The Piccinino: The Masterpieces of George Sand (Complete)
9781465676245
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The Piccinino is an imaginary tale, which does not attempt either to depict any precise period of history or to describe accurately any country. It is a study in color, dreamed rather than felt, wherein correct strokes are few and, as it were, accidental. The scene of this romance might have been placed anywhere else under the skies of Southern Europe, and my sole reason for selecting Sicily was that I happened to have a collection of fine engravings before my eyes at that moment. I had always been conscious of a longing to draw my little brigand chief, as others have done. The brigand chief who formed the principal motive of so many novels and melodramas under the Empire, under the Restoration, and even in romantic literature, always proved generally entertaining, and the principal interest always attached to that awe-inspiring and mysterious personage. It was most ingenuous on the part of the public, but so it was. Whether the type was terror-inspiring, as in the case of Byron's brigands, or, like those of Cooper, deserving of the Monthyon prize for virtue, it was enough that those heroes of despair should have legitimately earned the halter or the galleys, for every tender-hearted and virtuous reader to love them devotedly from the first page, and to offer up prayers for the success of their undertakings. Why, then, should I, on the pretext of being a reasonable person, have deprived myself of the pleasure of creating one of them according to my fancy? Being fully persuaded that the brigand chief had become a part of the public domain, and belonged to every novelist, as do all other classical types, I determined to try at least to make that personage, occupying as he does so abnormal a position, possible and true to life in his character. Such a mystery envelops Byron's pirates that one would not dare to question them, and that one fears or pities them without knowing them. Indeed we may as well say at once that it is by virtue of that unexplained mystery that they appeal to us; but I am not Byron, and my novels are not poems. I desired, for my own part, to draw a perfectly intelligible character, encompassed by romantic circumstances, who is somewhat exceptional in himself, but with whom my indulgent reader can become acquainted, little by little, as with any ordinary mortal.
