years reaches its climax. Condensed as I have given it here--it is six
times as long in the original--it is a beautiful, poetical expression
of George Sand's fully developed youthful self-consciousness. At the
time she wrote _Indiana_, neither her feeling of her own superiority
nor her pessimism had reached this stage. That unpretending tale she
composed as the sympathising spokeswoman of the victims of existing
social conditions. In it she did not consciously attack any social
institution--not even marriage, as the opponent of which she was at
once stigmatised. She is evidently speaking the truth when (in the
preface of 1842) she declares that long after writing the original
preface to _Indiana_ under the influence of a remnant of respect for
existing social institutions, she continued her attempt to solve
the insoluble problem, to find a means of securing the happiness
and dignity of the individuals oppressed by society which should be
consonant with the existence of society. And she is also perfectly
truthful when, in a letter to Nisard (the last in _Lettres d'un
Voyageur_), she maintains that she has only attacked husbands, and
not marriage as a social institution. It was in the rôle of the
psychologist and story-teller, not in that of the reformer, that she at
first appeared before the public. In _Indiana_, as in _Valentine_, the
fervour, the poetical impulses, the enthusiastic passions and stormy
protests of youth, are the proper contents of the book; there is much
psychological and little personal history. Nevertheless there was in
the nature of the feelings described (feelings free from any trace of
viciousness, yet at variance with the decrees of society), and still
more in the reflections interspersed throughout the tale, something
which actually struck at the foundations of society. Therefore it was
not pure stupidity which found expression in the clumsy and violent
attacks made upon these books and their author by the partisans of the
existing order of things. Men had a foreboding that such feelings and
thoughts would sooner or later remould the laws governing society. They
have begun to do so, and their influence will increase day by day.
Their very idealism and enthusiasm makes these books essentially
revolutionary. For, as only the inner world exists for the authoress,
she allows it to develop freely without taking any thought of the
possibility of its development destroying the outer world; and,
depicting as she does, chiefly strong feelings, or rather only one,
infinitely varied feeling--love, she shows how its laws and the laws
of society perpetually come into conflict. Although she casts no doubt
upon the necessity and indispensability of marriage in our days, she
undermines the belief in its eternal continuance. She certainly at
first only attacks husbands, but an examination of her demand for an
ideal husband shows that it is a demand which cannot be satisfied under
existing conditions. In much the same manner, at a somewhat later
period, Kierkegaard undermines Christianity by making an extravagantly
ideal demand of the individual Christian.
The French Naturalistic School of forty years later, which has often
suffered from more or less groundless accusations of immorality, has,
in revenge, re-directed the accusation against these enthusiastic early
works of George Sand's. When Émile Zola made one of his periodical
protests against the idealistic novel, he never omitted to point out
the dangers for the family and for society which lie in this constant
aspiring beyond the bounds which restrain the individual, this
continual representation of a craving for greater intellectual and
emotional liberty. He prided himself on never representing unlawful
love in a beautiful or inviting light, but always bedraggled with
mire. He might have added that he and his successors in the school
of Balzac have never felt the need of a higher morality than that in
common vogue, and never hold out the prospect of social conditions
different from the present. They have imposed a crushing restriction
on themselves by limiting themselves to the representation of the
outward realities visible to their own eyes, and resolutely refusing
to draw any conclusions from their observations. Hence it is that
their boldness in representing social relations and situations which
literature hitherto had been chary of approaching, is equalled by
their weakness, nay insignificance, as thinkers and moralists. They
are constantly reduced to seek support from the indubitable harmony
of their morality with the universally accepted moral code; they
plume themselves on calling vice what other people call vice, and on
inspiring horror of that vice. They are not as that sinner George Sand.
But it is time to observe that it is just in this "morality" of theirs
that their literary weakness lies; and that the strength of George
Sand's works, with their far more idealistic and chaste delineations,
lies in their "immorality." In the apparently extremely audacious
works of the Realistic School, there is not an utterance to compare
in real audacity with that which George Sand has put into the mouth
of one of the chief characters in _Horace_, and which gives admirably
condensed expression to her ideas of morality in the matter of love:
"I believe that that love should be defined as a noble passion, which
elevates and strengthens us by beautiful feelings and thoughts, and
that love as an evil passion, which makes us selfish and cowardly and
gives us over to all the meannesses of blind instinct. Every passion,
therefore, is lawful or criminal according to its production of one
or the other of these results--it being a matter of no consequence
that official society, which is not the supreme court of justice of
humanity, sometimes legalises the evil, and condemns the beneficent
passion."[1]
In _Lélia_ and _Jacques_ (1833 and 1834) their authoress's Byronic
"Weltschmerz" and declamatory tendency reach high-water mark. In
_Lélia_ she represented her ideal great, unsensual, profoundly feeling
woman, and provided her with an opposite in her sister, Pulchérie, a
luxurious courtesan. Taking her own character and separating the two
sides of it, she formed Lélia after the Minerva-image, Pulchérie after
the Venus-image in her own soul; the result being, not unnaturally,
rather two symbolic personages than two human beings of flesh and
blood. In _Jacques_ she approached the problem of marriage from a
new side. In _Indiana_ she had portrayed a brutal, in _Valentine_
a refined, cold husband; but now she equipped the husband with the
qualities which in her eyes were the highest, and wrecked his happiness
upon the rock of his own elevated character, which his insignificant
young wife is not capable of understanding and continuing to love.
The authoress has endeavoured to impart additional force to her own
opinions by putting them into the mouth of the wronged husband. He
himself excuses his wife: "No human being can control love; and no
one is guilty because he loves or ceases to loves. What degrades the
woman is the lie; what constitutes the adultery is not the hour she
grants her lover, but the night she spends in her husband's arms
afterwards." Jacques feels it his duty to make way for his rival:
"Borel, in my place, would calmly have beaten his wife, and would
probably not have blushed to embrace that same night the woman degraded
alike by his blows and his kisses. There are men who, in the Oriental
fashion, calmly kill their faithless wives, because they regard them
as their lawful property. Others challenge their rival, kill him or
put him out of the way, and then beg the woman whom they declare they
love, for kisses and caresses, which she either refuses or gives in
despair. These are perfectly ordinary proceedings in conjugal love.
It seems to me that the love of swine is less vile and coarse than
such love." These truths, already regarded as elementary by people
of the highest culture, were in 1830 the most atrocious heresy. They
are the salt which has kept this youthful work from becoming stale
in spite of its antiquated plot and the diffuseness of the tedious
letter-style. The extravagance of Romanticism is most noticeable in the
final catastrophe. Jacques can think of no better means of liberating
Fernande than a suicide committed in a manner which to her will give
it the appearance of an accident. This transports us at once into the
region of unreality. But the unreality in this novel is, generally
speaking, more apparent than actual. It is easy for modern criticism
to point out the absence of any indications of locality, of real
occupations, &c, &c.; the personages in George Sand's early novels have
no occupation and no aim but to love. The reality of these books is a
spiritual reality, the reality of feeling. Even this, however, has been
disputed in our day. It is the fashion to regard emotions such as those
here described--this wild despair caused by social conditions, this
passionate, erotic tenderness, this pure, ardent friendship between man
and woman--as unnatural and unreal.[2] But we must remember that George
Sand's characters are not supposed to be average men and women. She
describes unusually gifted beings. Indeed, in these early works she has
done little else than delineate and explain her own emotional life. She
places her own character in every variety of outward circumstance, and
then, with a marvellous power of self-observation and unerring skill,
draws the natural psychological conclusions. It is interesting to
observe how the constant craving to find a masculine mind which is the
equal of her own, leads her to a kind of self-duplication in two sexes.
Ardently as she exalts love, strongly as she allows it to influence
the life of the great woman and of the great man, nevertheless both
of these, Jacques as well as Lélia, are inspired by a still stronger,
still more ideal feeling, that of friendship for a noble member of
the opposite sex, by whom they are understood. In comparison with
this profound mutual understanding, Lélia's love for Sténio, Jacques'
for Fernande, seem merely the weaknesses of these two great souls.
Lélia has an understanding friend and equal in Trenmor, Jacques in
Sylvia. Jacques would love Sylvia if she were not his half-sister, or
rather if he were not compelled to suspect that she is; but there is
a beauty in their mutual relationship, such as it is, to which merely
erotic relations could hardly attain. I remember distinctly what a
powerful impression this friendship between Jacques and Sylvia made
upon me when I read the book (probably in 1867) for the first time.
I saw plainly enough that Jacques is to a certain extent an unreal
character--and Sylvia also; for she is nothing more than Jacques'
understanding confidante; but the ideal current between them is real,
and it electrified me. Sylvia has her origin in the distressful cry
of the genius for its equal and mate; she is undoubtedly nothing more
than the expression of the urgent craving and demand of the great,
lonely heart--but what is poetry else than this? Imperfect as the novel
otherwise may be, the friendship between Jacques and Sylvia lends it an
atmosphere of real poetry; we feel, while reading of it, as if, above
the low-lying world of the passions, we caught a glimpse of a higher
one, where purer, yet still quite earthly beings, love and understand
each other.
Characters such as these illustrate the strong instinct of friendship
which George Sand possessed, and which was quite in the spirit of the
youthful Romanticism of the period. Her _Lettres d'un Voyageur_, which
follow the first group of novels, and begin immediately after the
separation from Alfred de Musset in Venice, give us an insight into her
friendships. These letters belong to the works in which she has most
directly revealed her own personal feelings, although they are written
with a reserve concerning actual events which makes them obscure to
the uninitiated. In them we follow her from the days of her life with
the handsome, stupid Italian, Dr. Pagello, for whom she gave up De
Musset, to the period of her devotion to Everard (Michel de Bourges),
her counsel in the divorce suit, who inspired her with the idea of the
pretty tale, _Simon_. Between these two extremes lie all the good,
cordial friendships, with François Rollinat, Jules Néraud, &c.--frank,
clever men, with whom she felt a constant desire to exchange ideas and
letters, with whom she studied, from whom she learned much, and whom,
in the Romantic spirit of good fellowship, she addressed with the
familiar "thou"; as also all the genuine artistic comradeships with
Franz Liszt, the Comtesse d'Agoult, Meyerbeer, and many others--the men
and women of genius of the day.
In no other of her works is she so eloquent, in none of the later ones
do her periods flow in such long, lyrically rhetorical waves. Nowhere
better than here can we study her personal style, as distinguished
from the dialogue of her novels. Sonority is its most marked feature.
It rolls onward in long, full rhythms, regular in its fall and rise,
melodious in joy, harmonious even in despair. The perfect balance
of George Sand's nature is mirrored in the perfect balance of her
sentences--never a shriek, a start, or a jar; a sweeping, broad-winged
flight--never a leap, nor a blow, nor a fall. The style is deficient
in melody, but abounds in rich harmonies; it lacks colour, but has all
the beauty that play of line can impart. She never produces her effect
by an unusual and audacious combination of words, seldom or never by
a fantastic simile. And there is just as little strong or glaring
colour in her pictures as there is jarring sound in her language.
She is romantic in her enthusiasms, in the way in which she yields
unresistingly to feelings which defy rules and regulations; but she is
severely classical in the regularity of her periods, in the inherent
beauty of her form, and the sobriety of her colouring.[3]
The letters from Venice, and still more those written after her return
to France, tell the understanding reader how humiliated George Sand
felt by the loss of De Musset's friendship, how sadly she missed it,
and what a fictitious account of the whole episode it was which she
gave to the public some twenty years later in _Elle et Lui_. There is
little doubt that there were times when she felt utterly overwhelmed
with longing, shame, and grief. In a letter to Rollinat written in
January 1835, there is a significant and, as far as I know, hitherto
unnoticed passage, which, beautiful in itself, also contains a
confession:
"Listen to a tale and weep! There was once an excellent artist, by name
Watelet, who etched better than any other man of his day. He loved
Marguerite Le Conte, and taught her to etch as well as himself. She
left her husband, her home, and everything she possessed, to live with
Watelet. The world condemned them, but, as they were poor and modest,
it forgot them. Forty years later an idle wanderer in the neighbourhood
of Paris found, in a little house called Moulin-Joli, an old man
who etched and an old woman whom he called his 'meunière,' and who
etched too, seated at the same table. The idler who made the wonderful
discovery told others, and the fashionable world flocked to see this
marvellous phenomenon--a love which had lasted for forty years; an
occupation which had been pursued all that time with the same industry
and the same devotion; two admirable twin talents. The thing made a
great sensation. Fortunately the couple died of old age a few days
later; the prying crowd would have spoilt everything. The last thing
they etched was a drawing of Moulin-Joli, Marguerite's house.... It
hangs in my room, above the portrait of a person whom no one here has
ever seen. For a whole year he who left me this portrait sat working
with me every night at a little table.... At daybreak each examined
the other's work and criticised it, and we supped at the same little
table, talking of art, of thoughts and feelings, and of the future.
The future has broken its promise to us. Pray for me, O Marguerite Le
Conte!"
This is perhaps the only occasion on which George Sand writes as if
she owed anything to Alfred de Musset in her capacity as authoress.[4]
I have already indicated the nature of his influence upon her. It
was purely critical; it sharpened her aesthetic sense. His artistic
method was powerless to affect her. To any direct influence upon her
style George Sand was completely unreceptive. Madame Girardin's witty
hit at her: "It is especially when the works of women authors are in
question that we may say with Buffon, 'Le style, c'est l'homme,'" is as
incorrect as it is amusing. For though it is, almost without exception,
the case that each of George Sand's most important novels bears marks
of the influence of a different man, yet the influence never extends
to the style. Again and again she makes herself the organ of another's
ideas, but never does she imitate another's style. Her talent was too
independent for this, and she was moreover too little of the artist.
She who was so silent, and, when she did speak, so laconic, was the
improvisatrice when she wrote. She let her pen run over the paper
without making preparatory studies, without thought of models, without
conscious artistic aim; she never treated a given theme, or elaborated
and completed a stylistic suggestion thrown out by another;--in short,
she submitted to none of the conditions upon which purely technical
progress in any art depends. In this she forms a marked contrast to
De Musset. He was, at first, inspired by a spirit of revolt against
conventions and rules in art, which was always incomprehensible to her.
He intentionally spoiled the rhymes in his first poems, to make sure of
annoying the Classicists. (In the first sketch of _L'Andalouse_, the
Marchioness was called Amaémoni, which in French rhymes correctly with
"bruni," but in the final version she received the name of Amaégui,
which hardly rhymes.) When his creative capacity was on the wane, he
calmly employed seven pages of Carmontelle's Proverbe, _Le Distrait_,
in the manufacture of his weak little comedy, _On ne saurait penser
à tout_. In his best period he was a master of the art of delicate
plagiarism. I may mention, as an example, that I have found in the
Prince de Ligne's works his stylistic model for the beautiful poem,
"Après une lecture," quoted in a previous chapter.[5] A similar
discovery in connection with George Sand would be an impossibility. She
is incapable of polishing the rough diamonds of others into brilliants
for the adornment of her own muse; she presents us that muse clad in
simple white, with a wild flower in her hair.
Nowhere is the peculiar beauty of George Sand's style more fascinating
than in the above quoted letter to Rollinat. The profound understanding
of nature acquired in her youth by this revolutionary woman of genius,
blends in marvellous unison with her restless, endless longing; and
through both the longing for nature and the longing for happiness runs
the undertone of a loving heart's lamentation over the disappointments
it has caused and the disappointments it has suffered. And in this
letter and the following one to Everard, we see how George Sand's
political, republican, faith springs from the ruins of her youthful,
erotic, castles-in-the-air. At first she is weak in the faith, too much
engrossed with herself. The poor poetess undoubtedly "feels ill at ease
under the umbrella of the monarchy," but all the same her thoughts are
more occupied with the forms of violet and jasmine petals than with the
institutions of society or forms of government. Yet one sees the spark
of enthusiasm gradually beginning to glow in her breast. She envies her
men friends their faith and the energy it begets, she, "who is only
a poet, only _une femmelette!_" They, in the event of a revolution,
would go forth to fight with the steadfast hope of winning liberty for
their fellow-men; she could do nothing but let herself be killed in
the hope of being useful for once, were it only by raising a barricade
the height of her dead body. But she concludes thus: "Can any of you
find a use for my present and future life? So long as I am employed in
the service of an idea, and not of a passion, I consent to be bound by
your laws. But, alas! I warn you that all I am fit for is to execute
an order bravely and faithfully. I can act, but not plan; for I know
nothing and am sure of nothing. I can only obey when I shut my eyes
and stop my ears so as to see nothing and hear nothing which may make
me doubtful; I can march with my friends like the dog who, seeing his
master sailing away, jumps into the water and swims after the ship
until he dies of fatigue. The ocean is wide, my friends, and I am weak.
I am fit for nothing but to be a soldier--and I am not five feet high!
"But what of that! Dwarf as I am, I am yours. I am yours because I love
you and esteem you. Truth dwells not among men; the kingdom of God is
not of this world. But as much as man can steal from divinity of the
ray of light which illumines the world, you, ye sons of Prometheus, ye
lovers of naked truth and inflexible justice, have stolen. Forward,
then! no matter what the shade of your banner, so long as your troops
are marching in the direction of the republican future! Forward,
in the name of Jesus, who has only one true apostle left on earth
(Lamennais); in the name of Washington and of Franklin, who were unable
to accomplish enough, and have left us their task to finish; in the
name of Saint-Simon, whose sons--God be with them!--are attempting to
solve the great and terrible social problem! Forward, so long as good
is done, and those who believe prove that they do so! I am only a poor
daughter of the regiment--take me with you!"
There are few such pure and heartfelt feminine outbursts of enthusiasm
in literature. German literature presents something in the nature of a
counterpart to it in Bettina's Goethes _Correspondence with a Child_
(published the same year), which is the outcome of an equally exuberant
enthusiasm; but in Bettina's case we do not receive the same impression
of sincerity, and the feeling expressed is in itself narrower--it is
purely aesthetic, the cult of one great genius. Bettina is a clever
woman; her style is brilliant, with polished, and here and there
pointed facets; but even in the feminine weakness of George Sand's
enthusiasm there is greatness.
It was some years before the feelings, the birth of which we have
witnessed, display themselves in her works. To these later works we
shall come presently. We must first consider for a moment the more
tranquil, purely poetic tales of the second period of her literary
career.