GEORGE SAND
Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, self-called
George Sand!
--MRS. BROWNING.
I
Who reads George Sand nowadays? was asked at the time of her
centenary (she was born, 1804; died, 1876). Paris responded in
gallant phrases. She was declared one of the glories of French
literature. Nevertheless, we are more interested in the woman, in
her psychology, than in her interminable novels. The reason is
simple; her books were built for her day, not to endure. She never
created a vital character. Her men and women are bundles of
attributes, neither flesh nor blood nor good red melodrama. She was
a wonderful journalist, one is tempted to say the first of her sex,
and the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was a shriller
propagandist, yet she accomplished no more for the cause than her
French neighbour, not alone because she didn't smoke big cigars or
wear trousers, but on general principles. In a word, Mrs. Godwin
didn't exactly practise what she preached and George Sand did. For
her there was no talk of getting the vote; her feminism was a
romantic revolt, not economic or political rebellion. George Sand
should be enshrined as the patron saint of female suffragism. By no
means a deep thinker, for she reflected as in a mirror the ideas of
the intellectual men she met, she had an enormous vogue. Her
reputation was worldwide.
We know more about her now, thanks to the three volumes recently
published by Vladimir Karenine (the pen-name of a Russian lady, Mme.
Komaroff, the daughter of Dmitri Stassow). This writer has brought
her imposing work (thus far over 1,700 pages) down to 1848, and, as
much happened in the life of her heroine after that, we may expect
at least two more fat volumes. Her curiosity has been insatiable.
She has read all the historical and critical literature dealing with
Sand. She has at first-hand from friends and relatives facts
hitherto unpublished, and she is armed with a library of documents.
More, she has read and digested the hundred-odd stories of the
fecund writer, and actually analyses their plots, writes at length
of the characters, and incidentally throws light on her own
intellectual processes.
Mme. Karenine is not a broad critic. She is a painstaking
historian. While some tales of Sand are worth reading--The Devil's
Pool, Letters of a Voyager, even Consuelo, above all, her
autobiography--the rest is a burden to the spirit. Her facility
astounds, and also discourages. She confesses that with her writing
was like the turning on of a water-tap, the stream always flowed, a
literary hydrant. Awaken her in the night and she could resume her
task. She was of the centrifugal temperament, hence the resultant
shallowness of her work. She had charm. She had style, serene,
flowing, also tepid and fatuous, the style detested by Charles
Baudelaire, and admired by Turgenev and Renan and Lamennais.
Baudelaire remarked of this "best seller" that she wrote her chefs
d'[oe]uvre as if they were letters, and posted them. The "style
coulant," praised by bourgeois critics, he abhorred, as it lacked
accent, relief, individuality. "She is the Prudhomme of immorality,"
he said--not a bad definition--and "she is stupid, heavy, and a
chatterer." She loves the proletarian, and her sentiment is adapted
to the intelligent wife of the concierge and the sentimental harlot.
Which shows that even such a versatile critic as Baudelaire had his
prejudices. The sweetness and nobility of her nature were recognised
by all her associates.
Nietzsche is no less impolite. She derives from Rousseau--he might
have added Byron, also--she is false, artificial, inflated,
exaggerated; ... her style is of a variegated wall-paper pattern.
She betrays her vulgarity in her ambition to expose her generous
feelings. She is, like all the Romantics, a cold, insufferable
artist. She wound herself up like a timepiece and--wrote. Nietzsche,
like his great master, Schopenhauer, was never a worshipper of the
irresponsible sex. And her immorality? Pere Didon said that her
books are more immoral than Zola's, because more insidious, tinted
as they are with false ideas and sentiments. George Sand immoral?
What bathos! How futile her fist-shakings at conventional morality.
As well say Marie Corelli or Ouida is immoral. This literature of
gush and gabble is as dangerous to the morals of our time as the
Ibsen plays or AEsop's fables.
Unreality, cheap socialism, and sentiment of the downtrodden shop
girl are the stigmata of the Sand school. She has written many
memorable pages, many beautiful pages; such masters as Sainte-Beuve,
Balzac, Delacroix, Flaubert, Ballanche, Heine, Dostoievsky, and
Turgenev have told us so. Her idyllic stories are of an indubitable
charm. But her immorality, like her style, is old-fashioned--there
is a dating mark even in immorality, for if, as Ibsen maintained,
all truths stale and die after two decades, how much less life may
be allowed a lie? Your eternal verities, then, may be as evanescent
as last year's mist.
Mme. Karenine does not belong to the School of Moral Rehabilitation,
so prevalent here and in England. She does not spare her subject;
indeed, makes out a worse case than we had supposed. She is not a
prude and, if critically she is given to discovering a masterpiece
under every bush planted by that indefatigable gardener, George
Sand, she is quite aware of George's flagrant behaviour. The list of
lovers is a longer one than given by earlier biographers. Dumas
fils, a close observer of the novelist, asserts that she had no
temperament at all, thus corroborating the earlier testimony of
Heine. This further complicates the problem. She was not, then, a
perverse pursuer of young genius, going about seeking whom she could
devour, and indulging in what Mother Church calls morose
delectation! A "cold devil"--a la Felicien Rops. I doubt this.
Maternal she was. I once described her as a maternal nymphomaniac, a
metaphysical Messalina. She presided at numerous artistic
accouchements; she was, pre-eminently, the critical midwife to many
poets, pianists, painters, composers, and thinkers. If she made some
of them unhappy, she brought into the life of others much happiness.
Matthew Arnold believed in her, so did the Brownings, Elizabeth and
Robert; George Eliot admired her; she, too, was rowing in the same
kind of a moral galley, but with heavier oars and through the
Sargossian seas of British prudery.
In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was
neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has
fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful
grandmother. She had the featherbed temperament, and soothed
masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules
Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She
died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and
the idol of the literary world.
How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant
virtues--save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to
her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly
in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of
morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to
go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist
she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she
didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was
thrust upon her. At Nohant, her chateau in Berri, there was usually
a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy
dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their
blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his
famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the
Shelley-Godwin gatherings.
II
George Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men;
with women she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping with one eye
open. Her friendship with Mme. D'Agoult, the elective affinity of
Liszt, soon ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic seas, nor
hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories. She never did
approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire beginning: "Lo! the
Lesbians their sterile sex advancing." She was a woman from top to
toe. Nor did she indulge often in casual gallant adventures. Her
affairs were romantic. With the author of Carmen her spiritual
thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight
days, and Merimee is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he
tells as his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning
making the fire, her head in curl-papers, and attired in an old
dressing-gown. No passion could survive that shock, and selfish
Prosper at once grew frigid.
A French expression may suit George: She always had her heart "en
compote." And she was incorrigibly naive--they called it "Idealism"
in those days--witness her affair with Doctor Pagello in Venice. The
first handsome Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed
poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris alone, although she
had promised his mother to guard him carefully. He was suffering
from an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He had said of
himself: "I am not tender, I am excessive." He was. His name, unlike
Keats's, is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless, you can
reread him.
But the separation didn't kill him. He was twenty-two, George six
years older. Their affair struggled along about six months. Alfred
consoled himself with Rachel and many others. He was more poet than
artist, more artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen of a man.
He wrote the history of his love for George. She followed suit. This
sphinx of the ink-well was a journalist born. She used her lovers
for "copy"; and for that matter Byron and Goethe did the same.
George always discoursed of her thirst for the "infinite." It was
only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in
disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten
years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not in 1837, as the
Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced them. Later Chopin quarrelled
with Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at first; blue
stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the
world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than
from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin
before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage--and
the wisdom--to write that one of his Tiny Preludes contained more
genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings. And
Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this.
The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study
of Chopin. Solange Sand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly
perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him
from her mother--truly a Gallic triangle--but she so contrived
matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to
marry her lover, Clesinger, the sculptor. The knowledge of this Mme.
Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that he would
side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious at the
deception. He it was who broke with George, possibly aided thereto
by her nagging. He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped her
young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to George the
news that she was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.
Clesinger did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his
ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sand
suffered the agony of seeing in her daughter's life a duplicate of
her own. Her husband, Francois-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched country
squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated his
dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with
Jules Sandeau. (She had married in 1822, and brought her husband
five hundred thousand francs.)
But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her
desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copious
soul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still, as
metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with
her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised.
She was a subtle mixer of praise and poison, and her autobiography
is stuffed with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying facts, for
she was an incurable sentimentalist. Heine has cruelly said that
women writers write with one eye on the paper, the other on some
man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had one eye. George Sand
wrote with both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity should cover a
multitude of her missteps. In her case we don't know all. We know
too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning.
III
Since the fatal day when our earliest ancestors left the Garden of
Eden, when Adam digged and Eve span, there have been a million
things that women were told they shouldn't attempt, that is, not
without the penalty of losing their "womanliness," or interfering
with their family duties. But they continued, did these same
refractory females, to overcome obstacles, leap social hurdles, make
mock of antique taboos, and otherwise disport themselves as if they
were free individuals, and not petticoated with absurd prejudices.
They loved. They married. They became mothers. George Sand was in
the vanguard of this small army of protestants against the
prevailing moral code (for woman only). Her unhappy marriage was a
blazing bonfire of revolt. The misunderstood woman at last had her
innings. Sand stood for all that was wicked and hateful in the eyes
of law and order. Yet, compared with the feminine fiction of our
days, Sand's is positively idyllic. She is one parent of the Woman
movement, unpalatable as her morals may prove to churchgoers. She
acted in life what so many of our belligerent ladies urge others to
do--and never attempt on their own account. George was brave. And
George was polyandrous. If she hadn't much temperament, she had the
courage to throw her bonnet over the windmill when she saw the man
she liked, and if she suffered later, she, being an artist, made a
literary asset of these sufferings. She is the true ancestor of the
New Woman. Her books were considered so immoral by her generation
that to be seen reading them was enough to damn a man. Other males,
other tales.
She dared "to live her own life," as the Ibsenites say, and she was
the original Ibsen girl, proof-before-all-letters. I haven't the
slightest doubt that to-day she would speak to street crowds, urging
the vote for woman. Why shouldn't woman vote? she might be supposed
to argue. There will be less dyspepsia in America when women desert
the kitchen for the halls of legislation. Men, perforce, are better
cooks. So, by all means, let woman vote. Will it not be an acid test
applied to our alleged democratic institutions? George Sand believed
herself to be a social-democrat. She trusted in Pierre Leroux's
mysticism, trusted in the phalanstery of Fourier, in the doctrines
of Saint-Simon, the latter especially because of her intimacy with
Franz Liszt; nevertheless, she might shudder at the emancipation of
ideas in our century, and, as she had a sensitive soul, modern
democracy might prove for her a very delirium of ugliness. She was
always aesthetic. She could portray with a tender pen the stammering
litany of young caresses, but she couldn't face a fact in her
fiction. Her Indianas, Lelias, and the other romantic insurgents
against society are Byronic, Laras in petticoats. All rose-water and
rage, they are as rare in life as black lightning on a blue sky. Her
stories are as sad and as ridiculous as a nightcap.
IV
George Sand was not beautiful. Edouard Grenier declares that she was
short and stout. "Her eyes were wonderful, but a little too close
together." Do you recall Heine's phrase, "Femme avec l'[oe]il
sombre"? Black they were, those eyes, and they reminded Grenier at
once of unpolished marble and velvet. "Her nose was thick and not
overshapely. She spoke with great simplicity and her manner was very
quiet." With these rather negative physical attractions she
conquered men like Napoleon. Even prim President Thiers tried to
kiss her and her indignation was epical. He is said to have giggled
in a silly way when reproved. It seems incredible. (Did you ever see
the Bonnat portrait of this philistine statesman?) Liszt never
wholly yielded to her. Merimee despised her in his chilly fashion.
Michel de Bourges treated her rudely. Poor Alfred de Musset--who,
when he was short of money, would dine in an obscure tavern, and,
with a toothpick in his mouth, would stand at the entrance of some
fashionable boulevard cafe--seems to have loved her romantically,
the sort of love she craved. What was her attraction? She had brains
and magnetism, but that she could have loved all the lovers she is
credited with is impossible.
There is, to begin at the beginning, Jules Sandeau, who was followed
by De Musset; after him the deluge: Doctor Pagello--who was jilted
when he followed her to Paris; Michel de Bourges, Pierre Leroux,
Felicien Mallefille, Chopin, Merimee, Manceau, and the platonic
friendship with Flaubert. This was her sanest friendship; the
correspondence proves it. She went to the Magny dinners with
Flaubert, Goncourt, Renan, Zola, Turgenev, and Daudet. Her influence
on the grumbling giant of Croisset was tonic. It was she who should
have written Sentimental Education. But where is that sly old
voluptuary, Sainte-Beuve, or the elder Dumas (the Pasha of many
tales), or Liszt, who was her adorer for a brief period,
notwithstanding Mme. Karenine's denial? She denies the Leroux
affair, too. Are these all? Who dare say?
Dumas fils carried a bundle of Chopin's letters from Warsaw and Sand
buried them at Nohant. This story, doubted by Doctor Niecks, has
been corroborated since by Mme. Karenine. What a loss for
inquisitive critics! George was named Lucile Aurore Dupin, and she
was descended from a choice chain of rowdy and remotely royal
ancestors. In her mature years she became optimistic, proper,
matronly. She was a cheerful milch cow for her two children. It is
delicious comedy to read the warnings to her son Maurice against
actresses. Solange she gave up as hopelessly selfish, wicked for the
sheer sake of wickedness, a sort of inverted and evil art-for-art.
Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in
Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left
Clesinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis
Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in
Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Herve,
Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, the critic who describes her as having
the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She,
too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home,
in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier.
Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she
was old and full of honours, she went one day to visit the Minister
of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell
into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old
gentleman. After ten minutes' chat the unknown consulted his watch,
arose, and bowed to Mme. Sand. "If I could always find such a
charming companion I would visit the Ministry often," he gallantly
said, and went away. The novelist called an attendant. "Who is that
amiable gentleman?" she asked. "Ah, that is M. Jules Sandeau of the
French Academy." And he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name
of the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralising must have
ensued! The story is pretty enough to have been written in the
candied thunder of Sand herself.
De Lenz, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians,
did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by
Chopin. He asked her concierge, "What is Madame properly
called--Dudevant?" "Ah, Monsieur, she has many names," was the
reply. But it is her various names, and not her novels, that
interest us, and will intrigue the attention of posterity.