On the 8th June, 1876, George Sand, the great French novelist, died
at her château of Nohant in Berri. The strong right hand that for
forty years had been used in the service of her countrymen, sometimes
to delight, sometimes to admonish, had dropped the pen in death; the
noble heart that, with all its faults and all its deviations from the
strict line of social conventionality, had yet ever sided with the weak
against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, had ceased to
beat, and even in the frivolous, heartless capital where she had lived,
men went about knowing they had sustained an irreparable loss and that
a blank had been made in their lives that would never be filled.
She was the last of that illustrious fraternity of chosen spirits
that flourished fifty years ago in France, of whom Victor Hugo is
the sole survivor. Lamartine, Théophile Gautier, Michelet, Alfred de
Musset, Balzac, George Sand, were the names that then resounded in
the literary world of Paris, while now Emile Zola and Alexandre Dumas
fils are its principal adornments. George Sand and Balzac’s novels
form as it were the connecting link between the world of romance of
the eighteenth century and our own. She has carried the idealism of
Jean Jacques’ “Nouvelle Héloïse,” and the poetry of Chateaubriand’s
“Renée” into our prosaic nineteenth century, while Balzac presented to
his contemporaries as vivid reflections of life as any to be found in
the pages of “Manon Lescaut” or “Gil Blas.” The authoress of “Indiana”
is the high-priestess of the romantic school; the author of “Le Père
Goriot” the exponent of the realistic.
“Love must be idealised in fiction,” she says in the “Histoire de ma
Vie.” “We must give it all the force, and all the aspirations we have
felt ourselves, besides all the pain we have seen and suffered. Under
no circumstances must it ever be debased; it must triumph or die, and
we must not be afraid to invest it with an importance in life, which
lifts it altogether above ordinary sentiments.”
Balzac, her fellow-worker, used to say: “You seek men as they ought to
be; I take them as they are. I idealise and exaggerate their vices; you
their virtues.”
By further study of her life and correspondence, we shall know how
true this observation is, and how this striving after ideal perfection
not only influenced her literary work, but caused so much of that
eccentricity and rebellion against social laws which shocked her
contemporaries and has made her name a by-word in the mouths of those
who could not appreciate her genius, or realise the tenderness and
nobility of soul that were hidden under her unfeminine exterior.
The publication of her letters (looked forward to with so much
impatience) has recently taken place, and the veil has been still
further torn from those domestic relations well known to have been
unhappy. Were they written by any one but the authoress of “Elle et
Lui,” we should have regretted their appearance as indiscreet, and
wanting in loyalty towards one no longer able to protest against the
secrets of her life being dragged forth to amuse the crowd. A frequent
charge however brought against George Sand is the want of delicacy she
has shown in taking the world into her confidence. “Charity towards
others, dignity towards myself, sincerity before God,” is the motto
prefixed to the “Histoire de ma Vie.” She certainly is both charitable
and sincere, but we must agree with her enemies in thinking it an
open question whether, so far as concerns herself, she has observed
a dignified reserve. Indeed, on various occasions she defiantly
proclaimed, “That all hypocrisy was distasteful to her, and that it
would have been the recognition of those acts as irregularities which
were but the legitimate exercise of her liberty, had she been ashamed
of them or endeavored to keep them secret.”
The autobiography was unfortunately revised and corrected in 1869,
and considerably spoilt in the process. These letters are the more
interesting, therefore, as throwing sudden lights on varying moods, and
showing the rejection of many heterodox opinions at first, which were
afterwards accepted without hesitation.
“La vie ressemble bien plutôt à un roman, qu’un roman à la vie,” she
says, and certainly no heroine of one of her own romances could be more
interesting as a study than she is, with her gentleness and “bavardages
de mère” one moment, and her violent casting off of all domestic duties
the next. Touching appeals are made to Jules Boucoiran, the tutor, to
tell her whether her children ever mention her name, and directly after
there is the following exultant declaration:
“Ainsi, à l’heure qu’il est, à une lieue d’ici, quatre mille bêtes me
croient à genoux dans le sac, et dans la cendre, pleurant mes péchés
comme Madeleine. Le réveil sera terrible. Le lendemain de ma victoire,
je jette ma béquille, je passe au galop de mon cheval aux quatre coins
de la ville.”
The first letter of the “Correspondence” is written in 1812, when
Mademoiselle Aurore Dupin was a happy child of eight, living at her
ancestral home, the old château of Nohant.
Already she is insubordinate and high-spirited, delighted at being able
to deceive her grandmother by carrying on a secret correspondence with
her mother, and hiding the letters behind the portrait of the old Dupin
in the entrance-hall. “Que j’ai de regret de ne pouvoir te dire adieu.
Tu vois combien j’ai de chagrin de te quitter. Adieu; pense à moi,
et sois que je ne t’oublierai point.—TA FILLE. Tu mettras la réponse
derrière le portrait du vieux Dupin.”
The last letter of the first volume is dated “La Châtre, 1836,” when
what she herself called the crisis of the “sixth lustrum” was over.
The celebrated voyage to Venice with Alfred de Musset had already
been made, the romance of “Elle et Lui” had been lived through and
written—the immortal passion which has been told and sung by both sides
for the benefit of the world, and which has now become a part of the
poetry of the nineteenth century, was already a thing of the past; and
she had come to the point, as she writes to her friend Madame d’Agoult,
of finding her greatest happiness in a state of being where she neither
thinks nor feels. “You, perhaps, are too happy and too young to envy
the lot of those shining white stones which lie so cold, so calm, so
dead, under the light of the moon. I always salute them as I pass
along the road in my solitary midnight ride.” This volume comprises,
therefore, all the most eventful periods of her life, and whatever has
since been published is only of secondary interest.
George Sand was born in Paris in 1804. She was descended on her
father’s side from Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II.,
King of Poland. Her father died in 1808, and she was brought up at
the château of Nohant close to La Châtre in Berri. She lived there
until she was thirteen, passing her days in the open air, sometimes
wandering through the woods and fields, with the peasant children
of the neighboring village, or more often sitting alone, under some
great tree, listening to the murmur of the river close by, and the
whisper of the wind amidst the leaves. Here she learnt that kindness
and simplicity of manner which always characterised her, and here she
contracted that love for communion with Nature which in her wildest and
most despairing moments never forsook her.
“Ah, that I could live amidst the calm of mountain solitudes,” she
exclaims, “morally and materially above the region of storms! There to
pass long hours in contemplation of the starry heavens, listening to
the mysterious sounds of nature, possessing all that is grandest in
creation united with the possession of myself.”
At twelve she began to write, composing long stories about a hero to
whom, under the name of Corambe, she raised an altar of stones and
moss in the corner of the garden. For years she remained faithful to
Corambe and cherished the project of constructing a poem or romance to
celebrate his illustrious exploits.
At thirteen, her mother and grandmother, unable to agree upon the
subject of her education, determined to send her to a convent in Paris.
“Conceive,” one of her biographers says, “the sadness of this wild
bird shut up in the cage of the English Augustines in the ‘Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Victor.’ She wept tears of bitter regret for the cool
depths of woods, the sunny mornings, and dim quiet evenings of her
home.”
Comfort was soon found however in her work, and in the schoolgirl
friendships that she formed, some of which lasted her lifetime.
In 1820, when sixteen, she returned to Nohant. Her grandmother died
in the following year; and then, although often suffering from her
mother’s irritable and capricious temper, she seems to have enjoyed
perfect liberty: riding, walking, and reading; devouring everything
that came into her hands, from Thomas à Kempis to Jean Jacques
Rousseau. On one occasion, kneeling before the altar in the chapel,
she was seized with a paroxysm of devotion and talked of becoming a
nun. To this succeeded complete emancipation in her religious opinions,
and a refusal even to conform to the observances of her Church. A
quarrel with her confessor accomplished the separation from orthodoxy.
She became a deist, and remained so for the rest of her life, making
art her religion, and passing through all the phases of pessimism and
Saint-Simonianism that prevailed in her day.
In 1822, to escape the solicitations of her mother, she consented to
marry Monsieur Dudevant, son of one of the barons of the Empire.
She describes in her autobiography how one evening, when sitting
outside Tortoni’s eating ices after the theatre, she heard a friend
(Madame Duplessis) say to her husband: “See, there is Casimir!”
Whereupon a slight, elegant young man of military bearing came up to
salute them. Her fate was sealed from that day. They were married in
September 1822, she being only eighteen. After paying a few visits
they returned to live at Nohant. The letters begin consecutively after
the birth of her first child, and are written at odd times, and from
different places—sometimes in the middle of the night, while all the
household were asleep, the lightning flashing and the thunder rolling;
sometimes in a garret overlooking a narrow little street of the town
of Châtre, at six o’clock in the morning, the nightingales singing
outside and the scent of a lilac-tree pervading the air; sometimes at
her grandmother’s old bureau in the hall at Nohant, with all her family
round her.
The portion of the “Correspondence” which will take readers most by
surprise is that describing the first years of her married life. There
is no desire here “to lose her identity in the great conscience
of humanity!” her heart seems perfectly satisfied bending over her
cradle, and her mind entirely occupied with the “concrete duties” of
manufacturing soothing syrups and amusing her children.
“My son is splendidly fat and fresh,” she writes to her mother. “He
has a bright complexion and determined expression, which I must say is
borne out by his character. He has six teeth which he uses with great
vigor, and he stands beautifully on his feet, though too young to run
alone.”
Casimir is mentioned now and then, and always with a certain amount of
affection. She is evidently attached to him through the children, and
relates how fond he is of her and them.
“Our dear papa,” she says, “is very much
taken up with his harvest. He has adopted a
mode of threshing out his corn, which accomplishes
in three weeks what used to occupy five
or six. He works very hard all day, and is off
rake in hand at daybreak. We women sit on
the heaps of corn reading and working for
hours together.”
She describes a carnival at Nohant in 1826, four years after her
marriage, when she sits up three nights a week dancing, “Obligations
which have to be accepted in life.” Obligations which seem to be
grateful enough to her, although she only amuses herself by the light
of three candles, with an orchestra composed of a hurdy-gurdy and
bagpipes.
Certain disturbing elements seem however, as the year goes on, to
agitate the domestic barometer. They make a journey to Bordeaux, and
there the society, although not brilliant, is more attractive than
that of Nohant—the prospect of returning to the “three candles and the
hurdy-gurdy” seems to frighten her—and she complains of Casimir’s want
of “intellectual” energy: “Paresseux de l’esprit, et enragé des jambes.”
“Cold, wet, nothing keeps him at home; whenever he comes in it is
either to eat or to snore.” In writing about some commissions which
her mother has executed for her in Paris, she says: “Casimir asks me
to express his gratitude; it is a sentiment which we can _still_ feel
in common.” Rustic duties pall upon her, her appetite and health fail,
she is reduced to “looking at the stars, instead of sleeping.” “My
existence is passed in a complete state of mental solitude surrounded
by unsympathetic, commonplace people, some of whom deface their lives
by coarse inebriety.” She here alludes to her brother, Hippolyte, who
destroyed his own and his wife’s happiness by his drunken habits.
The only event that brightened her sadness was the arrival of a young
tutor for her children, M. Jules Boucoiran, who always, as she says,
remained her devoted friend and ally.
She thus whimsically relates an incident small in itself, but one that
made an impression on her owing to the existing circumstances:
“I was living in what used to be my grandmother’s boudoir, because
there was only one door, and no one could come in unless I liked. My
two children sleep in the room next to me. The boudoir was so small
that I could hardly fit into it with all my books. I therefore slept
in a hammock, and wrote at an old bureau, which I used in company with
a cricket, who seeing me so often had become perfectly tame. It lived
on my wafers, which I purposely chose white for fear of poisoning it.
After eating its meal on my paper as I wrote, it always went and sang
in its favorite drawer. One evening, not hearing it move, I searched
everywhere, but the only remains I found of my poor friend were his
hind legs. He never told me that he went out for a walk every day, and
the maid had crushed him when shutting the window. I buried him in a
datura flower, which I kept for some time as a sacred relic. I could
not get rid of a strange foreboding that with the song of this little
cricket my domestic happiness had fled for ever.”
Meantime the artistic leaven was working within her. On one of her
flying visits to Paris she entered the Louvre and felt singularly
“taken possession of” by the beautiful pictures around her.
“I returned,” she says, “again and again, arriving early in the
morning and going away late in the evening. I was transported into
another world, and was haunted day and night by the grand figures
created by genius. The past and present were revealed to me, I became
classical and romantic at the same time, without understanding the
struggle between the two that agitated the artistic world. I seemed
to have acquired a treasure, the existence of which I had never been
aware of. My spirit expanded, and when I left the gallery I walked
through the streets as in a dream.”
After this awakening of her intellectual nature she returned to
Nohant, more determined than ever to escape from her wretched life,
and to save her children from influences that might destroy them in
the future. Her first object was to endeavor to make money enough to
procure the means of existence. She tried everything, translating,
drawing, needlework, and at last discovered that she could earn an
humble pittance by painting flowers on wooden boxes. To this pursuit
she devoted herself for some time, believing it to be the only trade
for which she was fitted.
Meantime her domestic affairs came to a crisis sooner than she
expected. The cause is thus related to Jules Boucoiran:
“You know my home life, and how intolerable it is! You yourself have
often been astonished to see me raise my head the day after I had
been crushed to the earth. But there is a term to everything. Events
latterly have hastened the resolution which otherwise I should not
have been strong enough to take. No one suspects anything; there has
been no open quarrel. When seeking for something in my husband’s desk
I found a packet addressed to myself. On it were written these words:
‘To be opened after my death.’ I opened it however at once. What did
I find? imprecations, anathemas, insulting accusations, and the word
‘perversity.’”
This discovery, she tells him, decided her to come to an arrangement
with her husband at once, by which she was to live the greater part
of the year in Paris with her children, spending a month or two of
the summer at Nohant. There were, no doubt, faults on both sides. She
herself confesses in her autobiography “that she was no saint, and was
often unjust, impetuous in her resolves, too hasty in her judgments.”
Wherever there are strong feelings and desires there must be discord at
times.
“Happy he who plants cabbages,” says she. “He has one foot on the
earth, and the other is only raised off it the height of the spade.
Unfortunately for me, I fear if I did plant cabbages I should ask
for a logical justification for my activity, and some reason for the
necessity of planting cabbages.”
Hers is not a nature that must be judged coldly. What right have we to
say that she was to clip the wings of her genius, pass her years in the
service of conventionality, and never seek the full development of her
artistic nature? When she left the home of her childhood with pilgrim’s
staff and scrip to start along the thorny path that led to the shrine
of art, she was not actuated by any weak and wayward desire of change,
but by the vehement and passionate desire to give forth to the world
what was locked within her breast.
The beginning of her life in Paris was one of considerable poverty
and privation. She lived _au cinquième_ in a lodging, which cost her
a yearly rent of £12; she had no servant, and got in her food from an
eating-house close by for the sum of two francs a day. Her washing and
needlework she did herself. Notwithstanding this rigid economy, it was
impossible to keep within the limits of her husband’s allowance of £10
a year, especially as far as her dress was concerned.
After some hesitation therefore she took the resolution, which caused
so much scandal then and afterwards, of adopting male attire.
“My thin boots wore out in a few days,” she tells us in the
autobiography. “I forgot to hold up my dress, and covered my
petticoats with mud. My bonnets were spoilt one after another by the
rain. I generally returned from the expeditions I took, dirty, weary,
and cold. Whereas my young men acquaintances—some of whom had been the
companions of my childhood in Berri—had none of these inconveniences
to submit to. I therefore had a long gray cloth coat made with a
waistcoat and trousers to match. When this costume was completed by a
gray felt hat and a loose woollen cravat, no one could have guessed
that I was not a young student in my first year. My boots were my
particular delight. I should like to have gone to bed with them. On
their little iron heels I wandered from one end of Paris to the other;
no one took any notice of me, or suspected my disguise.”
George Sand was twenty-seven years of age at this time. Without being
beautiful she was striking and sympathetic-looking. Sainte-Beuve thus
describes his first interview with her:
“I saw, as I entered the room, a young woman with expressive eyes and
a fine open brow, surrounded by black hair, cut rather short. She was
quiet and composed in manner, speaking little herself, but listening
attentively to all I had to say.”
In an engraving of Calmatta’s from a picture done by Ary Scheffer, we
see that her features were large but regular, her eyes magnificent, and
her face distinguished by an expression of strength and calm that was
very remarkable. Her hair, dressed in long bandeaux, increases this
expression of peace so belied by the audacity of her genius.
She began her life of independence with very fixed opinions on
abstract ideas, but with complete ignorance, so far as material
necessities were concerned:
“I know nothing about the world, and have no prejudices on the
subject of society, to which the more I see of it, the less I desire
to belong. I do not think I can reform it, I do not interest myself
enough about it to wish to do so. This reserve and laziness is perhaps
a mistake, but it is the inevitable result of a life of isolation and
solitude. I have a basis of ‘nonchalance’ and apathy in my disposition
which, without any effort on my part, keeps me attached to a sedentary
life, or, as my friends would call it, ‘an animal one.’”
A great many of these friends were so shocked at her eccentric
proceedings, that she made up her mind to withdraw voluntarily from
intercourse with them, leaving them the option of continuing it if they
liked.
“What right had I to be angry with them, if they gave me up? How
could I expect them to understand my aims or my desires? Did _they_
know? Did _I_ know myself, when burning my vessels, whether I had any
talent, any perseverance?
“I never told any one my real intentions; and whenever I talked of
becoming an authoress, it was in joke, making fun of the idea, and of
myself.”
Still her destiny urged her forward, and she was more than ever
resolved, in spite of the difficulty, to follow a literary career:
“My life is restricted here, but I feel that I now have an object. I
am devoted to one task, and indeed to one passion. The love of writing
is a violent, almost an indestructible one; when once it has taken
possession of an unfortunate brain it never leaves it again.... I
have had no success: my work has been found unnatural by people whose
opinion I have asked.... Better known names must take precedence of
mine, that is only fair: patience, patience.... Meantime I must live
on. I am not above any work. I write even articles for _Figaro_. I
wish you knew what that meant; but at least they pay me seven francs a
column; and with that I can eat, drink, and go to the play, which is
an opportunity for me to make the most useful and amusing observations.
“If one wishes to write, one must see everything, know everything,
laugh at everything. Ah, ma foi, vive la vie d’artiste! notre devise
est liberté.”
She thus describes her mornings spent in the editorial offices of the
_Figaro_:
“I was not very industrious, I must confess, but then I understood
nothing of the work. Delatouche would give me a subject, and a piece
of foolscap paper, telling me not to exceed certain limits. I often
scribbled over ten pages which I threw in the fire, and on which
I had not written one word of sense. My colleagues were full of
intelligence, energy, and facility. I listened, was much amused, but
did no good work, and at the end of the month received an average of
twelve francs fifty centimes, and am not sure I was not overpaid at
that.”
She writes to M. Boucoiran:
“People blame me because I write for the _Figaro_. I do not care
much what they say. I must live, and am proud enough of earning my
bread myself. The _Figaro_ is a means as well as another. I must
pass through the apprenticeship of journalism. I know it is often
disagreeable; but one need never dirty one’s hands with anything
unworthy. Seven francs a column is not much to earn, but it is most
important to get a good footing in a newspaper office.”
She painted the most vivid portraits of the various eminent men whose
aid she sought, and who invariably tried to dissuade her from embarking
on a literary career. Balzac, when she first knew him, lived in an
“entresol” in the Rue de Cassini.
“I was introduced to him as a person greatly struck by his talent,
which indeed was true, for although at that time he had not yet
produced his ‘chefs-d’œuvre,’ I had admired his original manner of
looking at things, and felt that he had a great future before him.
Every one knows how satisfied he was with himself, a satisfaction
which was so well justified that one forgave him for it. He loved to
talk of his works, to describe them beforehand, and to read little
bits of them aloud. Naïve and good-hearted, he asked advice of
children, and then only made use of it as an argument to prove how
right he was himself.
“One evening when we had dined with him in some eccentric manner on
boiled beef, melon and iced champagne, he went and put on a beautiful
new dressing-gown, which he showed off with the delight of a young
girl. We could not dissuade him from going out in this costume to
accompany us as far as the entrance to the Luxembourg. There was not a
breath of wind, and he carried a lighted candle in his hand, talking
continuously of four Arab horses, which he never owned, but which he
firmly believed for some time were in his possession. He would have
gone with us to the other end of Paris, had we permitted it.
“My employer Delatouche was not nearly so pleasant. He also talked
continuously about himself, and read aloud his novels with more
discretion than Balzac, but with still more complacency. Woe betide
you if you moved the furniture, stirred the fire, or even sneezed
while he was thus occupied. He would stop immediately to ask you,
with polite solicitude, if you had a cold, or an attack of nerves,
and pretending to forget the book he had been reading, he obliged you
to beg and pray before he would open it again. He never could accept
the idea of growing old with resignation, and always said: ‘I am not
fifty, but twice twenty-five years of age.’ He had plenty of critical
discernment, and his observations often kept me from affectations
and peculiarities of style—the great stumbling-block of all young
authors. Although he gave me good advice, he put what seemed to me
insurmountable difficulties in my way. ‘Beware of imitation,’ he said,
‘make use of your own powers, read in your own heart, and in the life
you see around you, and then record your impressions.... You are too
absolute in your sentiments. Your character is too strong. You neither
know the world, nor individuals, your brain is empty! Your works may
be charming, but they are quite wanting in common sense. You must
write them all over again.’ I perfectly agreed with him and went away,
making up my mind to keep to the painting of tea-caddies and cigarette
cases.”
At last “Indiana” was begun, aimlessly, and with no hope of success.
“I resolutely,” she says in the “Histoire de ma Vie,” “put all
precept and example out of my mind, and neither sought in others,
nor in my own individuality, a type or character. Of course it has
been said that Indiana was me, and her history mine. She was nothing
of the kind. I have drawn many different female personations, but
I think when the world reads this confession of my impressions and
reflections, it will see that none of them are intended for my own
portrait. I am too elevated in my views to see a heroine of romance
in my mirror. I never found myself handsome enough nor amiable enough
to be either poetic or interesting; it would have seemed to me as
impossible to dramatise my life, as to embellish my person.”
“Indiana” was signed for the first time by her _nom de plume_ George
Sand.
Her former romance, “Rose et Blanche,” had been written in
collaboration with M. Jules Sandeau. It appeared under the name of
Jules Sand. When “Indiana” was finished Delatouche, who undertook
to publish it, advised its authoress to change the name of Jules to
George. She did so, and henceforth in literature and society was known
by no other name but George Sand.
“Indiana” was a genuine success, and made a considerable stir in Paris.
The imperfections of its construction were forgiven for the eloquence
of its passion and the beauty of its style; and the only words on every
one’s lips for some days after its appearance, were, “Have you read
‘Indiana’? You must read ‘Indiana.’”
Even her severe friend Delatouche was stirred out of his critical frame
of mind. She describes his clambering up to her garret, and finding a
copy of “Indiana” lying on the table.
“He took it up, and opened it contemptuously. I wished to keep him
from the subject and spoke about other things, but he would read on,
and kept calling out at each page: ‘Come, it is a copy! Nothing but
a copy of Balzac.’ I had neither sought nor avoided an imitation of
the great novelist’s style, and felt that although the book had been
written under his influence, it was unjust to say it was a copy. I let
him carry away the volume, hoping he would rescind his judgment. Next
morning on awaking I received the following letter:
“‘GEORGE,—I beg your pardon; I am at your feet. Forgive the insulting
observations I made last night. Forgive all that I have said to you
for the last six months. I have spent the night reading your book. Ah,
my child! How proud I am of you!’”
The following extract from one of her letters written after the
publication of “Indiana” shows how modest she remained in the midst of
her success:
“The popularity of my book frightens me. Up to this moment I have
worked inconsequently, convinced that anything I produced would pass
unnoticed. Fate has ordained otherwise. I must try to justify the
undeserved admiration of which I am the object.
“Curiously enough, it seems as if half the pleasure of my profession
were gone. I had always thought the word inspiration very ambitious,
and only to be employed when referring to genius of the highest
order. I would never dare to use it when speaking of myself without
protesting against the exaggeration of a term which is only sanctioned
by an incontestable success. We must find a word, however, which will
not make modest people blush, and will express that ‘grace’ which
descends more or less intensely on all heads in earnest about their
work. There is no artist, however humble, who has not his moments of
inspiration, and perhaps the heavenly liquor is as precious in an
earthenware vessel as in a golden one. Only one keeps it pure and
clear, while the other transmutes it or breaks itself. Let us accept
the word as it is therefore, and take it for granted that from my pen
it means nothing presumptuous.
“When beginning to write ‘Indiana,’ I felt an unaccustomed and
strong emotion, unlike anything I had ever experienced in my former
efforts at composition; it was more painful than agreeable. I wrote
spontaneously, never thinking of the social problem on which I was
touching. I was not Saint-Simonian, I never have been, although I have
had great sympathy with some of the ideas and for some of the members
of the fraternity; but I did not know them at that time, and was
uninfluenced by their tenets. The only feeling I had was a horror of
ignorant tyranny.”
In spite of her literary success the year 1833 was one of the most
unhappy of George Sand’s life. We know the lines addressed to her by
Mrs. Browning:
“True genius, but true woman! dost deny
The woman’s nature with a manly scorn,
And break away the gauds and armlets worn
By weaker women in captivity?
Ah, vain denial! That revolted cry
Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn,—
Thy woman’s hair, my sister! all unshorn,
Floats back dishevelled, strength in agony,
Disproving thy man’s name: And while before
The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,
We see thy woman’s heart beat evermore
Through the large flame.”
“I ought to be able to enjoy this independence bought at so dear a
price,” she writes to her friend M. François Rollinat, “but I am
no longer able to do so. My heart has become twenty years older,
and nothing in life seems bright or gay. I can never feel anything
acutely again, either sorrow or joy. I have gone through everything
and rounded the cape; not like those easy-going nabobs who repose in
silken hammocks under the cedarwood ceilings of their palaces, but
like those poor pilots who, crushed by fatigue, and burnt by the sun,
come to anchor, not daring to expose their fragile bark to the stormy
seas. Formerly they led a happy life, full of adventure and love. They
long to begin it again, but their vessel is dismasted, and the cargo
lost.”
Alas! the “fragile bark” was tempted once more to put to sea, this time
freighted with the rich cargo of all the love and all the hope of her
passionate woman’s heart.
In the “Histoire de ma Vie” she touches very slightly on the
episode of her journey to Venice with Alfred de Musset, and in the
“Correspondence” we only read the following significant words, written
to M. Jules Boucoiran from Venice on April 6, 1834:
“Alfred has left for Paris. I shall remain here some time. We have
separated, for months, perhaps for ever. God knows what will become
of me now. I feel still, however, full of strength to live, work, and
endure.”
He suffered more than she. After lying six weeks in a brain fever
hovering between life and death, he returned to his family broken down
in health and spirits—“I bring you,” he writes to his brother, “a sick
body, a grieving soul, and a bleeding heart, but one that still loves
you.”
He declared later, when the anguish had passed, that,
“In spite of its sadness, it was the happiest period of my life.
I have never told you all the story. It would be worth something if
I wrote it down; but what is the use? My mistress was dark, she had
large eyes! I loved her, and she forsook me. I wept and sorrowed for
four months; is not that enough?”
The year that followed their separation was a momentous one in both
their literary careers. He produced the “Nuit de Mai,” the “Nuit de
Décembre” and the “Confessions d’un Enfant du Siècle;” while she wrote
“Jacques” and “Consuelo.”
Her letters are the fittest commentary on her life and mode of thought
at this time. She thus addresses M. Jules Boucoiran:
“You make serious accusations against me. You reproach me for my many
frivolous friendships and affections. I never undertake to justify
statements made about my character. I can explain facts and actions,
but blunders of the intelligence, errors of the heart, never! I have
too just an opinion of merit in general to think much of my individual
worth; indeed I have neither reverence nor affection for myself, the
field is therefore open to those who malign me; and I am ready to
laugh with them, if they appeal to my philosophy; but when it is a
question of affection, when it is the sufferings of friendship which
you wish to express, you are wrong. If we have discovered great faults
in those we love we must take counsel with ourselves, and see whether
we can still continue to care for them. The wisest course is to give
them up, the most generous to remain their friends, but for that
generosity to be complete there must be no reproaches, no dragging up
of events long past.”
The following is written to M. Adolphe Gueroult:
“Your letter is as good and true as your heart; but I send you back
this page of it, which is absurd and quite out of place. No one must
write in such terms to me. If you criticise my costume, let it be on
other grounds. It is really better you should not interfere at all.
Read the parts I have underlined, they are astoundingly impertinent. I
don’t think you were quite responsible when you wrote them. I am not
angry and am not less attached to you, but I must beg you not to be so
foolish again. It does not suit you....
“My friends will respect me just as much, I hope, in a coat as in a
dress. I do not go out in male habiliments without a stick, so do
not be afraid ... and be assured I do not aspire to the dignity of a
man. It seems to me too ridiculous a position to be preferable to the
servitude of a woman. I only wish to possess to-day, and for ever,
that delightful and complete independence which you seem to imagine is
your prerogative alone. You can tell your friends and acquaintances
that it is absolutely useless to attempt to presume on my attire or
my black eyes, for I do not allow any impertinence, however I may be
dressed.”
She became Republican, almost Communistic in her views, founded a
paper, the _Cause du Peuple_, and contributed to another, the _Commune
de Paris_.
“It seems to me,” she writes to her son, “that the earth belongs
to God, who made it and has given it to man as a haven of refuge.
It cannot therefore be His intention that some should suffer from
repletion, while others die of hunger. All that any one can say on the
subject will not prevent me from feeling miserable and angry when I
see a beggar man moaning at a rich man’s door.
“If I say all this to you, however, you must not repeat it or show my
letter. You know your father’s opinions are different. You must listen
to him with respect, but your conscience is free, and you can choose
between his ideas and mine. I will teach you many things if you and I
ever live together. If we are not fated to enjoy this happiness (the
greatest I can imagine, and the only thing that would make me wish to
stop on earth), you will pray God for me, and from the bosom of death,
if anything remains of me in the Universe, my spirit will watch over
you.”
After the June massacres, she retired, sad and disappointed, to
Nohant, where, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she
reigned as _père et mère de famille_, respected and loved by all. The
eccentricities of her youth were forgiven for the sake of her genius
and generosity of heart. She was hospitable and simple, allowing her
son and his wife to manage the household and property, making her
guests, however, feel that she was the controlling spirit of the house.
Here—all the struggles of life over—she devoted herself to literature,
and produced the best works of her life: “La Petite Fadette,” “La
Mare au Diable,” and “François le Chiampi.” George Sand had none of
the brilliancy and repartee in general conversation one would have
expected, and as the years went on she became more silent and reserved.
Her greatest happiness was to sit in her arm-chair smoking cigarettes.
Often, when her friends thought she was absorbed in her own
meditations, she would put in a word that proved she had been listening
to everything. The word spoken, she would relapse again into silence.
It was only when she sat down to her desk that she became eloquent,
and the expressions that halted on her lips rushed abundantly from her
pen. Her characters grew beneath her hand, and she went on writing,
with that perfect style which is like the rhythmic cadence of a great
river—“Large, calm, and regular.” George Sand worked all night long
after all her guests were in bed, sometimes remaining up until five
o’clock in the morning. She generally sat down to the old bureau in the
hall at Nohant, with pen, ink, and foolscap paper sewn together, and
began, without notes or a settled scheme of any kind.
“You wish to write,” she says to her lovely young friend, the Comtesse
d’Agoult. “Then do so by all means. You are young, in the full force
of your intelligence and powers. Write quickly and don’t think too
much. If you reflect, you will cease to have any particular bent, and
will write from habit. Work while you have genius, while the gods
dictate to you. I think you will have a great success, and may you be
spared the thorns which surround the blessed flowers of the crown of
glory. Why should the thorns pierce your flesh? You have not wandered
through the desert.”
When death came, she met it simply and bravely, like the great soul
that she was. “Laissez la verdure” were the last words she spoke. No
one at first understood what she meant, and thought she was delirious,
but afterwards they remembered that she had always expressed a dislike
to slabs and crosses on the graves of those she loved, so they left a
mound of grass to mark her resting-place.
As we read the works of the two great female novelists of the century,
George Eliot and George Sand, a comparison inevitably suggests itself
to our minds. They both had the same passionate sympathy with the
trials and sufferings of humanity, the same love and reverence for all
that was weak and lowly. No intellectual aristocracy existed for them;
they loved the crowd, and tried to influence the crowd. It is curious
they should both have made the same observation, the one on hearing
Liszt, the other on hearing Mendelssohn play: “Had I any genius, _that_
is the form I should have wished to take, for then I could have spoken
to _all_ my fellow-men.” George Sand was ever seeking ideal perfection,
and in that search often lost the right road and “wandered in the
desert.” George Eliot accepted life with that calm resignation that was
part of her nature; she was more restrained and less passionate than
her French sister. The one, while at school, reproaches herself for her
coldness and inability to feel any enthusiasm about the prayer-meetings
in vogue among her companions. The other cast herself on her knees one
day in a fit of devotion, and for weeks declared that she would become
a nun.
There is as much divergence in the artistic work they produced as
in their characters. George Sand, without having the perfection of
construction and finish that distinguish George Eliot, far surpasses
her in the delineation of her female characters. George Eliot never
described a woman of genius, while George Sand has written Consuelo and
the Comtesse Rudolstadt, both of them types of the _femme artiste_,
with all her weakness and all her greatness.
In the painting of human love, also, the French novelist is infinitely
stronger than the English one. We linger with absorbing interest over
the suffering and passion of Indiana and Valentine, while we yawn over
the conversations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, or Deronda and
Myra. George Eliot herself has said, “That for eloquence and depth of
feeling no man approaches George Sand.”
We have seen a photograph done of George Sand shortly before she died.
The face is massive, but lit up by the wonderful eyes through which the
soul still shines. An expression of tenderness and gentle philosophy
hovers round the lips, and we feel almost as though they would break
into a smile as we gaze. She became latterly like one of those grand
old trees of her own “Vallée Noire,” lopped and maimed by the storms
and struggles of life, but ever to the last putting forth tender shoots
and expanding into fresh foliage, through which the soft winds of
heaven whisper, making music in the ears of those weary wayfarers who
pause to rest beneath their shade.—_Temple Bar._