NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN.
By her novels classed as "socialistic," Madame Sand had, as we have
seen, incurred the public hostility of those whom her doctrines alarmed.
And yet her "communist" heroes and heroines are the most pacific and
inoffensive of social influences. They merely aspire to isolate
themselves, and personally to practice principles and virtues of the
highest order; unworldliness such as, if general, might indeed turn the
earth into the desired Utopia. Nothing can be said against their
example, unless that it is too good, and that there is little hope of
its being widely followed.
Charges of another sort, no less bitter, and though exaggerated,
somewhat better founded, assailed her after the appearance in 1847 of
_Lucrezia Floriani_, a novel of character-analysis entirely, but into
which she was accused of having introduced an unflattering portrait of
Frederic Chopin, whose long and long-requited attachment to her entitled
him to better treatment at her hands.
With respect to the general question of such alleged fictitious
reproductions, few novelists escape getting into trouble on this head.
It has been aptly observed by Mr. Hamerton that the usual procedure of
the reading public in such cases is to fix on some real personage as
distinctly unlike the character in the book as possible, for the
original, and then to complain of the unfaithfulness of the resemblance.
Madame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts would have revolted against
the practice--now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior
writers--of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of
well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin
himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work
without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations
to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially from those of the
personages in the romance.
_Lucrezia Floriani_ is a _cantatrice_ of genius, who, whilst still
young, has retired from the world, indifferent to fame, and effectually
disenchanted--so she believes--with passion. Despite an experience
strange and stormy, even for a member of her Bohemian profession,
Lucrezia has miraculously preserved intact her native nobility of soul,
and appears as a meet object of worship to a fastidious young prince on
his travels, who becomes passionately enamored of her. He over-persuades
Lucrezia into trusting that they will find their felicity in each other.
Their happiness is of the briefest duration, owing to the unreasonable
character of the prince, who leads the actress a miserable life; his
love taking the form of petty tyranny and retrospective jealousy. After
long years of this material and moral captivity, the heroic Lucrezia
fades and dies.
Not content with identifying the intolerable, though it must be owned
severely-tested, Prince Karol with Chopin, imaginative writers have gone
so far as to assert that the book was conceived and written from an
express design on the novelist's part to bring about the breach of a
link she was beginning to find irksome!
Madame Sand has described how it was written--as are all such works of
imagination--in response to a sort of "call"--some striking yet
indefinable quality in one idea among the host always floating through
the brain of the artist, that makes him instantly seize it and single it
out as inviting to art-treatment. It would be preposterous to doubt her
statement. But whether the inspiration ought not to have been sacrificed
is another question. Her gift was her good angel and her evil angel as
well, but in any case something of her despot. Here, assuredly, it
ruled her ill. It is indisputable that, as she had pointed out, the sad
history of the attachment of Lucrezia the actress and Karol the prince
deviates too widely from that which was supposed to have originated it
for just comparisons to be drawn between the two, that Karol is not a
genius, and therefore has none of the rights of genius--including, we
presume, the right to be a torment to those around him--that to talk of
a portrait of Chopin without his genius is a contradiction in terms,
that he never suspected the likeness assumed until it was insinuated to
him, and so forth. But there remains this, that in the work of
imagination she here presented to the public there was enough of reality
interwoven to make the world hasten to identify or confound Prince Karol
with Chopin. This might have been a foregone conclusion, as also that
Chopin, the most sensitive of mortals, would be infinitely pained by the
inferences that would be drawn. Perhaps if only as a genius, he had the
right to be spared such an infliction; and one must wish it could have
appeared in this light to Madame Sand. It seems as though it were
impossible for the author to put himself at the point of view of the
reader in such matters. The divine spark itself, that quickens certain
faculties, deadens others. When Goethe, in _Werther_, dragged the
private life of his intimate friends, the Kestners, into publicity, and
by falsifying the character of the one and misrepresenting the conduct
of the other, in obedience to the requisitions of art, exposed his
beloved Charlotte and her husband to all manner of annoyances, it never
seems to have entered into his head beforehand but that they would be
delighted by what he had done. Nor could he get over his surprise that
such petty vexations on their part should not be merged in a proud
satisfaction at the literary memorial thus raised by him to their
friendly intercourse! This seems incredible, and yet his sincerity
leaves no room for doubt.
Madame Sand's transgressions on this head, though few, have obtained
great notoriety, on account of the extraordinary celebrity of two of the
personages that suggested characters she has drawn. To the supposed
originals, however obscure, the mortification is the same. But what
often passes uncommented on when the individuals said to be traduced are
unknown to fame, sets the whole world talking when one of the first
musicians or poets of the century is involved; so that Madame Sand has
incurred more censure than other novelists, though she has deserved it
more rarely. But regret remains that for the sake of _Lucrezia
Floriani_, one of the least pleasant though by no means the least
powerful of her novels, she should have exposed herself to the charge of
unkindness to one who had but a short while to live.
Other causes had latterly been combining to lead to differences of which
it would certainly be unfair to lay the whole blame on Madame Sand. The
tie of personal attachment between Chopin and herself was not associated
by identity of outward interests or even of cares and family affections,
such as, in the case of husband and wife, make self-sacrifice possible
under conditions which might otherwise be felt unbearable, and help to
tide over crises of impatience or wrong. Madame Sand's children were now
grown up; cross-influences could not but arise, hard to conciliate.
Without accrediting Chopin with the self-absorption of Prince Karol, it
is easy to see here, in a situation somewhat anomalous, elements of
probable discord. It was impossible that he should any longer be a first
consideration; impossible that he should not resent it.
For some years his state of health had been getting worse and worse, and
his nervous susceptibilities correspondingly intensified. Madame Sand
betrayed some impatience at last of what she had long borne
uncomplainingly, and their good understanding was broken. As was
natural, the breach was the more severely felt by Chopin, but that it
was of an irreparable nature, one is at liberty to doubt. He bitterly
regretted what he had lost, for which not all the attentions showered on
him by his well-wishers could afford compensation, as his letters
attest.
But outward circumstances prolonged the estrangement till it was too
late. They met but once after the quarrel, and that was in company in
March, 1848. Madame Sand would at once have made some approach, but
Chopin did not then respond to the appeal; and the reconciliation both
perhaps desired was never to take place. Political events had intervened
to widen the gap between their paths. Chopin had neither part nor lot in
the revolutionary movement that just then was throwing all minds and
lives into a ferment, and which was completely to engross Madame Sand's
energies for many months to come. It drove him away to England, and he
only returned to Paris, in 1849, to die.
In May, 1847, the tranquility of life at Nohant had been varied by a
family event, the marriage of Madame Sand's daughter Solange with the
sculptor Clesinger. The remainder of the twelvemonth was spent in the
country, apparently with very little anticipation on Madame Sand's part
that the breaking of the political storm, that was to draw her into its
midst, was so near.
The new year was to be one of serious agitations, different to any that
had yet entered into her experience. Political enterprise for the time
cast all purely personal interests and emotions into the background. "I
have never known how to do anything by halves," she says of herself very
truly; and whatever may be thought of the tendency of her political
influence and the manner of its exertion, no one can tax her with
sparing herself in a contest to which, moreover, she came disinterested;
vanity and ambition having, in one of her sex, nothing to gain by it.
But in political matters it seems hard for a poet to do right. If, like
Goethe, he holds aloof in great crises, he is branded for it as a
traitor and a bad patriot. The battle of Leipzig is being fought, and he
sits tranquilly writing the epilogue for a play. If, like George Sand,
he throws the whole weight of his enthusiastic eloquence into what he
believes to be the right scale, it is ten to one that his power, which
knows nothing of caution and patience, may do harm to the cause he has
at heart.
Madame Sand rested her hopes for a better state of things, for the
redemption of France from political corruption, for the amelioration of
the condition of the working classes, and reform of social institutions
in general, on the advent to power of those placed at the head of
affairs by the collapse of the government of Louis Philippe, a crisis
long threatened, long prepared, and become inevitable.
"The whole system," wrote Heine prophetically of the existing monarchy,
five years before its fall, "is not worth a charge of powder, if indeed
some day a charge of powder does not blow it up." February, 1848, saw
the explosion, the flight of the Royal Family, and the formation of a
Provisional Government, with Lamartine at its head.
It is hard to realize in the present day, when we contemplate these
events through the sobering light of the deplorable sequel, how immense
and wide-spreading was the enthusiasm that at this particular juncture
seemed to put the fervent soul of a George Sand or an Armand Barbes into
the most lukewarm and timid. "More than one," writes Madame d'Agoult,
"who for the last twenty years had been scoffing at every grand thought,
let himself be won by the general emotion." The prevailing impression
can have fallen little short of the conviction that a sort of millennium
was at hand for mankind in general and the French in particular, and
that all human ills would disappear because a bad government had been
got rid of, and that without such scenes of blood and strife as had
disfigured previous revolutions.
The first task was firmly to establish a better one in its place. Madame
Sand, though with a strong perception of the terrible difficulties
besetting a ministry which, to quote her own words, would need, in order
to acquit itself successfully, "the genius of a Napoleon and the heart
of Christ," never relaxed an instant in the enforcement, both by example
and exhortation, of her conviction that it was the duty of all true
patriots and philanthropists to consecrate their energies to the cause
of the new republic.
"My heart is full and my head on fire," she writes to a fellow-worker in
the same cause. "All my physical ailments, all my personal sorrows are
forgotten. I live, I am strong, active, I am not more than twenty years
old." The exceptional situation of the country was one in which,
according to her opinion, it behooved men to be ready not only with
loyalty and devotion, but with fanaticism if needed. She worked hard
with her son and her local allies at the ungrateful task of
revolutionizing Le Berry, which, she sighs, "is very drowsy." In March
she came up to Paris and placed her services as journalist and partizan
generally at the disposal of Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior
under the new Government. "Here am I already doing the work of a
statesman," she writes from Paris to her son at Nohant, March 24. Her
indefatigable energy, enabling her as it did to disdain repose, was
perhaps the object of envy to the statesmen themselves. At their disgust
when kept up all night by the official duties of their posts, she laughs
without mercy. Night and day her pen was occupied, now drawing up
circulars for the administration, now lecturing the people in political
pamphlets addressed to them. To the _Bulletin de la Republique_, a
government journal started with the laudable purpose of preserving a
clear understanding between the mass of the people in the provinces and
the central government, she became a leading contributor. For the festal
invitation performances given to the people at the "Theatre de la
Republique," where Rachel sang the Marseillaise and acted in _Les
Horaces_, Madame Sand wrote a little "occasional" prologue, _Le Roi
Attend_, a new and democratic version of Moliere's _Impromptu de
Versailles_. The outline is as follows:--Moliere is discovered impatient
and uneasy; the King waits, and the comedians are not ready. He sinks
asleep, and has a vision, in which the muse emerges out of a cloud,
escorted by AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and
Beaumarchais, to each of whom are assigned a few lines--where possible,
lines of their own--in praise of equality and fraternity. They vanish,
and Moliere awakes; his servant announces to him that the King
waits--but the King this time is, of course, the people, to whom Moliere
now addresses his flattering speech in turn.
But the fervor of heroism that fired everybody in the first days of
successful revolution, that made the leaders disinterested, the masses
well-behaved, reasonable, and manageable, was for the majority a flash
only; and the dreamed-of social ideal, touched for a moment was to
recede again into the far distance. It was Madame Sand's error, and no
ignoble one, to entertain the belief that a nation could safely be
trusted to the guidance of a force so variable and uncontrollable as
enthusiasm, and that the principle of self-devotion could be relied upon
as a motive power. The divisions, intrigues, and fatal complications
that quickly arose at head-quarters confirmed her first estimation of
the practical dangers ahead. She clung to her belief in the sublime
virtues of the masses, and that they would prove themselves grander,
finer, more generous than all the mighty and the learned ones upon
earth. But each of the popular leaders in turn was pronounced by her
tried and found wanting. None of the party chiefs presented the
desirable combination of perfect heroism and political genius. Michel,
the apostle who of old had converted her to the cause, she had long
scorned as a deserter. Leroux, in the moment of action, was a nonentity.
Barbes "reasons like a saint," she observes, "that is to say, very ill
as regards the things of this world." Lamartine was a vain trimmer;
Louis Blanc, a sectarian; Ledru-Rollin, a weathercock. "It is the
characters that transgress," she complains naively as one after the
other disappointed her. Her own shortcomings on the score of patience
and prudence were, it must be owned, no less grave. Her
clear-sightedness was unaccompanied by the slightest dexterity of
action. Years before, in one of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_, she had
passed a criticism on herself as a political worker, the accuracy of
which she made proof of when carried into the vortex. "I am by nature
poetical, but not legislative, warlike, if required, but never
parliamentary. By first persuading me and then giving me my orders some
use may be made of me, but I am not fit for discovering or deciding
anything."
Such an influence, important for raising an agitation, was null for
controlling and directing the forces thus set in motion. In the
application of the theories she had accepted she was as weak and obscure
as she was emphatic and eloquent in the preaching of them. Little help
could she afford the republican leaders in dealing with the momentous
question how to fulfill the immense but confused aspirations they had
raised, how to show that their principles could answer the necessities
of the moment.
The worst, perhaps, that can be said of Madame Sand's political
utterances is that they encouraged the people in their false
belief--which belief she shared--that the social reforms so urgently
needed could be worked rapidly by the Government, providing only it were
willing. Over-boldness of expression on the part of advanced sections
only increased the timidity and irresolution of action complained of in
the administration. As the ranks of the Ministry split up into factions,
Madame Sand attached herself to the party of Ledru-Rollin--in whom at
that time she had confidence,--a party that desired to see him at the
head of affairs, and that included Jules Favre, Etienne Arago, and
Armand Barbes. No more zealous political partizan and agent than Madame
Sand. The purpose in view was to preserve a cordial _entente_ between
these trusted chiefs and the masses whose interests they represented and
on whose support they relied. To this end she got together meetings of
working-men at her temporary Parisian abode, addressing them in speech
and in print, and seemingly blind in the heat of the struggle to the
enormous danger of playing with the unmanageable, unreasoning instincts
of the crowd. She still cherished the chimera dear to her
imagination--the prospective vision of the French people assembling
itself in large masses, and deliberately and pacifically giving
expression to its wishes.
Into the _Bulletin de la Republique_ there crept soon a tone of
impatience and provocation, improper and dangerous in an official organ.
The 16th number, which appeared on April 16, at a moment when the
pending general elections seemed likely to be overruled by
reactionaries, contained the startling declaration that if the result
should thus dissatisfy the Paris people, these would manifest their will
once more, by adjourning the decision of a false national
representation.
This sentence, which came from the pen of Madame Sand, was interpreted
into a threat of intimidation from the party that would make
Ledru-Rollin dictator, and created a considerable stir. There was,
indeed, no call for a fresh brand of discord in the republican ranks.
Almost simultaneously came popular demonstrations of a menacing
character. Ledru-Rollin disavowed the offending _Bulletin_; but the
growing uneasiness of the _bourgeoisie_, the unruly discontent among the
workmen, the Government, embarrassed and utterly disorganized, was
powerless to allay. Madame Sand began to perceive that the republic of
her dreams, the "republican republic," was a forlorn hope, though still
unconscious that even heavier obstacles to progress existed in the
governed many than in the incapacity or personal ambition of the
governing few. She writes to her son from Paris, April 17:--
I am sad, my boy. If this goes on, and in some sense there should
be no more to be done, I shall return to Nohant to console myself
by being with you. I shall stay and see the National Assembly,
after which I think I shall find nothing more here that I can do.
At the _Fete de la Fraternite_, April 20th, the spectacle of a million
of souls putting aside and agreeing to forget all dissensions, all
wrongs in the past and fears for the future, and uniting in a burst of
joyous exultation, filled her with enthusiasm and renewed hope. But the
demonstration of the 15th of May, of which she was next a spectator,
besides its mischievous effect in alarming the quiet classes and
exciting the agitators afresh, gave fatal evidence of the national
disorganization and uncontrollable confusion everywhere prevailing, that
had doomed the republic from the hour of its birth.
Madame Sand, though she strenuously denied any participation or sympathy
with this particular manifestation, was closely associated in the
public mind with those who had aided and abetted the uprising. During
the gathering of the populace, which she had witnessed, mingling
unrecognized among the crowd, a female orator haranguing the mob from
the lower windows of a _cafe_ was pointed out to her, and she was
assured that it was George Sand. During the repressive measures the
administration was led to take she felt uncertain whether the arrest of
Barbes might not be followed by her own. Some of her friends advised her
to seek safety in Italy, where at that time the partisans of liberty
were more united and sanguine. She turned a deaf ear. But she was
severed now from all influential connection with those in authority.
Before the end of May she left for Nohant, with her hopes for the rapid
regeneration of her country on the wane. "I am afraid for the future,"
she writes to the imprisoned Barbes, shortly after these events. "I
suffer for those who do harm and allow harm to be done without
understanding it.... I see nothing but ignorance and moral weakness
preponderating on the face of the globe."
Through the medium of the press, notably of the journal _La Vraie
Republique_, she continued to give plain expression to her sentiments,
regardless of the political enmities she might excite, and of the
personal mortification to which she was exposed, even at Nohant, which
with its inmates had recently become the mark for petty hostile
"demonstrations." Alluding to these, she writes:--
Here in this Berry, so romantic, so gentle, so calm and good, in
this land I love so tenderly, and where I have given sufficient
proof to the poor and uneducated that I know my duties towards
them, I myself in particular am looked upon as the enemy of the
human race; and if the Republic has not kept its promises, it is I,
clearly, who am the cause.
The term "communist," caught up and passed from mouth to mouth, was
flung at Madame Sand and her son by the peasants, whose ideas as to its
significance were not a little wild. "A pack of idiots," she writes to
Madame Marliani, "who threaten to come and set fire to Nohant. Brave
they are not, neither morally nor physically; and when they come this
way and I walk through the midst of them they take off their hats; but
when they have gone by they summon courage to shout, 'Down with the
communists.'"
The ingratitude of many who again and again had received succor from her
and hers, she might excuse on account of their ignorance, but the extent
of their ignorance was an obstacle to immediate progress whose weight
she had miscalculated.
"I shall keep my faith," she writes to Joseph Mazzini at this
crisis--"the idea, pure and bright, the eternal truth will ever remain
for me in my heaven, unless I go blind. But hope is a belief in the near
triumph of one's faith. I should not be sincere if I said that this
state of mind had not been modified in me during these last months."
The terrible insurrection of June followed, and overwhelmed her for the
time. It was not only that her nature, womanly and poetical, had the
greatest horror of bloodshed. The spectacle of the republicans
slaughtering each other, of the evil passions stirred, the frightful
anarchy, ended but at a frightful cost, the complete extinction of all
hopes,--nothing left rampant but fear, rancor and distrust,--was
heart-rendering to her whose heart had been thrown into the national
troubles. Great was the panic in Berry, an after-clap of the
disturbances in the capital. Madame Sand's position became more
unpleasant than ever. She describes herself as "_blasee d
outrages_--threatened perpetually by the coward hatreds and imbecile
terrors of country places." But to all this she was well-nigh insensible
in her despair over the public calamities oppressing her nation--the end
of all long-struggling aspirations in "frightful confusion, complete
moral anarchy, a morbid condition, in most which the courageous of us
lost heart and wished for death.
"You say that the _bourgeoisie_ prevails," she writes to Mazzini, in
September, 1848, "and that thus it is quite natural that selfishness
should be the order of the day. But why does the _bourgeoisie_ prevail,
whilst the people is sovereign, and the principle of its sovereignty,
universal suffrage, is still standing? We must open our eyes at last,
and the vision of reality is horrible. The majority of the French people
is blind, credulous, ignorant, ungrateful, wicked, and stupid; it is
_bourgeoisie_ itself!"
Under no conceivable circumstances is it likely that Madame Sand would
not very soon have become disgusted with active politics, for which her
temperament unfitted her in every respect. Impetuous and
uncompromisingly sincere, she was predestined to burn her fingers; proud
and independent, to become something of a scape-goat, charged with all
the follies and errors which she repudiated, as well as with those for
which she was more or less directly responsible.
For some time to come she remained in comparative seclusion at Nohant.
She had not ceased her propaganda, though obliged to conduct it with
greater circumspection. After the horrors of civil warfare, had come the
cry for order at any price, and France had declared for the rule of
Louis Bonaparte. During the course of events that consolidated his
power, Madame Sand withdrew more and more from the strife of political
parties. She had been, and we shall find her again, inclined to hope for
better things for France from its new master than time showed to be in
store. Other republicans besides herself had been disposed to build high
their hopes of this future "saviour of society" in his youthful days of
adversity and mysterious obscurity. When in confinement at the fortress
of Ham, in 1844, Louis Napoleon sent to George Sand his work on the
Extinction of Pauperism. She wrote back a flattering letter in which,
however, with characteristic sincerity, she is careful to remind him
that the party to which she belonged could never acknowledge any
sovereign but the people; that this they considered to be incompatible
with the sovereignty of one man; that no miracle, no personification of
popular genius in a single individual, could prove to them the right of
that individual to sovereign power.
Since then she had seen the people supreme, and been forced to own that
they knew not what they wanted, nor whither they were going, divided in
mind, ferocious in action. Among the leaders, she had seen some
infatuated by the allurements of personal popularity, and the rest
showing, by their inability to cope with the perplexities of
administrative government, that so far philosophical speculations were
of no avail in the actual solution of social problems.
The result of her disenchantment was in no degree the overthrow of her
political faith. A conviction was dawning on her that her social ideal
was absolutely impracticable in any future that she and her friends
could hope to live to see. But the belief on which she founded her
social religion was one in which she never wavered; a certainty that a
progress, the very idea of which now seemed chimerical, would some day
appear to all as a natural thing; nay, that the stream of tendency would
carry men towards this goal in spite of themselves.