A Self-evolved Religion
Perhaps there is no domain of children’s thought and feeling that is more remote from our older experience, and consequently less easily understood by us, than that of religion. Their first ideas about the supernatural are indeed, as we have seen above, though supplied by us, not controlled by us.
To most children, presumably, religious instruction comes—at first at least—with a commanding, authoritative force. The story of the supernatural, of the Divine Father, of Heaven, and the rest, cannot be scrutinised by the child—save, indeed, in respect of its inner consistency—for it tells of things unobservable by sense, and so having no direct contact with childish experience. Their natural tendency is to believe, in a submissive, childish way, not troubling about the proof of the mystery.
But even in this submissive acceptance there lies the germ of a subsequent transformation. If the child is to believe, he must believe in his own fashion; he must give body and reality to the ideas of Divine majesty and goodness, and of spiritual approach and worship. Hence the way in which children are apt to startle the reverent and amuse the profane by divulging their crude material fancies about things spiritual.
Such materialisation of spiritual conceptions is apt to bring trouble to the young mind. It is all so confusing—this exalted Personage, who nevertheless is quite unlike earthly dignitaries, this all-encompassing and never-failing Presence, which all the time refuses to reveal itself to eye or ear. How much real suffering this may entail in the case of children at once serious and imaginative we shall never know. The description of the boy Waldo, in that strangely fascinating book, The Story of an African Farm, kneeling bare-headed in the blazing sun and offering his dinner on an altar to God, may look exaggerated to some; but it is essentially true to some of the deepest instincts of childhood. The child that believes at all, believes intensely, and his belief grows all-commanding and prolific of action.
While, however, it is the common tendency of children passively to adopt their elders’ religious beliefs, merely inventing their own modes of giving effect to them, there is a certain amount of originality exercised in the formation of the beliefs themselves. Stories of independent creations of a religious cult by children are no doubt rare; and this for the very good reason that it needs the greatest force of self-assertion to resist the pressure of the traditional faith on the childish mind. The early recollections of George Sand furnish what is probably the most remarkable instance of childish daring in fashioning a new religion, with its creed and ritual all complete.
Poor little Aurore’s religious difficulties and experiments at solution can only be understood in the light of her confusing surroundings. From her mother—ardent, imaginative, and of a ‘simple and confiding faith’—she had caught some of the glow of a fervent piety. Then she suddenly passed into the chilling air of Nohant, where the grandmother equalled her master Voltaire in cynical contempt of the revered mysteries. The effect of this sudden change of temperature on the warm young heart was, as might have been anticipated, extremely painful. Madame Dupin at once recognised the girl’s temperament, and saw with dismay the leaning to ‘superstition,’ a trait which she disliked none the less for recognising in it a bequest from the despised grisette mother. So she applied herself with all the energy of her strong character to counteract the child’s religious tendencies. Now this might have proved neither a difficult nor lengthy process if she had consistently set her face against all religious observances. But though a disciple of Voltaire, she was also a lady with a conspicuous social position, and had to make her account with the polite world and the ‘bienséances’. So Aurore was not only allowed but encouraged to attend Mass and to prepare for the ‘First Communion’ like other young ladies of her station. Madame Dupin well knew the risk she was running with so inflammable a material, but she counted on her own sufficiency as a prompt extinguisher of any inconveniently attaching spark of devotion. In this way the young girl underwent the uncommon if not unique experience of a regular religious instruction, and, concurrently with this and from the very hand that had imposed it, a severe training in rational scepticism and contempt for the faith of the vulgar.
Even if Aurore had not been in her inmost heart something of a dévote, this parallel discipline in outward conformity and inward ridicule would have been hurtful enough. As it was, it brought into her young life all the pain of contradiction, all the bitterness of enforced rebellion.
The attendance on Mass could hardly have seemed dangerous to Madame Dupin. The old curé of Nohant was not troubled with an excess of reverence. When ordering a procession, in deference to the mandate of his archbishop, he would seize the occasion for expressing his contempt for such mummeries. In his congregation there was a queer old lady, who used to utter her disapproval of the ceremony with a frankness that would have seemed brutal even in a theatre, by exclaiming, ‘Quelle diable de Messe!’ And the object of this criticism, on turning to the congregation to wind up with the familiar Dominus vobiscum, would reply in an under-tone, yet loudly enough for Aurore’s ear, ‘Allez au diable!’ That the child attached little solemnity to the ritual is evident from her account to the grandmother of her first visit to the Mass: ‘I saw the curé who took his breakfast standing up before a big table, and turned round on us now and then to call us names’.
The preparation for the ‘First Communion’ was a more serious matter. The girl had now to study the life of Christ, and her heart was touched by the story. ‘The Gospel (she writes) and the divine drama of the life and death of Jesus drew from me in secret torrents of tears.’ Her grandmother, by making now and again ‘a short, dry appeal to her reason,’ succeeded in getting her to reject the notion of miracles and of the divinity of Jesus. But though she was thus unable to reach ‘full faith,’ she resolved en revanche to deny nothing internally. Accordingly she learnt her catechism ‘like a parrot, without seeking to understand it, and without thinking of making fun of its mysteries’. For the rest, she felt a special repugnance towards the confessional. She was able to recall a few small childish faults, such as telling a lie to her mother in order to screen the maid Rose, but feared the list would not satisfy the confessor. Happily, however, he proved to be more lenient than she had anticipated, and dismissed his young penitent with a nominal penance.
The day that makes an epoch in the Catholic girl’s life at length arrived, and Aurore was decked out like the rest of the candidates. The grandmother, having given a finishing touch to her instructions by bidding Aurore, while going through the act of decorum with the utmost decency, ‘not to outrage Divine wisdom and human reason to such an extent as to believe that she was going to eat her Creator,’ accompanied her to the church. It was a hard ordeal. The incongruous appearance of the deistic grandmamma in the place sufficed in itself to throw the girl’s thoughts into disorder. She felt the hollowness of the whole thing, and asked herself whether she and her grandmother were not committing an act of hypocrisy. More than once her repugnance reached such a pitch that she thought of getting up and saying to her grandmother, ‘Enough of this: let us go away’. But relief came in another shape. Going over the scene of the ‘Last Supper’ in her thoughts, she all at once recognised that the words of Jesus, ‘This is my body and my blood,’ were nothing but a metaphor. He was too holy and too great to have wished to deceive his disciples. This discovery of the symbolism of the rite calmed her by removing all feeling of its grotesqueness. She left the Communion table quite at peace. Her contentment gave a new expression to her face, which did not escape the anxious eyes of Madame Dupin: ‘Softened and terrified, divided between the fear of having made me devout and that of having caused me to lie to myself, she pressed me gently to her heart and dropped some tears on my veil’.
It was out of this conflicting and agitating experience, the full sense of the beauty of the Christian faith and the equally full comprehension of the sceptic’s destructive logic, that there was born in Aurore’s imagination the idea of a new private religion with which nobody else should meddle. She gives us the origin of this strange conception clearly enough:—
Since all religion is a fiction (I thought), let us make a story which may be a religion, or a religion which may be a story. I don’t believe in my stories, but they give me just as much happiness as though I did.337 Besides, should I chance to believe in them from time to time, nobody will know it, nobody will dispel my illusion by proving to me that I am dreaming.
The form and the name of her new divinity came to her in a dream. He was to be called ‘Corambé’. His attributes must be given in her own words:—
He was pure and charitable as Jesus, radiant and beautiful as Gabriel; but it was needful to add a little of the grace of the nymphs and of the poetry of Orpheus. Accordingly he had a less austere form than the God of the Christian, and a more spiritual feeling than those of Homer. And then I was obliged to complete him by investing him on occasion with the guise of a woman, for that which I had up to this time loved the best, and understood the best, was a woman—my mother. And so it was often under the semblance of a woman that he appeared to me. In short, he had no sex, and assumed all sorts of aspects.... Corambé should have all the attributes of physical and moral beauty, the gift of eloquence, the omnipotent charm of the arts—above all, the magic of musical improvisation. I wished to love him as a friend, as a sister, while revering him as a God. I would not be afraid of him, and to this end I desired that he should have some of our errors and weaknesses. I sought that one which could be reconciled with his perfection, and I found it in an excess of indulgence and kindness.
The religious idea took an historical form, and Aurore proceeded to develop the several phases of Corambé’s mundane existence in a series of sacred books or songs. She supposed that she must have composed not less than a thousand of such songs without ever being tempted to write down a line of them. In each of these the deity Corambé, who had become human on touching the earth, was brought into a fresh group of persons. These were all good people; for although there existed wicked ones, one did not see them, but only knew of them by the effects of their malice and madness. Corambé always appears, like Jesus—and one may add, like Buddha—as the beneficent one, spending himself, and suffering persecutions and martyrdom, in the cause of humanity.
This occupation of the imagination developed ‘a kind of gentle hallucination’. Aurore soon learned to betake herself to her hero-divinity for comfort and delight. Even when her peasant companions chattered around her she was able to lose herself in her world of religious romance.
The idea of sacred books was followed by that of a temple and a ritual. For this purpose she chose a little wood in her grandmother’s garden, a perfect thicket of young trees and undergrowth, into which nobody ever penetrated, and which, during the season of leaves, was proof against any spying eye. Here, in a tiny, natural chamber of green, carpeted with a magnificent moss, she proceeded to erect an altar against a tree stem, decking it with shells and other ornaments and crowning it with a wreath of flowers suspended from a branch above. The little priestess, having made her temple, sat down on the moss to consider the question of sacrifices.
To kill animals, or even insects, in order to please him, appeared to me barbarous and unworthy of his ideal kindliness. I persuaded myself to do just the opposite—that is, to restore life and liberty on his altar to all the creatures that I could procure.
Her offering included butterflies, lizards, little green frogs, and birds. These she would put into a box, lay it on the altar, and then open it, ‘after having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection’.
In these mimic rites, hardly removed from genuine childish play, the doubt-agitated girl found repose: ‘I had then delicious reveries, and while seeking the marvellous, which had for me so great an attraction, I began to find the vague idea and the pure feeling of a religion according to my heart’.
But the sweet sanctuary did not long remain inviolate. One day her boy playmate came to look for her, and tracked her to her secret grove. He was awe-struck at the sight, and exclaimed: ‘Ah, miss, the pretty little altar of the Fête-Dieu!’ He was for embellishing it still further, but she felt the charm was destroyed.
From the instant that other feet than mine had trodden his sanctuary, Corambé ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted it, and it seemed to me as if my ceremonies and my sacrifices were from this time only childishness, that I had not in truth been in earnest. I destroyed the temple with as much care as I had built it; I dug a hole at the foot of the tree, where I buried the garlands, the shells, and all the rustic ornaments, under the ruins of the altar.
This story of Aurore’s religious experiment cannot fail to remind the reader of biography of the child Goethe’s well-known essays in the same direction. The boy’s mind, it will be remembered, had been greatly exercised with the religious problem, first of all under the impression of horror caused by the earthquake at Lisbon, and later from having to listen to accounts of the new sects—Separatists, Moravians, and the rest—who sought a closer communion with the deity than was possible through the somewhat cold ritual of the established religion. Stirred by their example, he tried also to realise a closer approach to the Divine Being. He conceived him, he tells us, as standing in immediate connexion with Nature. So he invented a form of worship in which natural products were to represent the world, and a flame burning over these to symbolise the aspirations of man’s heart. A handsome pyramid-shaped music-stand was chosen for altar, and on the shelves of this the successive stages in the evolution of Nature were to be indicated. The rite was to be carried out at sunrise, the altar-flame to be secured by means of fumigating pastils and a burning-glass. The first performance was a success, but in trying to repeat it the boy-priest omitted to put the pastils into a cup, so the lacquered stand, with its beautiful gold flowers, was disastrously burnt—a contretemps which took away all spirit for new offerings.
In comparing these two instances of childish worship, one is struck perhaps more by their contrast than by their similarity. Each of the two incidents illustrates, no doubt, a true childish aspiration towards the great Unseen, and also an impulse to invent a form of worship which should harmonise with and express the little worshipper’s individual thoughts. But here the resemblance ceases. The boy-priest felt, apparently, nothing of the human side of religion: he was the true precursor of Goethe, the large-eyed man of science and the poet of pantheism, and found his delight in symbolising the orderliness of Nature’s work as a whole, and its Divine purpose and control. Aurore Dupin, on the other hand, approached religion on the human and emotional side, the side which seems more appropriate to her sex. She thought of her deity as intently occupied with humanity and its humble kinsfolk in the sentient world; and she endowed him above all other qualities with generosity and pitifulness, even to excess. Goethe seems to represent the speculative, Aurore the humanitarian, element in the religious impulse of the child.
To follow Aurore into her later religious experiences in the ‘Couvent des Anglaises’ would be clearly to go beyond the limits of these studies of childhood. I hope I may have quoted enough from the first chapters of the autobiography to illustrate not only their deep human and literary interest, but their special value to the psychological student.
Notes
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).
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.
334. Compare above, p. 113.
335. Compare this with other accounts of the first impression of death given above, p. 237 f.
336. A blue rose was for a long time the favourite dream of Balzac.
337. She here refers to the stories she had long been accustomed to compose for her own private delectation.