Madame Karénine’s third volume is copiously devoted to the period of her
heroine’s intimacy with Chopin and to the events surrounding this
agitated friendship, which largely fill the ten years precedent to ’48.
Our author is on all this ground overwhelmingly documented, and enlisted
though she is in the service of the more successful party to the
association—in the sense of Madame Sand’s having heartily outlived and
survived, not to say professionally and brilliantly “used,” it—the
great composer’s side of the story receives her conscientious attention.
Curious and interesting in many ways, these reflections of George Sand’s
middle life afford above all the most pointed illustration of the turn
of her personal genius, her aptitude for dealing with men, in the
intimate relation, exactly after the fashion in which numberless
celebrated men have contributed to their reputation, not to say crowned
their claim to superiority, by dealing with women. This being above all
the note of her career, with its vivid show of what such dealing could
mean for play of mind, for quickening of gift, for general experience
and, as we say, intellectual development, for determination of
philosophic bent and education of character and fertilisation of fancy,
we seem to catch the whole process in the fact, under the light here
supplied us, as we catch it nowhere else. It gives us in this
application endlessly much to consider—it is in itself so replete and
rounded a show; we at once recognise moreover how comparatively little
it matters that such works as “Lucrezia Floriani” and “Un Hiver à
Majorque” should have proceeded from it, cast into the shade as these
are, on our biographer’s evidence, by a picture of concomitant energies
still more attaching. It is not here by the force of her gift for rich
improvisation, beautiful as this was, that the extraordinary woman holds
us, but by the force of her ability to act herself out, given the
astounding quantities concerned in this self. That energy too, we feel,
was in a manner an improvisation—so closely allied somehow are both the
currents, the flow of literary composition admirably instinctive and
free, and the handling power, as we are constantly moved to call it, the
flow of a splendid intelligence all the while at its fullest
expressional ease, for the _actual_ situations created by her, for
whatever it might be that vitally confronted her. Of how to bring about,
or at the least find one’s self “in for,” an inordinate number of
situations, most of them of the last difficulty, and then deal with them
on the spot, in the narrowest quarters as it were, with an eloquence and
a plausibility that does them and one’s own nature at once a sort of
ideal justice, the demonstration here is the fullest—as of what it was
further to have her unfailing verbal as well as her unfailing moral
inspiration. What predicament could have been more of an hourly strain
for instance, as we cannot but suppose, than her finding herself
inevitably accompanied by her two children during the stay at Majorca
made by Chopin in ’38 under her protection? The victory of assurance and
of the handling power strikes us as none the less never an instant in
doubt, that being essentially but over the general _kind_ of
inconvenience or embarrassment involved for a mother and a friend in any
real consistency of attempt to carry things off male fashion. We do not,
it is true, see a man as a mother, any more than we easily see a woman
as a gentleman—and least of all perhaps in either case as an awkwardly
placed one; but we see Madame Sand as a sufficiently bustling, though
rather a rough and ready, father, a father accepting his charge and
doing the best possible under the circumstances; the truth being of
course that the circumstances never _can_ be, even at the worst, or
still at the best, the best for parental fondness, so awkward for him as
for a mother.
What call, again, upon every sort of presence of mind could have been
livelier than the one made by the conditions attending and following the
marriage of young Solange Dudevant to the sculptor Clésinger in 1846,
when our heroine, summoned by the stress of events both to take
responsible action and to rise to synthetic expression, in a situation,
that is in presence of a series of demonstrations on her daughter’s
part, that we seem to find imaginable for a perfect dramatic adequacy
only in that particular home circle, fairly surpassed herself by her
capacity to “meet” everything, meet it much incommoded, yet undismayed,
unabashed and unconfuted, and have on it all, to her great advantage,
the always prodigious last word? The elements of this especial crisis
claim the more attention through its having been, as a test of her
powers, decidedly the most acute that she was in her whole course of
life to have traversed, more acute even, because more complicated, than
the great occasion of her rupture with Alfred de Musset, at Venice in
’35, on which such a wealth of contemplation and of ink has been
expended. Dramatic enough in their relation to each other certainly
those immortal circumstances, immortal so far as immortalised on either
side by genius and passion: Musset’s return, ravaged and alone, to
Paris; his companion’s transfer of her favour to Pietro Pagello, whom
she had called in to attend her friend medically in illness and whose
intervention, so far from simplifying the juncture, complicated it in a
fashion probably scarce paralleled in the history of the erotic
relation; her retention of Pagello under her protection for the rest of
her period in Venice; her marvellously domesticated state, in view of
the literary baggage, the collection of social standards, even taking
these but at what they were, and the general amplitude of personality,
that she brought into residence with her; the conveyance of Pagello to
Paris, on her own return, and the apparent signification to him at the
very gate that her countenance was then and there withdrawn. This was a
brilliant case for her—of coming off with flying colours; but it
strikes us as a mere preliminary flourish of the bow or rough practice
of scales compared to the high virtuosity which Madame Karénine’s new
material in respect to the latter imbroglio now enables us ever so
gratefully to estimate. The protagonist’s young children were in the
Venetian crisis quite off the scene, and on occasions subsequent to the
one we now glance at were old enough and, as we seem free to call it,
initiated enough not to solicit our particular concern for them; whereas
at the climax of the connection with Chopin they were of the perfect age
(which was the fresh marriageable in the case of Solange) to engage our
best anxiety, let alone their being of a salience of sensibility and
temper to leave no one of their aspects negligible. That their parent
should not have found herself conclusively “upset,” sickened beyond
repair, or otherwise morally bankrupt, on her having to recognise in her
daughter’s hideous perversity and depravity, as we learn these things to
have been, certain inevitabilities of consequence from the social air of
the maternal circle, is really a monumental fact in respect to our great
woman’s elasticity, her instinct for never abdicating by mere
discouragement. Here in especial we get the broad male note—it being so
exactly the manly part, and so very questionably the womanly, not to
have to draw from such imputations of responsibility too crushing a
self-consciousness. Of the extent and variety of danger to which the
enjoyment of a moral tone could be exposed and yet superbly survive
Madame Karénine’s pages give us the measure; they offer us in action the
very ideal of an exemplary triumph of character and mind over one of the
very highest tides of private embarrassment that it is well possible to
conceive. And it is no case of that _passive_ acceptance of deplorable
matters which has abounded in the history of women, even distinguished
ones, whether to the pathetic or to the merely scandalous effect; the
acceptance is active, constructive, almost exhilarated by the resources
of affirmation and argument that it has at its command. The whole
instance is sublime in its sort, thanks to the acuteness of _all_ its
illustrative sides, the intense interest of which loses nothing in the
hands of our chronicler; who perhaps, however, reaches off into the vast
vague of Chopin’s native affiliations and references with an energy with
which we find it a little difficult to keep step.
In speaking as we have done of George Sand’s “use” of each twist of her
road as it came—a use which we now recognise as the very thriftiest—we
touch on that principle of vital health in her which made nothing that
might by the common measure have been called one of the graver dilemmas,
that is one of the checks to the continuity of life, really matter. What
this felicity most comes to in fact is that doing at any cost the work
that lies to one’s hand shines out again and yet again as the saving
secret of the soul. She affirmed her freedom right and left, but her
most characteristic assertion of it throughout was just in the luxury of
labour. The exhaustive account we at any rate now enjoy of the family
life surrounding her during the years here treated of and as she had
constituted it, the picture of all the queer conflicting sensibilities
engaged, and of the endless ramifications and reflections provided for
these, leaves us nothing to learn on that congested air, that
obstructive medium for the range of the higher tone, which the lady of
Nohant was so at her “objective” happiest, even if at her superficially,
that is her nervously, most flurried and depressed, in bravely
breasting. It is as if the conditions there and in Paris during these
several years had been consistently appointed by fate to throw into
relief the applications of a huge facility, a sort of universal
readiness, with a rare intelligence to back it. Absolutely nothing was
absent, or with all the data _could_ have been, that might have
bewildered a weaker genius into some lapse of eloquence or of industry;
everything that might have overwhelmed, or at least have disconcerted,
the worker who could throw off the splendid “Lucrezia Floriani” in the
thick of battle came upon her at once, inspiring her to show that on her
system of health and cheer, of experiential economy, as we may call it,
to be disconcerted was to be lost. To be lacerated and calumniated was
in comparison a trifle; with a certain sanity of reaction these things
became as naught, for the sanity of reaction was but the line of
consistency, the theory and attitude of sincerity kept at the highest
point. The artist in general, we need scarcely remind ourselves, is in a
high degree liable to arrive at the sense of what he may have seen or
felt, or said or suffered, by working it out as a subject, casting it
into some form prescribed by his art; but even here he in general knows
limits—unless perchance he be loose as Byron was loose, or possess such
a power of disconnection, such a clear stand-off of the intelligence, as
accompanied the experiments of Goethe. Our own experiments, we commonly
feel, are comparatively timid, just as we can scarce be said, in the
homely phrase, to serve our esthetic results of them hot and hot; we are
too conscious of a restrictive instinct about the conditions we may, in
like familiar language let ourselves in for, there being always the
question of what we should be able “intellectually” to show for them.
The life of the author of “Lucrezia Floriani” at its most active may
fairly be described as an immunity from restrictive instincts more ably
cultivated than any we know. Again and yet again we note the positive
premium so put upon the surrender to sensibility, and how, since the
latter was certain to spread to its maximum and to be admired in
proportion to its spread, some surrender was always to have been worth
while. “Lucrezia Floriani” ought to have been rather measurably
bad—lucidity, harmony, maturity, definiteness of sense, being so likely
to fail it in the troubled air in which it was born. Yet how can we do
less than applaud a composition throwing off as it goes such a passage
as the splendid group of pages cited by Madame Karénine from the
incident of the heroine’s causing herself to be rowed over to the island
in her Italian lake on that summer afternoon when the sense of her
situation had become sharp for her to anguish, in order to take stock of
the same without interruption and see, as we should say to-day, where
she is? The whole thing has the grand manner and the noblest eloquence,
reaching out as it does on the spot to the lesson and the moral of the
convulsions that have been prepared in the first instance with such
complacency, and illustrating in perfection the author’s faculty for the
clear re-emergence and the prompt or, as we may call it, the paying
reaction. The case is put for her here as into its final nutshell: you
may “live” exactly as you like, that is live in perfect security and
fertility, when such breadth of rendering awaits your simply sitting
down to it. Is it not true, we say, that without her breadth our
wonderful woman would have been “nowhere”?—whereas with it she is
effectively and indestructibly at any point of her field where she may
care to pretend to stand.
This biographer, I must of course note, discriminates with delicacy
among her heroine’s felicities and mistakes, recognising that some of
the former, as a latent awkwardness in them developed, inevitably parted
with the signs that distinguished them from the latter; but I think we
feel, as the instances multiply, that no regret could have equalled for
us that of our not having the display vivid and complete. Once all the
elements of the scarce in advance imaginable were there it would have
been a pity that they should not offer us the show of their full
fruition. What more striking show, for example, than that, as recorded
by Madame Karénine in a footnote, the afflicted parent of Solange should
have lived to reproduce, or rather, as she would herself have said, to
“arrange” the girlish character and conduct of that young person, so
humiliating at the time to any near relation, let alone a mother, in the
novel of “Mademoiselle Merquem,” where the truth to the original facts
and the emulation of the graceless prime “effects” are such as our
author can vouch for? The fiction we name followed indeed after long
years, but during the lifetime of the displeasing daughter and with an
ease of reference to the past that may fairly strike us as the last word
of superiority to blighting association. It is quite as if the close and
amused matching of the character and its play in the novel with the
wretched old realities, those that had broken in their day upon the
scared maternal vision, had been a work of ingenuity attended with no
pang. The example is interesting as a measure of the possible victory of
time in a case where we might have supposed the one escape to have been
by forgetting. Madame Sand remembers to the point of
gratefully—gratefully as an artist—reconstituting; we in fact feel
her, as the irrepressible, the “healthy” artist, positively to enjoy so
doing. Thus it clearly defined itself for her in the fulness of time
that, humiliating, to use our expression, as the dreadful Solange might
have been and have incessantly remained, she herself had never in the
least consented to the stupidity or sterility of humiliation. So it
could be that the free mind and the free hand were ever at her service.
A beautiful indifferent agility, a power to cast out that was at least
proportioned to the power to take in, hangs about all this and meets us
in twenty connections. Who of her readers has forgotten the harmonious
dedication—her inveterate dedications have always, like her clear light
prefaces, the last grace—of “Jeanne,” so anciently, so romantically
readable, to her faithful Berrichon servant who sits spinning by the
fire? “Vous ne savez pas lire, ma paisible amie,” but that was not to
prevent the association of her name with the book, since both her own
daughter and the author’s are in happy possession of the art and will be
able to pass the entertainment on to her. This in itself is no more than
a sign of the writer’s fine democratic ease, which she carried at all
times to all lengths, and of her charming habit of speech; but it
somehow becomes further illustrational, testifying for the manner in
which genius, if it be but great enough, lives its life at small cost,
when we learn that after all, by a turn of the hand, the “paisible amie”
was, under provocation, bundled out of the house as if the beautiful
relation had not meant half of what appeared. Françoise and her presence
were dispensed with, but the exquisite lines remain, which we would not
be without for the world.