Napoleon in exile declared that were he again on the throne he should
make a point of spending two hours a day in conversation with women,
from whom there was much to be learnt. He had, no doubt, several types
of women in mind, but it is more than probable that the banishment of
Madame de Stael rose before him as one of the mistakes in his career. It
was not that he showed lack of judgment merely by the persecution of a
rare talent, but by failing to see that the rare talent was pointing out
truths very valuable to his own safety. This is what happened in France
when George Sand--the greatest woman writer the world has known, or is
ever likely to know--was attacked by the orthodox critics of her time.
They feared her warnings; they detested her sincerity--a sincerity
displayed as much in her life as in her works (the hypocrite’s Paradise
was precisely her idea of Hell); they resented bitterly an independence
of spirit which in a man would have been in the highest degree
distinguished, which remained, under every test, untamable. With a kind
of _bonhomie_ which one can only compare with Fielding’s, with a passion
as great as Montaigne’s for acknowledging the truths of experience,
with an absence of self-consciousness truly amazing in the artistic
temperament of either sex, she wrote exactly as she thought, saw and
felt. Humour was not her strong point. She had an exultant joy in
living, but laughter, whether genial or sardonic, is not in her work.
Irony she seldom, if ever, employed; satire she never attempted. It was
on the maternal, the sympathetic side that her femininity, and therefore
her creative genius, was most strongly developed. She was masculine only
in the deliberate libertinism of certain episodes in her own life. This
was a characteristic--one on no account to be overlooked or denied or
disguised, but it was not her character. The character was womanly,
tender, exquisitely patient and good-natured. She would take cross
humanity in her arms, and carry it out into the sunshine of the fields;
she would show it flowers and birds, sing songs to it, tell it stories,
recall its original beauty. Even in her moods of depression and revolt,
one recognises the fatigue of the strong. It is never for a moment the
lassitude of the feeble, the weary spite of a sick and ill-used soul. As
she was free from personal vanity, she was also free from hysteria. On
marriage--the one subject which drove her to a certain though always
disciplined violence--she clearly felt more for others than they
felt for themselves; and in observing certain households and life
partnerships, she may have been afflicted with a dismay which the
unreflecting sufferers did not share. No writer who was carried away
by egoistic anger or disappointment could have told these stories of
unhappiness, infidelity, and luckless love with such dispassionate
lucidity.
With the artist’s dislike of all that is positive and arbitrary, she
was, nevertheless, subject rather to her intellect than her emotions.
An insult to her intelligence was the one thing she found it hard
to pardon, and she allowed no external interference to disturb her
relations with her own reasoning faculty. She followed caprices, no
doubt, but she was never under any apprehension with regard to their
true nature, displaying in this respect a detachment which is usually
considered exclusively virile. _Elle et Lui_, which, perhaps because
it is short and associated with actual facts, is the most frequently
discussed in general conversation on her work, remains probably the
sanest account of a sentimental experiment which was ever written. How
far it may have seemed accurate to De Musset is not to the point.
Her version of her grievance is at least convincing. Without fear and
without hope, she makes her statement, and it stands, therefore, unique
of its kind among indictments. It has been said that her fault was an
excess of emotionalism; that is to say, she attached too much importance
to mere feeling and described it, in French of marvellous ease and
beauty, with a good deal of something else which one can almost condemn
as the high-flown. Not that the high-flown is of necessity unnatural,
but it is misleading; it places the passing mood, the lyrical note,
dependent on so many accidents, above the essential temperament and the
dominant chord which depend on life only. Where she falls short of the
very greatest masters is in this all but deliberate confusion of things
which must change or can be changed with things which are unchangeable,
incurable, and permanent. Shakespeare, it is true, makes all his
villains talk poetry, but it is the poetry which a villain, were he a
poet, would inevitably write. George Sand glorifies every mind with her
own peculiar fire and tears. The fire is, fortunately, so much stronger
than the tears that her passion never degenerates into the maudlin. All
the same, she makes too universal a use of her own strongest gifts,
and this is why she cannot be said to excel as a portrait painter. One
merit, however, is certain: if her earliest writings were dangerous,
it was because of her wonderful power of idealization, not because she
filled her pages with the revolting and epicene sensuality of the new
Italian, French, and English schools. Intellectual viciousness was
not her failing, and she never made the modern mistake of confusing
indecency with vigour. She loved nature, air, and light too well and
too truly to go very far wrong in her imaginations. It may indeed be
impossible for many of us to accept all her social and political views;
they have no bearing, fortunately, on the quality of her literary art;
they have to be considered under a different aspect. In politics, her
judgment, as displayed in the letters to Mazzini, was profound. Her
correspondence with Flaubert shows us a capacity for stanch, unblemished
friendship unequalled, probably, in the biographies, whether published
or unpublished, of the remarkable.
With regard to her impiety--for such it should be called--it did not
arise from arrogance, nor was it based in any way upon the higher
learning of her period. Simply she did not possess the religious
instinct. She understood it sympathetically--in _Spiridion_, for
instance, she describes an ascetic nature as it has never been done in
any other work of fiction. Newman himself has not written passages of
deeper or purer mysticism, of more sincere spirituality. Balzac, in
_Seraphita_, attempted something of the kind, but the result was never
more than a _tour de force_. He could invent, he could describe, but
George Sand felt; and as she felt, she composed, living with and
loving with an understanding love all her creations. But it has to be
remembered always that she repudiated all religious restraint, that she
believed in the human heart, that she acknowledged no higher law than
its own impulses, that she saw love where others see only a cruel
struggle for existence, that she found beauty where ordinary visions can
detect little besides a selfishness worse than brutal and a squalor more
pitiful than death. Everywhere she insists upon the purifying influence
of affection, no matter how degraded in its circumstances or how illegal
in its manifestation. No writer--not excepting the Brontes--has shown
a deeper sympathy with uncommon temperaments, misunderstood aims,
consciences with flickering lights, the discontented, the abnormal, or
the unhappy. The great modern specialist for nervous diseases has not
improved on her analysis of the neuropathic and hysterical. There is
scarcely a novel of hers in which some character does not appear who
is, in the usual phrase, out of the common run. Yet, with this perfect
understanding of the exceptional case, she never permits any science of
cause and effect to obscure the rules and principles which in the main
control life for the majority. It was, no doubt, this balance which made
her a popular writer, even while she never ceased to keep in touch with
the most acute minds of France.
She possessed, in addition to creative genius of an order especially
individual and charming, a capacity for the invention of ideas. There
are in many of her chapters more ideas, more suggestions than one
would find in a whole volume of Flaubert. It is not possible that these
surprising, admirable, and usually sound thoughts were the result of
long hours of reflection. They belonged to her nature and a quality of
judgment which, even in her most extravagant romances, is never for a
moment swayed from that sane impartiality described by the unobservant
as common sense.
Her fairness to women was not the least astounding of her gifts. She is
kind to the beautiful, the yielding, above all to the very young, and in
none of her stories has she introduced any violently disagreeable female
characters. Her villains are mostly men, and even these she invests
with a picturesque fatality which drives them to errors, crimes,
and scoundrelism with a certain plaintive, if relentless, grace. The
inconstant lover is invariably pursued by the furies of remorse; the
brutal has always some mitigating influence in his career; the libertine
retains through many vicissitudes a seraphic love for some faithful
Solveig.
Humanity meant far more to her than art: she began her literary career
by describing facts as she knew them: critics drove her to examine their
causes, and so she gradually changed from the chronicler with strong
sympathies to the interpreter with a reasoned philosophy. She discovered
that a great deal of the suffering in this world is due not so much to
original sin, but to a kind of original stupidity, an unimaginative,
stubborn stupidity. People were dishonest because they believed,
wrongly, that dishonesty was somehow successful. They were cruel because
they supposed that repulsive exhibitions of power inspired a prolonged
fear. They were treacherous because they had never been taught the
greater strength of candour. George Sand tried to point out the
advantage of plain dealing, and the natural goodness of mankind
when uncorrupted by a false education. She loved the wayward and
the desolate: pretentiousness in any disguise was the one thing she
suspected and could not tolerate. It may be questioned whether she ever
deceived herself; but it must be said, that on the whole she flattered
weakness--and excused, by enchanting eloquence, much which cannot always
be justified merely on the ground that it is explicable. But to explain
was something--all but everything at the time of her appearance in
literature. Every novel she wrote made for charity--for a better
acquaintance with our neighbour’s woes and our own egoism. Such an
attitude of mind is only possible to an absolutely frank, even Arcadian,
nature. She did what she wished to do: she said what she had to say, not
because she wanted to provoke excitement or astonish the multitude, but
because she had succeeded eminently in leading her own life according to
her own lights. The terror of appearing inconsistent excited her scorn.
Appearances never troubled that unashamed soul. This is the magic, the
peculiar fascination of her books. We find ourselves in the presence
of a freshness, a primeval vigour which produces actually the effect of
seeing new scenes, of facing a fresh climate. Her love of the soil,
of flowers, and the sky, for whatever was young and unspoilt, seems
to animate every page--even in her passages of rhetorical sentiment we
never suspect the burning pastille, the gauze tea-gown, or the depressed
pink light. Rhetoric it may be, but it is the rhetoric of the sea and
the wheat field. It can be spoken in the open air and read by the light
of day.
George Sand never confined herself to any especial manner in her
literary work. Her spontaneity of feeling and the actual fecundity, as
it were, of her imaginative gift, could not be restrained, concentrated,
and formally arranged as it was in the case of the two first masters of
modern French novel-writing. Her work in this respect may be compared to
a gold mine, while theirs is rather the goldsmith’s craft. It must not
be supposed, however, that she was a writer without very strong views
with regard to the construction of a plot and the development of
character. Her literary essays and reviews show a knowledge of technique
which could be accepted at any time as a text-book for the critics and
the criticised. She knew exactly how artistic effects were obtained, how
and why certain things were done, why realism, so-called, could never be
anything but caricature, and why over-elaboration of small matters can
never be otherwise than disproportionate. Nothing could be more just
than her saying about Balzac that he was such a logician that he
invented things more truthful than the truth itself. No one knew better
than she that the truth, as it is commonly understood, does not exist;
that it cannot be logical because of its mystery; and that it is
the knowledge of its contradictions which shows the real expert in
psychology.
Three of her stories--_La Petite Fadette_, _La Mare au Diable_, and
_Les Maitres Mosaistes_--are as neat in their workmanship as a Dutch
painting. Her brilliant powers of analysis, the intellectual atmosphere
with which she surrounds the more complex characters in her longer
romances, are entirely put aside, and we are given instead a series
of pictures and dialogues in what has been called the purely objective
style; so pure in its objectivity and detachment that it would be hard
for any one to decide from internal evidence that they were in reality
her own composition.
To those who seek for proportion and form there is, without doubt, much
that is unsymmetrical in her designs. Interesting she always is, but to
the trained eye scenes of minor importance are, strictly speaking, too
long: descriptions in musical language sometimes distract the reader
from the progress of the story. But this arose from her own joy in
writing: much as she valued proportion, she liked expressing her mind
better, not out of conceit or self-importance, but as the birds, whom
she loved so well, sing.
Good nature is what we need above all in reading George Sand. It is
there--infectious enough in her own pages, and with it the courage which
can come only from a heart at peace with itself. This is why neither
fashion nor new nor old criticism can affect the title of George Sand
among the greatest influences of the last century and the present one.
Much that she has said still seems untried and unexpected. Writers so
opposite as Ibsen and Anatole France have expanded her themes. She is
quoted unconsciously to-day by hundreds who are ignorant of their real
source of inspiration. No woman ever wrote with such force before, and
no woman since has even approached her supreme accomplishments.