PRAYER IN ADULTERY
The problem of the relationship of art to morality is most interestingly
illustrated by the case of George Sand. This woman-writer was
promiscuous, and she was predatory, in the sense that she turned her
adventures into copy and sold them in the market. But she had a mind,
and she used it to investigate all the new ideas of her time. She was
moved, not merely by her own desire for pleasure, but by the sufferings
and strivings of her fellow human beings. She poured all these things
into her books, and made herself one of the civilizing forces of her
time.
She was born in 1804 and raised in a convent. Married at the age of
eighteen, and being unhappy, she kicked over the traces and became a
Bohemian adventurer, wearing trousers, proclaiming the rights of
passion, taking to herself one conspicuous lover after another, and
then putting them into books for the support of herself and her two
children. She was the founder of what we might call emotional feminism.
She was religious in a sentimental way, though a vigorous anti-clerical;
she became converted to Socialism, worked ardently for social reform,
and published many long novels in its support.
George Sand had a romantic ancestry, of which she did not fail to make
literary use. On her father’s side she was descended from a royal
bastard. Her mother had been a camp follower in the army of Napoleon, “a
child of the old pavements of Paris.” Thus the novelist united in one
person the aristocratic and the proletarian impulses. A large percentage
of her collected ancestors were illegitimate, so she came honestly by
her free love ideas. On the other hand, she was a very respectable,
hard-working bourgeois woman, who preached interminably on virtue, and
paid all her debts, and got good prices for her manuscripts--things
which were regarded as extremely bad taste by the art-world of her time.
France had had innumerable aristocratic ladies who had loved
promiscuously, proceeding from a king to a duke, and from a duke to an
abbé or a monseigneur. There had been women who had risen from the lower
classes by becoming the mistresses of noblemen. But here was a brand-new
phenomenon, a woman who went out and faced the world “on her own,” and
instead of taking the money of the men she loved, proceeded to earn the
money by writing about the men! It was an enormous scandal, and at the
same time an enormous literary success, for these were pot-boilers of
genius, full of eloquence and fire. Also they were full of ideas on a
hundred subjects, elementary instruction such as ladies on the women’s
pages of our Sunday supplements give to correspondents. But American
readers find it a little hard to understand the fusion of piety and
sexuality which George Sand pours into her romantic novels. “Oh, my dear
Octave,” writes an adulterous wife to her lover, “never shall we pass a
night together without kneeling and praying for Jacques!” It is just a
little shocking to us to learn that this Jacques is the husband whom the
pair are deceiving!
George Sand lived like a healthy bourgeoise to the age of seventy-two;
in her later years she retired to the country, and the fires of free
love died, and she wrote novels about the peasants in her neighborhood.
They are very human and simple, and make standard reading for French
courses in American high schools. It is interesting to compare them with
the old-style handling of the peasants in French art. Gone are the fancy
pictures of beautiful young shepherds and shepherdesses in silks and
satins and high-heeled slippers. Now for the first time a French artist
finds it worth while to go out among the working people of the fields,
and observe the external details of their lives, and at least try to
imagine their feelings. We note the same thing happening also in
pictorial art; instead of the elegancies of Fragonard, we now have a
peasant painter, Millet, peasant born and peasant reared, making real
pictures full of real proletarian feeling. That much as least the
revolution has accomplished!