ARTIST AND MORALIST.
On what, in the future, will the fame of George Sand mainly rest?
According to some critics, on her gifts of fertile invention and fluent
narration alone, which make her novels attractive in spite of the
chimerical theories, social, political and religious, everywhere
interwoven. According to other judges again, her fictions transcend and
are likely to outlive other fictions by virtue of certain eternal
philosophic verities which they persistently set forth, and which give
them a serious interest the changes in novel-fashions cannot effect.
The conclusion seems inevitable that whilst the artistic strength of
George Sand's writings is sufficient to command readers among those most
out of harmony with her views, to minds in sympathy with her own these
romances, because they express and enforce with earnestness, sincerity
and fire, the sentiments of a poetic soul, a generous heart, and an
immense intelligence, on subjects of consequence to humanity, have a
higher value than can attach to skillful development of plot and
intrigue, mere display of literary cleverness, or of the storings of
minute observation.
Her opinions themselves have been widely misapprehended, perhaps because
her personality--or rather that imaginary personage, the George Sand of
the myths--has caused a confusion in people's minds between her ideal
standard and her individual success in keeping up to it. We would not
ignore the importance of personal example in one so famous as herself.
We may pass by eccentricities not inviting to imitation; for if any of
her sex ever thought to raise themselves any nearer to the level of
George Sand by smoking or wearing men's clothes, such puerility does not
call for notice. Still, the influence she strenuously exerted for good
as a writer for the public would have worked more clearly had she never
seemed to swerve from the high principles she expressed, or been led
away by the disturbing forces of a nature calm only on the surface.
Nothing is more baffling than the incomplete revelations of a very
complex order of mind, with its many-sided sympathies and its apparent
contradictions. The self-justification she puts forward for her errors
is sometimes sophistical, but not for that insincere. She is not trying
to make us her dupes; she is the dupe herself of her dangerous
eloquence. But her moral worth so infinitely outweighed the alloy as to
leave but little call, or even warrant, for dwelling on the latter. "If
I come back to you," said her old literary patron Delatouche, into whose
disfavor she had fallen awhile, when he came years after to ask for the
restitution of the friendship he had slighted, "it is that I cannot help
myself, and your qualities surpass your defects."
To pass from herself to her books, no one has made more frank, clear and
unchanging confession of their heart's faith or their head's principles.
Her creed was that which has been, and ever will be in some guise, the
creed of minds of a certain order. She did not invent it. Poets,
moralists, theologians, have proclaimed it before her and after her. She
found for it a fresh mode of expression, one answering to the needs of
the age to which she belonged.
It is in the union of rare artistic genius with an almost as rare and
remarkable power of enthusiasm for moral and spiritual truth that lies
her distinguishing strength. Most of her novels--all her best
novels--share this characteristic of seeming to be prompted by the
double and equal inspiration of an artistic and a moral purpose.
Wherever one of these preponderates greatly, or is wanting altogether,
the novel falls below her usual standard.
For in several qualities reckoned important her work is open to
criticism. "Plan, or the want of it," she acknowledges, with a sort of
complacency, "has always been my weak point." Thus whilst in many of her
compositions, especially the shorter novels, the construction leaves
little to be desired, _Consuelo_ is only one among many instances in
which all ordinary rules of symmetry and proportion are set at naught.
Sometimes the leading idea assumed naturally and easily a perfect form;
if simple, as in _Andre_ and her pastorals, it usually did so; but if
complex, she troubled herself little over the task of symmetrical
arrangement. M. Maxime Du Camp reports that she said to him: "When I
begin a novel I have no plan; it arranges itself whilst I write, and
becomes what it may." This fault shocks less in England, where genius is
apt to rebel against the restrictions of form, and such irregularity has
been consecrated, so to speak, by the masterpieces of the greatest among
our imaginative writers. And even the more precise criticism of her
countrymen has owned that this carelessness works by no means entirely
to her disadvantage. In fictions more faultless as literary compositions
the reader, whilst struck with admiration for the art with which the
whole is put together, is apt to lose something of the illusion--the
impression of nature and conviction. The faults of no writer can be more
truly defined as the _defauts de ses qualites_ than those of George
Sand. Shorn of her spontaneity, she would indeed be shorn of her
strength. We are carried along by the pleasant, easy stream of her
musical eloquence, as by an orator who knows so well how to draw our
attention that we forget to find him too long. Her stories may be read
rapidly, but to be enjoyed should be read through. Dipped into and their
parts taken without reference to the whole, they can afford
comparatively but little pleasure.
In translation no novelist loses more than George Sand,--who has so much
to lose! The qualities sacrificed, though almost intangible, are
essential to the force of her charm. The cement is taken away and the
fabric coheres imperfectly; and whilst the beauties of her manner are
blurred, its blemishes appear increased; the lengthiness, over-emphasis
of expression, questionable taste of certain passages, become more
marked. Although nevertheless many of her tales remain pleasant reading,
they suffer as much as translated poetry, and only a very inadequate
impression of her art as a novelist can be arrived at from any rendering
of it in a foreign tongue.
Her dialogue has neither brilliancy nor variety. Her characters
characterize themselves by the sentiments they express; their manner of
expression is somewhat uniform--it is the manner of George Sand; and
although pleasant humor and good-natured fun abound in her pages, these
owe none of their attractions to witty sayings, being curiously bare of
a _bon mot_ or an epigram.
But we find there the rarer merits of a poetic imagination, a vast
comprehension of nature, admirable insight into human character and
power of clear analysis; a whole science of sentiment and art of
narrative, and a charm of narrative style that soothes the nerves like
music.
She has given us a long gallery of portraits of extraordinary variety.
It is true that her creations for the most part affect us rather as
masterly portraits than as living, walking men and women. This is
probably owing to the above-noted sameness of style of dialogue, and the
absence generally of the dramatic quality in her novels. On the other
hand they are extremely picturesque, in the highest sense, abounding in
scenes and figures which, without inviting to the direct illustration
they are too vivid to need, are full of suggestions to the artist. The
description in _Teverino_ of Madeleine, the bird-charmer, kneeling at
prayer in the rude mountain chapel, or outside on the rocks, exercising
her natural magic over her feathered friends; in _Jeanne_, of the
shepherd-girl discovered asleep on the Druidical stones; the noon-day
rest of the rustic fishing-party in _Valentine_--Benedict seated on the
felled ash-tree that bridges the stream, Athenais gathering
field-flowers on the banks, Louise flinging leaves into the current,
Valentine reclining dreamily among the tall river-reeds,--are a few
examples taken at random, which it would be easy to multiply _ad
infinitum_.
Any classification of her works in order of time that professes to show
a progressive change of style, a period of super-excellence or of
distinct decadence, seems to us somewhat fanciful. From _Indiana_ and
its immediate successors, denounced by so many as fraught with peril to
the morals of her nation, down to _Nanon_ (1872), which might certainly
carry off the prize of virtue in a competition in any country, George
Sand can never be said to have entirely abandoned one "manner" for
another, or for any length of time to have risen above or sunk below a
certain level of excellence. _Andre_, extolled by her latest critics as
"a delicious eclogue of the fields," was contemporary with the
bombastic, false Byronism of _Jacques_; the feeble narrative of _La Mare
au Diable_ with the passion-introspection of _Lucrezia Floriani_. The
ever-popular _Consuelo_ immediately succeeded the feeble _Compagnon du
Tour de France_. _La Marquise_, written in the first year of her
literary life, shows a power of projection out of herself, and of
delicate analysis, hardly to be surpassed; but _Francia_, of forty
years' later date, is an equally perfect study. From the time of
_Indiana_ onwards she continued to produce at the rate of about two
novels a year; and at intervals, rare intervals, the product was a
failure. But we shall find her when approaching seventy still writing
on, without a trace of the weakness of old age.
The charge of "unreality" so commonly brought against her novels it may
be well briefly to examine. Such little fantasy-pieces in Hoffmann's
manner as _Le Chateau des Desertes_, _Teverino_, and others, making no
pretense to be exact studies of nature, cannot fairly be censured on
this head. Like fairy tales they have a place of their own in art. One
of the prettiest of these is _Les Dames Vertes_, in which the fable
seems to lead us over the borders of the supernatural; but the secret of
the mystification, well kept till the last, is itself so pleasing and
original that the reader has no disappointing sense as of having had a
hoax played upon his imagination.
In character drawing no one can, on occasion, be a more uncompromising
realist than George Sand. Andre, Horace, Laurent in _Elle et Lui_,
Pauline, Corilla, Alida in _Valvedre_, might be cited as examples. But
her theory was unquestionably not the theory which guides the modern
school of novel writers. She wrote, she states explicitly, for those
"who desire to find in a novel a sort of ideal life." She made this her
aim, but without depreciation of the widely different aims of other
authors. "You paint mankind as they are," she said to Balzac; "I, as
they ought to be, or might become. You write the comedy of humanity. I
should like to write the eclogue, the poem, the romance of humanity."
She has been taxed with flattering nature and human nature because her
love of beauty--defined by her as the highest expression of
truth--dictated her choice of subjects. An artist who paints roses
paints from reality as entirely as he who paints mud. Her principle was
to choose among realities those which seemed best worth painting.
The amount of idealization in her peasant sketches was naturally
over-estimated by those who, never having studied the class, could not
conceive of a peasant except conventionally, as a drunken boor. The very
just portrait of Cecilia Boccaferri, the conscientious but obscure
artist in _Le Chateau des Desertes_, might seem over-flattered to such
as imagine that all opera-singers must be persons of riotous living. The
types she prefers to present, if exceptional, are not impossible or
non-existent. An absolutely faultless heroine, such as Consuelo, she
seldom attempts to bring before us; an ideal hero; never.
Further, even when the idealism is greatest the essence is true. Her
most fanciful conceptions, most improbable combinations, seem more
natural than do every-day scenes and characters treated by inferior
artists. This is only partly due to the inimitable little touches of
nature that renew the impression of reality at every page. Her
imagination modified her material, but only in order the more vividly to
illustrate truths positive and everlasting. So did Shakespeare when he
drew Prospero and Miranda, Caliban and Ariel. Art, as regarded by George
Sand, is a search for ideal truth rather than a study of positive
reality. This principle determined the spirit of her romances. She was
the highest in her _genre_; let the world decide which _genre_ is the
highest.
When, after the publication of _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lelia_ and
_Jacques_, the moral tendency of her works was so sharply attacked, it
was contended on her behalf by some friendly critics that art and
social morality have no necessary connection--a line of defense she
would have been the last to take up for herself. In the present day her
judges complain rather of her incessant moralizing, and on the whole
with more reason. She indignantly denied that her novels had the evil
tendencies imputed to them. Certainly the supposition of the
antagonistic spirit of her writings to Christianity and marriage
vanishes in proportion to the reader's acquaintance with her works. But
against certain doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church
which she believed to be pernicious in their influence, she from the
first declared war, and by her frank audacity made bitter enemies. M.
Renan relates that when he was a boy of fifteen his ecclesiastical
superiors showed him George Sand, emblematically portrayed for the
admonition of the youth under their care, as a woman in black trampling
on a cross! Now, it is not merely that her own faith was eminently
Christian in character, and that the Christian ideal seemed to her the
most perfect that has yet presented itself to the mind of man; but if
unable to accept for herself the doctrine of revelation as commonly
interpreted, she is utterly without the aggressiveness of spirit, the
petty flippancy, that often betray the intellectual bigot under the
banner of free thought. She was too large-minded to incline to ridicule
the serious convictions of earnest seekers for truth, and she respected
all sincerity of belief--all faith that produced beneficence in action.
The alleged hostility of her romances to marriage resumes itself into a
declared hostility to the conventional French system of match-making.
Much that she was condemned for venturing to put forward we should
simply take for granted in England, where--whichever system work the
best in practice--to the strictest Philistine's ideas of propriety there
is nothing unbecoming in a love-match. The aim and end of true love in
her stories is always marriage, whether it be the simple attachment of
Germain, the field-laborer, for the rustic maiden of his choice, the
romantic predilection of the rich young widow in _Pierre qui roule_ for
the handsome actor Laurence, or the worship of Count Albert for the
_cantatrice_ Consuelo. Her ideal of marriage was, no doubt, a high one,
"the indissoluble attachment of two hearts fired with a like love;" a
love "great, noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal." Among French
novelists she should rather be noted for the extremely small proportion
of her numerous romances that have domestic infelicity for a theme.
Her remark that their real offense was that they were a great deal too
moral for some of their critics, hit home, inasmuch as in her attack on
the ordinary marriage system of France she struck directly at the
fashionable immorality which is its direct result, and which she saw,
both in life and in literature, pass free of censure. It is the selfish
intriguer who meets with least mercy in her pages, and who is there held
up, not only to dislike, but to ridicule.
Persons perplexed by the fact that particular novels of hers which,
judged by certain theories, ought to be morally hurtful, do yet produce
a very different effect, have accounted for it in different ways. One
explains it by saying that if there is poison on one page there is
always the antidote on the next. Another observes that a certain
morality of misfortune is never absent from her fictions. In other
words, she nowhere presents us with the spectacle of real happiness
reaped at the expense of a violation of conscience. And in the rare
cases where the purpose of the novel seems questionable, she defeats her
own end. For truth always preponderates over error in her conceptions,
and the result is a moral effect.
The want of delicacy that not unfrequently disfigures her pages and
offends us, offends also as an artistic fault. As a fact it is taste
rather than conscience that she is thus apt to shock. For the almost
passing coarseness of expression or thought is nothing more than the
overflow, the negligent frankness of a rich and active but healthy
nature, not the deliberate obliquity of a corrupt fancy or perverted
mind. Such unreserve, unfortunately, has too commonly been the
transgression of writers of superabundant energy. But her sins are
against outward decorum rather than against the principles upon which
the rules of decorum are based. No one was better capable of
appreciating and indicating with fine touches, delicacy and niceties of
taste and feeling in others. Her sympathy with such sensitiveness is a
corrective that should render harmless what might vitiate taste if that
qualification were absent. And her stories, though including a very few
instances where the subject chosen seems to most English minds too
repulsive to admit of possible redemption, and the frequent incidental
introduction of situations and frank discussion of topics inadmissible
in English fiction of that period--an honorable distinction it seems in
some danger of losing in the present--can hardly be censured from the
French standpoint, as fair critics now admit. It is inconceivable that a
public could be demoralized by _Indiana_ and _Valentine_, at a time when
no subject seemed wicked and morbid enough to satisfy popular taste.
The art of George Sand in the main was sound and healthy, and in flat
opposition to the excesses both of the ultra-romantic and ultra-realist
schools.
Clear-sighted critics, perceiving that the impression produced by her
works is not one to induce men and women to defy the laws of their
country, nor likely to undermine their religious faith, have gone more
to the heart of the matter. The dangerous tendency is more insidious,
they say, and more general. Virtue, and not vice, is made attractive in
her books; but it is an easy virtue, attained without self-conquest. All
her characters, good and bad, act alike from impulse. Those who seek
virtue seek pleasure in so doing, and her philosophy of life seems to be
that people should do as they like. The morality she commends to our
sympathy and admiration is a morality of instinct and emotion, not of
reason and principle. Self-renunciation, immolation of desire in
obedience to accepted precept, is ignored. Sentiment is supreme. Duty,
as a motive power, is set aside.
George Sand, who as a writer from first to last appeared as a crusader
against the evil, injustice and vice that darken the world, did
undoubtedly choose rather to speak out of her heart to our hearts, than
out of her head to our heads, and considered moreover that such was the
more effectual way. Her idea of virtue lay not in the curbing of evil
instincts, but in their conversion or modification by the evoking of
good impulses, that "guiding and intensifying of our emotions by a new
ideal" which has been called the great work of Christianity.
It is not--or not in the first place--that people should do as they
like, but that they should like to do right; and further, that human
nature in that ideal life the sentiment of which pervades her works, and
in which she saw "no other than the normal life as we are called to know
it," does not desire what is hurtful to it.
The goodness that consists in doing right or refraining from doing wrong
reluctantly, or in obedience to prescribed rules, or from mechanical
habit, had for her no life or charm. The object to be striven for should
be nothing less than the "perfect harmony of inward desire and outward
obligation."
Virtue should be chosen, though we seem to sacrifice happiness; but that
the two are in the beginning identical, that, as expressed by Mr.
Herbert Spencer, "whether perfection of nature, virtuousness of action,
or rectitude of motive, be assigned as the proper aim, the definition of
perfection, virtue, rectitude, brings us down to happiness experienced
in some form, at some time, by some person as the fundamental idea," is
a philosophic truth of which a large _apercu_ is observable in the works
of George Sand. Self-sacrifice should spring from direct desire,
altruism be spontaneous--a need--becoming a second and better nature;
not won by painful effort, but through the larger development of the
principle of sympathy. Strong in her own immense power of sympathy, she
applied herself to the task of awakening and extending such sympathies
in others. This she does by the creation of agreeable, interesting and
noble types, such as may put us out of conceit with what is mean and
base. Goodness, as understood and portrayed by her, must recommend
itself not only to the judgment but to the heart. She worked to
popularize high sentiments, and to give shape and reality to vague ideas
of human excellence. Her idea of virtue as a motive, not a restraint,
not the controlling of low and evil desires, but the precluding of all
temptations to yield to these, by the calling out of stronger, higher
desires, so far from being a low one, is indeed the very noblest; yet
not on that account a chimera to those who hold, like her, to the
conviction that "what now characterizes the exceptionally high may be
expected eventually to characterize all. For that which the highest
human nature is capable of is within the reach of human nature at
large." "We gravitate towards the ideal," she writes, "and this
gravitation is infinite, as is the ideal itself." And her place remains
among those few great intelligences who can be said to have given
humanity an appreciable impulse in the direction of progress.