SOLITUDE, SOCIETY AND SOCIALISM.
The charge of both children now resting entirely in her hands, Madame
Sand was enabled to fulfill her desire of permanently removing her boy,
now fourteen years of age, from the college Henri IV. Not only was she
opposed to the general _regime_ and educational system pursued in French
public schools of this type, she felt persuaded of its special
unsuitability to her son, whose tastes and temperament were artistic,
like her own, and whose classical studies had been repeatedly
interrupted by illness. His delicate health determined her to spend the
winter of 1838-9 abroad with her family. Having heard the climate and
scenery of Majorca highly praised, she selected the island for their
resort; tempted herself by the prospect of a few months absolute quiet,
where, with neither letters to answer, nor newspapers to read, she would
enjoy some rare leisure, which she proposed to spend in studying history
and teaching French to her children.
Just at this time her friend and ardent admirer, Frederic Chopin, was
recovering from a chest attack, the first presage of the illness that
caused his early death. The eminent pianist and composer had also been
recommended to winter in the South, and greatly needed repose and change
of air to recruit him from the fatigues of the Parisian season. It was
arranged that the convalescent should make one of the expedition to
Majorca. He joined Madame Sand and her children at Perpignan, and they
embarked for Barcelona, whence the sea-voyage to the island was safely
accomplished, the party reaching Palma, the capital, in magnificent
November weather, and never suspecting how soon they would have cause to
repent their choice of a retreat.
But their practical information about the island proved lamentably
insufficient. With the scenery, indeed, they were enraptured. "We
found," says Madame Sand in her little volume, _Un Hiver a Majorque_,
published the following year, "a green Switzerland under a Calabrian
sky, with all the solemnity and stillness of the East." But though a
painter's Elysium, Majorca was wanting in the commonest comforts of
civilized life. Inns were non-existent, foreigners viewed and treated
with suspicion. The party thought themselves fortunate in securing a
villa some miles from Palma, furnished, though scantily. "The country,
nature, trees, sky, sea, and mountains surpass all my dreams," she
writes in the first days, "it is the promised land; and as we have
succeeded in housing ourselves pretty well, we are delighted."
The delight was of brief duration. That Madame Sand's manuscripts took a
month to reach the editor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_; that the piano
ordered from Paris for Chopin took two months to get to Majorca, were
the least among their troubles. A rainy season of exceptional severity
set in, and the villa quickly became uninhabitable. It was not
weatherproof. Chopin fell alarmingly ill. Good food and medical
attendance were hardly to be procured for him; and finally, the villa
proprietor, having heard that his tenant was suffering from
consumption--an illness believed to be infectious by the Majorcans--gave
the whole party notice to quit. The invalid improving somewhat, though
still too weak to attempt the return journey to France, Madame Sand
transported her ambulance, as she styled it, to some tolerable quarters
she had already discovered in the deserted Carthusian monastery of
Valdemosa--"a poetical name and a poetical abode," she writes; "an
admirable landscape, grand and wild, with the sea at both ends of the
horizon, formidable peaks around us, eagles pursuing their prey even
down to the orange-trees in our garden, a cypress walk winding from the
top of our mountain to the bottom of the gorge, torrents over-grown with
myrtles, palm-trees below our feet, nothing could be more magnificent
than this spot."
Parts of the old monastic buildings were dilapidated; the rest were in
good order, being frequented as a summer retreat by the inhabitants of
Palma. Now, in December, the Chartreuse was entirely abandoned, except
by a housekeeper, a sacristan and a lone monk, the last offshoot of the
community--a kind of apothecary, whose stock-in-trade was limited to
guimauve and dog-grass.
The rooms into which the travellers moved had just been vacated by a
Spanish family of political refugees departing for France. These
lodgings were at least provided with doors, window-panes, and decent
furniture; but the luxury of chimneys was unknown, and a stove, which
had to be manufactured at an enormous price on purpose for the party, is
described as "a sort of iron cauldron, that made our heads ache and
dried up our throats." Continuous stormy weather having suspended steam
traffic with the mainland, the visitors had no choice but to remain
prisoners some two months more, during which the deluge went on with
little intermission.
Still, to young and romantic imaginations the island and life in the
ex-monastery offered considerable charm. Madame Sand and her children
were delighted with the unfamiliar vegetation, the palms, aloes, olives,
almond and orange trees, the Arab architecture, and picturesque
costumes. Valdemosa itself was splendidly situated among the mountains,
in a stone-walled garden surrounded with cypress trees and planted with
palms and olives. In the morning, Madame Sand gave lessons to the
children; in the afternoon, they ran wild out of doors whilst she
wrote--when the invalid musician was well enough to be left. In the
evenings she and the young people went wandering by moonlight through
the cloisters, exploring the monkish cells and chapels. Maurice had
fortunately recovered his health completely, but poor Chopin's state,
aggravated by the damp weather and privations--for the difficulties in
obtaining a regular supply of provisions were immense--remained
throughout their stay a constant and terrible cause of anxiety and
responsibility to Madame Sand. From the islanders no sort of help or
even sympathy was forthcoming, and thievish servants and extortionate
traders were not the least of the annoyances with which the strangers
had to contend. In a letter to Francois Rollinat she gives a graphic
account of their misfortunes:--
It has rightly been laid down as a principle that where nature is
beautiful and generous, men are bad and avaricious. We had all the
trouble in the world to procure the commonest articles of food,
such as the island produces in abundance; thanks to the signal
dishonesty, the plundering spirit of the peasants, who made us pay
for everything three times what it was worth, so that we were at
their mercy under the penalty of dying of hunger. We could get no
one to serve us, because we were not _Christians_ [the travellers
passed for being "sold to the Devil" because they did not go to
Mass], and, besides, nobody would attend on a consumptive invalid.
However, for better for worse, we were established.... The place
was incomparably poetical; we did not see a living soul, nothing
disturbed our work; after waiting two months, and paying three
hundred francs extra, Chopin had at last received his piano, and
delighted the vaults of his cell with his melodies. Health and
strength were visibly returning to Maurice; as for me, I worked as
tutor seven hours a day: I sat up working on my own account half
the night; Chopin composed masterpieces, and we hoped to put up
with the remainder of our discomforts by the aid of these
compensations.
It was in the cells of Valdemosa that Madame Sand completed her novel of
Monastic life, _Spiridion_, then publishing in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. "For heaven's sake not so much mysticism!" prayed the editor of
her, now and then; and assuredly those readers for whom George Sand was
simply a purveyor of passionate romances, those critics who set her down
in their minds as exclusively a glorifier of mutinous emotion and the
apologist of lawless love, must have been taken aback by these pages, in
which she had devoted her most fervent energies to tracing the spiritual
history, _peu recreatif_, as she dryly observes, of a monk who, in the
days of the decadence of the monastic orders, retained earnestness and
sincerity; whose mind, revolted by the hypocrisy and worldliness around
him, passes through the successive stages of heresy and philosophic
doubt, and to whom is finally revealed an eternal gospel, which lies at
the core of his old religion, but which later growths have stifled, and
which outlasts all shocks and changes, and is to generate the religion
of the future.
The compositions of Chopin above alluded to, include the finest of his
well-known Preludes, which may easily be conceived of as suggested by
the strange mingling of contrasting impressions in the Chartreuse.
"Several of these Preludes," writes Madame Sand, "represent the visions
that haunted him of deceased monks, the sounds of funeral chants;
others are soft and melancholy; these came to him in his hours of
sunshine and health, at the sound of the children's laughter beneath the
window, the distant thrum of guitars and the songs of the birds under
the damp foliage; at the sight of the pale little roses in bloom among
the snow."
The loneliness and melancholy beauty of the spot, however congenial to
the romance writer or inspiring to the composer, were not the right
tonics for the nerves of the over-sensitive, imaginative invalid. The
care and nursing of Madame Sand made amends for much, and by her good
sense she saved him from being doctored to death by local practitioners.
But his fortitude, which bore up heroically against his personal danger,
was not proof against the dreary influences of Valdemosa in bad weather,
the fogs, the sound of the hurricane sweeping through the valley, and
bringing down portions of the dilapidated building, the noise of the
torrents, the cries of the scared sea-birds and the roar of the sea.
The elevation of the Chartreuse made the climate peculiarly disagreeable
at this season. She writes on:--
We lived in the midst of clouds, and for fifty days were unable to
get down into the plains; the roads were changed to torrents, and
we saw nothing more of the sun. I should have thought it all
beautiful if poor Chopin could only have got on. Maurice was none
the worse. The wind and the sea sung sublimely as they beat against
the rocks. The vast and empty cloisters cracked over our heads. If
I had been there when I wrote the portion of _Lelia_ that takes
place in the convent, I should have made it finer and truer. But my
poor friend's chest got worse and worse. The fine weather did not
return.... A maid I had brought over from France, and who so far
had resigned herself, on condition of enormous wages, to cook and
do the housework, began to refuse attendance, as too hard. The
moment was coming when after having wielded the broom and managed
the _pot au feu_, I was ready to drop with fatigue--for besides my
work as tutor, besides my literary labor, besides the continual
attention necessitated by the condition of my invalid, I had
rheumatism in every limb.
The return of spring was hailed as offering a tardy release from their
island. The steamers were running again, and the party determined to
leave at all risks; for though Chopin's state was more precarious than
ever, nothing could be worse for him than to remain. They departed,
feeling, she admits, as though they were escaping from the tender
mercies of Polynesian savages, and once safely on board a French vessel
at Barcelona, they thankfully welcomed the day that restored them to
comfort and civilization, and saw the end of an expedition that had
turned out in most respects so disastrous a _fiasco_.
They remained throughout April at Marseilles, where Chopin, in the hands
of a good doctor, became convalescent. From Marseilles they made a short
tour in Italy, visiting Genoa and the neighborhood, and returning to
France in May, Chopin apparently on the high road to complete recovery.
It was in the following year that his illness returned in a graver form,
and unmistakable symptoms of consumption showed themselves. The life of
a fashionable pianist in Paris, the constant excitement, late hours, and
heavy strain of nervous exertion, were fatal to his future chances of
preserving his health; but it was a life to which he had now become
wedded, and which he never willingly left, except for his long annual
visits to Nohant.
Madame Sand repeatedly contemplated settling herself entirely in the
country. She had no love for Paris. "Parisian life strains our nerves
and kills us in the long run," she writes from Nohant to one of her
correspondents. "Ah, how I hate it, that centre of light! I would never
set foot in it again, if the people I like would make the same
resolution." And again, speaking of her "Black Valley, so good and so
stupid," she adds, "Here I am always more myself than at Paris, where I
am always ill, in body and in spirit."
Paris, however, afforded greater facilities for her children's
education. She had a strong desire to see her son an artist, and he was
already studying painting in Delacroix's studio. Also her income at this
moment did not suffice to enable her to live continuously at Nohant
where, she frankly confessed, she had not yet found out how to live
economically, expected as she was to keep open house, regarded as
grudging and unneighborly if she did not maintain her establishment on a
scale to which her resources as yet were unequal. Her expenses in the
country she calculated as double those in Paris, where, as she writes to
M. Chatiron,--
Everyone's independence is admirable. You invite whom you like, and
when you don't wish to receive anyone you let the porter know you
are not at home. Yet I hate Paris in all other respects. There I
grow stout, and my mind grows thin. You know how quiet and retired
my life there is, and I do not understand why you tell me, as they
say in the provinces, that glory keeps me there. I have no glory, I
have never sought for it, and I don't care a cigarette for it. I
want to breath fresh air and live in peace. I am succeeding, but
you see and you know on what conditions.
Her Paris residence, a few seasons later, she fixed in the Cour
d'Orleans Rue St. Lazare, in a block of buildings one-third of which
was occupied by herself and her family; another belonged to her friend,
Madame Marliani, wife of the Spanish Consul, the third to Frederic
Chopin.
With respect to Chopin's long and deep attachment to Madame Sand, and
its requital, concerning which so much has been written, there can
surely be no greater misstatement than to speak of her as having
blighted his life. This last part of his life was indeed blighted, but
by ill-health and consequent nervous irritability and suffering; but
such mitigation as was possible he found for eight years in the womanly
devotion and genial society of Madame Sand--real benefits to one whose
strange and delicate individuality it was not easy to befriend--and
which the breach that took place between them shortly before his death
should not allow us to forget.
"Chopin," observes Eugene Delacroix, "belongs to the small number of
those whom one can both esteem and love." Madame Sand joined a
sympathetic appreciation of the refinement of his nature, and an
enthusiastic admiration of his genius--feelings she shared with his
numberless female worshippers--to a strength of character that lent the
support no other could perhaps so fully have given, or that he would
accept from no other, to the fragile, nervous, suffering tone-poet. Her
sentiments towards him seem to resolve themselves into a great
tenderness rather than a passionate fervor--a placid affection for
himself, and an adoration for his music.
All the time their existences, so far from having been united, flowed in
different, nay divergent channels. Chopin, the idol of Paris society,
moved constantly in the aristocratic and fashionable world, from which
Madame Sand lived aloof. She for her part had heavy domestic cares and
anxieties that did not touch him, and with the political party which was
absorbing more and more of her energies he had no sympathy whatever.
Whether the cause were the false start she had made at the outset by her
marriage, forbidding her the realization of a woman's ideal, the
non-separation of the gift of her heart from that of her whole life, or
whether that her masculine strength of intellect created for her serious
public interests and occupations, beside which personal pleasures and
pains are apt to become of secondary moment, certain it appears that
with George Sand, as with many an eminent artist of the opposite sex,
such _affaires de coeur_ were but ripples on the sea of a large and
active existence.
The year after her return from Majorca was marked by her first
appearance before the public as a dramatic author. Although it was a
line in which she afterwards obtained successes, as will be seen in a
future chapter, the result of this initial effort, _Cosima_, a five-act
drama, was not encouraging. It was acted at the Theatre Francais in the
spring of 1840, and proved a failure. It betrays no insufficient sense
of dramatic effect, nor lack of the means for producing it, but decided
clumsiness in the adaptation of these means to that end. The plot and
personages recall those of _Indiana_, with the important differences
that the _beau role_ of the piece falls to the husband, and that the
scene is transported back to Florence in the Middle Ages--an undoubted
error, as giving to a play essentially modern and French in its
complexities of sentiment and motive a strong local coloring of a past
time and another people, making the whole seem unreal. It has a
psychological subject which Emile Augier or Dumas _fils_ would know how
to handle dramatically; but as treated by George Sand, we are
perpetually being led to anticipate too much in the way of action, to
have our expectations dissipated the next moment. A wet blanket of
disappointment on this head dampens any other satisfaction that the
merits of the play might otherwise afford.
Hitherto she had continued to write regularly for the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. As her revolutionary opinions became more pronounced, they
began to find utterance in her romances. Her conversion by Michel had
not only been complete, but the disciple had outstripped the master. The
study of the communistic theories of Pierre Leroux had familiarized her
with the speculations in social science of those who at this time were
devoting their attention to criticising the existing social
organization, and seeking, and sometimes imagining they had found, the
secret of creating a better. George Sand's strong admiration for the
writings of Leroux, always praised by her in the highest terms, strikes
us now as extravagant, but was shared to some extent by not a few
leading men of the time, such as Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine. Her
intellect had eagerly followed this bold and earnest pioneer in
new-discovered worlds of thought; "I do not say it is the last word of
humanity, but, so far, it is its most advanced expression," she states
of his philosophy. The study of it had brought a clearness into her own
views, due, probably, much more to the action of her own mind upon the
novel ideas suggested than to the lucidity of a system of social science
as yet undetermined in some of its main points.
She writes, when looking back on this period from a long distance of
time,--
After the despairs of my youth, I was governed by too many
illusions. Morbid scepticism was succeeded in me by too much
kindliness and ingenuousness. A thousand times over I was duped by
dreams of an archangelic fusion of the opposing forces in the great
strife of ideas.
Her novel _Horace_, written for the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, was
rejected--as subversive of law and order--by the editor, except on
condition of alterations which she declined to make.
After this temporary rupture with Buloz, Madame Sand's services were
largely appropriated by the _Revue Independante_, a new journal founded
in 1840 by her friends Pierre Leroux and Louis Viardot, in conjunction
with whose names hers appears on the title page as leading contributor.
For this periodical no theories could be too advanced, no fictitious
illustrations too audacious, and to its pages accordingly was _Horace_
transferred. Among the secondary characters in this novel figure a young
couple, immaculate otherwise in principle and in conduct, but who as
converts to St. Simonism have dispensed with the ordinary legal sanction
to their union. Perhaps a more solid objection to its insertion in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_ was the picture introduced of the _emcute_ of
June 1832, painted in heroic colors. Both these features, however, are
purely incidental. The main interest and the real strength of the book
lie in a remarkable study of character-development--that of the chief
personage, Horace. It is a cleverly painted portrait of a type that
reappears, with slight modifications, in all ages; a moral charlatan,
who half imposes on himself, and entirely for a while on other people. A
would-be hero, genius, and chivalrous lover, he has none of the genuine
qualities needed for sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of
temperament, he is capable of nothing beyond a short course of
successful affectation. The imposition breaking down at last, he sinks
helplessly into the unheroic mediocrity of position and pretension for
which alone he is fit.
A veritable attempt at a Socialist novel is the _Compagnon du Tour de
France_ written in the course of 1840, which must surely be ranked as
one of the weakest of George Sand's productions. Exactly the converse of
_Horace_ may be said of this book. In the former, those most repelled by
the revolutionary doctrines flashing out here and there, will yet be
struck and interested by the masterly piece of character-painting that
makes of the novel a success. The utmost fanaticism for the ideas
ventilated in the _Compagnon du Tour de France_ can reconcile no reader
to the dullness and unreality of the story which make of it a failure.
For her socialism itself, as set forth in her writings, dispassionate
examination of what she actually inculcated, leaves but little warrant,
in the state of progress now reached, for echoing the mighty outcry
raised against it at the time. No doubt she thought that a complete
reorganization of society on a new basis was eminently to be desired.
But what she definitely advocated was, first, free education for the
poor, and secondly, some fairer adjustment of the relations to each
other of capital and labor. As to the first, authority has already
sanctioned her opinion; the second question, if unsettled, has become a
first preoccupation with statesmen and philosophers of all denominations
in the present day.
With regard to the complete solution of the problem, she leaves her
socialist heroes, as she herself felt, in doubt and perplexity. There
was something in the schemes and doctrines she conscientiously approved,
irreconcilable with her artist-nature--a materialistic tendency which
clashed with her poetical instincts. When the stern demagogue Michel
denounced the whole tribe of artists as a corrupting influence,
enervating to the courage and will of a nation, she rose up
energetically in defense of the confraternity to which she was born:--
Will you tell me, pray, what you mean, with your declamations
against artists? Cry out against them as much as you please, but
respect art. Oh, you Vandal! I like that stern sectarian who wants
to dress Taglioni in a stuff-gown and _sabots_, and set Liszt's
hands to turn the machinery of a wine-press, and who yet, as he
lies on the grass, finds the tears come into his eyes at the least
linnet's song, and who makes a disturbance in the theatre to stop
Othello from murdering Malibran! The austere citizen would suppress
artists as social excrescences that absorb too much of the sap; but
this gentleman is fond of vocal music, and so will spare the
singers. Let us hope that painters will find one among your strong
heads who appreciates painting, and won't wall up all studio
windows. And as for the poets, they are your cousins; and you don't
despise their forms of language and their rhythmical mechanism when
you want to make an impression on the idle crowd. You will go to
them to take lessons in metaphor, and how to make use of it.
Unfortunately for the cause of the superiority of antiquity,
whenever you go to hear Berlioz's _Funeral March_, the least that
can happen to you will be to confess that this music is rather
better than what they used to give us in Sparta, when we served
under Lycurgus; you will think that Apollo, displeased to see us
sacrificing to Pallas exclusively, has played us a trick in giving
lessons to that _Babylonian_, so that by the exercise of a magnetic
and disastrous power over us, he may lead our spirits astray.
And she would prove to the demagogue, out of his own mouth, that
everything cannot be reduced to "bread and shoes all round," as the
grand desideratum. Give these to men, it will not suffice. The eloquent
orator instinctively seeks besides to impart "hallowed emotions and
mystic enthusiasm to those who toil and sweat--he teaches them to hope,
to dream of God, to take courage and lift themselves above the sickening
miseries of human conditions by the thought of a future, chimerical it
may be, but strengthening and sublime."
For a period, however, she was too fascinated by the new ideas to judge
them, and she straightway sought in her art a means of popularizing
them. "These ideas," she writes in a later preface to her socialist
novel, _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, "at which, as yet but a small number of
conservative spirits had taken alarm, had, as yet, only really begun to
sprout in a small number of attentive, laborious minds. The government,
so long as no actual form of political application was assumed, was not
to be disquieted by theories, and let every man make his own, put forth
his dream, and innocently construct his city of the future, by his own
fire-side, in the garden of his imagination."
She was aware that her readers thought her novels getting more and more
tedious, in proportion as she communicated to her fictitious heroes and
heroines the pre-occupations of her brain, and that she was thus
stepping out of the domain of art. But she affirmed she could never help
writing of whatever was absorbing her thoughts and feelings at the
moment, and must take her chance of boring the public. Fortunately for
_Le Peche de M. Antoine_, nature and human nature are here allowed to
claim the larger share of our attention, and philosophy is a secondary
feature. The scene is laid in the picturesque Marche country on the
confines of Berry, a day's journey from Nohant, and we are glad to
linger with her along the rocky banks of the Creuse, or among the ruined
castles of Crozant and Chateaubrun. The novel contains much that is
original and admirable in the drawing of characters of the most opposite
classes.
Finally, in _Le Meunier d'Angibault_,[C] written as was the
last-mentioned work some four or five years later (1844-45), but which
may be named here, as making up with _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_
the trio of "socialist" novels, the _Tendenz_ does not interfere to the
detriment of the artistic plan of the book. In it the romantic elements
of the remote country nook she inhabited are cleverly brought together,
without departing too widely from probability. The dilapidated castle,
the picturesque mill, the traditions of brigandage two generations ago,
all these were realities familiar to her notice. The painting of the
country and country people is masterly; and there is not a passage in
the book to offend the taste of the most scrupulous reader. Nor can it
be justly impugned on the ground of inculcating disturbing political
principles. The personages, in their preference of poverty and obscurity
to rank and wealth, may, in the judgment of some, think and conduct
themselves like chimerical dreamers, but their actions, however
quixotic, concern themselves alone.
But, previous to either of the two novels last named, she had presented
the world with a more ambitious work, whose merit was to compel
universal acknowledgment--the most important, in fact, she had produced
for eight years.