The great difficulty was that, though they were sublime, the couple were
really not serious. But on the other hand if on a lady’s part in such a
relation the want of sincerity or of constancy is a grave reproach the
matter is a good deal modified when the lady, as I have mentioned,
happens to be—I may not go so far as to say a gentleman. That George
Sand just fell short of this character was the greatest difficulty of
all; because if a woman, in a love affair, may be—for all she is to
gain or to lose—what she likes, there is only one thing that, to carry
it off with any degree of credit, a man may be. Madame Sand forgot this
on the day she published “Elle et Lui”; she forgot it again more gravely
when she bequeathed to the great snickering public these present shreds
and relics of unutterably personal things. The aberration refers itself
to the strange lapses of still other occasions—notably to the
extraordinary absence of scruples with which she in the delightful
“Histoire de ma Vie” gives away, as we say, the character of her
remarkable mother. The picture is admirable for vividness, for breadth
of touch; it would be perfect from any hand not a daughter’s, and we ask
ourselves wonderingly how through all the years, to make her capable of
it, a long perversion must have worked and the filial fibre—or rather
the general flower of sensibility—have been battered. Not this
particular anomaly, however, but many another, yields to the reflection
that as just after her death a very perceptive person who had known her
well put it to the author of these remarks, she was a woman quite by
accident. Her immense plausibility was almost the only sign of her sex.
She needed always to prove that she had been in the right; as how indeed
could a person fail to who, thanks to the special equipment I have
named, might prove it so brilliantly? It is not too much to say of her
gift of expression—and I have already in effect said so—that from
beginning to end it floated her over the real as a high tide floats a
ship over the bar. She was never left awkwardly straddling on the
sandbank of fact.
For the rest, in any case, with her free experience and her free use of
it, her literary style, her love of ideas and questions, of science and
philosophy, her comradeship, her boundless tolerance, her intellectual
patience, her personal good-humour and perpetual tobacco (she smoked
long before women at large felt the cruel obligation), with all these
things and many I don’t mention she had more of the inward and outward
of the other sex than of her own. She had above all the mark that, to
speak at this time of day with a freedom for which her action in the
matter of publicity gives us warrant, the history of her personal
passions reads singularly like a chronicle of the ravages of some male
celebrity. Her relations with men closely resembled those relations with
women that, from the age of Pericles or that of Petrarch, have been
complacently commemorated as stages in the unfolding of the great
statesman and the great poet. It is very much the same large list, the
same story of free appropriation and consumption. She appeared in short
to have lived through a succession of such ties exactly in the manner of
a Goethe, a Byron or a Napoleon; and if millions of women, of course, of
every condition, had had more lovers, it was probable that no woman
independently so occupied and so diligent had had, as might be said,
more unions. Her fashion was quite her own of extracting from this sort
of experience all that it had to give her and being withal only the more
just and bright and true, the more sane and superior, improved and
improving. She strikes us as in the benignity of such an intercourse
even more than maternal: not so much the mere fond mother as the
supersensuous grandmother of the wonderful affair. Is not that
practically the character in which Thérèse Jacques studies to present
herself to Laurent de Fauvel? the light in which “Lucrezia Floriani” (a
memento of a friendship for Chopin, for Liszt) shows the heroine as
affected toward Prince Karol and his friend? George Sand is too
inveterately moral, too preoccupied with that need to do good which is
in art often the enemy of doing well; but in all her work the
story-part, as children call it, has the freshness and good faith of a
monastic legend. It is just possible indeed that the moral idea was the
real mainspring of her course—I mean a sense of the duty of avenging on
the unscrupulous race of men their immemorial selfish success with the
plastic race of women. Did she wish above all to turn the tables—to
show how the sex that had always ground the other in the volitional mill
was on occasion capable of being ground?
However this may be, nothing is more striking than the inward impunity
with which she gave herself to conditions that are usually held to
denote or to involve a state of demoralisation. This impunity (to speak
only of consequences or features that concern us) was not, I admit,
complete, but it was sufficiently so to warrant us in saying that no one
was ever less demoralised. She presents a case prodigiously discouraging
to the usual view—the view that there is no surrender to
“unconsecrated” passion that we escape paying for in one way or another.
It is frankly difficult to see where this eminent woman conspicuously
paid. She positively got off from paying—and in a cloud of fluency and
dignity, benevolence, competence, intelligence. She sacrificed, it is
true, a handful of minor coin—suffered by failing wholly to grasp in
her picture of life certain shades and certain delicacies. What she paid
was this irrecoverable loss of her touch for them. That is undoubtedly
one of the reasons why to-day the picture in question has perceptibly
faded, why there are persons who would perhaps even go so far as to say
that it has really a comic side. She doesn’t know, according to such
persons, her right hand from her left, the crooked from the straight and
the clean from the unclean: it was a sense she lacked or a tact she had
rubbed off, and her great work is by the fatal twist quite as lopsided a
monument as the leaning tower of Pisa. Some readers may charge her with
a graver confusion still—the incapacity to distinguish between fiction
and fact, the truth straight from the well and the truth curling in
steam from the kettle and preparing the comfortable tea. There is no
word oftener on her pen, they will remind us, than the verb to
“arrange.” She arranged constantly, she arranged beautifully; but from
this point of view, that of a general suspicion of arrangements, she
always proved too much. Turned over in the light of it the story of
“Elle et Lui” for instance is an attempt to prove that the mistress of
Laurent de Fauvel was little less than a prodigy of virtue. What is
there not, the intemperate admirer may be challenged to tell us, an
attempt to prove in “L’Histoire de ma Vie”?—a work from which we gather
every delightful impression but the impression of an impeccable
veracity.
These reservations may, however, all be sufficiently just without
affecting our author’s peculiar air of having eaten her cake and had it,
been equally initiated in directions the most opposed. Of how much cake
she partook the letters to Musset and Sainte-Beuve well show us, and yet
they fall in at the same time, on other sides, with all that was noble
in her mind, all that is beautiful in the books just mentioned and in
the six volumes of the general “Correspondance: 1812-1876,” out of which
Madame Sand comes so immensely to her advantage. She had, as liberty,
all the adventures of which the dots are so put on the i’s by the
documents lately published, and then she had, as law, as honour and
serenity, all her fine reflections on them and all her splendid busy
literary use of them. Nothing perhaps gives more relief to her masculine
stamp than the rare art and success with which she cultivated an
equilibrium. She made from beginning to end a masterly study of
composure, absolutely refusing to be upset, closing her door at last
against the very approach of irritation and surprise. She had arrived at
her quiet elastic synthesis—a good-humour, an indulgence that were an
armour of proof. The great felicity of all this was that it was neither
indifference nor renunciation, but on the contrary an intense partaking;
imagination, affection, sympathy and life, the way she had found for
herself of living most and living longest. However well it all agreed
with her happiness and her manners, it agrees still better with her
style, as to which we come back with her to the sense that this was
really her _point d’appui_ or sustaining force. Most people have to say,
especially about themselves, only what they can; but she said—and we
nowhere see it better than in the letters to Musset—everything in life
that she wanted. We can well imagine the effect of that consciousness on
the nerves of this particular correspondent, his own poor gift of
occasional song (to be so early spent) reduced to nothing by so
unequalled a command of the last word. We feel it, I hasten to add, this
last word, in all her letters: the occasion, no matter which, gathers it
from her as the breeze gathers the scent from the garden. It is always
the last word of sympathy and sense, and we meet it on every page of the
voluminous “Correspondance.” These pages are not so “clever” as those,
in the same order, of some other famous hands—the writer always denied,
justly enough, that she had either wit or presence of mind—and they are
not a product of high spirits or of a marked avidity for gossip. But
they have admirable ease, breadth and generosity; they are the clear
quiet overflow of a very full cup. They speak above all for the author’s
great gift, her eye for the inward drama. Her hand is always on the
fiddle-string, her ear is always at the heart. It was in the soul, in a
word, that she saw the drama begin, and to the soul that, after whatever
outward flourishes, she saw it confidently come back. She herself lived
with all her perceptions and in all her chambers—not merely in the
showroom of the shop. This brings us once more to the question of the
instrument and the tone, and to our idea that the tone, when you are so
lucky as to possess it, may be of itself a solution.
By a solution I mean a secret for saving not only your reputation but
your life—that of your soul; an antidote to dangers which the unendowed
can hope to escape by no process less uncomfortable or less inglorious
than that of prudence and precautions. The unendowed must go round
about, the others may go straight through the wood. Their weaknesses,
those of the others, shall be as well redeemed as their books shall be
well preserved; it may almost indeed be said that they are made wise in
spite of themselves. If you have never in all your days _had_ a weakness
worth mentioning, you can be after all no more, at the very most, than
large and cheerful and imperturbable. All these things Madame Sand
managed to be on just the terms she had found, as we see, most
convenient. So much, I repeat, does there appear to be in a tone. But if
the perfect possession of one made her, as it well might, an optimist,
the action of it is perhaps more consistently happy in her letters and
her personal records than in her “creative” work. Her novels to-day have
turned rather pale and faint, as if the image projected—not intense,
not absolutely concrete—failed to reach completely the mind’s eye. And
the odd point is that the wonderful charm of expression is not really a
remedy for this lack of intensity, but rather an aggravation of it
through a sort of suffusion of the whole thing by the voice and speech
of the author. These things set the subject, whatever it be, afloat in
the upper air, where it takes a happy bath of brightness and vagueness
or swims like a soap-bubble kept up by blowing. This is no drawback when
she is on the ground of her own life, to which she is tied by a certain
number of tangible threads; but to embark on one of her confessed
fictions is to have—after all that has come and gone, in our time, in
the trick of persuasion—a little too much the feeling of going up in a
balloon. We are borne by a fresh cool current and the car delightfully
dangles; but as we peep over the sides we see things—as we usually know
them—at a dreadful drop beneath. Or perhaps a better way to express the
sensation is to say what I have just been struck with in the re-perusal
of “Elle et Lui”; namely that this book, like others by the same hand,
affects the reader—and the impression is of the oddest—not as a first
but as a second echo or edition of the immediate real, or in other words
of the subject. The tale may in this particular be taken as typical of
the author’s manner; beautifully told, but told, as if on a last remove
from the facts, by some one repeating what he has read or what he has
had from another and thereby inevitably becoming more general and
superficial, missing or forgetting the “hard” parts and slurring them
over and making them up. Of everything but feelings the presentation is
dim. We recognise that we shall never know the original narrator and
that the actual introducer is the only one we can deal with. But we sigh
perhaps as we reflect that we may never confront her with her own
informant.
To that, however, we must resign ourselves; for I remember in time that
the volume from which I take occasion to speak with this levity is the
work that I began by pronouncing a precious illustration. With the aid
of the disclosures of the Revue de Paris it was, as I hinted, to show us
that no mistakes and no pains are too great to be, in the air of art,
triumphantly convertible. Has it really performed this function? I thumb
again my copy of the limp little novel and wonder what, alas, I shall
reply. The case is extreme, for it was the case of a suggestive
experience particularly dire, and the literary flower that has bloomed
upon it is not quite the full-blown rose. “Oeuvre de rancune” Arvède
Barine pronounces it, and if we take it as that we admit that the
artist’s distinctness from her material was not ideally complete. Shall
I not better the question by saying that it strikes me less as a work of
rancour than—in a peculiar degree—as a work of egotism? It becomes in
that light at any rate a sufficiently happy affirmation of the author’s
infallible form. This form was never a more successful vehicle for the
conveyance of sweet reasonableness. It is all superlatively calm and
clear; there never was a kinder, balmier last word. Whatever the measure
of justice of the particular representation, moreover, the picture has
only to be put beside the recent documents, the “study,” as I may call
them, to illustrate the general phenomenon. Even if “Elle et Lui” is not
the full-blown rose we have enough here to place in due relief an
irrepressible tendency to bloom. In fact I seem already to discern that
tendency in the very midst of the storm; the “tone” in the letters too
has its own way and performs on its own account—which is but another
manner of saying that the literary instinct, in the worst shipwreck, is
never out of its depth. The worker observed at the fire by Mérimée could
be drowned but in an ocean of ink. Is that a sufficient account of what
I have called the laying bare of the relation between experience and
art? With the two elements, the life and the genius, face to face—the
smutches and quarrels at one end of the chain and the high luminosity at
the other—does some essential link still appear to be missing? How do
the graceless facts after all confound themselves with the beautiful
spirit? They do so, incontestably, before our eyes, and the
mystification remains. We try to trace the process, but before we break
down we had better perhaps hasten to grant that—so far at least as
George Sand is concerned—some of its steps are impenetrable secrets of
the grand manner.
GEORGE SAND
1899
Those among us comfortably conscious of our different usage—aware, some
would say, of our better conscience—may well have remarked the general
absence from French practice of biographic commemoration of extinct
worthies. The Life as we understand it, the prompt pious spacious record
and mirror of the eminent career, rarely follows the death. The ghost of
the great man, when he happens to have been a Frenchman, “sits” for such
portraiture, we gather, with a confidence much less assured than among
ourselves, and with fewer relatives and friends to surround the chair.
The manner in which even for persons of highest mark among our
neighbours biography either almost endlessly hangs back or altogether
fails, suggests that the approach is even when authorised too often
difficult. This general attitude toward the question, it would thus
appear, implies for such retrospects the predominance of doors bolted
and barred. Hesitation is therefore fairly logical, for it rests on the
assumption that men and women of great gifts will have lived with
commensurate intensity, and that as regards some of the forms of this
intensity the discretion of the inquirer may well be the better part of
his enthusiasm. The critic can therefore only note with regret so much
absent opportunity for the play of perception and the art of
composition. The race that produced Balzac—to say nothing of
Sainte-Beuve—would surely have produced a Boswell, a Lockhart and a
Trevelyan if the fashion had not set so strongly against it. We have
lately had a capital example of the encounter of an admirable English
portraitist and an admirable English subject. It is not irrelevant to
cite such a book as Mr. Mackail’s “Life of William Morris” as our
high-water mark—a reminder of how we may be blessed on both faces of
the question. Each term of the combination appears supposable in France,
but only as distinct from the other term. The artist, we gather, would
there have lost his chance and the sitter his ease.
It completes in an interesting way these observations, which would bear
much expansion, to perceive that when we at last have a Life of George
Sand—a celebrity living with the imputed intensity, if ever a celebrity
did—we are indebted for it to the hand of a stranger. No fact could
more exactly point the moral of my few remarks. Madame Sand’s genius and
renown would have long ago made her a subject at home if alacrity in
such a connection had been to be dreamed of. There is no more
significant sign of the general ban under which alacrity rests.
Everything about this extraordinary woman is interesting, and we can
easily imagine the posthumous honours we ourselves would have hastened
to assure to a part taken, in literature and life, with such brilliancy
and sincerity. These demonstrations, where we should most look for them,
have been none the less as naught—save indeed, to be exact, for the
publication of a number of volumes of letters. It is just Madame Sand’s
letters, however—letters interesting and admirable, peculiarly
qualified to dispose the reader in her favour—that in England or in
America would have quickened the need for the rest of the evidence. But
now that, as befalls, we do at last have the rest of the evidence as we
never have had it before, we are of course sufficiently enlightened as
to the reasons for a special application of the law of reserves and
delays. It is not in fact easy to see how a full study of our heroine
could have been produced earlier; and even at present there is a
sensible comfort in its being produced at such a distance as practically
assigns the act to a detached posterity. Contemporaneously it was wise
to forbear; but to-day, and in Russia, by good luck, it is permitted to
plunge.
Mme. Wladimir Karénine’s extraordinarily diffuse, but scarcely less
valuable, biography, of which the first instalment,[6] in two large
volumes, brings the story but to the year 1838, reaches us in a French
version, apparently from the author’s own hand, of chapters patiently
contributed to Russian periodicals. Were it not superficially ungrateful
to begin with reserves about a book so rich and full, there might be
some complaint to make of this wonderful tribute on grounds of form and
taste. Ponderous and prolix, the author moves in a mass, escorted by all
the penalties of her indifference to selection and compression. She
insists and repeats, she wanders wide; her subject spreads about her, in
places, as rather a pathless waste. Above all she has produced a book
which manages to be at once remarkably expert and singularly provincial.
Our innocence is perhaps at fault, but we are moved to take the mixture
for characteristically Russian. Would indeed any but that admirable
“Slav” superiority to prejudice of which we have lately heard so much
have availed to handle the particular facts in this large free way?
Nothing is at all events more curious than the union, on the part of our
biographer, of psychological intelligence and a lame esthetic. The
writer’s literary appreciations lag in other words half a century behind
her human and social. She treats us to endless disquisitions on pages of
her author to which we are no longer in any manageable relation at
all—disquisitions pathetic, almost grotesque, in their misplaced good
faith. But her attitude to her subject is admirable, her thoroughness
exemplary, the spirit of service in her of the sort that builds the
monument stone by stone. When we see it reared to the summit, as we are
clearly to do, we shall feel the structure to be solid if not shapely.
Nothing is more possible meanwhile than that a culture more
homogeneous—a French hand or a German—could not have engaged in the
work with anything like the same sincerity. An English hand—and the
fact, for _our_ culture, means much—would have been incapable of
touching it. The present scale of it at all events is certainly an
exotic misconception. But we can take of it what concerns us.
The whole thing of course, we promptly reflect, concerns at the best
only those of us who can remount a little the stream of time. The author
of “L’Histoire de ma Vie” died in 1876, and the light of actuality rests
to-day on very different heads. It may seem to belittle her to say that
to care for her at all one must have cared for her from far back, for
such is not in general the proviso we need to make on behalf of the
greatest figures. It describes Madame Sand with breadth, but not with
extravagance, to speak of her as a sister to Goethe, and we feel that
for Goethe it can never be too late to care. But the case exemplifies
perhaps precisely the difference even in the most brilliant families
between sisters and brothers. She was to have the family spirit, but she
was to receive from the fairies who attended at her cradle the silver
cup, not the gold. She was to write a hundred books but she was not to
write “Faust.” She was to have all the distinction but not all the
perfection; and there could be no better instance of the degree in which
a woman may achieve the one and still fail of the other. When it is a
question of the rare originals who have either she confirms us,
masculine as she is, in believing that it takes a still greater
masculinity to have both. What she had, however, she had in profusion;
she was one of the deepest voices of that great mid-century concert
against the last fine strains of which we are more and more banging the
doors. Her work, beautiful, plentiful and fluid, has floated itself out
to sea even as the melting snows of the high places are floated. To feel
how she has passed away as a “creator” is to feel anew the immense waste
involved in the general ferment of an age, and how much genius and
beauty, let alone the baser parts of the mixture, it takes to produce a
moderate quantity of literature. Smaller people have conceivably ceased
to count; but it is strange for a member of the generation immediately
succeeding her own that she should have had the same fate as smaller
people: all the more that such a mourner may be ruefully conscious of
contributing not a little himself to the mishap. Does he still read,
re-read, can he to-day at all deal with, this wonderful lady’s novels?
It only half cheers him up that on the occasion of such a publication as
I here speak of he finds himself as much interested as ever.
The grounds of the interest are difficult to give—they presuppose so
much of the old impression. If the old impression therefore requires
some art to sustain and justify itself we must be content, so far as we
are still under the charm, to pass, though only at the worst, for
eccentric. The work, whether we still hold fast to it or not, has twenty
qualities and would still have an immense one if it had only its style;
but what I suppose it has paid for in the long-run is its want of
plastic intensity. Does any work of representation, of imitation, live
long that is predominantly loose? It may live in spite of looseness; but
that, we make out, is only because closeness has somewhere, where it has
most mattered, played a part. It is hard to say of George Sand’s
productions, I think, that they show closeness anywhere; the sense of
that fluidity which is more than fluency is what, in speaking of them,
constantly comes back to us, and the sense of fluidity is fundamentally
fatal to the sense of particular truth. The thing presented by intention
is never the stream of the artist’s inspiration; it is the deposit of
the stream. For the things presented by George Sand, for the general
picture, we must look elsewhere, look at her life and her nature, and
find them in the copious documents in which these matters and many
others are now reflected. All _this_ mass of evidence it is that
constitutes the “intensity” we demand. The mass has little by little
become large, and our obligation to Madame Karénine is that she makes it
still larger. She sets our face, and without intending to, more and more
in the right direction. Her injudicious analyses of forgotten fictions
only confirm our discrimination. We feel ourselves in the presence of
the extraordinary author of the hundred tales, and yet also feel it to
be not by reason of them that she now presents herself as one of the
most remarkable of human creatures. By reason then of what? Of
everything that determined, accompanied, surrounded their appearance.
They formed all together a great feature in a career and a character,
but the career and the character are the real thing.
Such is far from usually the case, I hasten to recognise, with the
complete and consistent artist. Poor is the art, a thing positively to
be ashamed of, that, generally speaking, is not far more pressing for
this servant of the altar than anything else, anything outside the
church, can possibly be. To have been the tempered and directed hammer
that makes the metal hard: if that be not good enough for such a
ministrant, we may know him by whatever he has found better—we shall
not know him by the great name. The immense anomaly in Madame Sand was
that she freely took the form of being, with most zest, quite another
sort of hammer. It testifies sufficiently to her large endowment that,
given the wide range of the rest of her appetite, she should seem to us
to-day to have sacrificed even superficially to _any_ form of objective
expression. She had in spite of herself an imagination almost of the
first order, which overflowed and irrigated, turning by its mere swift
current, without effort, almost without direction, every mill it
encountered, and launching as it went alike the lightest skiff and the
stateliest ship. She had in especial the gift of speech, speech supreme
and inspired, to which we particularly owe the high value of the “case”
she presents. For the case was definitely a bold and direct experiment,
not at all in “art,” not at all in literature, but conspicuously and
repeatedly in the business of living; so that our profit of it is before
anything else that it was conscious, articulate, vivid—recorded,
reflected, imaged. The subject of the experiment became also at first
hand the journalist—much of her work being simply splendid
journalism—commissioned to bring it up to date. She interviewed nobody
else, but she admirably interviewed herself, and this is exactly our
good fortune. Her autobiography, her letters, her innumerable prefaces,
all her expansive parentheses and excursions, make up the generous
report. We have in this form accordingly a literary title for her far
superseding any derived from her creative work. But that is the result
of a mere betrayal, not the result of an intention. Her masterpiece, by
a perversity of fate, is the thing she least sat down to. It
consists—since she is a case—in the mere notation of her symptoms, in
help given to the study of them. To this has the author of “Consuelo”
come.
But how in the world indeed was the point so indicated _not_ to be the
particular cross-road at which the critic should lie in wait for a poor
child of the age whom preceding ages and generations had almost
infernally conspired to trap for him, to give up, candidly astray, to
his hands? If the element of romance for which our heroine’s name stands
is best represented by her personal sequences and solutions, it is
sufficiently visible that her heredity left her a scant alternative.
Space fails me for the story of this heredity, queer and complicated,
the very stuff that stories are made of—a chain of generations
succeeding each other in confidence and joy and with no aid asked of
legal or other artificial sanctions. The facts are, moreover,
sufficiently familiar, though here as elsewhere Madame Karénine adds to
our knowledge. Presented, foreshortened, stretching back from the quiet
Nohant funeral of 1876 to the steps of the throne of King Augustus the
Strong of Poland, father of Maurice de Saxe, great-great-grandfather of
Aurore Dupin, it all hangs together as a cluster of components more
provocative than any the great novelist herself ever handled. Her
pre-natal past was so peopled with _dramatis personæ_ that her future
was really called on to supply them in such numbers as would preserve
the balance. The tide of illegitimacy sets straight through the series.
No one to speak of—Aurore’s father is an exception—seems to have had a
“regular” paternity. Aurore herself squared with regularity but by a
month or two; the marriage of her parents gave her a bare escape. She
was brought up by her paternal grandmother between a son of her father
and a daughter of her mother born out of wedlock. It all moves before us
as a vivid younger world, a world on the whole more amused and more
amusing than ours. The period from the Restoration to the events of 1848
is the stretch of time in which, for more reasons than we can now go
into, French life gives out to those to whom its appeal never fails most
of its charm—most, at all events, of its ancient sociability. Happy is
our sense of the picturesque Paris unconscious of a future all “avenues”
and exhibitions; happy our sense of these middle years of a great
generation, easy and lusty despite the ensanguined spring that had gone
before. They live again, piecing themselves ever so pleasantly and
strangely together, in Madame Sand’s records and references; almost as
much as the conscious close of the old régime so vaunted by Talleyrand
they strike us as a season it would have been indispensable to know for
the measure of what intercourse could richly be.
The time was at any rate unable to withhold from the wonderful young
person growing up at Nohant the conditions she was so freely to use as
measures of her own. Though the motto of her autobiography is _Wahrheit
und Dichtung_ quite as much as it had been that of Goethe’s, there is a
truth beyond any projected by her more regular compositions in her
evocation of the influences of her youth. Upon these influences Madame
Karénine, who has enjoyed access through her heroine’s actual
representatives to much evidence hitherto unpublished, throws a hundred
interesting lights. Madame Dupin de Francueil and Madame Dupin the
younger survive and perform for us, “convince” us as we say, better than
any Lélia or any Consuelo. Our author’s whole treatment of her
remarkable mother’s figure and history conveniently gives the critic the
pitch of the great fact about her—the formation apparently at a given
moment, yet in very truth, we may be sure, from far back, of the
capacity and the determination to live with high consistency for
herself. What she made of this resolve to allow her nature all its
chances and how she carried on the process—these things are, thanks to
the immense illustration her genius enabled her to lend them, the
essence of her story; of which the full adumbration is in the detached
pictorial way she causes her mother to live for us. Motherhood,
daughterhood, childhood, embarrassed maturity, were phenomena she early
encountered in her great adventure, and nothing is more typical of her
energy and sincerity than the short work we can scarce help feeling she
makes of them. It is not that she for a moment blinks or dodges them;
she weaves them straight in—embarks with them indeed as her principal
baggage. We know to-day from the pages before us everything we need to
know about her marriage and the troubled years that followed; about M.
Casimir Dudevant and his possible points of view, about her separation,
her sharp secession, rather, as it first presents itself, and her
discovery, at a turn of the road as it can only be called, of her
genius.
She stumbled on this principle, we see, quite by accident and as a
consequence of the attempt to do the very humblest labour, to support
herself from day to day. It would be difficult to put one’s finger more
exactly upon a case of genius unaided and unprompted. She embarked, as I
have called it, on her great voyage with no grounds of confidence
whatever; she had obscurely, unwittingly the spirit of Columbus, but not
so much even as his exiguous outfit. She found her gift of
improvisation, found her tropic wealth, by leaping—a surprised
_conquistador_ of “style”—straight upon the coral strand. No awakened
instinct, probably, was ever such a blessing to a writer so much in
need. This instinct was for a long time all her initiation, practically
all her equipment. The curious thing is that she never really arrived at
the fruit of it as the result of a process, but that she started with
the whole thing as a Patti or a Mario starts with a voice which _is_ a
method, which _is_ music, and that it was simply the train in which she
travelled. It was to render her as great a service as any supreme
faculty ever rendered its possessor, quite the same service as the
strategic eye renders a commander in the field or instant courage the
attacking soldier: it was to carry her through life still more
inimitably than through the career of authorship. Her books are all rich
and resonant with it, but they profit by it meagrely compared with her
character. She walks from first to last in music, that is in literary
harmonies, of her own making, and it is in truth sometimes only, with
her present biographer to elbow us a little the way, that these
triumphant sounds permit us a near enough approach to the procession to
make out quite exactly its course.
No part of her career is to my sense so curious as this particular
sudden bound into the arena. Nothing but the indescribable heredity I
have spoken of appears traceably to have prepared it. We have on one
side the mere poverty and provinciality of her marriage and her early
contacts, the crudity of her youth and her ignorance (which included so
small a view of herself that she had begun by looking for a future in
the bedaubing, for fancy-shops, of little boxes and fans); and on the
other, at a stride, the full-blown distinction of “Valentine” and
“Jacques,” which had had nothing to lead up to it, we seem to make out,
but the very rough sketch of a love-affair with M. Jules Sandeau. I
spoke just now of the possible points of view of poor M. Dudevant; at
which, had we space, it might be of no small amusement to glance—of an
amusement indeed large and suggestive. We see him, surely, in the light
of these records, as the most “sold” husband in literature, and not at
all, one feels, by his wife’s assertion of her freedom, but simply by
her assertion of her mind. He appears to have married her for a nobody
approved and guaranteed, and he found her, on his hands, a sister, as we
have seen, of Goethe—unless it be but a figure to say that he ever
“found” her anything. He appears to have lived to an advanced age
without having really—in spite of the lawsuits he lost—comprehended
his case; not the least singular feature of which had in fact positively
been the deceptive delay of his fate. It was not till after several
years of false calm that it presented itself in its special form. We see
him and his so ruthlessly superseded name, never to be gilded by the
brilliant event, we see him reduced, like a leaf in a whirlwind, to a
mere vanishing-point.
We deal here, I think, with something very different from the usual
tittle-tattle about “private” relations, for the simple reason that we
deal with relations foredoomed to publicity by the strange economy
involved in the play of genius itself. Nothing was ever less wasted,
from beginning to end, than all this amorous experience and all this
luxury of woe. The parties to it were to make an inveterate use of it,
the principal party most of all; and what therefore on that marked
ground concerns the critic is to see what they were appreciably to get
out of it. The principal party, the constant one through all mutations,
was alone qualified to produce the extract that affects us as final. It
was by the publication four years since of her letters to Alfred de
Musset and to Sainte-Beuve, by the appearance also of Madame Arvède
Barine’s clear compact biography of Musset, that we began to find her
personal history brought nearer to us than her own communications had in
her lifetime already brought it. The story of her relations with Musset
is accordingly so known that I need only glance at the fact of her
having—shortly after the highest degree of intimacy between them had,
in the summer of 1833, established itself in Paris—travelled with him
to Italy, settled with him briefly in Venice, and there passionately
quarrelled and parted with him—only, however, several months later, on
their return to France, to renew again, to quarrel and to part again,
all more passionately, if possible, even than before. Madame Karénine,
besides supplying us with all added light on this episode, keeps us
abreast of others that were to follow, leaves us no more in the dark
about Michel de Bourges, Félicien Mallefille and Chopin than we had
already been left about their several predecessors. She is commendably
lucid on the subject of Franz Liszt, impartially examines the case and
authoritatively dismisses it. Her second volume brings her heroine to
the eve of the historic departure with Chopin for Majorca. We have thus
in a convenient form enough for one mouthful of entertainment, as well
as for superabundant reflection.
We have indeed the whole essence of what most touches us, for this
consists not at all of the quantity of the facts, nor even of their
oddity: they are practically all there from the moment the heroine’s
general attitude defines itself. That is the solid element—the details
to-day are smoke. Yet I hasten to add that it was in particular by
taking her place of an autumn evening in the southward-moving diligence
with Alfred de Musset, it was on this special occasion that she gave
most the measure of her choice of the consistent, even though it so
little meant the consequent, life. She had reached toward such a life
obviously in quitting the conjugal roof in 1831—had attacked the
experiment clumsily, but according to her light, by throwing herself on
such material support as faculties yet untested might furnish, and on
such moral as several months of the _intimité_ of Jules Sandeau and a
briefer taste of that of Prosper Mérimée might further contribute. She
had done, in other words, what she could; subsequent lights show it as
not her fault that she had not done better. With Musset her future took
a long stride; emotionally speaking it “looked up.” Nothing was wanting
in this case—independently of what might then have appeared her
friend’s equal genius—quite ideally to qualify it. He was several years
her junior, and as she had her husband and her children, he had, in the
high degree of most young Frenchmen of sensibility, his mother. It is
recorded that with this lady on the eve of the celebrated step she quite
had the situation, as the phrase is, out; which is a note the more in
the general, the intellectual lucidity. The only other note in fact to
be added is that of the absence of funds for the undertaking. Neither
partner had a penny to spare; the plan was wholly to “make money,” on a
scale, as they went. A great deal was in the event, exactly speaking, to
be made—but the event was at the time far from clear to them. The
enterprise was in consequence purely and simply, with a rounded
perfection that gives it its value for the critic, an affair of the
heart. That the heart, taking it as a fully representative organ, should
fail of no good occasion completely and consistently to engage itself
was the definite and, as appeared, the promising assumption on which
everything rested. The heart was real life, frank, fearless, intelligent
and even, so far as might be, intelligible life; everything else was
stupid as well as poor, muddle as well as misery. The heart of course
might be misery, for nothing was more possible than that life
predominantly was; but it was at all events the misery that is least
ignoble.
This was the basis of Madame Sand’s personal evolution, of her immense
moral energy, for many a year; it was a practical system, applied and
reapplied, and no “inquiry” concerning her has much point save as
settling what, for our enlightenment and our esteem, she made of it. The
answer meets us, I think, after we have taken in the facts, promptly
enough and with great clearness, so long as we consider that it is not,
that it cannot be in the conditions, a simple one. She made of it then
intellectually a splendid living, but she was able to do this only
because she was an altogether exceptional example of our human stuff. It
is here that her famous heredity comes in: we see what a
race-accumulation of “toughness” had been required to build her up.
Monstrous monarchs and bastards of kings, great generals and bastards of
bastards, courtesans, dancers supple and hard, accomplished men and
women of the old dead great world, seasoned young soldiers of the
Imperial epic, grisettes of the _pavé de Paris_, Parisian to the core;
the mixture was not quite the blood of people in general, and obviously
such a final flower of such a stem might well fix the attention and
appeal to the vigilance of those qualified to watch its development.
These persons would, doubtless, however, as a result of their
observation, have acquired betimes a sense of the high vitality of their
young friend. Formed essentially for independence and constructed for
resistance and survival she was to be trusted, as I have hinted, to take
care of herself: this was always the residuary fact when a passion was
spent. She took care of Musset, she took care of Chopin, took care, in
short, through her career, of a whole series of nurslings, but never
failed, under the worst ingratitude, to be by her own elasticity still
better taken care of. This is why we call her anomalous and deprecate
any view of her success that loses sight of the anomaly. The success was
so great that but _for_ the remainder she would be too encouraging. She
was one in a myriad, and the cluster of circumstances is too unlikely to
recur.
It is by her success, none the less, we must also remember, that we know
her; it is this that makes her interesting and calls for study. She had
all the illumination that sensibility, that curiosity, can give, and
that so ingeniously induces surrender to it; but the too numerous
weaknesses, vulgarities and penalties of adventure and surrender she had
only in sufficient degree to complete the experience before they shaped
themselves into the eloquence into which she could always reascend. Her
eloquence—it is the simplest way to explain her—fairly _made_ her
success; and eloquence is superlatively rare. When passion can always
depend upon it to vibrate passion becomes to that extent action, and
success is nothing but action repeated and confirmed. In Madame Sand’s
particular case the constant recurrence of the malady of passion
promoted in the most extraordinary way the superior appearance, the
general expression, of health. It is of course not to be denied that
there are in her work infirmities and disfigurements, odd smutches even,
or unwitting drolleries, which show a sense on some sides enfeebled. The
sense of her characters themselves for instance is constantly a confused
one; they are too often at sea as to what is possible and what
impossible for what we roughly call decent people. Her own categories,
loose and liberal, are yet ever positive enough; when they err it is by
excess of indulgence and by absence of the humorous vision, a nose for
the ridiculous—the fatal want, this last almost always, we are
reminded, the heel of Achilles, in the sentimental, the romantic
estimate. The general validity of her novels, at any rate, I leave
impugned, and the feature I have just noted in them is but one of the
points at which they fail of reality. I stick to the history of her
personal experiment, as the now so numerous documents show it; for it is
here, and here only, that her felicity is amusing and confounding;
amusing by the quaintness of some of the facts exposed, and yet
confounding by reason of the beauty mixed with them.
The “affair” with Musset for example has come to figure, thanks to the
talent of both parties, as one of the great affairs in the history of
letters; and yet on the near view of it now enjoyed we learn that it
dragged out scarce more than a year. Even this measure indeed is
excessive, so far as any measure serves amid so much that is incoherent.
It supposed itself to have dropped for upwards of six months, during
which another connection, another imperious heart-history, reigned in
its stead. The enumeration of these trifles is not, I insist, futile; so
that while we are about it we shall find an interest in being clear. The
events of Venice, with those that immediately preceded and followed
them, distinctly repay inspection as an epitome, taken together, of the
usual process. They appear to contain, as well as an intensity all their
own, the essence of all that of other occasions. The young poet and the
young novelist met then, appear to have met for the first time, toward
the end of June 1833, and to have become finally intimate in the month
of August of that year. They started together for Italy at the beginning
of the winter and were settled—if settled be not too odd a word to
use—by the end of January in Venice. I neglect the question of Musset’s
serious illness there, though it is not the least salient part of the
adventure, and observe simply that by the end of March he had started to
return to Paris, while his friend, remaining behind, had yielded to a
new affection. This new affection, the connection with Pietro Pagello,
dates unmistakably from before Musset’s departure; and, with the
completion of “Jacques” and the composition of the beautiful “André,”
the wonderful “Léone-Léoni” and some of the most interesting of the
“Lettres d’un Voyageur,” constituted the main support of our heroine
during the spring and early summer. By midsummer she had left Italy with
Pagello, and they arrive in Paris on August 14th. This arrival marks
immediately the term of their relations, which had by that time lasted
some six or seven months. Pagello returned to Italy, and if they ever
met again it was the merest of meetings and after long years.
In October, meanwhile, the connection with Musset was renewed, and
renewed—this is the great point—because the sentiments still
entertained by each (in spite of Pagello, in spite of everything) are
stronger even than any awkwardness of which either might have been
conscious. The whole business really is one in which we lose our measure
alike of awkwardness and of grace. The situation is in the hands of
comedy—or _would_ be, I should rather say, were it not so distinctly
predestined to fall, as I have noted, into those of the nobler form. It
is prolonged till the following February, we make out, at furthest, and
only after having been more than once in the interval threatened with
violent extinction. It bequeaths us thus in a handful of dates a picture
than which probably none other in the annals of “passion” was ever more
suggestive. The passion is of the kind that is called “immortal”—and so
called, wonderful to say, with infinite reason and justice. The poems,
the letters, the diaries, the novels, the unextinguished accents and
lingering echoes that commemorate it are among the treasures of the
human imagination. The literature of the world is appreciably the richer
for it. The noblest forms, in a word, on both sides, marked it for their
own; it was born, according to the adage, with a silver spoon in its
mouth. It was an affection in short transcendent and sublime, and yet
the critic sees it come and go before he can positively turn round. The
brief period of some seventeen or eighteen months not only affords it
all its opportunity, but places comfortably in its lap a relation
founded on the same elements and yet wholly distinct from it. Musset
occupied in fact but two-thirds of his mistress’s time. Pagello
overlapped him because Pagello also appealed to the heart; but Pagello’s
appeal to the heart was disposed of as expeditiously. Musset, in the
same way, succeeded Pagello at the voice of a similar appeal, and this
claim, in its turn, was polished off in yet livelier fashion.
Liveliness is of course the tune of the “gay” career; it has always been
supposed to relegate to comedy the things to which it puts its mark—so
that as a series of sequences amenable mainly to satire the
approximations I have made would fall neatly into place. The anomaly
here, as on other occasions of the same sort in Madame Karénine’s
volumes, is that the facts, as we are brought near to them, strike us as
so out of relation to the beautiful tone. The effect and the achieved
dignity are those of tragedy—tragedy rearranging, begetting afresh, in
its own interest, all the elements of ecstasy and despair. How can it
not be tragedy when this interest is just the interest, which I have
touched on, of exemplary eloquence? There are lights in which the
material, with its want of nobleness, want of temper, want even of
manners, seems scarcely life at all, as the civilised conscience
understands life; and yet it is as the most magnanimous of surrenders to
life that the whole business is triumphantly reflected in the documents.
It is not only that “La Nuit d’Octobre” is divine, that Madame Sand’s
letters are superb and that nothing can exceed, in particular, the high
style of the passage that we now perceive Musset to have borrowed from
one of them for insertion in “On ne Badine pas avec l’Amour”—to the
extreme profit of the generation which was, for many years thereafter,
to hear Delaunay exquisitely declaim it at the Théâtre Français; it is
that, strange to say, almost the finest flower of the bouquet is the
now-famous written “declaration” addressed to Pagello one evening by the
lady. Musset was ill in bed; he was the attendant doctor; and while,
watching and ignorant of French, he twirled his thumbs or dipped into a
book, his patient’s companion, on the other side of the table and with
the lamp between them, dashed off (it took time) a specimen of her
finest prose, which she then folded and handed to him, and which, for
perusal more at leisure, he carried off in his pocket. It proved neither
more nor less than one of the pontoon bridges which a force engaged in
an active campaign holds itself ready at any time to throw across a
river, and was in fact of its kind a stout and beautiful structure. It
happily spanned at all events the gulf of a short acquaintance.
The incident bears a family resemblance to another which our biographer
finds in her path in the year 1837. Having to chronicle the close of the
relation with Michel de Bourges, from which again her heroine had so
much to suffer, she has also to mention that this catastrophe was
precipitated, to all appearance, by the contemporaneous dawn of an
affection “plus douce, moins enthousiaste, moins âpre aussi, et j’espère
plus durable.” The object of this affection was none other than the
young man then installed at Nohant as preceptor to Madame Sand’s
children—but as to whom in the event we ask ourselves what by this time
her notion of measure or durability can have become. It is just this
element that has positively least to do, we seem to make out, with
“affection” as so practised. Affection in any sense worth speaking of
_is_ durability; and it is the repeated impermanence of those
manifestations of it on behalf of which the high horse of “passion” is
ridden so hard that makes us wonder whether such loves and such
licences, in spite of the quality of free experience they represent, had
really anything to do with it. It was surely the last thing they
contained. Félicien Mallefille may be, to his heart’s content, of 1837
and even of a portion of 1838; it is Chopin who is of the rest of the
year and—let us hope our biographer will have occasion to show us—of
at least the whole of the following. It is here that, as I have
mentioned, she pauses.
One of the most interesting contributions to her subject is the long
letter from Balzac to his future wife, Madame Hanska, now reproduced in
the most substantial of the few volumes of his correspondence (“Lettres
à l’Étrangère, 1833-1842,” published 1899) and printed by Madame
Karénine. The author, finding himself near Nohant in the spring of 1838,
went over to pay his illustrious colleague a visit and spent more than a
day in sustained conversation with her. He had the good fortune to find
her alone, so that they could endlessly talk and smoke by the fire, and
nothing can be all at once more vivid, more curious and more judicious
than his immediate report of the occasion. It lets into the whole
question of his hostess’s character and relations—inevitably more or
less misrepresented by the party most involved—air and light and truth;
it fixes points and re-establishes proportions. It shows appearances
confronted, in a word, with Balzac’s strong sense of the real and offers
the grateful critic still another chance to testify for that precious
gift. This same critic’s mind, it must be added, rests with complacency
on the vision thus evoked, the way that for three days, from five
o’clock in the afternoon till five in the morning, the wonderful friends
must have had things out. For once, we feel sure, fundamental questions
were not shirked. As regards his comrade at any rate Balzac puts his
finger again and again on the truth and the idiosyncrasy. “She is not
_aimable_ and in consequence will always find it difficult to be loved.”
He adds—and it is here that he comes nearest straightening the
question—that she has in character all the leading marks of the man and
as few as possible those of his counterpart. He implies that, though
judged as a woman she may be puzzling enough, she hangs together
perfectly if judged as a man. She _is_ a man, he repeats, “and all the
more that she wants to be, that she has sunk the woman, that she isn’t
one. Women attract, and she repels; and, as I am much of a man, if this
is the effect she produces on me she must produce it on men who are like
me—so that she will always be unhappy.” He qualifies as justly, I may
parenthesise, her artistic side, the limits of which, he moreover
intimates, she had herself expressed to him. “She has neither intensity
of conception, nor the constructive gift, nor the faculty of reaching
the truth”—Balzac’s own deep dye of the truth—“nor the art of the
pathetic. But she holds that, without knowing the French language, she
has _style_. And it’s true.”
The light of mere evidence, the light of such researches as Madame
Karénine’s, added to her so copious correspondence and autobiography,
makes Madame Sand so much of a riddle that we grasp at Balzac’s
authoritative word as at an approach to a solution. It is, strange to
say, by reading another complexity into her image that we finally
simplify it. The riddle consists in the irreconcilability of her
distinction and her vulgarity. Vulgar somehow in spite of everything is
the record of so much taking and tasting and leaving, so much publicity
and palpability of “heart,” so much experience reduced only to the terms
of so many more or less greasy males. And not only vulgar but in a
manner grotesque—from the moment, that is, that the experience is
presented to us with any emphasis in the name of terror and pity. It was
not a passive but an active situation, that of a nature robust and not
too fastidious, full at all times of resistance and recovery. No history
gives us really more ground to protest against the new fashion, rife in
France, of transporting “love,” as there mainly represented, to the air
of morals and of melancholy. The fashion betrays only the need to
rejuvenate, at a considerable cost of falsity, an element in connection
with which levity is felt either to have exhausted itself or to look
thin as a motive. It is in the light of levity that many of the facts
presented by Madame Karénine are most intelligible, and that is the
circumstance awkward for sensibility and for all the graces it is
invited to show.
The scene quite changes when we cease to expect these graces. As a man
Madame Sand was admirable—especially as a man of the dressing-gown and
slippers order, easy of approach and of _tutoiement_, rubbing shoulders
with queer company and not superstitiously haunted by the conception of
the gentleman. There have been many men of genius, delightful, prodigal
and even immortal, who squared but scantly with that conception, and it
is a company to which our heroine is simply one of the most interesting
of recruits. She has in it all her value and loses none of her charm.
Above all she becomes in a manner comprehensible, as any frank Bohemian
is comprehensible. We have only to imagine the Bohemian really endowed,
the Bohemian, that is, both industrious and wise, to get almost all her
formula. She keeps here and there a feminine streak—has at moments an
excess of volubility and too great an insistence on having been in the
right; but for the rest, as Balzac says, the character, confronted with
the position, is an explanation. “Son mâle,” he tells Madame Hanska,
“était rare”—than which nothing could have been more natural. Yet for
this masculine counterpart—so difficult to find—she ingenuously spent
much of her early life in looking. That the search was a mistake is what
constitutes, in all the business of which the Musset episode is the
type, the only, the real melancholy, the real moral tragedy.
For all such mistakes, none the less, the whole lesson of the picture is
precisely in the disconcerting success of her system. Everything was at
the start against that presumption; but everything at the end was to
indicate that she was not to have been defeated. Others might well have
been, and the banks of the stream of her career are marked, not
invisibly, with mouldering traces of the less lucky or the less buoyant;
but her attitude as life went on was more and more that of showing how
she profited of all things for wisdom and sympathy, for a general
expertness and nobleness. These forces, all clarified to an admirable
judgment, kept her to the last day serene and superior, and they are one
of the reasons why the monument before us is felt not to be misplaced.
There should always be a monument to those who have achieved a prodigy.
What greater prodigy than to have bequeathed in such mixed elements, to
have principally made up of them, the affirmation of an unprecedented
intensity of life? For though this intensity was one that broke down in
each proposed exhibition the general example remains, incongruously,
almost the best we can cite. And all we can say is that this brings us
back once more to the large manner, the exceptional energy and well-nigh
monstrous vitality, of the individual concerned. Nothing is so absurd as
a half-disguise, and Madame Sand’s abiding value will probably be in her
having given her sex, for its new evolution and transformation, the real
standard and measure of change. This evolution and this transformation
are all round us unmistakable; the change is in the air; women are
turned more and more to looking at life as men look at it and to getting
from it what men get. In this direction their aim has been as yet
comparatively modest and their emulation low; the challenge they have
hitherto picked up is but the challenge of the “average” male. The
approximation of the extraordinary woman has been practically, in other
words, to the ordinary man. George Sand’s service is that she planted
the flag much higher—her own approximation at least was to the
extraordinary. She reached him, she surpassed him, and she showed how,
with native dispositions, the thing could be done. So far as we have
come these new records will live as the precious text-book of the
business.
-----
Footnote 6:
“George Sand, sa Vie et ses Œuvres, 1804-1876.” Paris, 1899.
GEORGE SAND
1914
It has much occurred to us, touching those further liberations of the
subordinate sex which fill our ears just now with their multitudinous
sound, that the promoters of the great cause make a good deal less than
they might of one of their very first contentious “assets,” if it may
not indeed be looked at as quite the first; and thereby fail to pass
about, to the general elation, a great vessel of truth. Is this because
the life and example of George Sand are things unknown or obscure to the
talkers and fighters of to-day—present and vivid as they were to those
of the last mid-century, or because of some fear that to invoke victory
in her name might, for particular, for even rueful reasons, not be
altogether a safe course? It is difficult to account otherwise for the
fact that so ample and embossed a shield, and one that shines too at
last with a strong and settled lustre, is rather left hanging on the
wall than seen to cover advances or ward off attacks in the fray.
Certain it is that if a lapse of tradition appeared at one time to have
left a little in the lurch the figure of the greatest of all women of
letters, of Letters in truth most exactly, as we hold her surely to have
been, that explanation should have begun to fail, some fourteen years
ago, with the publication of the first volume of Madame Wladimir
Karénine’s biography, and even in spite of the fact that this singularly
interesting work was not till a twelvemonth ago to arrive at the dignity
of a third,[7] which leaves it, for all its amplitude, still incomplete.
The latest instalment, now before us, follows its predecessors after an
interval that had alarmed us not a little for the proper consummation;
and the story is even now carried but to the eve of the Revolution of
1848, after which its heroine (that of the Revolution, we may almost
say, as well as of the narrative) was to have some twenty-seven years to
live. Madame Karénine appears to be a Russian critic writing under a
pseudonym; portions of her overbrimming study have appeared dispersedly,
we gather, in Russian periodicals, but the harmonious French idiom, of
which she is all-sufficient mistress, welds them effectively together,
and the result may already be pronounced a commemorative monument of all
but the first order. The first order in such attempts has for its sign a
faculty of selection and synthesis, not to say a sense of composition
and proportion, which neither the chronicler nor the critic in these too
multiplied pages is able consistently to exhibit; though on the other
hand they represent quite the high-water mark of patience and
persistence, of the ideal biographic curiosity. They enjoy further the
advantage of the documented state in a degree that was scarce to have
been hoped for, every source of information that had remained in
reserve—and these proved admirably numerous—having been opened to our
inquirer by the confidence of the illustrious lady’s two
great-granddaughters, both alive at the time the work was begun. Add to
this that there has grown up in France a copious George Sand literature,
a vast body of illustrative odds and ends, relics and revelations, on
which the would-be propagator of the last word is now free to
draw—always with discrimination. Ideally, well-nigh overwhelmingly
informed we may at present therefore hold ourselves; and were that state
all that is in question for us nothing could exceed our advantage.
-----
Footnote 7:
George Sand, sa Vie et ses Œuvres, vol. iii. (1838-1848). Par Wladimir
Karénine. Paris, Plon, 1912.
I
Just the beauty and the interest of the case are, however, that such a
condition by no means exhausts our opportunity, since in no like
connection could it be less said that to know most is most easily or
most complacently to conclude. May we not decidedly feel the sense and
the “lesson,” the suggestive spread, of a career as a thing scarce
really to be measured when the effect of more and more acquaintance with
it is simply to make the bounds of appreciation recede? This is why the
figure now shown us, blazed upon to the last intensity by the lamplight
of investigation, and with the rank oil consumed in the process fairly
filling the air, declines to let us off from an hour of that
contemplation which yet involves discomfiture for us so long as certain
lucidities on our own part, certain serenities of assurance, fail
correspondingly to play up. We feel ourselves so outfaced, as it were;
we somehow want in any such case to meet and match the assurances with
which the subject himself or herself immitigably bristles, and are
nevertheless by no means certain that our bringing up premature forces
or trying to reply with lights of our own may not check the current of
communication, practically without sense for us unless flowing at its
fullest. At our biographer’s rate of progress we shall still have much
to wait for; but it can meanwhile not be said that we have not plenty to
go on with. To this may be added that the stretch of “life,” apart from
the more concrete exhibition, already accounted for by our three volumes
(if one may discriminate between “production” and life to a degree that
is in this connection exceptionally questionable), represents to all
appearance the most violently and variously agitated face of the career.
The establishment of the Second Empire ushered in for Madame Sand, we
seem in course of preparation to make out, the long period already more
or less known to fame, that is to criticism, as the period of her great
placidity, her more or less notorious appeasement; a string of afternoon
hours as hazily golden as so many reigns of Antonines, when her genius
had mastered the high art of acting without waste, when a happy play of
inspiration had all the air, so far as our spectatorship went, of
filling her large capacity and her beautiful form to the brim, and when
the gathered fruit of what she had dauntlessly done and been heaped
itself upon her table as a rich feast for memory and philosophy. So she
came in for the enjoyment of all the _sagesse_ her contemporaries (with
only such exceptions as M. Paul de Musset and Madame Louise Colet and
the few discordant pleaders for poor Chopin) finally rejoiced on their
side to acclaim; the sum of her aspects “composing,” arranging
themselves in relation to each other, with a felicity that nothing could
exceed and that swept with great glosses and justifications every aspect
of the past. To few has it been given to “pay” so little, according to
_our_ superstition of payment, in proportion to such enormities of
ostensibly buying or borrowing—which fact, we have to recognise, left
an existence as far removed either from moral, or intellectual, or even
social bankruptcy as if it had proceeded from the first but on the most
saving lines.
That is what remains on the whole most inimitable in the picture—the
impression it conveys of an art of life by which the rough sense of the
homely adage that we may not both eat our cake and have it was to be
signally falsified; this wondrous mistress of the matter strikes us so
as having consumed _her_ refreshment, her vital supply, to the last
crumb, so far as the provision meant at least freedom and ease, and yet
having ever found on the shelf the luxury in question undiminished.
Superlatively interesting the idea of how this result was, how it
_could_ be, achieved—given the world as we on our side of the water
mainly know it; and it is as meeting the mystery that the monument
before us has doubtless most significance. We shall presently see, in
the light of our renewed occasion, how the question is solved; yet we
may as well at once say that this will have had for its conclusion to
present our heroine—mainly figuring as a novelist of the romantic or
sentimental order once pre-eminent but now of shrunken credit—simply as
a supreme case of the successful practice of life itself. We have to
distinguish for this induction after a fashion in which neither Madame
Sand nor her historian has seemed at all positively concerned to
distinguish; the indifference on the historian’s part sufficiently
indicated, we feel, by the complacency with which, to be thorough, she
explores even the most thankless tracts of her author’s fictional
activity, telling the tales over as she comes to them on much the same
scale on which she unfolds the situations otherwise documented. The
writer of “Consuelo” and “Claudie” and a hundred other things is to this
view a literary genius whose output, as our current term so gracefully
has it, the exercise of an inordinate personal energy happens to mark;
whereas the exercise of personal energy is for ourselves what most
reflects the genius—recorded though this again chances here to be
through the inestimable fact of the possession of style. Of the action
of that perfect, that only real preservative in face of other perils
George Sand is a wondrous example; but her letters alone suffice to show
it, and the style of her letters is no more than the breath of her
nature, her so remarkable one, in which expression and aspiration were
much the same function. That is what it is really to _have_ style—when
you set about performing the act of life. The forms taken by this latter
impulse then cover everything; they serve for your adventures not less
than they may serve at their most refined pitch for your Lélias and your
Mauprats.
This means accordingly, we submit, that those of us who at the present
hour “feel the change,” as the phrase is, in the computation of the
feminine range, with the fullest sense of what it may portend, shirk at
once our opportunity and our obligation in not squeezing for its last
drop of testimony such an exceptional body of illustration as we here
possess. It has so much to say to any view—whether, in the light of old
conventions, the brightest or the darkest—of what may either glitter or
gloom in a conquest of every license by our contemporaries of the
contending sex, that we scarce strain a point in judging it a provision
of the watchful fates for this particular purpose and profit: its
answers are so full to most of our uncertainties. It is to be noted of
course that the creator of Lélia and of Mauprat was on the one hand a
woman of an extraordinary gift and on the other a woman resignedly and
triumphantly voteless—doing without that boon so beautifully, for free
development and the acquisition and application of “rights,” that we
seem to see her sardonically smile, before our present tumults, as at a
rumpus about nothing; as if women need set such preposterous machinery
in motion for obtaining things which she had found it of the first
facility, right and left, to stretch forth her hand and take. There it
is that her precedent stands out—apparently to a blind generation; so
that some little insistence on the method of her appropriations would
seem to be peculiarly in place. It was a method that may be summed up
indeed in a fairly simple, if comprehensive, statement: it consisted in
her dealing with life exactly as if she had been a man—exactly not
being too much to say. Nature certainly had contributed on her behalf to
this success; it had given her a constitution and a temperament, the
kind of health, the kind of mind, the kind of courage, that might most
directly help—so that she had but to convert these strong matters into
the kind of experience. The writer of these lines remembers how a
distinguished and intimate friend of her later years, who was a very
great admirer, said of her to him just after her death that her not
having been born a man seemed, when one knew her, but an awkward
accident: she had been to all intents and purposes so fine and frank a
specimen of the sex. This anomalous native turn, it may be urged, can
have no general application—women cannot be men by the mere trying or
by calling themselves “as good”; they must have been provided with what
we have just noted as the outfit. The force of George Sand’s exhibition
consorts, we contend, none the less perfectly with the logic of the
consummation awaiting us, if a multitude of signs are to be trusted, in
a more or less near future: that effective repudiation of the
_distinctive_, as to function and opportunity, as to working and playing
activity, for which the definite removal of immemorial disabilities is
but another name. We are in presence already of a practical shrinkage of
the distinctive, at the rapidest rate, and that it must shrink till
nothing of it worth mentioning be left, what is this but a war-cry
(presenting itself also indeed as a plea for peace) with which our ears
are familiar? Unless the suppression of the distinctive, however, is to
work to the prejudice, as we may fairly call it, of men, drawing them
over to the feminine type rather than drawing women over to
theirs—which is not what seems most probable—the course of the
business will be a virtual undertaking on the part of the half of
humanity acting ostensibly for the first time in freedom to annex the
male identity, that of the other half, so far as may be at all
contrivable, to its own cluster of elements. Individuals are in great
world and race movements negligible, and if that undertaking must
inevitably appeal to different recruits with a differing cogency, its
really enlisting its army or becoming reflected, to a perfectly
conceivable vividness, in the mass, is all our demonstration requires.
At that point begins the revolution, the shift of the emphasis from the
idea of woman’s weakness to the idea of her strength—which is where the
emphasis has lain, from far back, by his every tradition, on behalf of
man; and George Sand’s great value, as we say, is that she gives us the
vision, gives us the particular case, of the shift achieved, displayed
with every assurance and working with every success.
The answer of her life to the question of what an effective annexation
of the male identity may amount to, amount to in favouring conditions
certainly, but in conditions susceptible to the highest degree of
encouragement and cultivation, leaves nothing to be desired for
completeness. This is the moral of her tale, the beauty of what she does
for us—that at no point whatever of her history or her character do
their power thus to give satisfaction break down; so that what we in
fact on the whole most recognise is not the extension she gives to the
feminine nature, but the richness that she adds to the masculine. It is
not simply that she could don a disguise that gaped at the seams, that
she could figure as a man of the mere carnival or pantomime variety, but
that she made so virile, so efficient and homogeneous a one. Admirable
child of the old order as we find her, she was far from our late-coming
theories and fevers—by the reason simply of her not being reduced to
them; as to which nothing about her is more eloquent than her living at
such ease with a conception of the main relevance of women that is
viewed among ourselves as antiquated to “quaintness.” She could afford
the traditional and sentimental, the old romantic and historic theory of
the function most natural to them, since she entertained it exactly as a
man would. It is not that she fails again and again to represent her
heroines as doing the most unconventional things—upon these they freely
embark; but they never in the least do them for themselves, themselves
as the “sex,” they do them altogether for men. Nothing could well be
more interesting thus than the extraordinary union of the pair of
opposites in her philosophy of the relation of the sexes—than the
manner in which her immense imagination, the imagination of a man for
range and abundance, intervened in the whole matter for the benefit,
absolutely, of the so-called stronger party, or to liberate her sisters
up to the point at which men may most gain and least lose by the
liberation. She read the relation essentially in the plural term—the
relations, and her last word about these was as far as possible from
being that they are of minor importance to women. Nothing in her view
could exceed their importance to women—it left every other far behind
it; and nothing that could make for authority in her, no pitch of tone,
no range of personal inquiry nor wealth of experience, no acquaintance
with the question that might derive light from free and repeated
adventure, but belonged to the business of driving this argument home.