alluding, little or nothing was known in England (or, I presume, in
America) of the real life of Aurore Amandine Dupin, who had been pleased
to call herself George Sand. People knew, or had heard, that she had
separated from her husband, that she had written novels which
depreciated the sanctity of legal marriage, and that she sometimes wore
male costume in the streets. This was enough. In England, at least, we
were ready to infer any enormity regarding a woman who was unsound on
the legal marriage question, and who did not wear petticoats. What would
have been said had people then commonly known half the stories which
were circulated in Paris; half the extravagances into which a passionate
soul and the stimulus of sudden emancipation from restraint had hurried
the authoress of "Indiana" and "Lucrezia Floriani"? For it must be owned
that the life of that woman was, in its earlier years, a strange and
wild phenomenon, hardly to be comprehended perhaps by American or
English natures. I have heard George Sand bitterly arraigned even by
persons who protested that they were at one with her as regards the
early sentiments which used to excite such odium. I have heard her
described by such as a sort of Lamia of literature and passion; a
creature who could seize some noble, generous, youthful heart, drain it
of its love, its aspirations, its profoundest emotions, and then fling
it, squeezed and lifeless, away. I have heard it declared that George
Sand made "copy" of the fierce and passionate loves which she knew so
well how to awaken and to foster; that she distilled the life-blood of
youth to obtain the mixture out of which she derived her inspiration.
The charge so commonly (I think unjustly) made against Goethe, that he
played with the girlish love of Bettina and of others in order to obtain
a subject for literary dissection, is vehemently and deliberately urged
in an aggravated form, in many aggravated forms, against George Sand.
Where, such accusers ask, is that young poet, endowed with a lyrical
genius rare indeed in the France of later days, that young poet whose
imagination was at once so daring and so subtle; who might have been
Beranger and Heine in one, and have risen to an atmosphere in which
neither Beranger nor Heine ever floated? Where is he, and what evil
influence was it which sapped the strength of his nature, corrupted his
genius, and prepared for him a premature and shameful grave? Where is
that young musician, whose pure, tender, and lofty strains sound sweetly
and sadly in the ears, as the very hymn and music of the
Might-Have-Been--where is he now, and what was the seductive power which
made a plaything of him and then flung him away? Here and there some man
of stronger mould is pointed out as one who was at the first conquered,
and then deceived and trifled with, but who ordered his stout heart to
bear, and rose superior to the hour, and lived to retrieve his nature
and make himself a name of respect; but the others, of more sensitive
and perhaps finer organizations, are only the more to be pitied because
they were so terribly in earnest. Seldom, even in the literary history
of modern France, has there been a more strange and shocking episode
than the publication by George Sand of the little book called "Elle et
Lui," and the rejoinder to it by Paul de Musset called "Lui et Elle." I
can hardly be accused of straying into the regions of private scandal
when I speak of two books which had a wide circulation, are still being
read, and may be had, I presume, in any New York bookstore where French
literature is sold. The former of the two books, "She and He," was a
story, or something which purported to be a story, by George Sand,
telling of two ill-assorted beings whom fate had thrown together for a
while, and of whom the woman was all tenderness, love, patience, the man
all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and eccentricity. The point of
the whole business was to show how sublimely the woman suffered, and how
wantonly the man flung happiness away. Had it been merely a piece of
fiction, it must have been regarded by any healthy mind as a morbid,
unwholesome, disagreeable production; a sin of the highest aesthetic kind
against true art, which must always, even in its pathos and its tragedy,
leave on the mind exalted and delightful impressions. But every one in
Paris at once hailed the story as a chapter of autobiography, as the
author's vindication of one episode in her own career--a vindication at
the expense of a man who had gone down, ruined and lost, to an early
grave. Therefore the brother of the dead man flung into literature a
little book called "He and She," in which a story, substantially the
same in its outlines, is so told as exactly to reverse the conditions
under which the verdict of public opinion was sought. Very curious
indeed was the manner in which the same substance of facts was made to
present the two principal figures with complexions and characters so
strangely altered. In the woman's book, the woman was made the patient,
loving, suffering victim; in the man's reply, this same woman was
depicted as the most utterly selfish and depraved creature the human
imagination could conceive. Even if one had no other means whatever of
forming an estimate of the character of George Sand, it would be hardly
possible to accept as her likeness the hideous picture sketched by Paul
de Musset. No woman, I am glad to believe, ever existed in real life so
utterly selfish, base, and wicked as his bitter pen has drawn. I must
say that the thing is very cleverly done. The picture is at least
consistent with itself. As a character in romance it might be pronounced
original, bold, brilliant, and, in an artistic sense, quite natural.
There is something thoroughly French in the easy and delicate force of
the final touch with which de Musset dismisses his hideous subject.
Having sketched this woman in tints that seem to flame across the eyes
of the reader; having described with wonderful realism and power her
affectation, her deceit, her reckless caprices, her base and cruel
coquetries, her devouring wantonness, her soul-destroying arts, her
unutterable selfishness and egotism; having, to use a vulgar phrase,
"turned her inside out," and told her story backwards, the author calmly
explains that the hero of the narrative in his dying hour called his
brother to his bedside, and enjoined him, if occasion should ever arise,
if the partner of his sin should ever calumniate him in his grave, to
vindicate his memory and avenge the treason practised upon him. "Of
course," adds the narrator, "the brother made the promise--and I have
since heard that he has kept his word." I can hardly hope to convey to
the reader any adequate idea of the effect produced on the mind by these
few simple words of compressed, whispered hatred and triumph, closing a
philippic, or a revelation, or a libel of such extraordinary bitterness
and ferocity. The whole episode is, I believe and earnestly hope,
without precedent or imitation in literary controversy. Never, that I
know of, has a living woman been publicly exhibited to the world in a
portraiture so hideous as that which Paul de Musset drew of George Sand.
Never, that I know of, has any woman gone so near to deserving and
justifying such a measure of retaliation.
For if it be assumed--and I suppose it never has been disputed--that in
writing "Elle et Lui" George Sand meant to describe herself and Alfred
de Musset, it is hard to conceive of any sin against taste and feeling,
against art and morals, more flagrant than such a publication. The
practice, to which French writers are so much addicted, of making "copy"
of the private lives, characters, and relationships of themselves and
their friends, seems to me in all cases utterly detestable. Lamartine's
sins of this kind were grievous and glaring; but were they red as
scarlet, they would seem whiter than snow when compared with the lurid
monstrosity of George Sand's assault on the memory of the dead poet who
was once her favorite. The whole affair indeed is so unlike anything
which could occur in America or in England, that we can hardly find any
canons by which to try it, or any standard of punishment by which to
regulate its censure. I allude to it now because it is the only
substantial evidence I know of which does fairly seem to justify the
worst of the accusations brought against George Sand; and I do not think
it right, when writing for grown men and women, who are supposed to have
sense and judgment, to affect not to know that such accusations are
made, or to pretend to think that it would be proper not to allude to
them. They have been put forward, replied to, urged again, made the
theme of all manner of controversy in scores of French and in some
English publications. Pray let it be distinctly understood that I am not
entering into any criticism of the morality of any part of George Sand's
private life. With that we have nothing here to do. I am now dealing
with the question, fairly belonging to public controversy, whether the
great artist did not deliberately deal with human hearts as the painter
of old is said to have done with a purchased slave--inflicting torture
in order the better to learn how to depict the struggles and contortions
of mortal agony. In answer to such a question I can only point to
"Lucrezia Floriani" and to "Elle et Lui," and say that unless the
universal opinion of qualified critics be wrong these books, and others
too, owe their piquancy and their dramatic force to the anatomization of
dead passions and discarded lovers. We have all laughed over the
pedantic surgeon in Moliere's "Malade Imaginaire," who invites his
_fiancee_ as a delightful treat to see him dissect the body of a woman.
I am afraid that George Sand did sometimes invite an admiring public to
an exhibition yet more ghastly and revolting--the dissection of the
heart of a dead lover.
But in truth we shall never judge George Sand and her writings at all if
we insist on criticising them from any point of view set up by the
proprieties or even the moralities of Old England or New England. When
the passionate young woman, in whose veins ran the wild blood of Marshal
Saxe, found herself surrendered by legality and prescription to a
marriage bond against which her soul revolted, society seemed for her to
have resolved itself into its original elements. Its conventionalities
and traditions contained nothing which she held herself bound to
respect. The world was not her friend, nor the world's law. By one great
decisive step she sundered herself forever from the bonds of what we
call society. She had shaken the dust of convention from her feet; the
world was all before her where to choose. No creature on earth is so
absolutely free as the Frenchwoman who has broken with society. There,
then, stood this daring young woman, on the threshold of a new, fresh,
and illimitable world; a young woman gifted with genius such as our
later years have rarely seen, and blessed or cursed with a nature so
strangely uniting the most characteristic qualities of man and woman as
to be in itself quite unparalleled and unique. Just think of it--try to
think of it! Society and the world had no longer any laws which she
recognized. Nothing was sacred; nothing was settled. She had to evolve
from her own heart and brain her own law of life. What wonder if she
made some sad mistakes? Nay, is it not rather a theme for wonder and
admiration that she did somehow come right at last? I know of no one who
seems to me to have been open at once to the temptations of woman's
nature and man's nature except this George Sand. Her soul, her brain,
her style may be described, from one point of view, as exuberantly and
splendidly feminine; yet no other woman has ever shown the same power of
understanding and entering into the nature of a man. If Balzac is the
only man who has ever thoroughly mastered the mysteries of a woman's
heart, George Sand is the only woman, so far as I know, who has ever
shown that she could feel as a man can feel. I have read stray passages
in her novels which I would confidently submit to the criticism of any
intelligent men unacquainted with the text, convinced that they would
declare that only a man could have thus analyzed the emotions of
manhood. I have in my mind just now especially a passage in the novel
"Piccinino" which, were the authorship unknown, would, I am satisfied,
secure the decision of a jury of literary experts that the author must
be a man. Now this gift of entire appreciation of the feelings of a
different sex or race is, I take it, one of the rarest and highest
dramatic qualities. Especially is it difficult for a woman, as our
social life goes, to enter into the feelings of a man. While men and
women alike admit the accuracy of certain pictures of women drawn by
such artists as Cervantes, Moliere, Balzac, and Thackeray, there are few
women--indeed, perhaps there are no women but one--by whom a man has
been so painted as to challenge and compel the recognition and
acknowledgment of men. In THE GALAXY some months ago I wrote of a great
Englishwoman, the authoress of "Romola," and I expressed my conviction
that on the whole she is entitled to higher rank as a novelist than even
the authoress of "Consuelo." Many, very many men and women, for whose
judgment I have the highest respect, differed from me in this opinion. I
still hold it, nevertheless; but I freely admit that George Eliot has
nothing like the dramatic insight which enables George Sand to enter
into the feelings and the experiences of a man. I go so far as to say
that, having some knowledge of the literature of fiction in most
countries, I am not aware of the existence of any woman but this one who
could draw a real, living, struggling, passion-tortured man. All other
novelists of George Sand's sex--even including Charlotte Bronte--draw
only what I may call "women's men." If ever the two natures could be
united in one form, if ever a single human being could have the soul of
man and the soul of woman at once, George Sand might be described as
that physical and psychological phenomenon. Now the point to which I
wish to direct attention is the peculiarity of the temptation to which a
nature such as this was necessarily exposed at every turn when, free of
all restraint and a rebel against all conventionality, it confronted the
world and the world's law, and stood up, itself alone, against the
domination of custom and the majesty of tradition. I claim, then, that
when we have taken all these considerations into account, we are bound
to admit that Aurora Dudevant deserves the generous recognition of the
world for the use which she made of her splendid gifts. Her influence on
French literature has been on the whole a purifying and strengthening
power. The cynicism, the recklessness, the wanton, licentious disregard
of any manner of principle, the debasing parade of disbelief in any
higher purpose or nobler restraint, which are the shame and curse of
modern French fiction, find no sanction in the pages of George Sand. I
remember no passage in her works which gives the slightest encouragement
to the "nothing new, and nothing true, and it don't signify" code of
ethics which has been so much in fashion of late years. I find nothing
in George Sand which does not do homage to the existence of a principle
and a law in everything. This daring woman, who broke with society so
early and so conspicuously, has always insisted, through every
illustration, character, and catastrophe in her books, that the one only
reality, the one only thing that can endure, is the rule of right and of
virtue. Nor has she ever, that I can recollect, fallen into the
enfeebling and sentimental theory so commonly expressed in the works of
Victor Hugo, that the vague abstraction society is always to bear the
blame of the faults committed by the individual man or woman. Of all
persons in the world Aurora Dudevant might be supposed most likely to
adopt this easy and complacent theory as her guiding principle. She had
every excuse, every reason for endeavoring to preach up the doctrine
that our errors are society's and our virtues our own. But I am not
aware that she ever taught any lesson save the lesson that men and women
must endeavor to be heroes and heroines for themselves, heroes and
heroines though all the world else were craven and weak and selfish and
unprincipled. Even that wretched and lamentable "Elle et Lui" affair,
utterly inexcusable as it is when we read between the lines its secret
history, has at least the merit of being an earnest and powerful protest
against the egotistical and debasing indulgence of moral weaknesses and
eccentricities which mean and vulgar minds are apt to regard as the
privilege of genius. "Stand upon your own ground; be your own ruler;
look to yourself, not to your stars, for your failure or success; always
make your standard a lofty ideal, and try persistently to reach it,
though all the temptations of earth and all the power of darkness strive
against you"--this and nothing else, if I have read her books rightly,
is the moral taught by George Sand. She may be wrong in her principle
sometimes, but at least she always has a principle. She has a profound
and generous faith in the possibilities of human nature; in the capacity
of man's heart for purity, self-sacrifice, and self-redemption. Indeed,
so far is she from holding counsel with wilful weakness or sin, that I
think she sometimes falls into the noble error of painting her heroes as
too glorious in their triumph over temptation, in their subjugation of
every passion and interest to the dictates of duty and of honor. Take,
for instance, that extraordinary book which has just been given to the
American public in Miss Virginia Vaughan's excellent translation,
"Mauprat." If I understand that magnificent romance at all, its purport
is to prove that no human nature is ever plunged into temptation beyond
its own strength to resist, provided that it really wills resistance;
that no character is irretrievable, no error inexpiable, where there is
sincere resolve to expiate and longing desire to retrieve. Take again
that exquisite little story, "La Derniere Aldini"; I do not know where
one could find a finer illustration of the entire sacrifice of man's
natural impulse, passion, interest, to what might almost be called an
abstract idea of honor and principle. I have never read this little
story without wondering how many men one ever has known who, placed in
the same situation as that of Nello, the hero, would have done the same
thing; and yet so simply and naturally are the characters wrought out
and the incidents described, that the idea of pompous, dramatic
self-sacrifice never enters the mind of the reader, and it seems to him
that Nello could not do otherwise than as he is doing. I speak of these
two stories particularly, because in both of them there is a good deal
of the world and the flesh; that is, both are stories of strong human
passion and temptation. Many of George Sand's novels, the shorter ones
especially, are as absolutely pure in moral tone, as entirely free from
even a taint or suggestion of impurity, as they are perfect in style.
Now, if we cannot help knowing that much of this great woman's life was
far from being irreproachable, are we not bound to give her all the
fuller credit because her genius at least kept so far the whiteness of
its soul? Revolutions are not to be made with rose water; you cannot
have omelettes without breaking of eggs. I am afraid that great social
revolutionists are not often creatures of the most pure and perfect
nature. It is not to patient Griselda you must look for any protest
against even the uttermost tyranny of social conventions. One thing I
think may at least be admitted as part of George Sand's
vindication--that the marriage system in France is the most debased and
debasing institution existing in civilized society, now that the buying
and selling of slaves has ceased to be a tolerated system. I hold that
the most ardent advocates of the irrevocable endurance of the marriage
bond are bound by their very principles to admit that in protesting
against the so-called marriage system of France George Sand stood on the
side of purity and right. Assuredly she often went into extravagances in
the other direction. It seems to be the fate of all French reformers to
rush suddenly to extremes; and we must remember that George Sand was not
a Bristol Quakeress or a Boston transcendentalist, but a passionate
Frenchwoman, the descendant of one of the maddest votaries of love and
war who ever stormed across the stage of European history.
Regarding George Sand then as an influence in literature and on society,
I claim for her at least four great and special merits. First, she
insisted on calling public attention to the true principle of marriage;
that is to say, she put the question as it had not been put before. Of
course, the fundamental principle she would have enforced is always
being urged more or less feebly, more or less sincerely; but she made it
her own question, and illuminated it by the fervid, fierce rays of her
genius and her passion. Secondly, her works are an exposition of the
tremendous reality of the feelings which people who call themselves
practical are apt to regard with indifference or contempt as mere
sentiments. In the long run the passions decide the life-question one
way or the other. They are the tide which, as you know or do not know
how to use it, will either turn your mill and float your boat, or drown
your fields and sweep away your dwellings. Life and society receive no
impulse and no direction from the influences out of which the novels of
Dickens or even of Thackeray are made up. These are but pleasant or
tender toying with the playthings and puppets of existence. George Sand
constrains us to look at the realities through the medium of her
fiction. Thirdly, she insists that man can and shall make his own
career; not whine to the stars and rail out against the powers above,
when he has weakly or wantonly marred his own destiny. Fourthly--and
this ought not to be considered her least service to the literature of
her country--she has tried to teach people to look at nature with their
own eyes, and to invite the true love of her to flow into their hearts.
The great service which Ruskin, with all his eccentricities and
extravagances, has rendered to English-speaking peoples by teaching them
to use their own eyes when they look at clouds, and waters, and grasses,
and hills, George Sand has rendered to France.
I hold that these are virtues and services which ought to outweigh even
very grave personal and artistic errors. We often hear that this or that
great poet or romancist has painted men as they are; this other as they
ought to be. I think George Sand paints men as they are, and also not
merely as they ought to be, but as they can be. The sum of the lesson
taught by her books is one of confidence in man's possibilities, and
hope in his steady progress. At the same time she is entirely practical
in her faith and her aspirations. She never expects that the trees are
to grow up into the heavens, that men and women are to be other than men
and women. She does not want them to be other; she finds the springs and
sources of their social regeneration in the fact that they are just what
they are, to begin with. I am afraid some of the ladies who seem to base
their scheme of woman's emancipation and equality on the assumption
that, by some development of time or process of schooling, a condition
of things is to be brought about where difference of sex is no longer to
be a disturbing power, will find small comfort or encouragement in the
writings of George Sand. She deals in realities altogether; the
realities of life, even when they are such as to shallow minds may seem
mere sentiments and ecstasies; the realities of society, of suffering,
of passion, of inanimate nature. There is in her nothing unmeaning,
nothing untrue; there is in her much error, doubtless, but no sham.
I believe George Sand is growing into a quiet and beautiful old age.
After a life of storm and stress, a life which, metaphorically at least,
was "worn by war and passion," her closing years seem likely to be
gilded with the calm glory of an autumnal sunset. One is glad to think
of her thus happy and peaceful, accepting so tranquilly the reality of
old age, still laboring with her unwearied pen, still delighting in
books, and landscapes, and friends, and work. The world can well afford
to forget as soon as possible her literary and other errors. Of the vast
mass of romances, stories, plays, sketches, criticisms, pamphlets,
political articles, even, it is said, ministerial manifestoes of
republican days, which she poured out, only a few comparatively will
perhaps be always treasured by posterity; but these will be enough to
secure her a classic place. And she will not be remembered by her
writings alone. Hers is probably the most powerful individuality
displayed by any modern Frenchwoman. The influence of Madame Roland was
but a glittering unreality, that of Madame de Stael only a boudoir and
coterie success, when compared with the power exercised over literature,
human feeling, and social law, by the energy, the courage, the genius,
even the very errors and extravagances of George Sand.
EDWARD BULWER, LORD LYTTON.
Ten years ago an important political question was agitating the English
House of Commons and the English public. It was the old question of
Parliamentary Reform in a new shape. Thirty years before Lord John
Russell had pleaded the right of the middle classes to have a voice in
the election of their Parliamentary representatives; this time he was
asserting a similar right for the working population. Then he had to
contend against the opposition of the aristocracy only; this time he had
to fight against the combined antagonism of the aristocracy and the
middle classes, the latter having made common cause with their old
enemies to preserve a monopoly of their new privileges. The debate in
the House of Commons on the proposed Reform Bill of 1860 was long and
bitter. When it was reaching its height, a speaker arose on the Tory
side of the House whose appearance on the scene of the debate lent a new
and piquant interest to the night's discussion. He sat on the front
bench of the Opposition, quite near to Disraeli himself. The moment he
rose, every head craned forward to see him; the moment he began to
speak, every ear was strained with keen curiosity to hear him. The ears
were for a while sorely tried and perplexed. What was he saying--nay,
what language was he speaking? What extraordinary, indescribable sounds
were those which were heard issuing from his lips? Were they articulate
sounds at all? For some minutes certainly those who like myself had
never heard the speaker before were utterly bewildered. We could only
hear what seemed to us an incoherent, inarticulate guttural jabber, like
the efforts at speech of somebody with a mutilated tongue or excided
palate. Anything like it I never heard before or since; for no
subsequent listening to the same speaker ever produced nearly the same
impression: either he had greatly improved in elocution, or his listener
had grown used to him. But the night of this famous speech, nothing
could have exceeded the extraordinary nature of the sensations produced
on those who heard the orator for the first time. After a while we began
to detect articulate sounds; then we guessed at and recognized words;
then whole sentences began to shape themselves out of the guttural fag;
and at last we grew to understand that, with an elocution the most
defective and abominable ever possessed by mortal orator, this Tory
speaker was really delivering a speech of astonishing brilliancy,
ingenuity, and power. The sentences had a magnificent, almost majestic
rotundity, energy, and power; they reminded one of something cut out of
solid and glittering marble, at once so dazzling and so impressive. The
speech was from first to last an aristocratic argument against the
fitness of the working man to be anything but a political serf. In the
true fashion of the aristocrat, the speaker was for patronizing the
working man in every possible way; behaving to him as a kind and
friendly master; seeing that he had a decent home to live in and coals
and blankets in winter; but all the time insisting that the ruin of
England must follow any successful attempt to place political power in
the hands of "poverty and passion." The speech overflowed with
illustration, ingenious analogy, felicitous quotation, brilliant
epigram, and political paradoxes that were made to sound wondrously like
maxims of wisdom. Despite all its hideous defects of delivery, this
speech was, beyond the most distant comparison, the finest delivered on
the Tory side during the whole of that long and memorable debate. For a
time one was almost cheated into the belief that that elaborate and
splendid diction, now so stately and now so sparkling, was genuine
eloquence. Yet to the last the listener was frequently baffled by some
uncouth, semi-articulate, hardly intelligible sound. "What on earth does
he mean," asked a puzzled and indeed agonized reporter of some laboring
brother, "by talking so often about the political authority of Joe
Miller?" Careful inquiry elicited the fact that the name of the
political authority to which the orator had been alluding was John Mill.
Fortunately for his readers and his fame, the speaker had taken good
care to write out his oration and send the manuscript to the newspapers.
Now this inarticulate orator, this Demosthenes without the
pebble-training, was, as my readers have already guessed, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, then a baronet and a member of the House of Commons, now
a peer. Undoubtedly he succeeded, by this and one or two other speeches,
in securing for himself a place among the few great Parliamentary
debaters of the day. Despite of physical defects which would have
discouraged almost any other man from entering into public life at all,
he had succeeded in winning a reputation as a great speaker in a debate
where Palmerston, Gladstone, Bright, and Disraeli were champions. So
deaf that he could not hear the arguments of his opponents, so defective
in utterance as to become often almost unintelligible, he actually made
the House of Commons doubt for a while whether a new great orator had
not come among them. It was not great oratory after all; it was not true
oratory of any kind; but it was a splendid imitation of the real
thing--the finest electroplate anywhere to be found. "If it is not Bran,
it is Bran's brother," says a Scottish proverb. If this speech of
Bulwer-Lytton's was not true oratory, it was oratory's illegitimate
brother.