Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (19)

The father asked him if he had shown his displeasure to his girl playmate, to which he replied: “I didn’t show my angriness;” and after a pause: “I’d better not show how angry I can be, I’m too strong and too big, ain’t I?” As a matter of fact he had once, at least, been so ungallant as to strike his companion on her nose with one of his toys, selecting this objective for his attack apparently for no other reason than that it was already disfigured by a scratch. He wound up this disquisition on E.’s shortcomings by an attempt at a magnanimous allowance for her weakness: “I b’lieve she tries not to say these things because she knows they will tease me, but I think she can’t help it;” and he repeated this as if to emphasise the point.

Even our much-biassed chronicler is obliged to own that all this is a lamentable exhibition of boyish swagger, and particularly out of place in one born in these enlightened days, when, as we all know, ‘she’s’ are as good as ‘he’s,’ if not a great deal better. The only palliation of the unpleasant picture of coxcombry which he offers is the information that a year or too later C.’s views about girls were profoundly modified when he found himself in a school where a girl of his own age could beat him at certain things of the mind.

The growing vigour of his self-consciousness was shown in other ways too. He was much hurt by anything which seemed to him an invasion of his liberty. About the end of the sixth month, we read, he had got into ‘finicking’ ways of taking his food. Thus he conceived a strong dislike for the ‘cream’ on his boiled milk. If anybody attempted to cross him in these faddish ways he would be greatly offended. It looks as if he were at this time getting a keen sense of private rights, any interference with which he regarded as an offence.

The story about what he would do if his family were ship-wrecked suggests that self-sacrifice was as yet not a strong element in the boy’s moral constitution. Egoism, it might well seem, was still the foundation of his character. This egoism would peep out now and again in his talk. One day (middle of eighth month) when the family was lodging in a cottage his mother had reason to scold him for walking on the flower-beds in the cottage garden. Whereupon he answered: “It isn’t your garden, it’s Mr. G.’s”. To this the mother observed: “I know, dear, but I have to be all the more particular because it is not mine”; which observation drew forth the following: “I should think Mr. G. would be all the more particular because it is his”. It was evident, writes the father, from this somewhat cynical observation that caring for things and resenting any injury to them seemed to C. to devolve on the owner and on nobody else.

He himself certainly did repel any encroachment on his rights. Here is an amusing illustration. One day (the end of seventh month) he was playing on the Heath under the eye of his mother. He had put on one of the seats a lot of grass and sand as fodder for his wooden horse. While he went away for a minute a strange nurse and children arrived, making a perfectly legitimate use of the bench by seating themselves on it, and in order to get room brushing away the precious result of his foraging expedition. On coming back and seeing what had happened he turned to his mother and swelling with indignation exclaimed loudly: “What do you mean by it, letting these children move away my things?” Of course this was intended to intimidate the real culprits, the children. Finding that they were not abashed at this, but on the contrary were looking at one another with a look of high-bred astonishment, he turned to them and shouted: “What do you mean by it?” This outburst, observes the father, showed a preternatural heat of indignation, for in general he was very distant and reserved towards strange children.

Yet C. was very far from being wholly absorbed in himself and his own interests. It cannot be said indeed that self monopolised the intensest of his feelings, for he felt just as strongly for others too. There was, we are told, a marked development of sympathy during this year. His sister was now away from home at school, and the absence seems to have drawn out kindly feeling. So that when, on one occasion (middle of seventh month), his father and aunt were going to visit her, and to take her to the Crystal Palace, though he wanted dreadfully to go himself, he made a great effort, and in answer to his father’s question, what message he had for his sister, answered a little tremulously, “Give her my love,” and then, waxing more valiant, added, “I hope she will enjoy herself at Crystal Palace”.

Some months later (end of ninth month), he proved himself considerate for his father, whose repugnance to noises has already been alluded to. A man had come to repair a window and his father had been forced to stop his work and to go out. On his return C. met him in the garden and asked him loudly, evidently so that the man might hear, “Does that man disturb you, papa?” He had previously talked to his mother in an indignant way about the noises which disturbed his father. About a fortnight after this, on hearing some children make an uproar in the passage, he asked indignantly, “What are those children about, making papa not do his work?” “He was at this time,” writes the father, “transferring some of that chivalrous protection which he first bestowed on animals to his own kith and kin. He became to me just at this time something of a guardian angel.”

His compassion for the lower creation had meanwhile by no means lessened. Here is a story which shows how the killing of animals by human hands still tortured his young heart. One day (towards end of fourth month) he was looking at his beloved picture-book of animals. _Apropos_ of a picture of some seals he began a talk with his mother in the usual way by asking her a question.

C. “What are seals killed for, mamma?”

M. “For the sake of their skins and oil.”

C. (turning to a picture of a stag). “Why do they kill the stags? They don’t want _their_ skins, do they?”

M. “No, they kill them because they like to chase them.”

C. “Why don’t policemen stop them?”

M. “They can’t do that, because people are allowed to kill them.”

C. (loudly and passionately). “Allowed, allowed? People are not allowed to take other people and kill them.”

M. “People think there is a difference between killing men and killing animals.”

C. was not to be pacified this way. He looked woe-begone and said to his mother piteously, “You don’t understand me”. He added that he would tell his friend the Heath-keeper about these things.

The father observes on this: “There was something almost heart-breaking in that cry ‘You don’t understand me’. How can we, with minds blinded by our conventional habits and prejudices, hope to catch the subtle and divine light which is reflected from the untarnished mirror of a child’s mind?” Somehow, the father’s sentimental comments seem less out of place here. But already the boy’s wrestlings of spirit with the dreadful ‘must,’ which turns men into killers, were proving too much for his young strength. He was learning, sullenly enough, to adjust his eye to the inevitable realities. This accommodation of thought to stern necessity was illustrated by an incident which occurred at the end of the fourth month. He had had some leaden soldiers given him at Christmas. Some time after this he had been observed to break off their guns. His mother now asked him why he had broken them off. He replied: “Oh! that was when I didn’t know what soldiers were for, when I thought they were just naughty men who liked to kill people”. On his mother then asking him what he now thought soldiers were for, he explained: “Oh! when some people want to do harm to some _other_ people, then those other people must send their soldiers to fight them, to stop them from doing harm”.

One moral quality had, it seems, always been distinctly marked in C., _viz._, a scrupulous regard for truth. His father believes the child had never knowingly made a false statement, save playfully, when throwing for a moment the reins on the neck of fancy and allowing it to come dangerously near the confines of truth. This scrupulosity the father connects, reasonably enough, with certain intellectual qualities, as close observation and accurate description of what was observed. Sometimes this scrupulous veracity would display itself in a quaint form. One morning (end of tenth month) C. was obstinate and would not say his lesson to his mother, so that she had to threaten him with forfeiture of his toys till the lesson was got through. On this C. said rebelliously: “Very well, I won’t say them”. His mother then talked to him about his naughtiness. He grew very unhappy, and said sobbing and looking the very picture of misery: “It’s a good deal worse to break my promise than not to say my lesson”.

Another incident of about the same date throws a curious light on the quality of his moral feeling at this period. He had been out one afternoon in the garden with a girl companion of about his own age, and the two little imps between them had managed to strip that unpretending garden of its spring glory, to wit, about twenty buds of peonies. The sacrilege betrayed itself in C.’s red-dyed fingers. A condign chastisement was administered by the mother, and the culprit was sent to bed immediately after tea in the hope that solitude might bring reflexion and remorse. In order to ensure so desirable a result the mother before leaving him in bed enlarged on the heinousness of the offence. At last he began to get downright miserable, and the mother, expectant of a confession of guilt, overheard him say to himself: “I’m _so_ sorry I picked the flowers. I didn’t have half enough tea.” The next day, referring to his mischievous act, his mother happened to say: “You were not sorry for it at the time”. Whereupon he burst out in a contemptuous tone: “Eh! you didn’t suppose I was sorry at the time? I liked doing it.” “Shocking enough, no doubt,” writes the father on this in his characteristic manner, “yet may we not see in this defiant avowal of enjoyment in wrong-doing the germ of a true remorse, which in its essence is the resolute confronting of the lower by the higher self?”

His mind was still occupied about the mysteries of God, death, and heaven. Following the example of his sister he would occasionally on going to bed quite spontaneously say his prayers. One evening at the end of the eleventh month, having knelt down and muttered over some words, he asked his mother whether she had heard him. She said no, and he remarked that he had not wished her to hear. On her asking why not, he rejoined: “If anybody hears what I say perhaps God won’t listen to me,” which seems to suggest that talking to God was to him something particularly confidential, what he himself once described as telling another a “private secret”.[327]

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Footnote 327:

Compare above, p. 283 f.

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When his mother asked him what he had been praying for he said it was for a fine day on his birthday. He thought much of God as the maker of things, and wondered. One day (middle of tenth month) he asked how God made us and “put flesh on us,” and made “what is inside us”. He then proceeded to invent a little theory of creation. “I s’pose he made stone men and iron men first, and then made real men.” “This myth,” writes the father, “might readily suggest that the child had been hearing about the stone and the iron age, and about sculptors first modelling their statues in another material. It seems probable, however, that it was invented by a purely childish thought as a way of clearing up the mystery of the living thinking man.” There is subsequent evidence that his theory did not fully satisfy him. In the eleventh month he continued to ask how God made things, and wanted to know whether ‘preachers’ could resolve his difficulty. (His sister appears about this time to have had the common childish awe for the clergy.) On learning from his mother that even these well-informed persons might not be able to satisfy all his questions, he observed: “Well, anyhow, if we go to heaven when we die we shall know,” and added after a pause, “and if we don’t it doesn’t much matter”. “From this,” writes the father, “it seems fully clear that the child was beginning to adjust his mind to the fact of mystery, to the existence of an impenetrable region of the unknown.”

C.’s deepest interest just now in religious matters grew out of the feelings awakened by the thought of death. In the early part of the year he plied his mother with questions about death and burial. He was manifestly troubled about the prospect of being put under ground. One night (end of third month) when his mother was seeing him to bed, he said: “Don’t put earth on my face when I am buried”. The touch of the bed-clothes on his face had no doubt suggested the stifling effect of the earth. About the same date he remarked in his characteristic abrupt manner, after musing for some time: “Mamma, perhaps the weather will be _very_, _very_ fine, much finer than we have ever seen, when we are not there”. The mother was not unnaturally puzzled by this dark utterance and asked him what he meant. He replied: “I mean when we are buried, and then we shall be very sorry”. “Who can tell,” writes the father, “what this fancy of lying under the ground, yet catching the whispering of the most delicious of summer breezes, and the far-off touch of the gladdest of sunbeams, and the faint scent of the sweetest of flowers, may have meant for the wee dreamy sensitive creature?”

The following dialogue between C. and his mother at the beginning of the fourth month may further illustrate his feeling about this subject.

C. “Why must people die, mamma?”

M. “They get worn out, and so can’t live always, just as the flowers and leaves fade and die.”

C. “Well, but why can’t they come to life again just like the flowers?”

M. “The same flowers don’t come to life again, dear.”

C. “Well, the little seed out of the flower drops into the earth and springs up again into a flower. Why can’t people do like that?”

M. “Most people get very tired and want to sleep for ever.”

C. “Oh! _I_ shan’t want to sleep for ever, and when I am buried I shall try to wake up again; and there won’t be any earth on my eyes, will there, mamma?”

The difficulty of coupling the fact of burial with after-existence in heaven then began to trouble him. One day (middle of eighth month) he and his mother were passing a churchyard. He looked intently at the gravestones and asked: “Mamma, it’s only the naughty people who are buried, isn’t it?” Being asked why he thought so he continued: “Because auntie said all the good people went to heaven”. On his mother telling him that all people are buried he said: “Oh, then heaven must be under the ground, or they couldn’t get there”. Another way by which he tried to surmount the difficulty was by supposing that God would have to come up through the ground to take us to heaven. He clung tenaciously to the idea of heaven as an escape from the horror of death. That the hope of heaven was the core of his religious belief is seen in the following little talk between him and his mother and sister one evening at the end of the first month.

C. “Does God ever die?”

E. (the sister). “No, dear, and when we die God will take us to live with him in heaven.”

C. (to mother). “Will he, mamma?”

M. “I hope so, dear.”

C. “Well, what is God good for if he won’t take us to heaven when we die?”[328]

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Footnote 328:

On children’s attempts to understand about being buried and going to
heaven, see above, p. 120 ff.

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_Sixth Year._

The sixth year, the last with which the diary attempts to deal, is very meagrely represented. The observation was plainly becoming intermittent and lax. I have, however, thought it worth while to complete this sketch of a child’s mental development by a reference to this fragmentary chapter.

The child continued to be observant of the forms of things. He began to attend the Kindergarten at the beginning of this year, and this probably served to develop his visual observation. We have, however, no very striking illustrations of his perceptual powers. It might interest the naturalist to know that he compared the head of Mr. Darwin, which he saw in a photograph, to that of an elephant, and being asked why he thought them like one another, answered: “Because it is so far from the top of the head to the ear”. Perhaps admirers of our great naturalist may be ready to pardon the likening of their hero’s head to that of one of the most intelligent of the large animal family which he showed to be our kinsfolk.

Another remark of his at about the same date seems to show that he still entertained a particularly gross form of the animistic conception that things are double, and that there is a second filmy body within the solid tangible one. He was looking at the pictures in Darwin’s _Descent of Man_, and came on some drawings of the human embryo. His mother asked him what they looked like, and he replied: “Why, like the inside of persons of course”. Asked to explain this he pointed to the head, the eye, the stomach, and so forth.

He spontaneously began to talk (middle of eighth month) about opposition of colours. He was looking at his coloured soldiers and talking to himself in this wise: “Which colour is most opposite colour to blue?” He said that red was its opposite, not yellow as suggested by his father, in which opinion he probably has a good many older people on his side. He also observed to his father at the same date: “I tell you, papa, what two colours are very like one another, blue and green”. The father remarks, however, that he was now mixing pigments and using them, and that the knowledge so gained probably made him bring blue and green nearer to one another than he used to do.

An opportunity of testing his memory occurred at the beginning of the sixth month. He met a gentleman who had been kind to him during that memorable visit to the sea-side village D—— just three and a half years before, and whom he had not seen since. His father asked the child whether he knew Mr. S. He looked at him steadily, and answered yes. Asked where he had seen him, he answered: "Down at ——". He had forgotten the name of the place. On his father further asking him what he remembered about him he said: “He made me boats and sailed them in a pool”. This was quite correct. So far as the father can say the fact had not been spoken of to him since the time. If this is so, it seems worth recording that a child of five and a half should recall such distinct impressions of what had occurred when he was only just two.

Fancy, the old frisky, wonder-working fancy, was now getting less active. At least, we meet this year with none of the pretty fairy-myths of earlier years. So far as the journal tells us, it was only in sleep that C. entered the delightful region of wonderland. Here is a quaint dream of his (end of fifth month). It was Christmas time, and he had been seeing a huge prize-ox, a shaggy Highland fellow with big head and curled horns. He had taken a violent fancy to it and wanted his father to draw it for him. A morning or two afterwards he told his father that he had had a funny dream. Both his father and his mother were turned into oxen, and it was a “very nice dream”.

For the rest, the brain of our little Kindergärtner was being engrossed with the business of getting knowledge, and, as a result of this fancy, was being taken in hand by sober understanding and drilled to the useful and necessary task of discovering truth.

We get one or two pretty glimpses of the boy trundling his hoop beside his father in a late evening walk and now and again stopping to ask questions. Here is one (end of third month): They were walking home together across the sands at Hunstanton at the rosy sun-set hour. C. was much impressed and began asking his father how far off the sun was. On finding out that the clouds were not a hard substance but could be passed through, he wanted to know what was on the other side. “Is it another world, papa, like this?”

Shortly after this date he was talking about the size of the sun, when he remarked: “I s’pose the sun’s big enough to put on the world and make see-saw”. He seemed to think of the sun as a disc, and imagined that it might be balanced on the earth-globe.

What with home instruction and the ‘lessons’ at the Kindergarten his little brain was being confronted with quite a multitude of new problems. It was interesting, remarks the father, to note how he would try to piece together the various scraps of knowledge he thus gathered. For instance, we find him in the ninth month trying hard to make something out of the motley presentations of the ‘world’ which he had got from classical myths as known through the _Tanglewood Tales_ and from his elementary geography lessons. He asked whether Atlas could stand in the middle of the sea and not be drowned. On his father’s trying to evade this awkward question, the boy inquired whether the sea came half way up the world. Asked to explain what he meant, he continued: “You know the shore gets lower and lower or else the sea would not go out; and out in the middle it goes down very deep. Now, where the sea comes in, is that half way up the world?” One would like to know how the father met this dark inquiry.

He would sometimes apply his newly-gained knowledge in an odd fashion. One day (middle of ninth month), he observed that his porridge was hottest in the middle, and remarked: “That’s just like the earth. It’s hottest in the middle. There’s real fire there.” This smacks just a little perhaps of pedantry, and the child, on entering the new world of school-lore, is, we know, apt to display the pride of learning. Yet we must beware, writes the ever-apologetic father, of judging the child’s ways too rigorously by our grown-up standards.

The progress in the more abstract kind of thinking and in the correlative use of abstract language was very noticeable at this stage. An odd example of an original way of expressing a newly attained relation of thought occurred towards the end of the third month. C. was at this time much occupied with the subject of the bearing-rein, the cruelty of which he had learnt from a favourite story, the autobiography of a horse, called _Black Beauty_. One day when walking out, and, as was his wont, vigilantly observant of all passing horses, he said: “That horse has bearing-rein at all,” by which he seems to have meant that the horse had it somewhere or wore it sometimes. The use of expressions like these, which at once made his statements more cautious and showed a better grasp of the full sweep of a proposition, was very characteristic at this period.

Even now, however, he found himself sometimes compelled to eke out his slender vocabulary by concrete and pictorial descriptions of the abstract. Thus one day (end of eighth month) he happened to overhear his father say that he should oppose a proposal of a member of the Library Committee to which he belonged. C., boy-like, interested in the prospect of a tussle, asked: "Who is the greatest man, you or Mr. ——?" Asked by his father, who imagined that the child was thinking of a physical contest with the honourable gentleman, “Do you mean taller?” he answered: “No. Who is most like a king?” In this wise, observes the chronicler, did he try to express his new idea of authority or influence over others.

While he thus pushed his way into the tangle of abstract ideas, he found himself now and again pulled up by a thorny obstacle. Some of us can remember how when young we had much trouble in learning to recognise the difference between the right and the left hand. C. experienced the same difficulty. One evening (towards the end of the eleventh month) after being put to bed he complained of a sore spot on his foot. Being asked on which foot, the right or the left, he said: “I can’t tell when in bed. I can’t say when my clothes are off. I know my right side by my pockets.” It would seem as if the differences in the muscular and other sensations by help of which we come to distinguish the one side of the body from the other are too slight to be readily recognised, and that a clear intuition of this simple and fundamental relation of position is the work of a prolonged experience.[329]

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Footnote 329:

According to Professor Baldwin’s observations the infant shows a
decided right-handedness, that is, a disposition to reach out with the
right hand rather than with the left, by the seventh or eighth month
(quoted by Tracy, _The Psychology of Childhood_, p. 55). But of course
this is a long way from a definite intuition and idea of the right and
the left hand. Mr. E. Kratz finds that more than one-fourth of
children of five coming to a primary school cannot distinguish the
right hand from the left.

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By the end of the fourth month—a month after joining the Kindergarten—he was able to count up to a century. His interest in counting, which was particularly lively just now, is illustrated in the fact that in the fifth month, after showing himself very curious about the word ‘fortnight,’ saying again and again that it was a funny word, and asking what it meant, he put the question: “Does it mean fourteen nights?”

About the same date he proffered a definition of one of the most difficult of subjects. His mother had been trying to explain the difference between poetry and prose by saying that the former describes beautiful things, when he suddenly interrupted her, exclaiming: “Oh yes, I know, it’s language with ornaments”. But here the diary has, it must be confessed, the look of wishing to display the boy’s accomplishments, a fault from which, on the whole, it is creditably free.

As might be expected, the boy’s reasoning was now much sounder, that is to say, more like our own. Yet now and again the old easy fashion of induction would crop up. Thus one day (towards end of ninth month) he was puzzled by the fact that boys of the same age might be of unequal size. This brought him to the old subject of growth, and he suggested quite seriously that the taller boys had had more sun. On his father saying: ‘The sun makes _plants_ grow,’ he added: “And people too”.

His questionings took about this time the direction of origins or beginnings. As with other children, God did not appear to be the starting-point in the evolution of things, and he once asked quite seriously (end of sixth month): “What was God like in his younger days?” With a like impulse to go back to absolute beginnings he inquired about the same date, after learning that chicken-pox was only caught from other animals: “What was the person or thing that first had chicken-pox?” A little later (beginning of ninth month) he and a boy companion of nearly the same age were talking about the beginnings of human life. C. said “I can’t make out how the first man in the world was able to speak. A word, you know, has a sound, and how did he find out what sound to make?” His friend then said that his puzzle was how the first babies were nursed. This child seems to have set out with the supposition that the history of our race began with the arrival of babies.

Very little is told us in this unfinished chapter of the child’s emotional and moral development. As might be expected from the increase of intellectual activity the movements expressive of the feelings of strain and perplexity which accompany thought grew more distinct. In particular it was noticeable at this time that during the fits of thought the child’s face would take on a quaint old-fashioned look, the eye-brows being puckered up and the eye-lids twitching.

He continued very sensitive about the cruelties of the world, more especially towards animals. One day (at the end of the fifth month) his mother had been reading to him his favourite, _Black Beauty_, in which a war-horse describes to the equine author the horrors of war. C. was deeply affected by the picture, and at length exclaimed with much emphasis, “Oh, ma! why do they do such things? It’s a _beastly_, _beastly_ world,” at the same time bursting into tears and hiding his face in his mother’s lap. “So hard,” writes the father, “did the boy still find it, notwithstanding his increased knowledge, to accept this human world as a right and just one.”

The religious thought and sentiment remained thoroughly childish. He was still puzzled about the relations of heaven and the grave. One day (end of sixth month) his father observed, looking at the Christmas pudding on the table wreathed with violet flame: “Oh, how I should like to be burned after death instead of being buried”. On this C. looking alarmed said: “_I_ won’t be burned. I shouldn’t go to heaven then.” On his father remarking: “’Tisn’t your body that goes to heaven,” he continued: “But my _head_ does”. Here, writes the father, we seem to perceive a transition from the old gross materialism of last year to a more refined form. C. was now, it may be presumed, localising the soul in the head, and clinging to the idea that at least that limited portion of our frame might manage to get away from the dark grave to the bright celestial regions. It may be too, he adds, that this fancy was aided by seeing pictures of detached cherub heads.[330]

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Footnote 330:

Compare above, p. 123.

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A month or two later (beginning of ninth month) he began to attack the difficult problem of Divine fore-knowledge and free-will. His mother had been remonstrating with him about his naughty ways. He grew very miserable and said: “I can’t make out how it is God doesn’t make us good. I pray to him to make me good.” To this his mother replied that he must help himself to be good. This only drew from C. the following protest: “Then what’s the use of having God if we have to help ourselves”. “Even now,” writes the father, "it looks as if God and heaven were for him institutions, the _raison d’être_ of which was their serviceableness to man."

He brought to the consideration of prayer a childish sense of propriety which sometimes wore a quaint aspect. One day (end of third month) on his return from the Kindergarten he asked his mother: “Does God teach us?” and when bidden explain his question continued: “Because they said that at school” (“Teach us to be good”). He then added: “But anyhow that isn’t a proper way to speak to God”. His notion of what was the proper way was illustrated in his own practice. One evening (end of sixth month) after his bath he was kneeling with his head on his mother’s lap so that she might dry his hair. He began to pray half audibly in this wise: “Please, God, let me find out before my birthday, but at least on my birthday.... So now good-bye!” This ending, obviously borrowed from his sister’s letters, was varied on another occasion in this way: “With my love, good-bye”.[331]

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Footnote 331:

Compare above, p. 283.

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It seems strange that the diary should break off at a time when there was so much of the quaint and pretty child-traits left to be observed. No explanation of the abrupt termination is offered, and I am only able to conjecture that the father was at this time pressed with other work, and that when he again found the needed leisure he discovered to his chagrin that time, aided by the school-drill, was already doing its work. We know that it is about this time that the artist, Nature, is wont to rub out the characteristic infantile lines in her first crude sketch of a human mind, and to elaborate a fuller and maturer picture. And while the onlooking parent may rejoice in the unfolding of the higher human lineaments, he cannot altogether suppress a pang at the disappearance of what was so delightfully fresh and lovely.

I will close these extracts, following the father’s own fashion, with a word of apology. C.’s doings and sayings have seemed to me worth recording, not because their author was in any sense a remarkable child, but solely because he was a true child. In spite of his habitual association with grown-up people he retained with childish independence his own ways of looking at things. No doubt something of the intellectual fop, of the assertive prig, peeps out now and again. Yet if we consider how much attention was given to his utterances, this is not surprising. For the greater part the sayings appear to me the direct naïve utterance of genuine childish conviction. And it is possible that the inevitable impulse of the parent to show off his child has done C. injustice by making too much, especially in the last chapter of the diary, of what looks smart. Heaven grant that our observations of the little ones may never destroy the delightful simplicity and unconsciousness of their ways, and turn them into disagreeable little performers, all conscious of their _rôle_, and greedy of admiration.

XII.
GEORGE SAND’S CHILDHOOD.

_The First Years._

Much has been written about George Sand, but singularly little about her childhood. Yet she herself, when she set to work, between forty and fifty, to write the _Histoire de ma Vie_, thought it worth while to fill the best part of two volumes of that work with early reminiscences; and herein surely she judged wisely. Good descriptions of childish experience are rare enough. George Sand gives us a singularly full story of childhood; and, allowing for the fact of its author being a novelist, one may say that this story reads on the whole like a record of memory. That a narrative at once so charming and so pathetic should have been neglected, by English writers at least, can only be set down to the circumstance that it is not clearly marked off from the tediously full account of ancestors which precedes it.[332]

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Footnote 332:

A selection of scenes from the story, with notes, has been prepared
for young English students by M. Eugène Joël, under the title,
_L’Enfance de George Sand_ (Rivingtons).

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The early reminiscences of a great man or woman have a special interest. Schopenhauer has ingeniously traced out the essential similarity of the man of genius and the child. Whatever the value of this analogy, it is certain that the gifted child seems not less but more of a child because of his gifts. This is emphatically true of the little lady with whom we are now concerned, and of whom, since we are interested in her on her own account and not merely as the precursor of the great novelist, we shall speak by her rightful name, Aurore Dupin.

The reader need not be told that the child who was to become the representative among modern women of the daring irregularities of genius was an uncommon child. She would certainly have been set down as strange and as deficient in childish traits by a commonplace observer. Yet close inspection shows that the untamed and untamable ‘oddities’ were, after all, only certain common childish impulses and tendencies exalted, or, if the reader prefers, exaggerated. Herein lies the chief value of the story. To this it may be added that this exaggeration of childish sensibility was set in a _milieu_ admirably fitted to stir and strain it to the utmost. It was a motley turbulent world into which little Aurore was unceremoniously pitched, and makes the chronicle of her experience a thrilling romance. And all this experience, it may be said finally, is set down with the untroubled regard and the patient hand of one of the old chroniclers. The forty years had left the memory tenacious and clear to a remarkable degree—in this respect the story will bear comparison with the childish recallings of Goethe and the other famous self-historians; at the same time these years had brought the woman’s power of quiet retrospect and the artist’s habit of calm complacent envisagement. Herein lies a further element of value. The writer feels her identity with the subject of her memoir: she lives over again the passion-storms and ennuis, the reveries and hoydenish freaks of little Aurore; yet she can detach herself from her heroine too, and discuss her and her surroundings with perfect artistic aloofness.

Aurore—or, to give her her full appellation, Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin—was born in 1804. Her father, a distinguished officer of the Empire, was grandson of Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Poland. Her mother was a daughter of a Parisian bird-seller, and a true child of the people. The student of heredity may, perhaps, find in this commingling of noble and humble blood a key to much of the wild and bizarre in the child as well as in the later woman. However this may be, it is certain that the disparate alliance gave the sombre and almost tragic hue to the child’s destiny. Through the precious years that should be given over to happy play and dreams, she was to hear the harsh and dismal contention of classes, and hear it, too, in the shape of a bawling strife for the possession of herself.

The first home was a humble lodging in Paris. The father was away. The mother, disdained by the father’s family, had to be hard at work, and the baby had its irregular career foreshadowed by being often handed over to a male nurse, one Pierret, an ugly and quarrelsome though really good-natured creature, whom an accident suddenly made a devoted friend of the small family, faithfully dividing his time between the _estaminet_ and the Dupin _ménage_.

Beyond a recollection of an accident, a fall against the corner of the chimney-piece, which shock, she tells us, ‘opened my mind to the sense of life,’ the first three years yield no reminiscences. From that date onwards, however, her memory moves without a hitch, and gives us a series of delightful vignette-like pictures of child-life.

Her mother had a fresh, sweet voice, and the first song she sang to Aurore was the nursery rhyme:—

Allons dans la grange
Voir la poule blanche
Qui pond un bel œut d’argent
Pour ce cher petit enfant.

I was vividly impressed [she writes] with that white hen and that
silver egg which was promised me every evening, and for which I never
thought of asking the next morning. The promise returned always, and
the naïve hope returned with it.

The legend of little Father Christmas, a good old man with a white beard, who came down the chimney exactly at midnight and placed a simple present, a red apple or an orange, in her little shoe, excited the infantile imagination to unusual activity.

Midnight, that fantastic hour which children know not, and which we
point out to them as the unattainable limit of their wakefulness! What
incredible efforts I made not to fall asleep before the appearance of
the little old man. 1 had at once a great desire and a great fear to
see him; but I could never keep awake.

The love of sound, so strong in children, found an outlet in playing with some brass wirework on the doors of an alcove near her bed.

My special amusement before going to sleep was to run my fingers over
the brass network. The little sounds that I drew thence seemed to me a
heavenly music, and I used to hear my mother say, “There’s Aurore
playing the wirework.”

Her vivid recollection enables her to describe with a sure touch the oddly mixed and capriciously changeful feeling of children towards their dolls and other simulacra of living creatures. She somehow had presented to her a superb Punch, brilliant with gold and scarlet, of whom she was greatly afraid at first, on account of her doll. Before going to bed she securely shut up this last in a cupboard, and laid the brilliant monster on his back on the stove; but her anxieties were not yet over.

I fell asleep very much preoccupied with the manner of existence of
this wicked being who was always laughing, and could pursue me with
his eyes into all the corners of the room. In the night I had a
frightful dream: Punch had got up, his hump had caught on fire on the
stove, and he ran about in all directions, chasing now me, now my
doll, which fled distractedly. Just as he was overtaking us with long
jets of flame, I awoke my mother with my cries.

Her childish way of looking at dolls is thus described in another place:—

I do not remember to have ever believed that my doll was an animated
being; nevertheless, I have felt for some of my dolls a real maternal
affection.... Children are between the real and the impossible. They
need to care for, to scold, to caress, and to break this fetish of a
child or animal that is given them for a plaything, and with which
they are wrongly accused of growing disgusted too quickly. It is quite
natural, on the contrary, that they should grow disgusted with them.
In breaking them they protest against the lie.

She only broke those, she adds, that could not stand the test of being undressed, or that proclaimed their unfleshly substance by falling and breaking their noses. The fluctuations of childish feeling in this matter, and the triumph of faith over doubt in the case of a real favourite, are prettily illustrated in a later story of how she parted from her doll when she was going from home on a long journey.

At the moment of setting out I ran to give it a last look, and when
Pierret promised to come and make it take soup every morning, I began
to fall into a state of doubt, which children are wont to feel
respecting the reality of these creatures, a state truly singular, in
which nascent reason on one side and the need of illusion on the other
combat in their heart greedy of maternal love. I took the two hands of
my doll and joined them over its breast. Pierret remarked that this
was the attitude of a dead person. Thereupon I raised the hands, still
joined, above the head, in the attitude of despair or of invocation.
With this I associated a superstitious idea, thinking that it was an
appeal to the good fairy, and that the doll would be protected,
remaining in this position all the time of my absence.[333]

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Footnote 333:

What George Sand here writes about the intrusion of doubt and disgust
into the child’s feeling for the doll does not, I think, contradict
what was said above in chapter ii. on the intensity and persistence of
his faith. In truth these are illustrated in the very resistance to
the occasional attack of the child’s nascent reason, just as they are
illustrated in the resistance to others’ sceptical assaults.

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The gift of vivid imagination is probably quite as much a torment as a joy to a child, as the story of Punch suggests. Aurore’s finely strung nervous organisation exposed her to a preternatural intensity of fear, and made any clumsy attempt to ‘frighten’ by suggestion of ‘black hole,’ or other childish horror, more than ordinarily cruel. One day she had been with her mother and Pierret on a visit to her aunt. On returning towards the evening she was lazy and wanted the amiable Pierret to carry her. So to spur her on her mother threatened in fun to leave her alone if she did not come on. The child knew it was not meant, and daringly stopped while the others made a feint of moving on. It happened that a little old woman was just then lighting a lamp hard by, and, having overheard the talk, turned to the child and said in a broken voice, ‘Beware of me; it is I who take up the wicked little girls, and I shut them in my lamp all the night’.

It seemed as if the devil had whispered to this good woman the idea
that would most terrify me. I do not remember ever experiencing such a
terror as she caused me. The lamp, with its glittering reflector,
instantly took on fantastic proportions, and I saw myself already shut
in this crystal prison consumed by the flame which the Punch in
petticoats made to burst forth at her pleasure. I ran towards my
mother uttering piercing cries. I heard the old woman laugh, and the
grating sound of the lamp as she remounted gave me a nervous shiver.

At bottom Aurore’s nature was a happy one, and if it encountered in the real world the terrors of childhood, it found in the ideal world of fiction its supreme delights. Before she learned to read (about four) she had managed to stock her small brain with an odd jumble of supernatural imagery, the outcome of fairy stories recited to her, and of picture-books setting forth incidents from classical mythology and the lives of the saints; and she soon began to make artistic use of this motley material. Her mother, she tells us, used to shut her within four straw chairs in order to keep her from playing with the fire. She would then amuse herself by pulling out the straws with her hands (she always felt the need of occupying her hands) and composing in a loud voice interminable stories. They were of course modelled on the familiar fairy-tale pattern. The principal characters were a good fairy, a good prince, and a beautiful princess. There were but few wicked beings, and never great misfortunes. ‘All arranged itself under the influence of a thought, smiling and optimistic as childhood.’ These stories, carried on day after day, were the subject of amusing comment. ‘Well, Aurore,’ the aunt used to ask, ‘hasn’t your prince got out of the forest yet?’

To Aurore’s ardent imagination, play, as the story of the doll suggests, was more than the half-hearted make-believe it often is with duller children. She was able to immerse her whole consciousness in the scene, the occupation imagined, so as to lose all account of her actual surroundings. One evening, at dusk, she and her cousin were playing at chasing one another from tree to tree, for which the bed-curtains did duty. The room had disappeared for these little day-dreamers; they were really in a gloomy country at the oncoming of night and when they were called to dinner they heard nothing. Aurore’s mother had finally to carry her to the table, and she could ever after recall the astonishment she felt on seeing the light, the table, and other real objects about her.

Even at this tender age the child came into contact with the large mysterious outer world. At her aunt’s home at Chaillot there was a garden, the one garden she knew, a small square plot, seeming a vast region to Aurore, shut in by walls. At the bottom of this garden, on a green terrace, she and her cousin used to play at fighting battles.

One day we were interrupted in our games by a great commotion outside.
There were cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ marchings with quick step, and
then retirings, the cries continuing all the while. The emperor was,
in fact, passing at some distance, and we heard the tread of the
horses and the emotion of the crowd. We could not look over the walls,
but the whole thing seemed very beautiful to my fancy, and we cried
with all our strength, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ transported by a sympathetic
enthusiasm.

She first saw the Emperor in 1807, from the good Pierret’s shoulders, where, being a conspicuous object, she attracted Napoleon’s quick eye. ‘I was, as it were, magnetised for a moment by that clear look, so hard for an instant, and suddenly so benevolent and so sweet.’

The political storm that was then raging on the sea of Europe made itself felt even in the far-off and seemingly sheltered creek of Aurore’s small life. Her father was aide-de-camp to Murat at Madrid, and in 1808 the mother resolved to betake herself to him with her child. It was a singular experience for a girl just completing her fourth year, and the narrative of it is romantic enough. Her imagination was strangely affected by the sight of the great mountains, which seemed to shut them in and to forbid their moving forwards or backwards. Yet she felt no fear at the postillion’s malicious fictions about brigands which quite horrified her mother. In Madrid they found themselves quartered in a large and magnificent palace. The unaccustomed space and splendour at first troubled the child. She was tormented by the huge pictures from which big heads seemed to come out and follow her, and she was further alarmed by a low mirror which gave her the first sight of her whole figure and made her feel how big she was.

Murat was not over well pleased at the arrival of his aide-de-camp’s wife and child, so an attempt was made to propitiate him by decking the little maid in a gay and coquettish uniform. The child, who was no coquette, seems to have cared but little for this performance, though she soon began to find amusement in her new sumptuous dwelling.

As soon as I found myself alone in this large room I placed myself
before the low glass, and I tried some theatrical poses. Then I took
my white rabbit, and tried to force it to do likewise; or rather I
pretended to offer it as a sacrifice to the gods, using a footstool as
altar.... I had not the least feeling of coquetry; my pleasure came
from the make-believe that I was playing in a quartette scene in which
were two little girls and two rabbits. The rabbit and I addressed, in
pantomime, salutations, threats, and prayers to the personages of the
mirror, and we danced the bolero with them.

It was at Madrid that she first made acquaintance with one of Nature’s most fascinating mysteries, the echo.

I studied this phenomenon with an extreme pleasure. What struck me as
most strange was to hear my own name repeated by my own voice. Then
there occurred to me an odd explanation. I thought that I was double,
and that there was round about me another “I” whom I could not see,
but who always saw me, since he always answered me.

She then combined with this strange phenomenon another, _viz._, the red and blue balls (ocular spectra) that she got into her eyes after looking at the golden globe of a church glittering against the sky, and so found her way to a theory that everything had its double—a theory which, Mr. Tylor and others tell us, was excogitated in very much the same way by uncivilised man. She spent days in trying to get sight of her double. Her mother, who one day surprised her in this search, told her it was echo, ‘the voice in the air!’

This voice in the air no longer astonished me, but it still charmed
me. I was satisfied at being able to name it, and to call to it,
‘Echo, are you there? Don’t you hear me? Good-day, Echo!’[334]

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Footnote 334: