else. It is upon its coast that the wanton, cynical De Musset, in
his capacity of author, lands at last. De Musset, the man, suffered
shipwreck on other shores. He fell a victim to the abuse of narcotics.
His undisciplined, ill-regulated character was his bane. In his
writings he became ever more spiritual, ever more moral; in his life
he sank ever deeper into mechanical sensual indulgence. He early lost
control over himself; for a time he rose by the aid of his art above
the ruin of his life; but in the end even the wings of art became
powerless.
He had hoped much from the Constitutional Monarchy. He had expected
from it, or under it, an art-loving court, a liberal policy, a revival
of national glory, and a blossoming time in literature. We can imagine
his disappointment. It is not impossible that a court with a keen
appreciation of literature and art might have exercised a saving
influence upon Alfred de Musset, have drawn him into its circle,
compelled him to preserve his self-respect, and made his pleasures,
and even his excesses, more refined. But Louis Philippe, that polished
and well-educated peace-lover, had no real love of literature and no
literary taste. He was even less capable of attaching Alfred de Musset
than Victor Hugo to himself. De Musset wrote a sonnet on the occasion
of Meunier's attempt to assassinate the King, in 1836. It was not
printed, but the Duke of Orleans, who had been a school-fellow of De
Musset's, saw it, thought it excellent, and read it to His Majesty.
The King never knew who had written it; as soon as he heard that the
author presumed to address him in the second person singular, he became
so indignant that he would hear no more. To make amends for this
slight, the Duke procured De Musset an invitation to the court balls.
When the poet was presented to Louis Philippe, he was astonished by
the reception he met with. The King came up to him with a smile of
pleasant surprise and said: "You have just come from Joinville; I am
very glad to see you." De Musset had too much _savoir-vivre_ to betray
any surprise. He made a low bow and tried to think what the King's
words could mean. At last he remembered that a distant relation of his
was inspector of forests on the crown property of Joinville. The King,
who did not burden his memory with the names of authors, had a perfect
acquaintance with all the names of the officials in charge of the crown
lands. Every winter for eleven years in succession he saw the face of
his supposed forest-inspector with the same pleasure, and favoured him
with such gracious nods and smiles that many a courtier turned pale
with envy. The honour was supposed to be shown to literature; but this
much is certain, that Louis Philippe never knew that there lived in
France during his reign a great poet who bore the same name as his
inspector of forests.
Such a lack-lustre rule as Louis Philippe's could not but be abhorrent
to De Musset. His haughty, wildly defiant answer to Becker's
_Rheinlied_, points to lyric possibilities in him which might have
developed under other political conditions. As things were, he felt
himself restricted to being the poet of youth and love; and when youth
was past he was incapable of reviving his powers. His virtues were
as fatal to him as his vices. Proud and distinguished, he had not a
trace of the ambition which leads a man to husband his intellectual
resources, not an atom of the desire of gain which compels to industry,
or of the egotism which makes the writer attribute supreme importance
to his own work. He lived his life with such greedy haste that at forty
he was as exhausted as a man of seventy, without having attained to
either composure or wisdom. His premature physical exhaustion brought
intellectual exhaustion in its train. He was destitute of that higher
instinct which compels the author to live altogether for his art, and
he had not a trace of the social or political instinct which bends the
productive mind to the yoke of duty to others. He was so incapable of
self-control that the slightest temptation proved irresistible. His
life became as absolutely aimless as his art was; there was no cause
he desired to advance, nothing that he was determined at any cost to
say; and his character was too uncontrollable, too little reflective,
for self-development, as Goethe understood it, to be the aim which
rendered all others superfluous. When Alfred de Musset died in 1857,
his creative capacity had been extinct for several years.
[1] His tour in Italy with George Sand lasted from December 1833 to
April 1834. In 1834 he wrote _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_ and
_Lorenzaccio_; in 1835 _Barberine_ (his most insignificant play), _Le
Chandelier, Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle_, and _La Nuit de Mai_; in
1836 _Emmeline_ and _Il ne faut jurer de rien_; in 1837 _Un Caprice,
Les deux Maîtresses_, and _Frédéric et Bernerette_; in 1838 _Le Fils
du Titien. Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermée_ was written in
1845, _Bettine_ in 1851, _Carmosine_ in 1852.
XI
GEORGE SAND
"I believe," writes George Sand in the introduction to _La Mare au
Diable_, "that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love,
and that the novel of our day ought to supply the place of the parable
and fable of the childish days of old. The aim of the artist should
be to awaken love for the objects he represents; and I, for my part,
should not reproach him if he beautified them a little. Art is not an
examination of the given reality, but a pursuit of the ideal truth."
What the mature woman here proclaims as her aesthetic creed is what
she had felt all her life. She had never regarded the calling of the
author in any other light than that of an aspiration after the highest
of which humanity is capable; or, to put it more correctly, she had
considered it to be the author's calling to elevate the mind above
the imperfection of the existing conditions of society, with the aim
of giving it a wide horizon, and thereby imparting to it the power,
when it descended to earth again, to combat in its own fashion the
prejudices, the conventions, the coarseness of mind and hardness of
heart to which that imperfection was due.
In the introduction to _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_ she says:
"Since when has it been obligatory for the novel to be a transcription
of what is, of the hard and cold reality of contemporary men and
things? It may be this, I know; and Balzac, a master to whose talent
I have always done homage, has written the _Comédie humaine_. But,
although I was united by the ties of friendship to that illustrious
man, I saw human affairs under quite a different aspect. I remember
saying to him: 'You are writing the Human Comedy, The title is a
modest one. You might quite as well call it the Human Drama, the Human
Tragedy.' 'Yes,' said he, 'and you, you are writing the Human Epic.'
'The title in this case,' I replied, 'would be too imposing. What I
should like to write is the human pastoral, the human ballad, the human
romance. To put it plainly, you have the desire and the ability to
paint the human being as you see him. Good! I, on the other hand, feel
impelled to paint him as I wish him to be, as I believe he ought to
be.' And, as we were not competing with each other, we each recognised
that the other was right."
The passage is part of a protest made by George Sand against the charge
that it was her desire to flatter the lower classes by producing
idealised representations of them--this explains how she came to give
such pointed, dogmatic expression to the idealism of her nature.
Most undoubtedly she was the idealist, all her life long; but it was
not really the desire to delineate human beings as "they ought to
be" which inspired her to write, but the desire to show what they
could be if society did not hamper their spiritual growth, corrupt
them, and destroy their happiness; hence, in her delineations of the
representatives of "society" no leniency was shown. What George Sand
originally meant to give was a picture of life as it is, of reality as
she had experienced and observed it; what she gave was the feminine
enthusiast's view of reality. The section she saw was a patch of earth
with the brightness of heaven over it. Her clear-sightedness was the
clear-sightedness of the poet.
The period was the period of enormous productivity. Victor Hugo,
Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, wrote ceaselessly, piling work upon work.
Dumas at last regularly manufactured books; he published four or five
novels at a time, and with the help of numerous collaborators produced
a good-sized shelf of volumes in a year. George Sand's productivity was
almost as remarkable. Her works fill 110 closely printed volumes. I can
make no attempt here to criticise them all. It is only of consequence
that I should indicate the main features of the most important works,
the ideas which permeate them, the results which remain even when the
details of the books are forgotten.
The real life story lying behind the first group of George Sand's
novels is familiar to every one. She was born in 1804; lost her
father at an early age; had a foolish, passionate mother, and a wise,
distinguished grandmother; grew up on the family property of Nohant in
Berry, a regular country child, romping out of doors, loving nature and
freedom, and mixing on equal terms with the children of the peasantry.
Her tastes were the tastes of the people, but she was not the less
romantic for that. As Chateaubriand in his early youth evolved for
himself the image of an ideally charming woman, of whom he constantly
dreamed, so George Sand's young imagination created a hero, to whom
she built an altar of stone and moss in a corner of her garden, and
whom she credited with all the wonderful deeds suggested by her fertile
invention. At the age of thirteen she was sent to a convent school in
Paris. At first she sadly missed the free country life; then she became
for a time ardently religious; but even before she returned to Nohant
this enthusiasm had been superseded by a lively interest in the stage
and in political literature. In her country surroundings, the grown-up
girl reads Rousseau for the first time, and is fascinated, as we all
are, when our own nature is revealed to us. Henceforward, to her life's
end, she is Rousseau's faithful disciple. His understanding and worship
of nature, his faith in God, his belief in and love of equality, his
defiant attitude towards so-called civilised society, appealed to
all her instincts and, as it were, forestalled feelings that were
slumbering in her soul. Shakespeare, Byron, and Chateaubriand also
enrapture her; they cause her to feel solitary in her surroundings,
and communicate to her that first, vague melancholy which in young,
passionate, enthusiastic souls generally precedes the melancholy
of real disappointment. In 1822 this girl, who, with her powerful
intellect, her rich imagination, and her inability to live her life
independently, would never have been satisfied with the companionship
of one man, however noble his character and great his gifts, was
married to a Monsieur Dudevant, a perfectly ordinary country gentleman,
neither better nor worse than most of his kind. He was uncultivated and
passionate, and quite incapable of understanding his wife; but it is
evident that, even if he had been a much better husband, the ultimate
consequences of the marriage would have been the same. Only the first
three years were spent in peace and amity. By 1825, George Sand was
beginning to look down upon her husband, and, with her natural craving
for sympathetic understanding, to form friendships with other men, as
a relief from what to her were the insulting and cruelly degrading
conditions of her home life. Monsieur Dudevant, who was enough of the
husband to be exasperated by intellectual independence in his wife,
though he was far too insignificant a personage to be able to profit
by that want of intellectual self-sufficiency which impelled her to
seek a leader and guide, regarded even her most innocent interchange
of sympathies with other men as a transgression of duty. Incessant
conjugal friction and disputes at last put an end to all community of
feeling. Even the two children who were the fruit of the marriage could
not keep their parents together. In 1831 George Sand went to live in
Paris alone.
The documents connected with the ensuing separation suit, as also
George Sand's own letters, give us an adequate understanding of what
her married life was. I have read in the _Gazette des Tribunaux_ (30th
July and 1st and 19th August 1836, and 28th June and 12th July 1837)
the pleas advanced on both sides. They were horrible, disgraceful
accusations which this great woman was obliged to hear from the lips
of her husband's counsel. With her beautiful dark hair falling over a
black velvet jacket, or else dressed, in the fashion of the day, in
white, with a flowered shawl round her shoulders, George Sand sat and
listened without a trace of emotion. Her husband accused her of having
conceived and yielded to a criminal passion for another man within
three years of her marriage. "Monsieur Dudevant soon discovered that he
was being deceived by the woman he worshipped (!), but was magnanimous
enough to forgive." The lawyer read a long letter from Madame Dudevant
to her husband, in which she confessed, and reproached herself for,
various faults, and attributed the misunderstanding between them to
an incompatibility in their characters which by no means implied an
absence of generosity and amiability on his part. This letter, Monsieur
Dudevant's counsel most illogically argued, was equivalent to a
confession of unfaithfulness on the lady's part. He went on to show how
the couple had lived from 1825 to 1828 in voluntary separation, and how
Madame Dudevant, even after she left her husband in 1831 to lead "the
life of an artist," had carried on an amicable correspondence with him
and accepted 300 francs (!) a year. (He did not mention that she had
brought her husband a dowry of 500,000.) At the beginning of the year
1835 the couple had come to a private agreement each to take a child,
to divide the fortune, and to allow each other full liberty of action;
but before this agreement came into force George Sand had drawn back
and sued for a judicial separation. (In the course of a dispute about
their son, Monsieur Dudevant had tried to strike her, had even in the
presence of witnesses taken up his gun to fire at her.) In spite of
exaggerated accusations her application, the lawyer reminded the court,
had been refused. Now it was Monsieur Dudevant's turn to complain.
He denied all the charges brought against him, and brought others,
of the gravest character, against his wife; he maintained that any
woman who had written such immoral books as hers was unfit to educate
her children; he accused her of intimacy with the secrets of "all the
most shameful licentiousness." It was on account of these accusations,
accusations which he, Monsieur Dudevant's counsel, asserted to be fully
justified, that George Sand was once more suing for a separation.
His eloquence reached its climax in the outburst: "It is, then, your
opinion, Madame, that a woman has the right, if she chooses, to
squander the half of a fortune, to embitter her husband's life, and to
adopt, when she feels inclined to indulge still more freely in the most
unbridled excesses, the convenient and simple plan of bringing against
him in the court of justice a purely fictitious accusation of revolting
conduct!"
It must have been hard for the proud woman to sit, the observed of
all observers, listening to this besmirching of her name and fame.
It cannot have afforded her much consolation that her counsel and
friend, Michel de Bourges, immediately afterwards extolled her as
a genius, and produced a profound impression by reading remarkably
beautiful passages from her letters and recounting all the insulting
words and brutal actions of which her husband had been guilty towards
her. She was accustomed to see her novels reviled in the newspapers
as so many shameless defences of immorality, but to hear her private
life maligned in this style was a new experience. These public
proceedings which terminated her married life, give us, however, as it
were, a retrospective view of that life, and explain the indignation
which finds its first expression in _Indiana, Valentine, Lélia_, and
_Jacques_.
They are books, these, which possess little literary interest for the
reader of to-day: the characters are vague idealisations; the plots are
improbable, as in _Indiana_, or unreal, as in _Lélia_ and _Jacques_;
the harmonious sonority of her style does not save the author from the
reproach of frequent lapses into magniloquence; in the letters and
monologues she is often the poetical sermoniser. And yet there is a
fire in these works of George Sand's youth which gives light and warmth
to this day; they struck a note which will go on sounding for ages.
They emit both a wail and a war-cry, and where they penetrate they
carry with them germs of feelings and thoughts, the growth of which
this age has succeeded in checking, but which in the future will unfold
and spread with a luxuriant vigour of which we can only form a faint
conception.
Indiana is the young, full heart's first outburst of bitterness and
woe. The youthful heroine is the embodiment of refined intellectality
and noble-mindedness; her husband, Colonel Delmare, is a rather
better-tempered Monsieur Dudevant; Indiana's affectionate, enthusiastic
heart turns, wounded, from husband to lover. The originality of the
book lies in its delineation of the latter's character. For to him
even the husband is infinitely preferable. Raymon is the average
young Frenchman under the restored Legitimist monarchy; he is what
the society of the period has made him, emotional and calculating,
love-sick and egotistical, influenced by public opinion and the verdict
of society to such an extent that his hard-heartedness develops into
heartlessness, his unreliability into worthlessness; his thorough
mediocrity is at last plainly discernible through its glittering husk
of brilliant qualities and talents. In this first work George Sand at
once introduces us to several distinct types of male character. There
is the man with the coarse nature, whom the power which society puts
into his hands has made brutal, and the man with the weak nature, whom
congenital irresolution and acquired submissiveness to the dictation
of society have made unreliable and cowardly. Woman-like, she starts
with a spirited exposure of man's egotism. But in this her first
book she also at once presents us with her ideal man, in the person
of the reserve lover, the apparently phlegmatic but really ardent
Ralph, who, taciturn as George Sand herself, appears (like her) to the
superficial observer stiff and cold, but is in reality the embodiment
of self-sacrificing, noble, faithful love. This was a character she
rang changes on for years. We find him in _Lélia_ in the noble and
hardly tried Trenmor, the galley-slave who passes judgment on society
with stoic calm; in _Jacques_ he is the hero who with almost superhuman
magnanimity commits suicide, that he may not stand in the way of his
young wife's alliance with another; in _Léone Léoni_ he is the quiet,
manly Don Aleo, to the very last prepared to marry that unfortunate
Juliette whom an almost magic fascination binds to the incredibly
rascally Leone, a species of male Manon Lescaut. In _Le Secrétaire
Intime_ he is the modest German, Max, whose distinguishing qualities
are naïve kind-heartedness and poetical enthusiasm, and who is secretly
married to the princess whom every one worships; in _Elle et Lui_
he is Palmer, the Englishman, the foil to the gifted and dissipated
Parisian, Laurent; in _Le Dernier Amour_, he is called Sylvestre and is
a weaker Jacques. All these figures have a fault which is not uncommon
in ideals; they are bloodless. But the men of the Raymon type, the
men who represent the world, the selfishness, the vanity, and the
weaknesses of society, are much more successful creations. Raymon
himself is much more real than the other characters in _Indiana_; the
local colouring in his case is stronger, more definite. The authoress
(in chapter x.) attributes his unmanliness to "the conciliatory and
yielding tendency" of the age, which she calls the age "of mental
reservations"; she shows how Raymon, who is the advocate of political
moderation, imagines that because he is devoid of political passions
he is also devoid of political self-interest, and therefore stands on
a higher level than that of any party--the fact of the matter being,
that the existing condition of society is too advantageous to him for
him to wish it changed. He is "not so ungrateful to Providence as to
reproach it with the misfortunes of others." The numerous successors
of this character in George Sand's novels all bear witness to a
penetrating and delicate observation of human nature, from Sténio, the
poet in _Lélia_, and Octave, the lover in _Jacques_, slightly sketched,
weak characters, mere playthings of passion, to the carefully drawn,
distinctly characterised figures like the dissolute young Italian
singer, Anzoleto, in _Consuelo_, the ultra-refined, morbidly nervous
and self-centred Prince Karol (Chopin) in _Lucrezia Floriani_, and the
extravagantly capricious young painter, Laurent (Alfred de Musset), in
_Elle et Lui_.
In the end Indiana goes the length of discovering the ruthless egotism
of the male sex in all the outward developments of society, even in
the religion taught by men. They have made of God a man in their own
image. She writes to her hypocritical lover: "I do not serve the same
God as you, but I serve mine better and more purely. Yours is the man's
God, a man, a king, the founder and the patron of your race; mine is
the God of the universe, the creator, the preserver, and the hope of
every living being. Yours has made everything for you alone; mine has
made all his creatures for each other." Two things are noticeable in
these words--a naïve protest against that order of society which is
founded upon the subordination of woman to man, and the optimism of
an innocent, youthfully trustful faith in God. This attitude George
Sand did not long maintain. Only a few years later she brings _Lélia_
to a conclusion with an outburst of despairing pessimism. Shortly
before her death the heroine says: "Alas! despair reigns, and moans of
suffering emanate from every pore of the created world. The wave casts
itself writhing and moaning on the beach, the wind weeps and wails in
the forest. All those trees which bend and only rise to fall again
under the lash of the storm, suffer frightful torture. There exists
one miserable, cursed being, terrible, immense--the world which we
inhabit cannot contain him. This invisible being is in everything, and
his voice fills space with one eternal sob. Imprisoned in the universe
he writhes, strives, struggles, beats his head and his shoulders
against the confines of heaven and earth. He cannot pass beyond them;
everything crushes him, everything curses him, everything torments
him, everything hates him. What is this being and whence does he come?...
Some have called him Prometheus, others Satan; I call him desire;
I, the hopeless sibyl, the spirit of departed ages.... I, the broken
lyre, the dumb instrument whose sounds would not be understood by those
who inhabit the earth to-day, but in whose breast the eternal harmonies
lie murmuring; I, the priestess of death, who feel that I once was
Pythia, that I wept then, that I spoke then, but who cannot remember
the healing word!... O truth, truth! to find thee I descended into
abysses the very sight of which would make the bravest giddy with fear.
But truth! thou hast not revealed thyself; I have sought thee for ten
thousand years and have not found thee! For ten thousand years the only
answer to my cries, the only consolation of my agony, has been the
sound, audible throughout this whole accursed world, of that despairing
sob of impotent desire! For ten thousand years I have shouted into
infinity: Truth! Truth! For ten thousand years infinity has answered:
Desire! desire! O miserable Sibyl! O dumb Pythia! dash thy head against
the rocks of thy cave and mingle thy blood, which is foaming with rage,
with the foam of the sea!"