Lelia

“ SOPHOS. No, sir; a man may ask a yea; a woman may say nay. She is in choice to take her choice, yet I must confess I love Lelia.
GRIPE. Sir, I must be plain with you. I like not of your love. Lelia's mine. I'll choose for Lelia, and therefore I would wish you not to frequent my house any more. It's better for you to ply your book, and seek for some preferment that way, than to seek for a wife before you know how to maintain her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her mental revolt and suffering found vent in Lélia, which it was an immense relief to her to write. Characteristic as an exhibition of feeling and of mastery of language, it is not in the least typical of her fiction. Yet, but for Lélia, and its successor Jacques, it is impossible to point to a work of hers that would ever have lastingly stamped her, in the public mind, as an expounder of dangerous theories. In Lélia, however, which is strongly imbued with Byronic colouring, she had chosen to pose somewhat as the proud angel in rebellion ”

“ Lélia, a lyrical novel—an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose, stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions of poetic form which are the true conditions of so much latitude. "Manfred" and "Alastor" are fables not further removed from real life than is Lélia. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a child. There is no action. ”

“ The note of despair struck in Lélia, the depth of bitter feeling, the capacity for mental and moral speculation and suffering it seemed to disclose, astounded many of her familiar acquaintance. "Lélia is a fancy-type," so writes to the author her friend and neighbor in Berry, Jules Néraud, an ardent naturalist, whose botanical and entomological pursuits she had often shared: "it is not like you—you who are merry, dance the bourrée, appreciate lepidoptera, do not despise puns, who are not a bad needlewoman, and make very good preserves. ”

“ Lelia is a woman who has had her trials in life. She has loved and been disappointed, so that she can no longer love at all. She reduces the gentle poet Stenio to despair. He is much younger than she is, and he has faith in life and in love. His ingenuous soul begins to wither and to lose its freshness, thanks to the scepticism of the beautiful, disdainful, ironical and world-weary Lelia. This strange person has a sister Pulcherie, a celebrated courtesan, whose insolent sensuality is a set-off to the other one's mournful complaints. ”

“ To gain fair Lelia's love, although by loss of life.
NURSE. 'Faith, mistress, he speaks like a gentleman. Let me persuade you; be not hard-hearted. Sophos? Why, what's he? If he had loved you but half so well, he would ha' come through stone walls, but he would have come to you ere this.
LELIA.
I must confess, I once lov'd Sophos well;
But now I cannot love him, whom
All the world knows to be a dissembler. ”

“ Lélia was certainly the expression of a new phase in her mind's history, a moral crisis she could not escape, which was all the more severe for her having, as she remarks, reached her thirtieth year without having opened her eyes to the realities of life. Till the time of her coming to Paris, for very dearth of outward impressions she had lived chiefly in dreams, the life of all others most favourable to the prolongation of ignorance and credulity. The liberty and activity she had enjoyed for the last two years were fatal to Utopian theories. ”

“ Her frank style is tainted with none of the faults of the day. Lélia, though painful to read and offering none of the delicious scenes of Indiana and Valentine, is nevertheless a master-piece of its kind: of the nature of an orgy, it is without passion, but perturbing like passion; it lacks soul, and yet it weighs upon the heart; the depravity of its maxims, its insults thrown at rectitude of life could go no further than they do; but over that abyss the author sends down her talent In the Valley of Gomorrah, the dew falls at night upon the Dead Sea. ”

“ Some among those who, like Dickens, first saw her in her later years and still looked for the semblance of a heroine of romance, failed to find the muse Lélia of their imaginations under the guise of a middle-aged bourgeoise. But such impressions were superficial. Her portrait in black and white by Couture, engraved by Manceau, seems to reconcile these apparent discrepancies. Beauty is not here, but the face is so powerful and comprehensive that we perceive there at once the mirror of a mind capable of embracing both the prose and the poetry of life ”

“ Now, sir, this old pennyfather would marry her to one Peter Plod-all, rich Plod-all's son and heir; whom though his father means to leave very rich, yet he's a very idiot and brownbread clown, and one I know the wench does deadly hate: and though their friends have given their full consent, and both agreed on this unequal match, yet I know that Lelia will never marry him. But there's another rival in her love—one Sophos; and he's a scholar, one whom I think fair Lelia dearly loves, but her father hates him as he hates a toad ”

“ Your sister Lelia, sir, you know, is a woman, as another woman is, sir.
FORTUNATUS.
Well, and what of that?
WILL CRICKET. Nay, nothing, sir; but she fell in love with one Sophos, a very proper, wise young man, sir. Now, sir, your father would not let her have him, sir; but would have married her to one, sir, that would have fed her with nothing but barley bag-puddings and fat bacon. Now, sir, to tell you the truth, the fool, ye know, has fortune to land; but Mistress Lelia's mouth doth not hang for that kind of diet. ”

“ It was not really to be wondered at, however, for Polia was the last surviving remnant of the ancient Lelia family in Rome, from whom she was descended by way of Lelius Maurus, the founder of Treviso. She was brought up under the watchful eye of an imperious and haughty father, so proud of the splendour of his race, that he would have considered the marriage of his daughter to the greatest prince in Italy as marrying below her station, and besides, it was known that the treasures that she would inherit one day could suffice for the dowry of a queen. ”

“ The declamatory style, then so popular, is one the taste for which has so completely waned that Lélia will find comparatively few readers in the present day, fewer who will not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps whose morality, however weak, will be seriously shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering on the perilous confines of the sublime and the ludicrous. ”

“ The morality of Lélia, which it is rather difficult to discuss seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as determined as its aggressors. ”

“ The authoress of "Lelia" has quiet, soft eyes, which remind one neither of Sodom nor of Gomorrah. She has neither an emancipated aquiline nose nor a witty little snub nose. It is just an ordinary straight nose. A good- natured smile plays usually around her mouth, but it is not very attractive; the somewhat hanging under-lip betrays fatigued sensuality. ”

“ CHURMS. Marry, thus, sir: I am of late grown passing familiar with Master Gripe; and for Plod-all, he takes me for his second self. Now, sir, I'll fit myself to the old crummy churls' humours, and make them believe I'll persuade Lelia to marry Peter Plod-all, and so get free access to the wench at my pleasure. Now, o' the other side, I'll fall in with the scholar, and him I'll handle cunningly too; I'll tell him that Lelia has acquainted me with her love to him, and for Because her father much suspects the same, He mews her up as men do mew their hawks ”

“ It is a series of reveries, adapted to the soul of 1830. At every different epoch there is a certain frame of mind, and certain ideas are diffused in the air which we find alike in the works of the writers of that time, although they did not borrow them from each other. Lelia is a sort of summing up of the themes then in vogue in the personal novel and in lyrical poetry. The theme of that suffering which is beneficent and inspiring is contained in the following words: "Come back to me, Sorrow! Why have you left me? It is by grief alone that man is great." ”

“ Lélia becomes an abbess, Sténio a suicide, the above-mentioned priest, Magnus, being much concerned in this. She admits her unfortunate lover to burial, and is degraded and imprisoned for it—or for having saved Trenmor-Valmarina from the law. Everybody else now dies, and the nightmare comes to an end. ”

“ You were to blame to hinder Lelia's choice;
As she in nature's graces doth excel,
So doth Minerva grace him full as well.
NURSE. Now, by cock and pie, you never spake a truer word in your life. He's a very kind gentleman, for, last time he was at our house, he gave me three-pence.
WILL CRICKET. O, nobly spoken: God send Peg to prove as wise a woman as her mother, and then we shall be sure to have wise children. Nay, if he be so liberal, old grandsire, you shall give him the goodwill of your daughter. ”

“ But soft; I'll none of that neither: so the scholar may chance cosen me. Persuade him to keep her in still: and before she'll have Peter Plod-all, she'll have anybody; and so I shall be sure that Sophos shall never come at her. Why, I'll warrant ye, she'll be glad to run away with me at length. Hang him that has no shifts. I promised Sophos to further him in his suit; but if I do, I'll be pecked to death with hens. I swore to Gripe I would persuade Lelia to love Peter Plod-all; but, God forgive me, 'twas the furthest end of my thought. Tut! what's an oath? ”

“ Simon, Lavinia, and Metella, 1836. She also rewrote Lélia (of which she says: "Lélia is not myself ... but she is my ideal.") , modifying her first production of anger so that it should "harmonize with that of gentleness." Leone Leoni is a tale of a woman's incurable love. The heroine is a bourgeoise, who has been ensnared by the wiles of a Venetian nobleman. She endures manifold sufferings and base indignities, yet her heart triumphs over her mind. While she rebels against the thrall in which she is held, she cannot break from it ”

“ Come to my arms!"
"Alas!" said Leila, obeying the instinct, and casting herself upon that rugged bosom. "I will dare, at least, not to disavow my God. Father! by that dread anathema which is on our race, which has made us homeless and powerless—outcasts and strangers in the land; by the persecution and anguish we have known, teach thy lordly heart that we are rightly punished for the persecution and the anguish we doomed to Him, whose footstep hallowed our native earth! ”

“ Enough of these thoughts, which thou, a woman and a child, art not formed to witness. Leila, thou hast been nurtured with tenderness, and schooled with care. Harsh and unloving may I have seemed to thee, but I would have shed the best drops of my heart to have saved thy young years from a single pang. Nay, listen to me silently. That thou mightest one day be worthy of thy race, and that thine hours might not pass in indolent and weary lassitude, thou hast been taught lessons of a knowledge rarely to thy sex. Not thine the lascivious arts of the Moorish maidens ”

“ Leila stood within this chamber, pale and breathless, with her lips apart, her hands clasped, her very soul in her ears; nor was it possible to conceive a more perfect ideal of some delicate and brilliant Peri, captured in the palace of a hostile and gloomy Genius. Her form was of the lightest shape consistent with the roundness of womanly beauty; and there was something in it of that elastic and fawnlike grace which a sculptor seeks to embody in his dreams of a being more aerial than those of earth. ”

“ He gazed in silence, upon the kneeling maiden; nor was it until she rose that he made his presence audible.
"Ah, fairest!" said he, then, as he attempted to take her hand, "thou wilt not answer my letters—see me, then, at thy feet. It is thou who teachest me to kneel."
"You, prince." said Leila, agitated, and in great and evident fear. "Why harass and insult me thus? Am I not sacred as a hostage and a charge? and are name, honour, peace, and all that woman is taught to hold most dear, to be thus robbed from me under the pretext of a love dishonouring to thee and an insult to myself?" ”

“ By degrees, as her new faith grew confirmed, Leila now inclined herself earnestly to those pictures of the sanctity and calm of the conventual life which Inez delighted to draw. In the reaction of her thoughts, and her despondency of all worldly happiness, there seemed, to the young maiden, an inexpressible charm in a solitude which was to release her for ever from human love, and render her entirely up to sacred visions and imperishable hopes. ”

“ Take comfort, poor child—weep not: all have their cares; our duty is to bear in this life, reserving hope only for the next."
The queen, destined herself to those domestic afflictions which pomp cannot soothe, nor power allay, spoke with a prophetic sadness which yet more touched a heart that her kindness of look and tone had already softened; and, in the impulse of a nature never tutored in the rigid ceremonials of that stately court, Leila suddenly came forward, and falling on one knee, seized the hand of her protectress, and kissed it warmly through her tears. ”