II

It was not in the tower of art that George Sand ever shut herself up;

but I come back to a point already made in saying that it is in the

citadel of style that, notwithstanding rash _sorties_, she continues to

hold out. The outline of the complicated story that was to cause so much

ink to flow gives, even with the omission of a hundred features, a

direct measure of the strain to which her astonishing faculty was

exposed. In the summer of 1833, as a woman of nearly thirty, she

encountered Alfred de Musset, who was six years her junior. In spite of

their youth they were already somewhat bowed by the weight of a troubled

past. Musset, at twenty-three, had that of his confirmed libertinism—so

Madame Arvède Barine, who has had access to materials, tells us in the

admirable short biography of the poet contributed to the rather markedly

unequal but very interesting series of Hachette’s Grands Écrivains

Français. Madame Sand had a husband, a son and a daughter, and the

impress of that succession of lovers—Jules Sandeau had been one,

Prosper Mérimée another—to which she so freely alludes in the letters

to Sainte-Beuve, a friend more disinterested than these and qualified to

give much counsel in exchange for much confidence. It cannot be said

that the situation of either of our young persons was of good omen for a

happy relation, but they appear to have burnt their ships with much

promptitude and a great blaze, and in the December of that year they

started together for Italy. The following month saw them settled, on a

frail basis, in Venice, where the elder companion remained till late in

the summer of 1834 and where she wrote, in part, “Jacques” and the

“Lettres d’un Voyageur,” as well as “André” and “Léone-Léoni,” and

gathered the impressions to be embodied later in half-a-dozen stories

with Italian titles—notably in the delightful “Consuelo.” The journey,

the Italian climate, the Venetian winter at first agreed with neither of

the friends; they were both taken ill—the young man very gravely—and

after a stay of three months Musset returned, alone and much ravaged, to

Paris.

In the meantime a great deal had happened, for their union had been

stormy and their security small. Madame Sand had nursed her companion in

illness (a matter-of-course office, it must be owned) and her companion

had railed at his nurse in health. A young physician, called in, had

become a close friend of both parties, but more particularly a close

friend of the lady, and it was to his tender care that on quitting the

scene Musset solemnly committed her. She took up life with Pietro

Pagello—the transition is startling—for the rest of her stay, and on

her journey back to France he was no inconsiderable part of her luggage.

He was simple, robust and kind—not a man of genius. He remained,

however, but a short time in Paris; in the autumn of 1834 he returned to

Italy, to live on till our own day but never again, so far as we know,

to meet his illustrious mistress. Her intercourse with her poet was, in

all its intensity, one may almost say its ferocity, promptly renewed,

and was sustained in that key for several months more. The effect of

this strange and tormented passion on the mere student of its records is

simply to make him ask himself what on earth is the matter with the

subjects of it. Nothing is more easy than to say, as I have intimated,

that it has no need of records and no need of students; but this leaves

out of account the thick medium of genius in which it was foredoomed to

disport itself. It was self-registering, as the phrase is, for the

genius on both sides happened to be the genius of eloquence. It is all

rapture and all rage and all literature. The “Lettres d’un Voyageur”

spring from the thick of the fight; “La Confession d’un Enfant du

Siècle” and “Les Nuits” are immediate echoes of the concert. The lovers

are naked in the market-place and perform for the benefit of society.

The matter with them, to the perception of the stupefied spectator, is

that they entertained for each other every feeling in life but the

feeling of respect. What the absence of that article may do for the

passion of hate is apparently nothing to what it may do for the passion

of love.

By our unhappy pair at any rate the luxury in question—the little

luxury of plainer folk—was not to be purchased, and in the comedy of

their despair and the tragedy of their recovery nothing is more striking

than their convulsive effort either to reach up to it or to do without

it. They would have given for it all else they possessed, but they only

meet in their struggle the inexorable _never_. They strain and pant and

gasp, they beat the air in vain for the cup of cold water of their hell.

They missed it in a way for which none of their superiorities could make

up. Their great affliction was that each found in the life of the other

an armoury of weapons to wound. Young as they were, young as Musset was

in particular, they appeared to have afforded each other in that

direction the most extraordinary facilities; and nothing in the matter

of the mutual consideration that failed them is more sad and strange

than that even in later years, when their rage, very quickly, had

cooled, they never arrived at simple silence. For Madame Sand, in her so

much longer life, there was no hush, no letting alone; though it would

be difficult indeed to exaggerate the depth of relative indifference

from which, a few years after Musset’s death, such a production as “Elle

et Lui” could spring. Of course there had been floods of tenderness, of

forgiveness; but those, for all their beauty of expression, are quite

another matter. It is just the fact of our sense of the ugliness of so

much of the episode that makes a wonder and a force of the fine style,

all round, in which it is offered us. That force is in its turn a sort

of clue to guide, or perhaps rather a sign to stay, our feet in paths

after all not the most edifying. It gives a degree of importance to the

somewhat squalid and the somewhat ridiculous story, and, for the old

George-Sandist at least, lends a positive spell to the smeared and

yellowed paper, the blotted and faded ink. In this twilight of

association we seem to find a reply to our own challenge and to be able

to tell ourselves why we meddle with such old dead squabbles and waste

our time with such grimacing ghosts. If we were superior to the

weakness, moreover, how should we make our point (which we must really

make at any cost) as to the so valuable vivid proof that a great talent

is the best guarantee—that it may really carry off almost anything?

The rather sorry ghost that beckons us on furthest is the rare

personality of Madame Sand. Under its influence—or that of old memories

from which it is indistinguishable—we pick our steps among the

_laideurs_ aforesaid: the misery, the levity, the brevity of it all, the

greatest ugliness in particular that this life shows us, the way the

devotions and passions that we see heaven and earth called to witness

are over before we can turn round. It may be said that, for what it was,

the intercourse of these unfortunates surely lasted long enough; but the

answer to that is that if it had only lasted longer it wouldn’t have

been what it was. It was not only preceded and followed by intimacies,

on one side and the other, as unadorned by the stouter sincerity, but

was mixed up with them in a manner that would seem to us dreadful if it

didn’t still more seem to us droll, or rather perhaps if it didn’t

refuse altogether to come home to us with the crudity of contemporary

things. It is antediluvian history, a queer vanished world—another

Venice from the actually, the deplorably familiarised, a Paris of

greater bonhomie, an inconceivable impossible Nohant. This relegates it

to an order agreeable somehow to the imagination of the fond

quinquegenarian, the reader with a fund of reminiscence. The vanished

world, the Venice unrestored, the Paris unextended, is a bribe to his

judgment; he has even a glance of complacency for the lady’s liberal

_foyer_. Liszt, one lovely year at Nohant, “jouait du piano au

rez-de-chaussée, et les rossignols, ivres de musique et de soleil,

s’égosillaient avec rage sur les lilas environnants.” The beautiful

manner confounds itself with the conditions in which it was exercised,

the large liberty and variety overflow into admirable prose, and the

whole thing makes a charming faded medium in which Chopin gives a hand

to Consuelo and the small Fadette has her elbows on the table of

Flaubert.

There is a terrible letter of the autumn of 1834 in which our heroine

has recourse to Alfred Tattet on a dispute with the bewildered

Pagello—a disagreeable matter that involved a question of money. “À

Venise il comprenait,” she somewhere says, “à Paris il ne comprend

plus.” It was a proof of remarkable intelligence that he did understand

in Venice, where he had become a lover in the presence and with the

exalted approval of an immediate predecessor—an alternate

representative of the part, whose turn had now, on the removal to Paris,

come round again and in whose resumption of office it was looked to him

to concur. This attachment—to Pagello—had lasted but a few months; yet

already it was the prey of complication and change, and its sun appears

to have set in no very graceful fashion. We are not here in truth among

very graceful things, in spite of superhuman attitudes and great

romantic flights. As to these forced notes Madame Arvède Barine

judiciously says that the picture of them contained in the letters to

which she had had access, and some of which are before us, “presents an

example extraordinary and unmatched of what the romantic spirit could do

with beings who had become its prey.” She adds that she regards the

records in question, “in which we follow step by step the ravages of the

monster,” as “one of the most precious psychological documents of the

first half of the century.” That puts the story on its true footing,

though we may regret that it should not divide these documentary honours

more equally with some other story in which the monster has not quite so

much the best of it. But it is the misfortune of the comparatively short

and simple annals of conduct and character that they should ever seem to

us somehow to cut less deep. Scarce—to quote again his best

biographer—had Musset, at Venice, begun to recover from his illness

than the two lovers were seized afresh by _le vertige du sublime et de

l’impossible_. “Ils imaginèrent les déviations de sentiment les plus

bizarres, et leur intérieur fut le théâtre de scènes qui égalaient en

étrangeté les fantaisies les plus audacieuses de la littérature

contemporaine;” that is of the literature of their own day. The register

of virtue contains no such lively items—save indeed in so far as these

contortions and convulsions were a conscious tribute to virtue.

Ten weeks after Musset has left her in Venice his relinquished but not

dissevered mistress writes to him in Paris: “God keep you, my friend, in

your present disposition of heart and mind. Love is a temple built by

the lover to an object more or less worthy of his worship, and what is

grand in the thing is not so much the god as the altar. Why should you

be afraid of the risk?”—of a new mistress she means. There would seem

to be reasons enough why he should have been afraid, but nothing is more

characteristic than her eagerness to push him into the arms of another

woman—more characteristic either of her whole philosophy in these

matters or of their tremendous, though somewhat conflicting, effort to

be good. She is to be good by showing herself so superior to jealousy as

to stir up in him a new appetite for a new object, and he is to be so by

satisfying it to the full. It appears not to occur to either one that in

such an arrangement his own honesty is rather sacrificed. Or is it

indeed because he has scruples—or even a sense of humour—that she

insists with such ingenuity and such eloquence? “Let the idol stand long

or let it soon break, you will in either case have built a beautiful

shrine. Your soul will have lived in it, have filled it with divine

incense, and a soul like yours must produce great works. The god will

change perhaps, the temple will last as long as yourself.” “Perhaps,”

under the circumstances, was charming. The letter goes on with the ample

flow that was always at the author’s command—an ease of suggestion and

generosity, of beautiful melancholy acceptance, in which we foresee, on

her own horizon, the dawn of new suns. Her simplifications are

delightful—they remained so to the end; her touch is a wondrous

sleight-of-hand. The whole of this letter in short is a splendid

utterance and a masterpiece of the shade of sympathy, not perhaps the

clearest, which consists of wishing another to feel as you feel

yourself. To feel as George Sand felt, however, one had to be, like

George Sand, of the true male inwardness; which poor Musset was far from

being. This, we surmise, was the case with most of her lovers, and the

truth that makes the idea of her _liaison_ with Mérimée, who _was_ of a

consistent virility, sound almost like a union against nature. She

repeats to her correspondent, on grounds admirably stated, the

injunction that he is to give himself up, to let himself go, to take his

chance. That he took it we all know—he followed her advice only too

well. It is indeed not long before his manner of doing so draws from her

a cry of distress. “Ta conduite est déplorable, impossible. Mon Dieu, à

quelle vie vais-je te laisser? l’ivresse, le vin, les filles, et encore

et toujours!” But apprehensions were now too late; they would have been

too late at the very earliest stage of this celebrated connection.