old walls and
hiding only tottering stones! Beautiful veils woven by beneficent
Nature, in her ingenious and inexhaustible richness, to cover the
constant decay of human things!
As Madame Sand perceived that this artist, in place of giving
body to his phantasy in porphyry and marble, or defining his
thoughts by the creation of massive caryatides, rather effaced
the contour of his works, and, had it been necessary, could have
elevated his architecture itself from the soil, to suspend it,
like the floating palaces of the Fata Morgana, in the fleecy
clouds, through his aerial forms of almost impalpable buoyancy,
she was more and more attracted by that mystic ideal which she
perceived glowing within them. Though her arm was powerful enough
to have sculptured the round shield, her hand was delicate enough
to have traced those light relievos where the shadows of
ineffaceable profiles have been thrown upon and trusted to a
stone scarcely raised from its level plane. She was no stranger
in the supernatural world, she to whom Nature, as to a favored
child, had unloosed her girdle and unveiled all the caprices, the
attractions, the delights, which she can lend to beauty. She was
not ignorant of the lightest graces; she whose eye could embrace
such vast proportions, had stooped to study the glowing
illuminations painted upon the wings of the fragile butterfly.
She had traced the symmetrical and marvellous network which the
fern extends as a canopy over the wood strawberry; she had
listened to the murmuring of streams through the long reeds and
stems of the water-grass, where the hissing of the "amorous
viper" may be heard; she had followed the wild leaps of the Will-
with-a-wisp as it bounds over the surface of the meadows and
marshes; she had pictured to herself the chimerical dwelling-
places toward which it perfidiously attracts the benighted
traveller; she had listened to the concerts given by the Cicada
and their friends in the stubble of the fields; she had learned
the names of the inhabitants of the winged republics of the woods
which she could distinguish as well by their plumaged robes, as
by their jeering roulades or plaintive cries. She knew the secret
tenderness of the lily in the splendor of its tints; she had
listened to the sighs of Genevieve, [Footnote: ANDRE] the maiden
enamored of flowers.
She was visited in her dreams by those "unknown friends" who came
to rejoin her "when she was seized with distress upon a desolate
shore," brought by a "rapid stream...in large and full
bark"...upon which she mounted to leave the unknown shores, "the
country of chimeras which make real life appear like a dream half
effaced to those, who enamored from their infancy of large shells
of pearl, mount them to land in those isles where all are young
and beautiful...where the men and women are crowned with flowers,
with their long locks floating upon their shoulders...holding
vases and harps of a strange form...having songs and voices not
of this world...all loving each other equally with a divine
love...where crystal fountains of perfumed waters play in basins
of silver...where blue roses bloom in vases of alabaster...where
the perspectives are all enchanted...where they walk with naked
feet upon the thick green moss, soft as carpets of velvet...where
all sing as they wander among the fragrant groves." [Footnote:
LETTRES D'UN VOYAGEUR]
She knew these unknown friends so well that after having again
seen them, "she could not dream of them without palpitations of
the heart during the whole day." She was initiated into the
Hoffmannic world--"she who had surprised such ineffable smiles
upon the portraits of the dead;" [Footnote: SPIRIDSON] who had
seen the rays of the sun falling through the stained glass of a
Gothic window form a halo round loved heads, like the arm of God,
luminous and impalpable, surrounded by a vortex of atoms;--she
who had known such glorious apparitions, clothed with the purple
and golden glories of the setting sun. The realm of fantasy had
no myth with whose secret she was not familiar!
Thus she was naturally anxious to become acquainted with one who
had with rapid wing flown "to those scenes which it is impossible
to describe, but which must exist somewhere, either upon the
earth, or in some of the planets, whose light we love to gaze
upon in the forests when the moon has set." [Footnote: LETTRES
D'UN VOYAGEUR] Such scenes she had prayed never to be forced to
desert--never desiring to bring her heart and imagination back to
this dreary world, too like the gloomy coasts of Finland, where
the slime and miry slough can only be escaped by scaling the
naked granite of the solitary rocks. Fatigued with the massive
statue she had sculptured, the Amazonian Lelia; wearied with the
grandeur of an Ideal which it is impossible to mould from the
gross materials of this earth; she was desirous to form an
acquaintance with the artist "the lover of an impossible so
shadowy"--so near the starry regions. Alas! if these regions are
exempt from the poisonous miasmas of our atmosphere, they are not
free from its desolating melancholy! Perhaps those who are
transported there may adore the shining of new suns--but there
are others not less dear whose light they must see extinguished!
Will not the most glorious among the beloved constellation of the
Pleiades there disappear? Like drops of luminous dew the stars
fall one by one into the nothingness of a yawning abyss, whose
bottomless depths no plummet has ever sounded, while the soul,
contemplating these fields of ether, this blue Sahara with its
wandering and perishing oases,--is stricken by a grief so
hopeless, so profound, that neither enthusiasm nor love can ever
soothe it more. It ingulfs and absorbs all emotions, being no
more agitated by them than the sleeping waters of some tranquil
lake, reflecting the moving images thronging its banks from its
polished surface, are by the varied motions and eager life of the
many objects mirrored upon its glassy bosom. The drowsy waters
cannot thus be wakened from their icy lethargy. This melancholy
saddens even the highest joy. "Through the exhaustion always
accompanying such tension, when the soul is strained above the
region which it naturally inhabits...the insufficiency of speech
is felt for the first time by those who have studied it so much,
and used it so well--we are borne from all active, from all
militant instincts--to travel through boundless space--to be lost
in the immensity of adventurous courses far, far above the
clouds...where we no longer see that the earth is beautiful,
because our gaze is riveted upon the skies...where reality is no
longer poetically draped, as has been so skilfully done by the
author of Waverley, but where, in idealizing poetry itself, the
infinite is peopled with the spirits belonging only to its mystic
realm, as has been done by Byron in his Manfred."
Could Madame Sand have divined the incurable melancholy, the will
which cannot blend with that of others, the imperious
exclusiveness, which invariably seize upon imaginations
delighting in the pursuit of dreams whose realities are nowhere
to be found, or at least never in the matter-of-fact world in
which the dreamers are constrained to dwell? Had she foreseen the
form which devoted attachment assumes for such dreamers; had she
measured the entire and absolute absorption which they will alone
accept as the synonyme of tenderness? It is necessary to be in
some degree shy, shrinking, and secretive as they themselves are,
to be able to understand the hidden depths of characters so
concentrated. Like those susceptible flowers which close their
sensitive petals before the first breath of the North wind, they
too veil their exacting souls in the shrouds of self
concentration, unfolding themselves only under the warming rays
of a propitious sun. Such natures have been called "rich by
exclusiveness;" in opposition to those which are "rich by
expansiveness." "If these differing temperaments should meet and
approach each other, they can never mingle or melt the one into
the other," (says the writer whom we have so often quoted) "but
the one must consume the other, leaving nothing but ashes
behind." Alas! it is the natures like that of the fragile
musician whose days we commemorate, which, consuming themselves,
perish; not wishing, not indeed being able, to live any life but
one in conformity with their own exclusive Ideal.
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