MENTAL DEVELOPMENT.
The period immediately following George Sand's return from Italy in
August 1834, was a time of transition, both in her outer and inner life.
If undistinguished by the production of any novel calculated to create a
fresh sensation, it shows no abatement of literary activity. This, as we
have seen, had become to her a necessity of nature. Neither vicissitudes
without nor commotions within, though they might direct or stimulate,
seem to have acted as a check on the flow of her pen.
During the first twelvemonth she continued to reside alternately at
Nohant, whither she came with her son and daughter for their
holidays--Solange being now placed in a children's school kept by some
English ladies at Paris,--and her "poet's garret," as she styled her
third floor _appartement_ on the Quai Malplaquet.
This winter saw the ending for herself and De Musset of their hapless
romance. An approach to complete reconciliation--for the existing
partial estrangement had been discovered to be more unbearable than all
besides--led to stormy scenes and violent discord, and resulted before
very long in mutual avoidance, which was to be final. It is said that
forgiveness is the property of the injured, and it should be remembered
that whenever De Musset's name is mentioned by George Sand it is with
the admiring respect of one to whom his genius made that name sacred,
and who refused to the end of his life to use the easy weapon offered
her by his notorious frailties for vindicating herself at his expense.
And, however pernicious the much talked of effect on De Musset's mind,
it is but fair to the poet to recollect that it is no less true of him
than of George Sand that his best work, that with which his fame has
come chiefly to associate itself, was accomplished after this painful
experience.
Into her own mental state--possibly at this time the least enviable of
the two--we get some glimpses in the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ of the
autumn 1834, and winter 1834-35. Here, again, we should be content with
gathering a general impression, and not ingenuously read literal facts
in all the self-accusations and recorded experiences of the
"_voyageur_"--a semi-fictitious personage whose improvisations were,
after all, only a fresh exercise which George Sand had invented for her
imagination taking herself and reality for a starting-point merely, a
suggestive theme.
But the despair and disgust of life, to which both these and her private
letters give such uncompromising and eloquent expression, indubitably
reflect her feelings at this moral crisis--the feelings of one who
having openly braved the laws of society, to become henceforward a law
unto herself, recognizes that she has only found her way to fresh
sources of misery. Never yet had she had such grave and deep causes of
individual mental torment to blacken her views of existence, and incline
her to abhor it as a curse. "Your instinct will save you, bring you back
to your children," wrote a friend who knew her well. But her maternal
love and solicitude themselves were becoming a source of added distress
and apprehension.
The extraordinary arrangement she and M. Dudevant had entered into four
years before with regard to each other, was clearly one impossible to
last. It will be recollected that she at that time had relinquished her
patrimony to those who had thought it no dishonor to continue to enjoy
it; and the terms of that agreement had since been nominally
undisturbed. But besides that, the control of the children remained a
constant subject of dissension. M. Dudevant was beginning to get into
pecuniary difficulties in the management of his wife's estate. Sometimes
he contemplated resigning it to her, and retiring to Gascony, to live
with his widowed stepmother on the property which at her death would
revert to him. But unfortunately he could not make up his mind to this
course. No sooner had he drawn up an agreement consenting to a division
of property, than he seemed to regret the sacrifice; upon which she
ceased to press it.
Meantime Madame Dudevant, whose position at Nohant was that of a visitor
merely, and becoming untenable, felt her hold on her cherished home and
her children becoming more precarious day by day.
Some of her friends had strongly advised her to travel for a length of
time, both as offering a mortal remedy, and as a temporary escape from
the practical perplexities of the moment. Her rescue, however, was to be
otherwise effected, and a number of new intellectual interests that
sprang up for her at this time all tended to retain her in her own
country.
It was in the course of this spring that she made the acquaintance of M.
de Lamennais, introduced to her by their common friend, the composer,
Franz Liszt. The famous author of the _Paroles d'un Croyant_ had
virtually severed himself from the Church of Rome by his recent
publication of this little volume, pronounced by the Pope, "small in
size, immense in perversity!" The eloquence of the poet-priest, and the
doctrines of the anti-Catholic and humanitarian Christianity of which he
came forward as the expounder, could not fail powerfully to impress her
intelligence. Here seemed the harbor of refuge her half-wrecked faiths
were seeking, and what the abbe's antagonists denounced as the
"diabolical gospel of social science," came to her as the teachings of
an angel of light. Christianity as preached by him was a sort of
realization of the ideal religion of Aurore Dupin--faith divorced from
superstition and the doctrine of Romish infallibility. Complete identity
of sentiments between herself and the abbe was out of the question. But
his was the right mind coming to her mind at the right moment, and
exercised a healing influence over her troubled spirits. For _Le Monde_,
a journal founded by him shortly after this time, she wrote the _Lettres
a Marcie_, an unfinished series, treating of moral and spiritual
problems and trials. Finally, the position M. de Lamennais had taken up
as the apostle of the people further enlisted her sympathies in his
cause, which made religious one with social reform, and amalgamated the
protest against moral enslavement with the liberation-schemes then
fermenting in young and generous minds all over Europe.
The belief in the possibility of their speedy realization was then
wide-spread--a conviction that, as Heine puts it, some grand recipe for
freedom and equality, invented, well drawn up, and inserted in the
_Moniteur_, was all that was needed to secure those benefits for the
world at large. If George Sand, led afterwards into searching for this
empirical remedy for the wrongs and sufferings of the masses, believed
the elixir to have been found in the establishment of popular
sovereignty by universal suffrage, it was through the persuasive
arguments of the leaders of the movement, with whom at this period she
was first brought into personal relations. Her own unbiassed judgment,
to which she reverted long years after, when she had seen these
illusions perish sadly, was less sanguine in its prognostications for
the immediate future, as appears in her own reflections in a letter of
this time:--
What I see in the midst of the divergencies of all these reforming
sects is a waste of generous sentiments and of noble thoughts, a
tendency towards social amelioration, but an impossibility for the
time to bring forth through the want of a head to that great body
with a hundred hands, that tears itself to pieces, for not knowing
what to attack. So far the struggles make only dust and noise. We
have not yet come to the era that will construct new societies, and
people them with perfected men.
She had recently been introduced to a political and legal celebrity of
his day, the famous advocate Michel, of Bourges. He was then at the
height of his reputation, which, won by his eloquent and successful
defense of political prisoners on various occasions, was considerable.
Madame Sand had been advised to consult him professionally about her
business affairs, and for this purpose went over one day with some of
her Berrichon friends to see him at Bourges. But the man of law had, it
appears, been reading _Lelia_, and instead of talking of business with
his distinguished client, dashed at once into politics, philosophy, and
social science, overpowering his listeners with the strength of his
oratory. His sentiments were those of extreme radicalism, and he carried
on a little private propaganda in the country around. The force of his
character seems to have spent itself in oratorical effort. He could
preach revolution, but not suggest reform; denounce existing abuses, but
do nothing towards the remodelling of social institutions; and in after
years he failed, as so many leading men in his profession have failed,
to make any impression as a speaker in Parliament. The author of
_Lelia_ was overwhelmed, if not all at once converted, by the tremendous
rhetorical power of this singular man. She was a proselyte worth the
trouble of making, and Michel was bent on drawing her more closely into
active politics, with which hitherto she had occupied herself very
little. He began a correspondence, writing her long epistles, the sum of
which, she says, may thus be resumed:--"Your scepticism springs from
personal unhappiness. Love is selfish. Extend this solicitude for a
single individual to the whole human race." He certainly succeeded in
inspiring her with a strong desire to share his passion for politics,
his faith, his revivifying hopes of a speedy social renovation, his
ambition to be one of its apostles. To Michel, under the sobriquet of
"Everard," are addressed several of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ of the
spring and summer of 1835, letters which she defines as "a rapid
analysis of a rapid conversion."
But Michel's work was a work of demolition only; and when his earnest
disciple wanted new theories in place of the old forms so ruthlessly
destroyed, he had none to offer. There were others, however, who could.
She was soon to be put into communication with a number of the active
workers for the republican cause throughout the country. They counted
many of the best hearts and not the worst heads in France, and were
naturally eager to enlist her energies on their side.
Foremost, by right of the influence exercised over her awhile by his
writings, was the philosopher Pierre Leroux, with whom her acquaintance
dates from this same year. In spite of the wide divergence between her
pre-eminently artistic spirit and a mind of the rougher stamp of this
born iconoclast, he was to indoctrinate her with many new opinions. His
disinterested character won her admiration; he was a practical
philanthropist as well as a critical thinker, one whose life and
fighting power were devoted to promoting the good of the working classes
to whom he belonged, having been brought up as a printer. He was
regarded as the apostle of communism, as then understood, or rather not
understood--for the form under which it suggested itself to the social
reformers of the period in question was entirely indefinite.
Meantime the novelist's pen was far from idle. One or two pleasant
glimpses she has given us into her manner of working belong to this
year. In the summer the heat in her "poet's garret" becoming
intolerable, she took refuge in a congenial solitude offered by the
ground-floor apartments of the house, then in course of reconstruction,
dismantled and untenanted. The works had been temporarily suspended,
and Madame Sand took possession of the field abandoned by the builders
and carpenters. The windows and doors opening into the garden had been
taken away, and the place thus turned into an airy, cool retreat. Out of
the apparatus of the workmen, left behind, she constructed her
writing-establishment, and here, secure from interruption, denying
herself to all visitors, never going out except to visit her children at
their respective schools, she completed her novel with no companions but
the spiders crawling over the planks, the mice running in and out of the
corners, and the blackbirds hopping in from the garden; the deep sense
of solitude enhanced by the roar of the city in the very heart of which
she had thus voluntarily isolated herself.
As an artistic experience she found it refreshing, and repeated it more
than once. Soon after, a friend offered her the loan of an empty house
at Bourges, a town that had been suggested to her as a desirable place
of residence, should the circumstances at Nohant ever force her to
abandon it entirely. As a home she saw and disapproved of Bourges, but
she thoroughly enjoyed a brief retreat spent there in an absolutely
deserted, vine-covered dwelling, standing in a garden enclosed by stone
walls. Her meals were handed in through a wicket. A few friends came to
see her in the evenings. The days, and often the nights, she passed in
study and meditation, shut up in the library reading Lavater,
expatiating on her impressions of his theories in a letter addressed to
Franz Liszt (inserted among the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_), or strolling
in the flower garden--"forgotten," she tells us, "by the whole world,
and plunged into oblivion of the actualities of my own existence."
Of her numerous letters of advice to her boy at school, we quote one
written during this summer of 1835, when their future relations to each
other were in painful uncertainty:--
Work, be strong and proud; despise the little troubles supposed to
belong to your age. Reserve your strength of resistance for deeds
and facts that are worth the effort. If I am here no longer, think
of me who worked and suffered cheerfully. We are like each other in
mind and in countenance. I know already from this day what your
intellectual life will be. I fear for you many and deep sorrows. I
hope for you the purest of joys. Guard within yourself that
treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to
lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. Know how to
replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the
happiness that may be wanting to yourself. Keep the hope of another
life. It is there that mothers meet their sons again. Love all
God's creatures. Forgive those who are ill-conditioned, resist
those who are unjust, and devote yourself to those who are great
through their virtue. Love me. I will teach you many, many things
if we live together. If that blessing (the greatest that can befall
me, the only one that makes me wish for a long life) is not to be,
you must pray for me, and from the grave itself, if anything
remains of me in the universe, the spirit of your mother will watch
over you.
In the autumn, 1835, Madame Dudevant, under legal advice, and supported
by the approval of friends of both parties, determined to apply to the
courts for a judicial separation from her husband, on the plea of
ill-treatment. She had sufficient grounds to allege for her claim, and
had then every reason to hope that her demand would not even be
contested by M. Dudevant, who, on former occasions, had voluntarily
signed but afterwards revoked the agreement she hereby only desired to
make valid and permanent, and which, ensuring to him a certain
proportion of her income, gave her Nohant for a place of habitation, and
established the children under her care.
Pending the issue of this suit, which, unexpectedly protracted, dragged
on until the summer of the next year, she availed herself of the
hospitality of a family at La Chatre, friends of old standing, and from
under whose roof she awaited, as from a neutral ground, the decision of
her judges. During this year she saw little of Paris, and less of
Nohant, except for a brief visit which, profiting by a moment when its
walls were absolutely deserted by every other human being, she paid to
her house--not knowing then whether she would ever, so to speak, inhabit
it again in her own right.
On the result of the legal proceedings depended her future home and the
best part of her happiness. Sooner than be parted from her children, she
contemplated the idea, in case of the decision going against her, of
escaping with them to America! Yet, in the midst of all this suspense,
we find her industrious as ever, joining in the daytime in the family
life of the household with which she was domesticated, helping to amuse
the children among them, retiring to her room at ten at night, to work
on at her desk till seven in the morning, according to her wont. A more
cheerful tone begins to pervade her effusions. The clouds were slowly
breaking on all sides at once, and a variety of circumstances combining
to restore to her mind its natural tone--faith, hope, and charity to her
heart, and harmony to her existence. She began to perceive what she was
enabled afterwards more fully to acknowledge as follows:--
As to my religion, the ground of it has never varied. The forms of
the past have vanished, for me as for my century, before the light
of study and reflection. But the eternal doctrine of believers, of
God and His goodness, the immortal soul and the hopes of another
life, this is what, in myself, has been proof against all
examination, all discussion, and even intervals of despairing
doubt.
It is significant that during these months, spent for the most part at
La Chatre, we find her rewriting _Lelia_, trying, as she expressed her
intention, "to transform this work of anger into a work of gentleness."
_Engelwald_, a novel of some length on which she was engaged, was
destined never to see the light.
To the Comtesse d'Agoult, better known by her _nom de plume_ of Daniel
Stern, whose acquaintance she had recently made in Paris, she writes in
May, 1836:--
I am still at La Chatre, staying with my friends, who spoil me like
a child of five years old. I inhabit a suburb, built in terraces
against the rock. At my feet lies a wonderfully pretty valley. A
garden thirty feet square and full of roses, and a terrace
extensive enough for you to walk along it in ten steps, are my
drawing-room, my study, and gallery. My bed-room is rather
large--it is decorated with a red cotton curtained bed--a real
peasant's bed, hard and flat, two straw chairs, and a white wooden
table. My window is situated six feet above the terrace. By the
trellised trees on the wall I can get out and in, and stroll at
night among my thirty feet of flowers without having to open a door
or wake anyone.
Sometimes I go out riding alone, at dusk. I come in towards
midnight. My cloak, my rough hat, and the melancholy trot of my
nag, make me pass in the darkness for a commercial traveller, or a
farm-boy.
One of my grand amusements is to watch the transition from night to
day; it effects itself in a thousand different manners. This
revolution, apparently so uniform, has every day a character of its
own.
The summer that had set in was unusually hot and sultry. Writing to
Madame d'Agoult, July 10, 1836, she thus describes her enjoyment of a
season that allowed of some of the pleasures of primitive existence:--
I start on foot at three in the morning, fully intending to be back
by eight o'clock; but I lose myself in the lanes; I forget myself
on the banks of the river; I run after butterflies; and I get home
at midday in a state of torrefaction impossible to describe.
Another time the sight of the cooling stream is more than she can
resist, and she walks into the Indre fully dressed; but a few minutes
more and the sun has dried her garments, and she proceeds on her walk of
ten or twelve miles--"Never a cockchafer passes but I run after it."
You have no idea of all the dreams I dream during my walks in the
sun. I fancy myself in the golden days of Greece. In this happy
country where I live you may often go for six miles without meeting
a human creature. The flocks are left by themselves in pastures
well enclosed by fine hedges; so the illusion can last for some
time. One of my chief amusements when I have got out to some
distance, where I don't know the paths, is to fancy I am wandering
over some other country with which I discover some resemblance. I
recollect having strolled in the Alps, and fancied myself for hours
in America. Now I picture to myself an Arcadia in Berry. Not a
meadow, not a cluster of trees which, under so fine a sun, does not
appear to me quite Arcadian.
We give these passages because they seem to us very forcibly to portray
one side, and that the strongest and most permanent, of the character of
George Sand: the admixture of a child's simplicity of tastes, a poet's
fondness for reverie, and that instinctive independence of habits--an
instinct stronger than the restraints of custom--which her individuality
seemed to demand.
In the letter last quoted to Madame d'Agoult, the new ideal which was
arising out of these contemplations is thus resumed:--
To throw yourself into the lap of mother nature: to take her really
for mother and sister; stoically and religiously to cut off from
your life what is mere gratified vanity; obstinately to resist the
proud and the wicked; to make yourself humble with the unfortunate,
to weep with the misery of the poor; nor desire another consolation
than the putting down of the rich; to acknowledge no other God than
Him who ordains justice and equality upon men; to venerate what is
good, to judge severely what is only strong, to live on very
little, to give away nearly all, in order to re-establish primitive
equality and bring back to life again the Divine institution: that
is the religion I shall proclaim in a little corner of my own, and
that I aspire to preach to my twelve apostles under the lime-trees
in my garden.
The judgment of the court, first pronounced in February, 1836, and given
in her favor by default, no opposition having been raised to her claims
to the proposed partition of property by the defendant, placed her in
legal possession of her house and her children. Appeal was made,
however, prolonging and complicating the case, but without affecting its
termination. In the war of mutual accusations thus stirred up, M.
Dudevant's _role_ as accuser, yet objecting in the same breath to the
separation, had an appearance of insincerity that could not fail to
withdraw sympathy from his side, irrespective of any judgment that might
be held on the conduct of the wife, whose absence and complete
independence he had authorized or acquiesced in. Before the actual
conclusion of the law-suit his appeal was withdrawn. As a result, the
previous judgment in favor of Madame Dudevant was virtually confirmed,
and the details were settled by private agreement.
It is almost impossible to overrate the importance to George Sand of a
conclusion that gave her back her old home of Nohant, and secured to her
the permanent companionship of her children. The present pecuniary
arrangement left M. Dudevant some hold over Maurice and his education,
concerning which his parents had long disagreed, and which for another
year remained a source of contention.
The affair thus concluded, Madame Sand entered formally into possession
of Nohant; and early in September she started with her two children for
Switzerland, where they spent the autumn holidays in a long-contemplated
visit to her friend the Comtesse d'Agoult, then at Geneva. This tour is
fancifully sketched in a closing number of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_,
a volume which stands as a sort of literary memorial of two years of
unsettled, precarious existence, material and spiritual--a time of trial
now happily at an end.
_Simon_, a tale dedicated to Madame d'Agoult, and published in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1836--a graceful story, of no high
pretentions--is noticeable as marking the commencement of a decided and
agreeable change in the tone of George Sand's fiction. Hitherto the
predominant note struck had been most often one of melancholy, if not
despair--the more hopelessly painful the subject, the more fervent,
apparently, the inspiration to the writer. In _Indiana_ she had
portrayed the double victim of tyranny and treachery; in _Valentine_, a
helpless girl sacrificed to family ambition and social prejudice; in
_Lelia_ and _Jacques_, the incurable _Weltschmerz_, heroism unvalued and
wasted; in _Leone Leoni_, the infatuation of a weak-minded woman for a
phenomenal scoundrel; in _Andre_, the wretchedness which a timid,
selfish character, however amiable, may bring down on itself and on all
connected with it. Henceforward she prefers themes of a pleasanter
nature. In _Simon_ she paints the triumph of true and patient love over
social prejudice and strong opposition. In _Mauprat_,[B] written in
1837, at Nohant, she exerts all the force of her imagination and
language to bring before us vividly the gradual redemption of a noble
but degraded nature, through the influence of an exclusive, passionate
and indestructible affection. The natural optimism of her temperament,
not her incidental misfortunes, began and continued to color her
compositions.
From Switzerland she returned for part of the winter to Paris. She had
given up her "poet's garret," and occupied for a while a suite of rooms
in the Hotel de France, where resided also Madame d'Agoult. The _salon_
of the latter was a favorite _rendezvous_ of cosmopolitan artistic
celebrities, whose general _rendezvous_ just then was Paris. A very
Pantheon must have been an intimate circle that included, among others,
George Sand, Daniel Stern, Heine, the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Eugene
Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Hiller, and Frederic Chopin.
The delicate health of her son forced Madame Sand to leave with him
shortly for Berry, where he soon became convalescent. Later in the
season, some of the same party of friends that had met in Paris met
again at Nohant. It was during this summer that George Sand wrote for
her child the well-known little tale, _Les Maitres Mosaistes_, in which
the adventures of the Venetian mosaic-workers are woven into so charming
a picture. "I do not know why, but it is seldom that I have written
anything with so much pleasure," she tells us. "It was in the country,
in summer weather, as hot as the Italian climate I had lately left. I
have never seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. Liszt was
playing the piano on the ground floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated
with music and sunshine, were singing madly in the lilac-trees around."
The party was abruptly dispersed upon the intelligence that reached
Madame Sand of her mother's sudden, and, as it proved, fatal illness.
She hurried to Paris, and remained with Madame Maurice Dupin during her
last days. The old fond affection between them, though fitful in its
manifestations on the part of the mother, had never been impaired, and
the breaking of this old link with the past was very deeply felt by
Madame Sand.
Before returning to Nohant, she spent a few weeks at Fontainebleau with
her son, from whom she never liked to separate. They passed their days
in exploring the forest, then larger and wilder than now, botanizing and
butterfly-hunting. At night she sat up writing, when all was quiet in
the inn. Just as, whilst at Venice, her fancy flew back to the scenes
and characters of French provincial life, and _Andre_ was the result, so
here, amid the forest landscapes of her own land, her imagination rushed
off to Venice and the shores of the Brenta, and produced _La Derniere
Aldini_.
This constant industry, which had now become her habit of life, was more
of a practical necessity than ever. Nohant, as already mentioned, barely
repaid the owner the expenses of keeping it up. Madame Sand, who desired
to be liberal besides, to travel occasionally, to gratify little
artistic fancies as they arose, must look to her literary work to
furnish the means.
"Sometimes," she writes from Nohant, in October, 1837, to Madame
d'Agoult, then in Italy, "I am tempted to realize my capital, and come
and join you; but out there I should do no work, and the galley-slave is
chained up. If Buloz lets him go for a walk it is on _parole_, and
_parole_ is the cannon-ball the convict drags on his foot."
Nor was it for herself only that she worked in future, but for her
children, the whole responsibility of providing for both of whose
education she was now about definitely to take on her own shoulders. The
power of interference left to M. Dudevant by the recent legal decision
had been exercised in a manner leading to fresh vexatious contention,
and continual alarm on Madame Sand's part lest the boy should be taken
by force from her side. These skirmishes included the actual abduction
of Solange from Nohant by M. Dudevant during her mother's absence at
Fontainebleau; a foolish and purposeless trick, by which nothing was to
be gained, except annoyance and trouble to Madame Sand, whose right to
the control of her daughter had never been contested. A final settlement
entered into between the parties, in 1838, placed these matters
henceforward on a footing of peace, fortunately permanent. By this
agreement Madame Sand received back from M. Dudevant--who had lately
succeeded to his father's estate--some house property that formed part
of her patrimony, and paid down to him the sum of L2,000; he ceding to
her the remnant of his paternal rights; she freeing him from all charges
for Maurice's education, her authority over which, in future, was
recognized as complete.