"Chopin spoke frequently and almost by preference of Madame Sand,
without bitterness or recrimination. Tears always filled his eyes
when he named her; but with a kind of bitter sweetness he gave
himself up to the memories of past days, alas, now stripped of
their manifold significance. . . . All attempts to fix his
attention upon other objects were made in vain; he refused to be
comforted, and would constantly speak of the one engrossing
subject. . . . He was another great and illustrious victim to the
transitory attachments occurring between persons of different
character, who, experiencing a surprise full of delight in their
first sudden meeting, mistake it for a durable feeling, and build
hopes and illusions upon it which can never be realized. It is
always the nature the most deeply moved, the most absolute in its
hopes and attachments, for which all transplantation is impossible,
which is destroyed and ruined in the painful awakening from the
absorbing dream. . . . Chopin felt, and often repeated, that the
sundering of this long friendship, the rupture of this strong tie,
broke all the cords which bound him to life."
Her friends say, upon her part, that he was a morbid, dreary invalid,
jealous beyond endurance, and that she suffered much at his hands, and
separated from him only when she could endure his exactions no longer.
He did not long survive the sundering of their relations, and died in
Paris in 1849, very deeply deplored by all admirers of his genius.
Chopin was a wonderfully gifted and very remarkable man, exceedingly
reserved, and with little of the egotism of genius. His eyes were blue
and dreamy, his smile very sweet, his complexion very fair and delicate,
his hair light in color, soft and silky, his nose slightly aquiline. His
bearing was so distinguished, and his manners stamped with so much high
breeding, that involuntarily he was always treated _en prince_. His
gestures were many and graceful, yet he was on the whole serene in his
bearing, and generally gay in company, though subject to moods of deep
melancholy. He was passionately devoted to Poland all his life, and when
he was dying requested the Countess Potocka to sing to him the melodies
of his country. He was deeply religious in nature, a devout Catholic.
It was during the years of which we have been speaking that George Sand
produced her most famous works. "Indiana" was followed by "Valentine,"
"Lelia," and "Lettres d'un Voyageur." Others followed in quick
succession, many of them dealing with the subject of marriage in such a
manner as to raise a most violent storm about her head. People who had
never read these books described them as being of revolting indecency;
and that impression prevails in many quarters even yet. In point of
fact, she is no more open to the charge of indelicacy than any prominent
English novelist of the day. The opinions are bad enough many times, but
the style is always pure and perfect. This is the answer she herself
made to her critics:--
"I was astounded when a few Saint Simonians, conscientious and
sincere philanthropists, estimable and sincere seekers of truth,
asked me what I would put in the place of husbands. I answered them
naively that it was marriage; in the same way as in the place of
priests who have so much compromised religion, I believe it is
religion which ought to be put. . . . That _love_ which I erect and
crown over the ruins of the infamous, is my Utopia, my dream, my
poetry. That love is grand, noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal;
but that love is marriage such as Jesus made it, such as Saint Paul
explained it. This I ask of society as an innovation, as an
institution lost in the night of ages, which it would be opportune
to revive, to draw from the dust of aeons, and the shrine of habits,
if it wishes to see real conjugal fidelity, real repose, and the
real sanctity of the family, replace the species of shameful
contract and stupid despotism bred by the infamous decrepitude of
the world."
It must always be remembered that she wrote of French marriages, in
which there is no pretence of having love to start with; and if we
remember this, her language can scarcely be considered too strong. The
system is utterly vile, and her hatred of it an honor to her in every
sense. Had she done nothing worse than to protest against this form of
marriage few would condemn her; her condemnation comes rather from the
life she felt it consistent with her theories to live for many years.
What the world said was: "The welfare of the human family demands that a
marriage legally made shall never be questioned or undone. Marriage is
not a union depending on love, or congeniality, or any such condition.
It is just as sacred when made for money, or for ambition, or for lust
of the flesh, or for any other purpose, however ignoble or base, as when
contracted in the spirit of the purest mutual love." Against all this,
George Sand, both with pen and life, protested. She contended that it
was love alone which made marriage anything but a disgusting sin. We
have heard much of this in these latter days, even in our own country,
but it was George Sand who first struck the keynote; the doctrine is
essentially hers in all its parts. That she denounced the whole system
of marriages of convenience, is an honor to her; that she proclaimed
love as the only true foundation for marriage, is equally an honor; but
that she assailed the institution of legal marriage as a whole, and
overleaped its bounds and became a law to herself in the matter, is her
weakness and her shame. It is frequently denied that she did this. It is
said that she did not assail the institution of marriage, but only the
things that are perpetrated in its name.
"But all the same [as another has well said], her eloquent
expositions of ill-assorted unions, her daring appeals from the
obligations they impose to the affections they outrage, her
assertion of the rights of nature over the conventions of society,
have the final effect of justifying the violation of duty on the
precarious ground of passion and inclination.
"Nobody who knows what the actual life of George Sand has been can
doubt for a moment the true nature of her opinions on the subject
of marriage. It is not a pleasant subject to touch, and we should
shrink from it if it were not as notorious as everything else by
which she has become famous in her time. It forms in reality as
much a part of the philosophy she desires to impress upon the world
as the books through which she has expanded her theory. It is
neither more nor less than her theory of freedom and independence
in the matter of passion (we dare not dignify it by any higher
name) put into action,--rather vagrant action, we fear, but on that
account all the more decisive."
Society and she were naturally at war from the beginning of her career;
and she suffered from it, though she dealt many bitter blows at it even
while she suffered. "What has it done," she says in one place,--
"what has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for
our children, this society shielded with such care? Nothing. Those
whom it calls vain complainers, and rebels, and madmen, may reply:
Suffer us to bewail our martyrs, poets without a country that we
are, forlorn singers well versed in the causes of their misery and
of our own. You do not comprehend the malady which killed them;
they themselves did not comprehend it. If one or two of us at the
present day open our eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange
and unaccountable good Providence? and have we not to seek our
grain of faith in storm and darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the
absence of all sympathy, all example, all brotherly aid, all
protection and countenance in high places? Try yourselves to speak
to your brethren heart to heart, conscience to conscience! Try it!
but you cannot, busied as you are with watching and patching up in
all directions your dykes which the flood is invading: the material
existence of this society of yours absorbs all your cares, and
requires more than all your efforts. Meanwhile the powers of human
thought are growing into strength and rise on all sides around you.
Among these threatening apparitions there are some which fade away
and re-enter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet
struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no
longer with the horrors of the present chaos; but there are others
that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and
alive, to say, 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we,
we do not mean to die.'"
But she rises after a while out of her depths of passionate contention
with a world out of joint, with the reign of stupidity and the tyranny
of convention, into serener heights; and in her later books she gives us
exquisite pictures of nature, with which she has the closest sympathy;
lovely stories of rural life and gentle tales of perfectly pure love.
Her passionate resentment against the world has worn itself out, and she
is calmer, wiser now. Her daughter, too, Solange, has grown to be a
woman and has a lover of her own, and the household thoughts and cares,
and the tenderness of a serious and unselfish cast which creep into a
mother's heart upon such occasions, shed their sweetness upon this
wayward soul, and inspire it with congenial utterances. Now she looks
back and says:--
"My poor children, my own flesh and blood, will perhaps turn upon
me and say: 'You are leading us wrong; you mean to ruin us as well
as yourself. Are you not unhappy, reprobated, evil spoken of? What
have you gained by these unequal struggles, by these much-trumpeted
duels of yours with Custom and Belief? Let us do as others do; let
us get what is to be got from this easy and tolerant world.' This
is what they will say to me. Or at best, if, out of tenderness for
me, or from their own natural disposition, they give ear to my
words and believe me, whither should I guide them? Into what
abysses shall we go and plunge ourselves, we three? for we shall be
our own three upon earth, and not one soul with us. What shall I
reply to them, if they come and say to me: 'Yes, life is unbearable
in a world like this. Let us die together. Show us the path of
Bernica, or the Lake of Stenio, or the glaciers of Jacques'?"