C c^ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Date Due lUTx m$- Efcn vw JAPT t3 5Dfli. Y Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924025939319 Cornell University Library PQ 2412.C29 188S 3 1924 025 939 319 THE GREAT FRENCH WRITERS 1 GEORGE SAND 7 /. C&e ©reat JFitnci) Centers GEORGE SAND By ET CARO OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY TRANSLATED BY MELVILLE B. ANDERSON TRANSLATOR OF HUGO'S " SHAKESPEARE " CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 1888 l'NIV£g£'l1Y I 1,'kAKY /iijcttL, iT\ N»Y':- ' T'V Copyright Bv A. C. McClurg and Company a.d. 1888 yi i&fnyiMu CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Years of Childhood and Youth. — The Formation of her Mind. George Sand's charm for a former generation, 7. — Her Bo- hemian life at Paris in 1831, 10. — Aristocratic and ple- beian descent, 13. — An imaginative child, 16. — Demon- lore, 19. — The religious crisis, 22. — Religion gives place to poetry and philosophy, 26. — Wide reading, 28. — Marriage and maternity, 30. — Emancipation, 33. — The genesis of her literary talent, 34. — Literature or kick- shaws ? 36. CHAPTER II. History of the Works of George Sand. — The Or- der and the Psychological Succession of her Novels. Her ideal theory of art, 39. — Her work poetic, spontaneous, sympathetic, 41. — Her inner biography in her works, 42. — I. The lyric period (1832-1840), 44. — "Indiana," 45. — " Valentine," 46. — " Jacques," " Lelia," 47. — " Spiridion," 48. — Short Stories, 48. — " The Letters of a Traveller," 50. — Prevailing inspiration of all these works, 52. — II. Humanitarian and socialistic period (1840-1848), 53. — Her misfortune as an artist, 53. — In- equality of talent and style, 55. — " The Companion of the Tour of France," 55. — " Horace " and " Jeanne," 58. iv Contents. — " Consuelo," 59. — " The Miller of Angibault," 63. — III. The return to nature and 'simplicity, 65. — " The Haunted Pool," 65. — " Francois le Champi," 67. — The Revolution of 1848, 68. — " Fanchon the Cricket," 69. — Dramatic works, 70. — IV. Her return to the novel of society, 73. — "Jean de la Roche," 75. — " The Marquis . de Villemer," 78. — George Sand's perennial fruitfulness, 79. — Stories for her grandchildren, 80. CHAPTER III. The Sources of her Inspiration. — Her Ideas and her Sentiments. Folly of seeking a system in George Sand's novels, 82. — Her three sources of inspiration, 83. — Her conception of love, 83. — Carlyle's conception' of love, 86. — Her identification of love with religion, 87. — Faith in free- dom maketh free, 92. — Idealized sensualism, 93. — Love a mighty leveller, 95. — The saving grace of poetry in her best creations, 99. — Want of resignation her chief defect, 101. — Elective affinities, 102. — George Sand disclaims any attack upon marriage, 105. — Remedies for the shame- ful decrepitude of society, no. — Her spirit and that of Lamennais, 115. — Her genuine goodness, 117. — Her masters in philosophy, 119. — Her good faith, 120. — Un- rivalled power of describing and interpreting Nature, 122. — Superiority to Lamartine in this respect, 124. — The human element in her landscapes, 1 27. — Her interpreta- tion of peasant character, 132. CHAPTER IV. Her Invention and Observation. — Her Style. — The Perishable and the Permanent in her Work. Idealism and realism not mutually exclusive, 136. — George Sand's accurate observation of real life, 140. — " Lucrezia Contents. v Floriani " a novel of analysis, 143. — Transition, in each of her novels, from observation to romantic treatment, 146. — " Mauprat," 147. — "Valentine," 148. — Lack of proportion in her novels and of unity in her characters, 152. — "The Private Secretary" and "Teverino," 155. — Shall the hovel be poetical or scientific ? 161. — Her style spontaneous, facile, copious, 163. — A mountain spring, 167. — The perishable and the permanent in her work, 168. — Place of the novel in modern life, 170. CHAPTER V. Private Life at Nohant. — Her Method of Work. — Her Final Conception of Art. De Musset's " Story of a White Blackbird," 178. — Heine's description of George Sand's person, 181. — Her retired, hospitable life at Nohant, 183. — Her appearance and manner, 184. — Her conversation, 187. — Her forgetful- ness of her own stories ; her modesty, 190. — Her ruling instincts domestic and maternal, 193.. — Chopin and Ma- jorca, 194. — The little theatre at Nohant, 196. — Her devotion to family and friends, 200. — Moral judgment of herself, 204. — Her methods of work, 205. — Her insist- ence upon the necessity of study and culture, 208. — The modification of her early principles in the school of life, 214. — Literary relations with Feuillet, About, Dumas, 221. — The firmness of her convictions on fundamental themes, 224. — The memorable correspondence with Flau- bert, 225. — Contrast between George Sand and Flaubert, 227. — Her noble ideal of art brought out in her advice to Flaubert, 229. GEORGE SAND. CHAPTER I. YEARS OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. THE FORMATION OF HER MIND. GEORGE SAND is no longer read," they tell us. It may be so ; yet, were it only for the honor of the French language, we be- lieve that men will return, if not to the whole, at least to a part of her work, which will be refined by time, carefully sifted by public taste, and found superior to the vicissitudes and to the caprices of opinion. When we were asked to gather up our recollections of this author and to revive them at a time so strangely scornful and so swift to forget, we were an- ticipated in a secret desire to make an ap- peal, some day, to our former impressions, to freshen them by renewed reading, to bring them to light corrected and tempered by ac- quired experience and by comparison. Sand ! 8 George Sand. that magic syllable meant for us days of deli- cious reverie and of impassioned discussion. It represents so many generous feelings, so many vague aspirations, such audacities of thought, such deep discouragements, translunary hopes mingled with the refined torture of doubt! There was epitomized in a single conscious- ness, in a single imagination, a portion of a generation which, a little before 1848, vaguely tortured itself in the midst of a state of things apparently prosperous and tranquil, as if the somewhat monotonous tranquillity of events was an incitement to wish for something else, to long for emotion, to throw one's self into deeds or thoughts of unknown import, — on the whole a happy generation, although stirred already by obscure forebodings. An idea, more ardent than precise, of reform or of social renovation, brooded in the minds of many who were aroused without very well knowing why. This was the time when a young man having, in the words of George Sand, " the torment of divine things," could give himself the delight of hearing, in the same day, the splendid appeals of Lacordaire at N6tre Dame, and in the evening the thrilling voice of Mademoiselle Rachel, in some great tragedy at the Theatre Francais, or perhaps be intoxicated with the exquisite and almost Years of Childhood and Youth. 9 rhythmical prose of Alfred de Mussel:, recited from the same stage. People read some grand deep poem of Victor Hugo upon the recent death of his daughter; they discussed such and such a portrait in Lamartine's " Giron- dins ; " they eagerly perused " The Haunted Pool" ("La Mare au Diable"), that little masterpiece of . rustic poesy whose charm atoned for the prolix error of " The Miller of Angibault." It was a time saturated with ideas and with emotions, and strangely de- scribed by one of its great poets, who said, " France suffers ennui," and, stranger still, made France believe it, confusing ennui with the secret fermentation of minds dissatisfied with a present which gave them too few emotions. I take the already remote years 1 846 and • 1847, because they mark the zenith of George Sand's influence and fame, — a tempest-born fame. The memory of the lofty polemicsT'bf which George Sand was then the text or the pretext is not lost. Ought one to be sur- prised, upon reflection, that this brilliant and stormy renown oscillated, in the winds of opin- ion, between admiration and ajiailiema-H. Very few minds preserved any moderation with re- spect to her. Now we were treated to the wrath of avenging justice wreaked upon an io George Sand. insolent female reformer ; again, to an idolatry as lyrical as the works which were its object, — boisterous applause of ideas and principles, ^confounded in a sort of dishevelled apotheosis with the strength of the inspiration and the beauty of the style. To-day, all these pas- sions have quite subsided. There is now room, apparently, in the midst of a real or affected indifference, for a more impartial judg- ment, perhaps for a better-grounded and a freer admiration. At all events, if it be true that forgetfulness has impartially swallowed up both parties, that of insult and that of ex- travagant praise, if it be true that people no longer even read the works which were the fiery pretext for so many contradictory judg- ments, our study will at least have the merit of an exploration of forgotten regions, — a kind of voyage of discovery. Going backward some fifteen or sixteen years from 1847, we find George Sand, toward the end of the winter of 1831, coming to es- tablish herself at Paris, with her daughter's cradle, and her very light baggage, consisting of some manuscripts scribbled at Nohantin the midst of the tumult of children. Without an acquaintance, without a supporter in the let- tered world, she finds herself in the midst of this vast desert of men, some of them formid- Years of Childhood and Youth. 1 1 able rivals equipped for the struggle and ready to shut out the new-comer from all access to the publishers, the journals, and the reviews. I have often tried to imagine the state of mind of Baroness Aurora Dudevant, when at the age of twenty-seven years she came, in complete ignorance of her powers, to seek her fortune, a voluntary refugee from home and from conjugal life, ready to attempt on her own account, and perhaps also for the instruction of others, a solution of that great problem, the absolute independence of woman. How complex already her nature ! How many contradictory influences had met and mingled within her! To see her at her work-table in her attic of the Quai Saint- Michel, muffled in her coarse gray frock-coat, or to follow her with her friends of Berry to the Pinson restaurant, to the smoking-room, to the museums, to the concerts, to the pit of the theatre on a first night, frankly curious concerning everything which interested the in- telligent youth of that time, — the literary and political incidents of the assembly, the club, the street, — who would recognize in this some- what boisterous student the mystic pupil of the English nuns, the humble and gentle friend of sister Alicia, or again the shepherd- girl of the Berry fields, the adventurous and 1 2 George Sand. visionary child of the heaths and woods ? This smart young man who takes such gay evening promenades with a troop of hail fellows under the lead of a vain and very old young man, Henri Delatouche, chief of the literary Bohe- mia of that time, — this vagabond observer, this new-fledged romancer, is a woman, very serious at heart, who has already known mor- tal sadness, who has lived much by sorrow (if sorrow gives life), who has suffered in all her deeper affections, who has been lacerated by all her family ties. These ties had even be- come for her an intolerable torture by the fatality of circumstances, and doubtless also by that other fatality which each individual bears within himself, and of which each is the ex- pert and cruel artist. She comes to attempt to form for herself at Paris a new existence out- side of all the laws of opinion and all the in- stincts of her sex. She will bring Nature itself into question, and force it to her caprice ; she " virilizes " as much as she can her mode of life, her costume, her tastes, her opinions, her talent. She is about to try all the doctrines circulating throughout society that give prom- ise of a better day for mankind ; full of intel- lectual curiosity, she is about to test these doctrines upon herself; she has a generous and unregulated impatience for absloute truth, Years of Childhood and Youth. 1 3 and she cannot conceive that the realization of any accepted truth is to be deferred a single moment. ■**"^ Already, at the age of twenty-seven, what regions of thought has she not explored, trav- ersing them all unsatisfied, — abiding in none ! Like Wilhelm Meister, she can count her years of severe apprenticeship. " The History of My Life " will enable us to survey them, and in that exact itinerary we shall tread with her more than one path of sorrow. There, too, we shall come upon the hidden sources whence sprang her growing imagination. The first of these sources leads us back to her very birth. Throughout her life George Sand was subject to the influences that hung heavy above her cradle. 1 By her mother a daughter of the people, by 1 Her grandmother was own daughter of Marshal Mau- rice of Saxony and of pne of the Demoiselles Verriere who nrere well known in the eighteenth century. Her grand- father was the celebrated M. Dupin de Francueil, designated ]y Jean Jacques Rousseau and Madame d'%>inay by the lame of Francueil alone, and still at the age of sixty-two ' the relic of a charming man " of the last century. From his marriage sprang Maurice Dupin, a soldier, a brilliant, :hatty writer j a man somewhat too fond of adventures, who vhile very young contracted marriage with a very amiable ind clever Parisian milliner, against the will of Madame Dupin, who was by turns indulgent and wrathful. In 1804 Maurice Dupin had a daughter, Aurora, who was to illustrate he name of George Sand. 14 George Sand. her father a daughter of the aristocracy, she owed, she tells us, most of her instincts to the i singularity of her position, — to her birth, " astride," as she termed it, of two classes. She owed them to her love for her mother, — a , love opposed and crushed by prejudices which made her suffer .before she understood the V cause of her suffering. She owed them to her tinreasoning affection for her father, a man of critical and romantic mind, who, in an interval of his military life, finding his youth, his pas- sion, his ideal, heavy upon his hands, yields himself up to an exclusive and dispropor- tionate love which brings him into conflict, in his own family, with the principles of aristoc- racy and with the world of the past. Finally, she owed these instincts to an education, by fits philosophic and religious, and to all the contrasts which her own life offered her from her tenderest age. She was formed in the midst of the conflicts stirred up in her heart and in her life by her plebeian blood, " and if certain books afterward influenced her, it is because their tendencies only confirmed and justified her own." Add to these irresistible sentiments of solidarity and heredity the dolo- rous twinges, the heart-rendings even, to which cruel misconceptions exposed her, victim as she was of her mother's fits of temper and iC Formation of her Mind. 1 5 of her grandmother's scarcely-concealed con- tempt. A genuine child of Paris, imbued with the prejudices of a lineage to which she only- half belonged, one understands the schooling to which that fiery soul, silent often by con- straint, was subjected, and what a fund of bitterness must have accumulated within her against that distinction of classes from which her childhood so cruelly suffered. From this point of view the reading of the first volumes of "The History of My Life" is peculiarly instructive, enabling us to discern the first impressions awakened in that existence so strangely torn as soon as it became conscious of itself; hence came what she afterwards termed her levelling and democratic instincts, which were simply the explosion of ancient grudges and inward sufferings of early date. When, still a child, she read " The Battuecas " of Madame de Genlis, a story innocently socialistic (although that word was not yet spoken), it was this governess and friend of kings who revealed to the dreamy child a part af her future ideas. To these thoughts she always clung with a simplicity that time did lot impair, throughout new readings and for- mulas which more than once betrayed this iimplicity into declamation, always sincere :hough often somewhat vague. > 1 6 George Sand. Meanwhile the silent activity of her imagina- tion was incessantly going forward. She came -/ later upon traces of its incipient action in the remotest recollections of her life. Her whole life as a child had been, she said, an imagi- native life. She clearly recalled the moment when the first doubt came to her touching the reality of Father Noel, 1 the great distributor of gifts to children. She mourned his loss sincerely. The first day the child doubts is the last of his simple happiness. " To banish the wonderful from the child's life is to pro- ceed against the very laws of his nature. The child naturally lives in a kind of supernatural atmosphere where everything within him is a miracle, and where everything outside him must, at first view, seem to him miraculous.'' Childhood itself, so near to birth, that tide of sensations bearing the news of an unknown world, — is not all this a continual current of wonders? At every opportunity George Sand opposes the notion of Rousseau, who would suppress the miraculous on the pretext that it is a lie. Leave Nature to herself, — she knows her trade. Anticipate nothing. " We do the child no service by hastening, without discre- tion and discernment, his accurate valuation of all the things that strike his attention. It is 1 The French Santa Claus. Formation, o/Jier Mind. 1 7 well that he should seek for himself and form judgments in his own way during that period of his life when our misplaced explanations might instil, in place of his innocent error, errors still greater and perhaps forever fatal to the soundness of his judgment and conse- quently to the integrity of his soul." She was born a dreamer ; while still a child she lost herself in trances which isolated her from the whole world. The habit' of reverie which she formed almost in the cradle, and which she was afterward unable to account for, gave her early " a stupid air." " I speak the word straight out, because all my life, — in childhood, at the convent, in the intimacy of the family, — I have been told the same thing, and it must be so." These crises of reverie sometimes assumed an extreme duration and intensity, as happened in the days following the death of her father (she was then four years old). When she had formed a vague conception of what death is, she remained for hours at a time sitting on a stool at her mother's feet, speechless, with hands at her side, fixed eyes, and parted lips. " ' I have often seen her thus,' said her mother, to reassure the anxious family; 'it is her nature, — it is not stupidity. Be sure always that she is rumi- nating something.' " She was indeed " rumi- 1 8 George Sand. nating;" this was the habitual form of her already active thought. She has painted in expressive strokes this first inner labor of her imagination. In this period of her dawning life she read, of her own accord, nothing; she was happy in her natural indolence ; she confesses that she afterward succeeded in con- quering herself only by great effort. All that she learned through eyes and ears entered tu- multuously into her little head ; she thought about it until she often lost consciousness of reality and of her surroundings. With such tendencies the passion for romance took pos- session of her before she had finished learning to read, and before she knew what a novel was. She composed interminable stories, act- ing them with her sister Caroline or her little companion Ursula. It was a sort of imitation of everything that had entered her little brain — mythology and religion mingled — in the course of the singular education given her by her mother, an artist and a poet in her way. Her mother " talked to her of the three Graces or of the nine Muses with as much seriousness as of the theological virtues or of the wise virgins," combining Perrault's Mother Goose tales and the fairy shows of the boulevard, "so that angels and cupids, the good virgin and the good fairy, punchinellos and magicians, Formation of her Mind. 1 9 imps of the theatre and saints of the Church, produced in her head the oddest poetical med- ley imaginable." This fermentation of images, which found realization in fantastic scenes within herself, and to which she attempted to give still greater reality in her games with other children, be- came modified but did not disappear when she left the narrow lodgings of Grange-Bate- liere Street, where she dwelt at Paris with her mother, and went to the Nohant mansion be- longing to Madame Dupin. Here was a quite different existence, quite other nourishment for the " ruminating " life. Outside of study hours, observed by her with a regularity wholly exterior, she liked to be in the company of the little peasant children of the neighborhood, joining them by their open-air fires in the pastures, playing, dancing, or telling dreadful stories. Their terrors aroused and inspired her. Recalling this period of her childhood, she said : " People do not dream what is going on in the heads of children who live among the scenes of Nature of which they comprehend nothing, and who have the strange faculty of seeing with the bodily eye all that the imagi- nation conjures up." Here she tried in good faith upon herself that species of hallucination peculiar to country people, — watching for the 20 George Sand. apparition of some fantastic animal, such as "the great beast," which all her little com- panions had seen at least once. She was the leader in the tales of eventide when the hemp- dressers came to pound hemp at the farm-house. Notwithstanding all her good-will, she declares that she could never obtain the slightest vision for herself; she could not completely succeed in being her own dupe; but the shock of nerves and imagination continued, giving her a kind of tremor of delight, and throughout her life she loved to renew the shuddering pleasure that emotions of this nature gave her. In all those rustic fictions which she so eagerly- collected, in those evening visions which she invited in the country, there was merely some- thing to stir her brain a moment and to deprive her of some hours of sleep. In reality these were but materials which she was accumulating in her storehouse of images; she gathered them in her incessant reverie for the future work of which she had not, of course, the slightest presentiment; she was already an artist, and, after the fashion of artists, she was wont to resolve herself into two beings, be- coming at once author and actor of the little dramas that she played for her own amuse- ment. In later life she devoted many studies to this literature of fear which she had tested Formation of her Mind. 21 upon herself: "The Demon of the Fields," "The Tales of a Grandmother," "The Rustic Legends," "The House-Kobold," 1 etc. Upon this subject she finally amassed a good deal of / curious erudition with which she amused her- self, not without some trepidation. The fan- tastic element seemed to her one of the powers of the popular mind. She took especial pleas- ure in tracing it among communities that seem to be able to assert themselves against the sordid wretchedness of their material life only by means of the imagination. The " Kobold " of Sweden, the " Korigan " of Brittany, the "Follet" of Berry, the Venetian "Oreo," the Provencal " Drac," — there is scarcely one of her stories of adventure that does not pre- serve some memory of these names, some impression of this nature, and is not the con- tinuation of one of her childhood reveries. Such is the prelude she makes to that dream of the golden age, to that mirage of rural in- nocence, which overtook her in childhood and pursued her to mature age. Notwithstanding these rather gloomy preoccupations, she was not sad ; she had her hours of frank, exuber- / ant gayety. IHer life of childhood and adoles- cence was an alternation of rapt contemplation and madcap giddiness. On emerging from 1 Le Drac. 22 George Sand. her long fits of musing, she yielded herself with a sort of intoxication to very simple and very active amusements, which produced an extremely singular contrast in the eyes of per- sons accustomed to her ways. These were " the two phases of a mind prone to dark thoughts and eager for distraction, of a mind perhaps incapable of being satisfied with what interests the majority of men, and easily de- lighted with what they esteem puerile and illusory. ... I cannot better explain myself. Owing to these contrasts, certain people con- ceived me to be hopelessly eccentric." This inward life, already so intensely active in the secrecy of her thought, had very nearly taken a quite different course by reason of an event of some gravity, — a religious crisis which toward her sixteenth year declared itself within her. In consequence of her ever- renewed pangs of heart and of some blunder- ingly cruel revelations that were made her concerning her mother's past life, Aurora had resolved to renounce everything that could in the future widen the breach between herself and her mother, from whom she generally lived apart; she wished to renounce the for- tune of her grandmother, education, elegant manners, everything that is called " the world."** She conceived disgust for the lessons of her Formation of her Mind. 23 pedagogue, Deschartres, whose figure, vanities, oddity, and rigid integrity she afterwards im- mortalized; she rebelled, and became an en- fant terrible. Being unable to suppress her revolt, Madame Dupin resolved to place her in the convent of the English nuns, then the fashionable school at Paris for young girls of high birth. The young school-girl, her heart bruised by the last struggles between her mother and her grand- mother, the two beings whom she loved most, tasted delicious repose in this retreat. Her sojourn here she has described with exquisite charm in " The History of My Life," enliven- ing her narrative with life-like portraitures of the nuns and the school-girls, describing the manners and customs of the place, the school- rooms and the chambers, interesting us in the little dramas of convent life, in the quarrels and reconciliations of the pupils, in the faults committed and the punishments incurred, in their errant truancy in the corridors, in the vaults, and on the roofs of the convent in search of a secret that had never existed, and of imaginary nameless victims whom they wished to deliver from a romantic captivity. Here already, put into action, is a conception which will be realized in several of herstories, and which she seems to pursue incessantly, — 24 George Sand. the mysteries of " La Daniella," of " The Coun- tess of Rudolstadt," of " The Castle in the Wilderness," 1 of " Flamarande," and of many- other tales in which invention labors among material surprises, labyrinths, mazes of fantas- tic architecture, and in which the reader seems to be present at a secret collaboration of Anne Radcliffe with a writer of genius. Fixed ideas of this nature are found in George Sand ; this one had announced itself early. In this company of very undisciplined young girls, of some of whom she was now the fol- lower and again the leader, her gayety, for a moment quenched, became kindled again even to excess; she became a " devil," — even she, — a characteristic name chosen by such of the school-girls as wished to class them- selves neither among the " good " nor among the " stupid." Then, suddenly, after two" rest- less years of very irregular study, after having exhausted amusements in which there was little of the diabolic but the name, and which re- duced themselves to an aimless movement of silent and systematic rebellion to riile, a revo- lution took place in her mind. V" This oc- curred of a sudden, like a passion flaming up in a soul ignorant of its own powers." There came a day when her deep and tranquil love 1 Le ChSteau des D^sertes. Formation of her Mind. 25 for Mother Alicia no longer satisfied her. " All her needs were in her heart, and her heart was weary." Under a swift impulsion resembling the power of grace, she felt her- self transformed. One day as she sat in a dark corner of the chapel, absorbed in medi- tation, she also heard the '* Tolle, lege " of Saint Augustine, who was represented in a rude picture before her. At once she yields herself without reserve, without discussion, to the faith that is borne in upon her ; she was no coward, she tells us, and she made a point of honor of this total abandonment. She suf- fers to the end " the sacred malady ; " devo- tion takes possession of her, she knows the burning tears of piety, the exaltations of faith, and she feels at times also its faintings and its languor. Under the cloistered arches the mys- tic fever stirs her as with holy frenzy, her knees become worn, she sheds her soul in tears upon the floor of the chapel where she had received her revelation. Afterward she will take up the memories of this period of her life in a burning tale of divine love, in " Spiridion," — or rather in the first pages of this tale; for there comes a time when the tenderly exalted soul of the young monk becomes a prey to agitations and visions of a different kind, turn- ing him from his simple faith and into new 26 George Sand. paths. But the opening of the story bears the mark of a great and sincere religious emotion, which is found nowhere else in the author's life to the same degree as at the convent of the English nuns. As in the case of the young monk Spiridion, life soon shattered her fine mystic dream, chilled her ecstasy, and intro- duced factors that profoundly modified the impression received. But from it she always preserved a spark of Christian idealism which the accidents of life, her adventures even, could never put out, and which always revived after temporary eclipses. The religious fever soon abated upon her return to Nohant, whither she was recalled by the somewhat restless anxiety of her grand- mother, and where the cruel uncertainty in- cident to the precarious health of the latter forced her to take up the cares of practical life. During the last six months of the slow and inevitable dissolution of a life dear to her, Aurora lived by the bedside of Madame Du- pin, or alone in an almost savage gloom. This deep melancholy was interrupted only by aim- less horseback rides, " by that reverie of the gallop," taking her through a rapid succession of landscapes, now gloomy, now delightful, the only episodes of which, as noted by her and set down in her memoirs, were picturesque Formation of her Mind. 27 encounters with flocks or with birds of passage, the ripple of a brook as its water was splashed by her horse's feet, a breakfast upon a farm- house bench with her little rustic page Andre, who had been tutored by Deschartres not to interrupt her dreamful silence. Then it was that she became wholly a poet by the trend of her mind and by her sharp perception of out- ward things, but a poet without perceiving it. At that time she formed the resolution to educate herself, and eagerly began a series of readings that passionately attracted her. She felt the void left in her mind by her desultory and fortuitous education under the odd dis- cipline of Deschartres, or under the too indul- gent rule of the convent. She began to read enormously, but with a tumultuous curiosity, without direction and without plan. At this epoch a new change took place in her mind. She abandoned " The Imitation of Jesus Christ" and the doctrine of humility, for " The Genius of Christianity," which initiated her rather in the poetry of the Romantic School than in a new form of religious truth. Soon she passed on to philosophy; each new book made a kind of new era within her. I know nothing so dangerous as metaphysics, taken in great doses and without method, by an ardent and quite inexperienced mind. For 28 George Sand. such young intellects there is equal peril either in attaching one's self exclusively to a doctrine which one is incapable of coolly examining, and in drawing from it the exclusive enthu- siasm of a sectary; or in confo'unding and merging everything in an undiscriminating •,v eclecticism, uniting by affinities of sentiment disparate names and dogmas like those of Jesus and Spinoza. The young dreamer could not escape this double peril: she passed by fits from the enthusiasm that confounds all to the enthusiasm attaching itself exclusively to a thought or to a name, — and all this at the beck of the present sensation or the caprice of the imagination. But she rapidly increased her stock of acquirements, which soon became considerable, although very ill classified. She had unceremoniously attacked Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aris- totle, Montaigne, Pascal, and especially Leib- nitz, whom she placed, as a metaphysician, above all others (a fortunate opinion and pref- erence). Then had come the poets and the moralists, — La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakspeare ; all as they came to hand, without program of studies or notion of suc- cession. She took possession of this whirling mass of ideas with wonderful ease of intuition ; her brain was deep and broad, her memory Formation of her Mind. 29 obedient, her feeling acute and swift, her will firm-strung. At length Rousseau had come; she had recognized her master, had submitted to the imperious charm of that ardent logic, and her divorce from Catholicism was complete. In this conflict of doctrines and opinions her nervous force had become exhausted in the effort to comprehend all, to reconcile all, or to choose. Chateaubriand's "Rene," Shaks- peare's " Hamlet," finally Byron, had finished the work. She had fallen into an intellectual and moral confusion, into a melancholy which she no longer even strove to resist. She had resolved to abstain as much as possible from life; she had even passed from weariness of life to a desire for death. She never ap- proached the river without feeling in her brain a kind of febrile gayety, and saying within herself: " How easy it is ! There would be but a step to take. Yes or no ? " This she repeated to herself often enough and long enough to risk being dashed by the " Yes " to the bottom of the transparent water that mag- netized her. One day the "Yes " was spoken ; she urged her horse out of the ford into the peril of the deep waters. All had been over with her and her future works, had not the good mare Colette, by an extraordinary bound, saved her from the gulf. 30 George Sand. The death of her grandmother, of whose last moments she speaks with unassuming sor- row and touching sincerity, closed the period of initiation. The separation between the pa- ternal and maternal families was consummated, legally at least, by the opening of the will. Her mother, forewarned by some one, had for a long time known of the clause separating her from her daughter; she knew also of the compliance with that clause. Hence new tempests. Certain concessions were made. Aurora was forced to break with her relatives of Villeneuve, to whom she was commended by the wish of the dead. This was a new family broil. To break up a false and sometimes intoler- able situation, Madame Dupin took her to the country home of some friends whom she had met three years before, and who turned out to be the best people in the world, the Duplessis ; they dwelt with their children in a handsome villa of the Brie. Promising to return for her "the following week," Madame Dupin left her here for five months. Here took place one day the marriage which was to form a natural close to family relations stormy and at times even wildly extravagant, and to give the young woman the hope of a normal existence. Here again there was no lack of disappoint- Formation of her Mind. ji ments. Aurora passed for a rich heiress ; she had a very pretty face, and a gay disposition when she was not in contact with the ill-temper of her mother, whose privilege it was to make her horribly wretched. In this Duplessis fam- ily she met the natural son of a retired colonel, M. Dudevant, whose fortune was commensu- rate with her own, and who immediately took a liking to her, " although not talking of love, and acknowledging himself little disposed to sudden passion, and at all events incapable of 1/ expressing it in a seductive manner." Auro- ra's friends practised upon her the jest of treat- ing her as his future wife. Nothing more was necessary; she married almost passively, as she performed all the exterior acts of her life. The marriage took place in September, 1822; they departed for Nohant, where her first oc- cupation, during the winter of 1823, was the preparation, animated by the sweetest visions and the liveliest hopes, for the motherhood that was in store for her. The needs of the intelligence, the unrest of the thoughts, the curiosity of study and of observation, all dis- appeared, she says, as soon as the sweet bur- den was felt. " Providence wills that, in this phase of expectation and of hope, the physical life and the life of sentiment should predomi- nate. So the vigils, the readings, the reveries, 32 George Sand. — in a wprd, the intellectual life, — were nat- urally suppressed without the least merit or the least regret." Her husband was of a negative and fussy disposition; he spent his time in hunting. She, without a single support near her, gave up her dreaming, and made baby-linen with a zeal, and very soon with -a dexterity in the use of the scissors, surprising to herself. The episode of maternity apart, the begin- nings of this existence were dull enough. It was merely by accident that she was later subjected to fits of that painful exaltation which had till now been her secret torment, and, more dangerous still, her secret and cher- ished delight. Some years elapsed in a sort of prosaic calm and negative happiness. Her dreams seemed to have flown afar; two fine children were growing up beside her. If we are to credit her own statement, she had be- come, in appearance at least, " a torpid coun- trywoman ; " what is even more difficult, she exerted herself to become a good housekeeper. If her thought still labored solitarily in the very vulgar condition in which she seemed condemned to live, the young mother had not the pedantry of her moral agitations ; no one near her possessed the secret nor even the suspicion of them. When she had written her Formation of her Mind. 33 first novels, one of her dearest friends, a fre- quenter of Nohant, Le Malgache, wrote her: " ' Ldlia ' is a fantasy. It is not like you, who are gay, who dance the boree, who appreciate the butterfly, who do not despise the pun, who are not a bad hand with the needle, and who make very good jam." When, toward 1 831, her home was definitively troubled, when plans for a free future had gained the ascendant, when they had granted her a miserable pen- sion and her liberty, — which was later to take the form of a legal separation to her advan- tage, — when she had arrived at Paris to incur, the frightful risks of a completely emancipated life, then it was that Madame Sand became known, a new woman with a new name. It was Henri Delatouche who thus baptized her. Sand was held jointly by Jules Sandeau and herself, united by collaboration in the first book. They soon agreed upon the forenames : Sandeau kept his own ; George was the syno- nym of a native of Berry. " Jules and George, unknown to the public, would pass for brothers or cousins." The two names soon conquered a celebrity that separated them farther and farther. We are not making a biography, we are simply attempting to draw a psychological sketch. Our design was to note the various 3 34 George Sand. trials and the intellectual phases of Madame Sand's youth. kShe came to the literary life with a fund of very real sufferings, — although doubtless exaggerated by a strong imagina- tion, — of secret emotions and religious agi- tations fostered rather than soothed by unsys- tematic reading, with an acute and refined sensibility, with a profound disdain for the relative truths with which one must, as the world goes, sometimes be content, with an instinctive hatred for all the yokes imposed by law' or opinion, with an inborn abhorrence of everything that trammels freedom of thought or of the heart. Add that, by a miracle of lavish Nature, she finds herself almost at the first stroke master of a marvellous style, which seems expressly made and prepared to receive her glowing thought, and which she formed alone and uncounselled, between the long se- ries of little note-books devoted to the epic of " Corambe " and the first novel she is about to give to the public. How was the first revelation of her talent for writing made to her? Its origin is curious. It was toward the close of the last autumn that she passed at Nohant. She had much read Walter Scott, traces of whom reappear in sev- eral of her novels. During these sad months she sketched in Formation of her Mind. 35 her long promenades the plan of a kind of novel which was never to see the light, and which she wrote, with her children by her, on the shelf of an old cupboard in the former boudoir of her grandmother. " Having read it," she says with candor, " I convinced my j self that it was good for nothing, but that I could make some that were not so bad ; " and as she was then much preoccupied with the choice of a trade that should secure her lib- erty at Paris, she came to think that, on the whole, it was no worse than many other stories which brought their authors some kind of a livelihood. " I saw that I wrote rapidly, easily, long without fatigue ; that my ideas, dormant in my brain, were awakened and linked by the act of exposition, by the movement of the pen; that in my life of seclusion I had ob- served much, and had understood sufficiently well the characters brought by chance under my observation ; and that, consequently, I was well enough acquainted with human nature to delineate it." Thus she was encouraged in her attempt ; she concluded from this, that of all her little accomplishments, literature proper, for which she had a taste and a confused in- stinct, was the trade that offered her the great- est chance of success. She made her choice. But she had long hesitated beforehand; she 36 George Sand. had sometimes tried crayon or water-color portraits. It seems that she had the knack of catching the resemblance, but there was lack of originality. For a moment she thought she had discovered her real aptitude : she had taste for decorating chestnut-wood tobacco- boxes and cigar-cases with microscopic paint- ings of flowers and birds. She might have sold one for eighty francs to a dealer to whom she had offered it. Upon what threads hang literary destinies ! Had she obtained the hun- dred francs she tremblingly asked, not believ- ing that it was possible, " Consuelo " and "The Haunted Pool" would never have ap- peared. Fortunately, these objects soon went out of fashion, and Madame Dudevant was forced to look elsewhere for what she had thought to find here, — " her daily bread." The word is her own ; it is strictly true in the con- ditions imposed upon her. She had to pay her passage through a life of freedom, by her own labor, having at the outset, weary of con- tention, abandoned to her husband all her rights in order to purchase her independence. This husband, who shall not cross our path again, although not in the first years precisely "an offensive reality," although usually neither ill-natured nor brutal, had contrived to make himself unendurable, and to render a common Formation of her Mind. 37 life very difficult to a woman of a solitary and somewhat retiring disposition, whom he could neither subjugate nor reduce to his habits and tastes. Some other graver faults, it seems, intervened to increase the conjugal difficulties, and to bring about a separation which, at first partial and voluntary, became definitive. The day finally came when Madame Dude- vant reconquered her entire right to the inde- pendence she had so long desired. In 1836 a judgment of the tribunal of Bourges decreed the separation in her favor, leaving to her the education of the two children. But already she had made the dangerous experiment of literary celebrity, by works which had sur- prised public attention. She had reached fame with the qualities that we have seen her testing in the retreat, inwardly so disturbed, where she had lived: the habit of long reveries which had become a shelter against real life ; a very keen sensitiveness to all forms of human suf- fering ; a kindness of heart which was for her a source of inspiration and at the same time an occasion of perpetual errors and miscon- ceptions; finally, an exhaustless imagination, whose plays and combinations, by turns lovely and dreadful, she had pursued with secret delight up to the day when it occurred to her to exhibit them to the public, — which became 38 George Sand. passionately enamoured of them and lauded the name of the enchantress. Almost immedi- ately she was assigned a place, and it was often the first place, in that illustrious pleiad of romancers embracing such various names as those of Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Sandeau ; among which the name of George Sand preserved its personal lustre, while bor- rowing nothing from the fraternal and neigh- bor stars. CHAPTER II. HISTORY OF THE WORKS OF GEORGE SAND. THE ORDER AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUC- CESSION OF HER NOVELS. WHEN George Sand undertook to write for the public, what conception had she of the novel? Even conceding all that is said of her spontaneity, can we believe that an intelligence so richly gifted and so fruitful pro- ceeded wholly at haphazard along the paths which chanced to be open to her, with the vulgar indifference of a talent aiming only at success? Or, on the other hand, did it reach development under the unrecognized but ac- tive sway of strong and permanent instincts? Let her reply for herself: — " When I began to write I had not the slightest theory, nor do I believe myself to have ever entertained one at the time when a romancing disposition placed the pen in my hand. Nevertheless, my instincts have formed, without my privity, the theory I am about to set down, — a theory which I have 40 George Sand. generally followed unconsciously, and which, at the present moment, is still under discus- sion. According to this theory the novel is as much a work of poetry as of analysis. It demands true situations, and characters not only true but real, grouped about a type in- tended to epitomize the sentiment or the main conception of the book. This type generally represents the passion of love, since almost all novels are love-stories. According to this theory (and it is here that it begins) the writer must idealize this love, — and consequently this type, — and must not fear to attribute to it all the powers to which he inwardly aspires, or all the sorrows whose pangs he has observed or felt. This type must in no wise, however, become degraded by the vicissitude of events ; it must either die or triumph ; and the writer should not fear to give it an importance ex- ceptional in real life, powers Jranscending the vulgar, charms or sufferings quite out of the routine of human affairs, and even in some degree the likelihood admitted by the majority of intelligences. If, in short, the underlying sentiment of the theme be idealized, the nar- rator's art may be trusted to set this theme among conditions and in a frame of reality obvious enough to give it relief." * 1 Story of My Life. History of her Works. 41 George Sand was not infallible in the appli- cation of this theory. She chanced more than once to idealize the chimerical and the false. But this was an error of judgment rather than of instinct ; even when false to'her theory, she remained faithful to it by her intention. This theory appears very simple and very noble, especially by contrast with what has since been seen. t Throughout all the chances of her real life and of her literary life, George Sand kept alive her faith in the ideal, — she remained a poet ! Of this distinction the varying taste of new generations will never deprive her. It is a poetic conception that gives birth to those tales, so rich, so varied, which always begin wonderfully, however much they may deterio- rate as they proceed. One readily sees how this spontaneity of an imagination whose troubled origins I have en- deavored to trace, an imagination unrestrained and self-excited, — how the memory of the moral crises traversed, the confused hope of a future in which her credulous enthusiasm beheld visions divine, — how her whole restless, palpitating, and superb nature, with its illusions and its real sorrows, will instinctively find ex- pression in strange works, bold in thought, ex- alted and thrilling in style, full of groans and 42 George Sand. passion, abounding in lyric strains concerning love, concerning religion, concerning human life* If, then, one reflects that this author is a wo- man whom life has bruised, deceived, goaded in a thousand ways ; that, until now, in an ex- istence very active within, but very solitary and retired, she has remained unacquainted with the moving spectacle of politics and of society; and that, thus inexperienced, she is now cast upon the world, with her unbounded longings and her deep pity for the misery and sorrow that fill human life with groans, and with her deeper compassion for her sisters who suffer and bleed in silence, — one will understand why this woman should have been at the out- set dismayed and transported by what she saw, like all noble souls who judge society with the heart, and whose aspirations are lac- erated by the brutality of facts. Then she will seek, she will know no rest; she will in- quire whether for so may evils there be no remedy. At first, her mind and her works will be swayed by personal, religious, and moral pre- occupations. Next will come the turn for social preoccupations. Then, about this in- ■ spired woman, this much-praised poet, this already popular writer, you will behold a crowd of doctors of the universal renovation, History of her Works. 43 Utopians and quacks, sophists and dreamers, the sincere apostles and the charlatans of the social question, knaves and their dupes, the ambitious and the simple. They have found in George Sand the splendid spokesman of their doctrine. Each is eager to urge upon her a new plan, an unpublished system, — the philosophy, the politics, the religion of the future. Madame Sand was predisposed by nature to yield to the despotism of austere convictions and of strong imaginations. A devotee of the absolute good, or, in default of it, dreaming of an immediate better, less apt to originate an idea than to put it in practice, herself recognizing her lack of intellectual in- itiative, she permits a whole period of her life to be invaded by political utopianism, by the dream of a golden age touching whose coming everybody about her is agreed, while each clings to his plan for ushering it in and to his private program for realizing it. At length, one fine day, — yes, it was a fine day for her talent and her fame, — she will feel a great weariness of this agitation of empty ideas, of these theories spotless and noble so long as they sit upon the inner throne of pure thought, but which, the moment they descend into ac- tive politics and into the movement of the street, become " debased and tarnished by 44 George Sand. events." This great spirit, with its abhorrence of violence, will make a return upon itself under an impulse of fatigue and of disgust; she will effect a spiritual retreat toward the sanctuary of her dearest memories; she will listen to the strong appeal of her secret in- stincts, too long bruised by violent discussion ^md by the unavailing struggle ; she will return to her taste for the country, for those ? fields of Berry, the scene of the early poetry of her childhood dreams; there will occur wh$m her a sudden and unexpected germination of fresh and charming recollections, of exquisite and wholesome emotions. We shall at length re- pose with her from all the agitations and the hatreds; the soft, half-ygiled light of her na- tive country-side will finally subdue the hectic lustre of the reformer, the inflamed vision of the humanitarian poet. Is not this precisely the circle traversed by George Sand, and is not this page of in- ner biography the epitomized history of her works ? #• I- THE first period of her literary life is one of quite spontaneous, personal lyric fervor. And as I would draw here no fantastic picture, but History of her Works. 45 an historic one, with the relative precision admissible in such entirely psychological di- visions, I think I can make this first period extend from 1832 to about 1840. # Within this period of nine years appear one upon another the masterpieces of her first manner, — " In- diana," " Valentine," " Jacques," " Andre," " Mauprat," " Lelia," and the charming series^ of Venetian tales. 1 Letjus rapidly recall the subjects of the princfpi^ works. We shall see that they all proceed from a common fund of personal emo- tions and sorrows, without, however, being the confidential narrative of her life. Madame Sand has always protested against the too strictly biographical applications which were made of her first storiesN Nevertheless there must be an understanding upon this delicate point. " Indiana," she as- sures us, is not her own history unveiled. It was at least the expression of her habitual reflections, of her moral agitations, of a part 1 Here are the dates of her principal novels : 1832, " In- diana," " Valentine ; " 1833, "Lelia; " 1834, " The Letters of a Traveller" and "Jacques;" 1835, "Andre^Land "Leone Leoni;" from 1833 to 1838, "The Private Secretary," " Lavinia," " Metella," " Mattea," " The Last Aldini." " Mauprat " was written at Nohant, in 1836, just after her divorce suit. This circumstance furnishes a commentary upon the author's thought. 46 George Sand. of her real or imaginary sufferings; if it was not her life, it was the romance or the drama of her life, as she conceived it under the shades of Nohant. If it was not, as I am ready to believe, a complaint formulated against her particular master, it was at least a protest against conjugal tyranny personified in Colo- nel Delmare. It was also the conception, the ideal of a loving woman, such as she had then formed ; it was for her own sake that she in- terested herself in the delineation of a love simple and deep, lofty and sincere, impassioned and chaste, betrayed by its own simplicity, de- livered over by its own sincerity, and with no defence but chance, as a prey to the brutal and voluptuous selfishness of a man of the world ; and saved at last from the final despair by a heart heroically silent, a heart worthy of her, worthy of reconciling her with life and friendship. " Valentine " takes up again, with charming details and incomparable poetic beauty, this theme of the impious and un- happy marriage imposed by the sacrilegious exigencies of the world, and drawing in its train the most lamentable and tragic suffer- ings, the violent awakening of nature and of the heart, the fatal passion, the tempta- tions stronger than will, the family dishonored, a noble house ruined, a home destroyed. History of her Works. 47 " Jacques " embodies her ideal of love in man, as " Indiana " her ideal of love in woman ; Jacques is a stoic turned lover, and he loves with the depth and nobleness that a stoic can throw into these things, with a courage that sadly faces death as soon as he forebodes weakness or treachery, — a devoted man, who quietly renounces all his rights and resigns himself to suicide in order to spare to Fer- nande, adored even in her sin, the humiliation of her guilty pleasures and the shame of her adulterous happiness. Love in a weak and graceful nature which it uplifts but to shatter, — love again, but in aiwffijWtamed nature which it masters and exalts to the highest issues of heart and intellect, ^- here are two dreams upon the diverse effects of the great passion embodied in "Andre^ and in "Mauprat." " Lilia " ! Who, having read it once, does not recall this strange, incoherent, magnificent, and absurd poem, in which spirituality falls so low, in which sensuality aspires so high, in which despair declaims so finely, in which the mind, delighted, astonished, shocked, passes abruptly from a scene of debauch to a lofty prayer, in which the most fantastical inspiration leaps from the abyss to the sky, only to fall back into the depths of the pit? It is doubt blas- pheming, cursing, melting to ecstasy; it is 48 George Sand. love pitilessly mocking itself and analyzing its wretchedness with a sort of despairing madness; it is faith now denying and anon exalted ; it is the ideal dishonored in the em ■ braces of harlots, and receiving from debauch the feeble consolation of its dreams and its delusive transports. This excessive lyricism, although now out of date, still offers to the reader an astonishing spectacle of infatuation and fever mingled with aspirations of the highest beauty. In " Spiridion," the young monk Alexis, who is not without much resem- blance to George Sand herself at the feet of Lamennais, represents the troubled soul in search of religious truth, touched with the divine ideal and seeking it with painful anxiety in symbols and in books, and above all in the agony of an old dying monk who bequeaths to his successor the storm-lighted torch that is destined to kindle the flame of religious revolt, and, later still, that of revolution. By the side of these great novels, one must not forget works slighter, not indeed in talent, but in extent. He who knows not the short stories of Madame Sand does not know her ; fails, at least, to recognize the astonishing flexi- bility of her art. Throughout her greatest works, at all periods of her life, but especially in the first, there breathes at intervals a lively History of her Works. 49 and aerial spirit that is wholly French, the re- nascent eighteenth-century spirit of elegant fancy and adventurous curiosity, playing freely in fictions of which love is the infinitely varied theme. Has light irony ever been wielded by a more graceful hand than that which penned " Cora " and " Lavinia," and traced those pages in which the last marchioness of the eighteenth century delineates, with flirt of fan, the manners and the characters of her time, and describes the one emotion that had nearly disturbed the smooth course of a long life devoted to facile amours? And Lavinia, who could forget her? Long after she has vanished we retain the impression of that smile reveal- ing the subtle revenge of a heart betrayed; she sees the deserter come back to her, and in her turn abandons him, with smiling sadness, to his brief remorse. How natural the plots of all these tales, how animated the movement, how exquisite the conduct and style ! " Me- tella " exhibits, in a most telling and life-like way, the art of depicting the gravest troubles of the heart with a discreet touch that leaves everything to be divined, skimming the sur- face, and really telling hardly anything. " The Private Secretary" and "Teverino" are two works of most brilliant poetic inspiration. " Leone Leoni " I like less, notwithstanding 4 50 George Sand. its extraordinary vigor, and I have but a moderate liking for some pages of " The Last Aldini." The mother pleases me little when she desires to wed her gondolier, and the daughter terrifies me when she throws herself at the head of the singer. But how many other pages full of freshness and beauty, and what bright coloring! What delicacy and grace in the scene where Lelio is for the first time alone with young Alezia, what a clever and ingenious struggle, and what a charming triumph for both ! The glory of the great works of George Sand has been too splendid ; they have been celebrated or discussed with so much ardor that the short stories have been somewhat neglected. There are here, how- ever, some of the purest jewels of a casket already so rich. All the graces of the spirit combine as if to form a golden frame to a delicate sentiment. Elegance touched with emotion, smiling fancy, originality now tren- chant and now tender, — how many charming gifts, and what a pity George Sand was not contented with them ! Why would she make of her talent an organ, more sonorous but often false, of half-comprehended doctrines? With these tales, whose setting and scenery are drawn from Italy and especially from Venice, must be compared " The Letters of a History of her Works. 51 Traveller," published at different dates and at rather wide intervals, the first of which, the Venetian letters, have a strange and impas- sioned interest not found to the same degree in the others. These first letters, a genuine prose poem, — now the chronicle of a journey in Alpine lands and toward Tyrol, now the narrative of conversations or of solitary mus- ings at Venice, — are the sad though dramatic expression of a sick and suffering mind al- ready cruelly tried by sorrow and betrayed by love. It is as if, after a few brief years of ex- perience, one had found it necessary to prove to himself that the most romantic passions are no more exempt from suffering than the most ignoble lives. Here a criticism upon human life is expressed with bitter fortitude; again a shrill complaint or a cry of anguish, — one of those cries that make themselves heard around the world and have a long reverbera- tion. This is certainly, by reason of its tone and the exquisite reserve of the sorrow, the most curious and touching disclosure that Ma- dame Sand has given us concerning herself. In these simple pages we behold all the most sacred sentiments in conflict in a single soul, yet they stir and throb behind the veil ; neither the sex nor the age of this poor and poetic pilgrim of life is revealed for a single moment ; 52 George Sand. passion and suffering observe an admirable discretion, and this doubles the charm. All these works, so various in conception, in fancy, in setting, bear the burning mark of a youthful mind. Throughout the dazzling variety of the adventures, almost the sole sub- ject is the delineation of noble love struggling with the temptations and the surprises of life, with weakness or with treachery ; it is the for- tunes of the poor and great human heart in its baffled flights toward heroism and in its tremendous falls ; it is also the conflict of lov- ing souls with the perfidy of fate, which flings them a prey to violence; it is the revolt of nature against the fatal errors of society; it is a protest against the slavery of code or of opinion, — against everything, in a word, that shackles the free movement of true love. It is, in fine, the restless and passionate pursuit of the religious ideal, an ideal often chimerical and turbid but fervently desired, and glimpsed through the double fogs of superstition and of scepticism. Such is the prevailing inspiration of this first period, and such the motives of these first songs. Each of these works is a poem consecrated to divine love, and still more to human love, — both greatly surprised at being so closely mingled and confounded. The social question appears only in the background, History of her Works. 53 vaguely and incidentally. The thought of a reformation at first hardly ventures beyond the marriage relation, which is criticised less in its principle than in its practice. She wrote then, as she says, under the sway of an emotion, not of a system. II. The system soon appears, however, and crowds back the emotion within certain limits. Emotion and system, the one proceeding from the very soul of the author, the other from without, will divide into more or less equal parts the novels of the second period, — those which fill the literary life of Madame Sand from 1840 to about 1848. From the artistic standpoint this division was a misfortune. It cannot precisely be said that in the works of the second manner her talent has sunk; but certainly the interest is less keen, and one's sympathy, being baffled at every turn, becomes chilled. Entire por- tions there are stricken with mortal languor. It could not be otherwise. What she had promised us in the novel was the more or less idealized painting of the human heart, the analysis of the soul thrown into fictitious sit- uations, and developing, in this combination of 54 George Sand. imaginary events, at the will of the observing or poetic artist. What pleased us in this read- ing was to taste the cup of forgetfulness of the real world, the repose from that tumultuous labor in which, as a necessary consequence of practical life, all our sentiment and activity are drained in struggles so bitter and so per- petually renewed, often for such paltry ends. Here we loved to find rest from the conflict, from the noise and dust of every day. You have offered me, O poet, the amiable bait of a fiction ; I have followed you without distrust, and with a charmed soul ; you have pricked my curiosity and have delighted it; you have moved me, — I yield to the sweet intoxication of your art. And behold ! of a sudden the current of my emotion is checked and frozen. What have you done? In the middle of the enchanted idyl, behold a surreptitious tirade whose inspirer I recognize ; the socialistic ser- mon begins and the spell is broken. You push me back by main force, and with a cer- tain breach of faith, into that discordant and agitated region from which I was seeking to escape. Here I recognize the speech of M. Michel [de Bourges], there the heated pam- phlet of M. de Lamennais, elsewhere the phi- losophic and religious dream of M. Pierre Leroux; hasten after my emotion and try Order and Succession of her Novels. 55 to catch it, — it is far afield. I add that, by- force of circumstances, in these episodes of intermittent preaching neither talent nor style is any longer the same. One feels too well that the inspiration is from without, and that the words are but an echo. Declamation in- evitably supervenes, as always when the style is no longer the very voice of the soul directly modulated by its emotion. The eloquence becomes stilted, and the forced animation be- comes unpleasantly like bombast. Let this criticism be tested upon the prin- cipal novels of this second period. It is about 1840, with "The Companion of the Tour of France," that the system appears and that socialism takes the field. There are certainly charming passages in this novel, types and sit- uations caught with great art. The foundation of the story is, or at least should be, the con- trast between the generous and really great love of Pierre Huguenin, and the vain and sensual passion of Amaury, — the one devoting the chaste passion of his thought to an austere, grave virgin, all intelligence and soul; the other seeking the satisfaction of an artistic taste in the seduction of an elegant and co- quettish woman, whom he loves with all the pride of his senses and all the exaltation of a fantasy. That which is true in this novel, 56 George Sand. that which is well observed and really fine, is the effect upon Amaury of this false and evil love. This well-endowed but feeble heart, the dupe of its own vanity, cruelly expiates its fault, not by the loss of its future, but, what is more dreadful, by the successive degradation of its finer qualities. Sensuality and ambition have touched it, — they possess it forever. True also, and admirably described, is the effect of a noble love upon Pierre Huguenin, — the depic- tion of his moral elevation, of the delicate pride of his sentiments, of that courage and that in- tegrity of common sense which holds his love apart and in the shadow where impossible pas- sions should be relegated. But, alas ! at every moment these fine analyses are abruptly broken off. This deep and charming study of the ef- fects of two contrary passions upon two ple- beian souls is checked, in order to open the floodgates of political declamation. I am acquainted with no personage more tiresome, more noisy, more foolishly garrulous, than this Achille Lefort, who is sure to be met at some turn in the lane every time the idyl goes out for a walk. I know nothing more improbable than the character of M. de Villepreux, the accomplice of Achille Lefort, whom he despises; — an indescribable compound of a sceptical great lord, of a member of the constitutional Order and Succession of her Novels. 57 opposition, of a conspirer without conviction, who seems at certain moments to mount the tripod of the humanitarian sibyl, only to de- scend, the next moment, with the smile of a Machiavelli of the Bourbon Palace. But above all, I know nothing falser, more declamatory, more dissonant, than the character of the noble Yseult in the latter- part of the story, where one is astounded to discover that this young girl, so graceful and so charming, who seems to be reason itself, is nothing but an inflamed con- spirator, an infatuated pedant. Behold her initiating Pierre Huguenin into the mysteries of the Carbonari, dedicating, in the midst oi" that splendid landscape and of that beautiful park, a lodge to Jean-Jacques Rousseau ; then, initiated in her turn by the virtue of the work- man into the true doctrine of equality, sud- denly, in a strange scene, asking him " before God who sees and hears them," if he loves her as she loves him; and confessing that from the day when she began to reason upon the future she had resolved "to marry a man of the people in order to be of the people," — as men accepting Christianity had themselves baptized in order to be able to call themselves Christians. Charming and gentle Yseult, where are you ? I know not what phantom from the Woman's Club has taken your place. I no 58 George Sand. longer recognize you. 1 Thus, to the great vex- ation of the reader, the two parts of the story continually intermingle, — the one lovely and touching, stamped with that charm which is the grace of art; the other surcharged with harsh and glaring colors which frighten grace and make it fly far away. " Horace " would be the interesting analysis of a wretchedly selfish and weak character, if the novel were not spoiled by the contrast, too plainly sought, with Arsene, the sublime man of the people, the hero of incipient socialism, the type of all the virtues according to the new gospel. In " Jeanne" is seen the dawn of the Druidical idea, so dear to some friends of Madame Sand, involved with I know not what vague synthesis or religious chaos. Here again, in a work so mingled, one would fain select. Some charming episodes, like the dis- covery of Jeanne asleep among the " Jomatre Stones," and like that of the April fool; some admirably drawn rustic scenes, as the conflagration in a hamlet, the washerwomen, the death in the country, the haymaking, — are insufficient to rescue the novel from the tediousness caused by the author's preoccu- 1 The Russian novel has frequently exhibited to us, in these latter days, this type of a Nihilist Yseult. In France, this type has remained a fiction. Order and Succession, of her Novels. 59 pation with her system, which is forever being dragged across the path of the sentiment. By inches the story dies at the hands of the sys- tem. The time comes when Jeanne is no longer the admirably simple and pure daugh- ter of the fields, whose artless charms inspire friendship or love in all who meet her, and who is surprised or frightened by this with such bashful modesty. She is transformed before our eyes. She becomes now the Vel- leda of Mount Barlot, anon the Grand Shep- herdess; she is constantly magnified, if so be that from the standpoint of art a character is magnified by passing to the state of myth or of allegory. She symbolizes the heroic and meditative soul of the rural community. Be it so ; but I shut the book at the point where the young peasant girl becomes so fine a speaker, and I pass eagerly to " Consuelo." Here again, in all this lavish display of the treasures of invention and of art, shall I experience no discomfiture? Certainly I am not so foolishly anxious to prove my critical power as to discuss the astonishing fertility of invention, the intellectual curiosity, the pas- sion, abounding throughout this novel, and even in the first part of its sequel, "The Count- ess of Rudolstadt." Madame Sand felt here, as she admits, a fine subject, powerful types, 60 George Sand. an epoch and regions sown thick with historic incidents the obscure side of which it was de- lightful to explore, and through which her imagination moved with ever increasing emo- tion, advancing at random, perpetually lured on by new horizons. Recent readings which had taken sharp hold on her mobile intel- ligence attracted her to this singular and complex enterprise by making her feel how interesting is the eighteenth century in respect to art, to philosophy, and to the marvellous, — three elements produced by this century in a fashion apparently very heterogeneous, but having a bond of connection curious to trace without the exercise of too much fancy ; the century of Maria Theresa and of Frederic the Second, of Voltaire and of Cagliostro, — a strange century beginning with songs, devel- oping in whimsical conspiracies, and issuing through profound ideas in formidable revo- lutions. I recognize willingly, with Madame Sand, the grandeur of the subject, and, more indulgent than she is to herself, I recognize that she has in most instances utilized it to excellent purpose, by the interest of the plot, by the strange charm of certain situations, by the lively delineation of sentiments and of characters. How we love Consuelo, that lofty intelligence, that noble heart, that admirable Order and Succession of her Novels. 61 artist, in the chastely adventurous outset, at Venice, of her wandering life; in her first tri- umphs and her first sorrows ; in her arrival on a tempestuous night at the awful Castle of the Giants ; throughout that whole phantasmagoria of ancient ruins and of great caverns ; in her love, so long contending with terror, for the young Count Albert; in her flight; in her chance encounter in the fields with Haydn, then hardly more than a child, — in fine, in that long journey the most delightfully fantastic that the imagination can conceive ! And later, when, struggling with dire events, the mournful bride of the dead, under the cloud of a dreadful mystery that at times disturbs her reason, Consuelo reappears — a maid and a widow, the Countess of Rudolstadt, still a great and noble artist — at the court of Frederic and in the dangerous intimacy of Princess Amelia, what scenes full of attraction and terror ! Her imprisonment, her abduc- tion, that renewed flight under the escort of the Invisibles, those painful emotions of an enigmatical passion which attracts her as a lawful love and which terrifies her as a kind of infidelity to the dead, — all this is related with incomparable interest and spirit. But for Heaven's sake let Count Albert not be so unlucky, so prolix, and so cloudy ! If he 62 George Sand. loves Consuelo let him tell his love, and not comment endlessly, in a travesty of history, upon the bloody legends of John Ziska and the Hussites I Were his madness not so pre- tentious, it might interest us ; did he not stalk at brief intervals across the scene with his pale forehead, his fixed eye, and his black cloak studded like a shroud with silver tears, he might seem to us amiable. But it is very ill in him to rave so frequently, to the terror of Consuelo and to the vexation of the reader. And when the moment of initiation comes, when finally the oracle speaks from the depth of the cavern, — do I err? — is it the noble Count who speaks? I seem to recognize timeworn phrases that have performed yeoman service in " the pacific Democracy " of this and oth- er days. " A mysterious and singular sect dreamed, among other things, of rehabilitating the life of the flesh, and of uniting in a single divine principle those two principles arbitral rily divided. It desired to sanction the love, the equality, the community of all, the elements of happiness. It sought to raise from its low estate the alleged principle of evil, and to ren- der it, on the contrary, the servant and agent of the good," etc. The noble Count can con- tinue long to this effect; as for me, I have long been dreaming, and I suspect Consuelo Order and Succession of her Novels. 63 of being so patient a listener only because she does as I do. But all this is nothing to the second volume of " The Countess of Rudol- stadt." It is here that a reader of great cour- age might treat himself to the spectacle of the flood-tide of the system and of declamation. Tediousness here suddenly rises to immeasu- rable heights. Who could follow Consuelo in- to that grotesque Pantheon opened to her by the priests and priestesses of Truth, which is adorned, between the columns, by the statues of the greatest friends of humanity, and where one sees Jesus Christ figuring between Pythag- oras and Plato, Apollonius of Tyana by the side of Saint John, Abailard by the side of Saint Bernard, John Huss and Jerome of Prague by the side of Saint Catherine and of Jeanne d'Arc ? Pray let us pause on the threshold of the temple before Spartacus arrives to close the story, and before all the more or less touching figures of the novel disappear in the fogs of a universal symbolism : another story winding up with the most frigid thing in the world, — allegory; linked with the most pretentiously empty thing, — humanitarian theosophy. It would really be a waste of evidence to insist further, and to repeat at length the same melancholy test upon " The Miller of Angi- bault," where at the outset we behold a heroic 64 George Sand. artisan, the great Ldmor, refuse, on the ground that wealth is contrary to his principles, the hand of a patrician widow whom he adores; while at the end of the story the rich widow rejoices at the fire that sweeps away her castle, because with the last piece of wall belonging to her she sees fall the last obstacle separating her from socialism and from her lover. Let me mention " The Sin of M. Antoine," whose greatest sin, in my eyes, is, not to have so pretty a daughter as Gilberte, but rather to have made M. de Boisguilbault the most un- endurable of men by taking away his wife. In the singular society in which move the char- acters of this story everybody is more or less communistic, — M. Antoine the decayed noble- man, John the peasant philosopher, Janille the maid-servant, fimile, Cardonnet the young sage, M. de Boisguilbault the old fool. M. Car- donnet, Sr., is the only one not steeped in " the new thought ; " and so the author takes care to make of him — as if this were not a matter of course — the type of the heartless commercial man, whose cold brutality kills his wife, and who crushes ideas as well as men under the millstone of his manufactory. All these people (M. Cardonnet always excepted) have the two imposed qualities of heroism of heart and endless argumentation. Their rivalry Order and Succession of her Novels. 65 is to see who shall perform the noblest actions and pronounce the most lengthy discourses. The palm remains to M. de Boisguilbault. III. Already, however, at the time when that fine imagination was so cruelly ridden by the humanitarian nightmare, it had made within itself more than one dumb revolt against the tyranny of friendships and of systematic ideas. More than once it had ventured to raise for a moment the crushing leaden yoke in order to breathe the bracing air of freer regions. Be- tween " The Miller of Angibault " and " The Sin of M. Antoine," those two clumsy social- istic engines, she had given in " The Haunted Pool " a delicious idyl to the charmed and attentive world; and thus, by an exquisitely chaste little masterpiece of rural poesy, she had preluded a new manner and a new period of her art, — a period of renascence. Unex- pected good luck: in these privileged pages not a word of politics or of Utopia, — nothing that repels ; nothing but what is modest and gentle; nothing but what is noble without strain, fine without bombast, touching without affectation. A little journey of three leagues, which lasts all night because the travellers lose 5 66 George Sand. their way ; a conversation several times inter- rupted, renewed, broken off, between the skilled ploughman Germain, who is on his way to Fourche to seek a wife, and little Marie, who is going as a shepherd-girl to The Elms ; two other personages, episodical but not stran- gers to the action, — little Pierre, who would like to have Marie for his second mother, and Gray, a good handsome mare whom we love as if she were a human being; the bivouac improvised under the great oaks, where the night passes nicely, — for Marie in chatting and sleeping, for Germain in talk and meditation; an im- pulse on the part of the worthy peasant, which he very quickly subdues in the presence of such innocence and candor; and, what is bet- ter, a good marriage project germinating in his brain and accompanying him back to the farm the next day, — that is all. It is nothing ; but this nothing will remain in our imaginative lit- erature among the perfect works born under a kindly star and consecrated. Poetry is Ma- dame Sand's talisman ; the moment she touches it sympathy revives, and bad dreams and weari- ness take flight. This vein of renewed innocence and poesy was to bring good luck to Madame Sand. After having endeavored, in the brilliant ad- ventures of her " Piccinino," to forget M. de Order and Succession of her Novels. 67 Boisguilbault and his communism, she returned with affection to the golden vein whence she had already drawn a treasure of grace and sentiment, and found " Francois le Champi." We trembled as we opened the book. In the first lines had been perceived some words of fatal augury, — I know not what theory of consciousness, of sensation, and of their rela- tion in sentiment, — and we feared lest M. Pierre Leroux had shed the flickering light of his psychology upon this new work. We were very soon reassured. We breathed again upon perceiving that this page was merely a prelim- inary flourish, — a last concession to friend- ship. We breathed again, but the alarm had been sharp. From beginning to end it was a story of life in Berry. Madame Sand had bent her beautiful style to this fancy for the rustic speech, imitated in its last delicacies and seized in its native simplicity in order to relate the tale of this worthy Champi and of good Made- Ion, of their bucolic friendship in the shadow of the mill, — motherly affection on the part of Madelon, filial on the part of Champi, but changing with the lapse of years and events to a very hearty love, which leads them arm in arm to the village church, with little Jeannie behind them smiling her archest smile; must there not often be a child Ascanius, in village tales 68 George Sand. as in epic poems, to serve as a pretext for the first whisperings of young love? But while this tranquil epic was unfolding in thefeui7/e- ton of the " Journal des Debats," at the very moment of the denouement, another denoue- ment which, according to Madame Sand, made sad havoc with the former, was unfolded in the leading article of the said journal. This was the Revolution of 1848. For Madame Sand the crisis was sharp. The emotion of the first hour had nearly cut short the renascence of her talent and abruptly faulted the new vein. The exactions of friend- ship placed in power had all but compromised that exquisite pen in the violence of polemics. "Letters to the People," "Bulletins of the Minister of the Interior," — things like these replaced, during several months, the charming fictions with which she had so recently en- chanted herself and all of us. The terrible insurrection of June was required to break the charm and set free her captive imagina- tion. " It was just after those unhappy days," she says, " that, agitated and wounded in soul by the outward tempests, I endeavored to recover in solitude, if not peace, at least faith. ... In such moments a stormy and puissant genius, like Dante, writes with his tears, his bile, his nerves, a terrible poem, a drama replete with Order and Succession of her Novels. 69 tortures and with groans. In our weaker and more shrinking days the artist, who is but the reflection and the echo of a generation not un- like himself, experiences the imperious need of turning away his eyes and diverting his imagination, by going back to an ideal of peace, of innocence, and of reverie. In times when the root of the evil lies in the fact that men misunderstand and hate one another, it is the artist's mission to celebrate gentleness, confidence, friendship, and thus to remind hardened or discouraged men that pure man- ners, tender sentiments, and primitive equity do, or may, still exist in the world. Direct allusions to present calamities, the appeal to fermenting passions, — such is not the path of safety ; better a sweet song, a note of the rus- tic flute, a tale to lull little children to sleep without pain and without terror, than the spec- tacle of real evils, set off and darkened by the colors of fiction." These lines are prefixed' to " Fanchon the Cricket," 1 as an adieu to stormy politics and a tacit engagement to confine her- self thenceforward to gentler visions. " Fan- chon the Cricket " was the first pledge of Madame Sand's reconciliation with her gen- ius. In those restless years, in those uncertain hours of which each brought its danger or its 1 La Petite Fadette. jo George Sand. menace, a new discord among party chiefs or a tremor of the masses, with what joy we took refuge from this precarious life by following Madame Sand along some daisied woodland lane, or yonder where the river sleeps beneath the boughs ! What tears, mingled perhaps by the contrast of political events with smiles, started at the friendship of the twins, at the jealousy of Sylvinet, at the affection — per- plexed at first, soon deep and tender — of noble Landry for Fanchon, at the growing loveliness of Fanchon transformed by the spell of a true love ! It was a success of renascent grace. The finest days of her talent had re- turned, recognized and welcomed by the pub- lic emotion. To the same source of rustic inspiration may be traced some works nearer to us in the order of time, like "The Master Bell-ringers," a very original tale, and " Night Visions in the Fields," the thrilling fantasy of an imagination that loves to interpret simple terrors, superstitions, and legends, — not with- out a sympathetic shudder at these games of fear, the poetry of midnight, and the nocturnal drama of the countryside. At about this time the passion for the dra- ma, which had been very strong in Madame Sand, was reawakened with renewed force. The fruitless effort of " Cosima " had rather Order and Succession of her Novels. 7 1 stimulated than discouraged this passion. " Ga- brielle," " The Seven Chords of the Lyre," " The Mississippians," had been a series of ideal exhibitions in which Madame Sand had been indulgent to her own imagination. We shall see Jater that in her studious retreat at Nohant her dearest recreation with her chil- dren and friends was an amateur theatre to which, in conformity to stage-directions previ- ously prepared, each one brought the impro- vised flash of his wit or the pointed shrewdness of his reason, his melancholy, or his gayety. In 1849 she brought out her pastoral comedy of " Francois le Champi." We shall not follow her far in this new path, in which the author will never gain a success commensurate with her merit, with her effort, with her evident desire to excel. The special turn of her talent for anal- ysis and for poetry did not serve her here as it had done elsewhere. What is needed for the drama is the science of relief, the instinct for perspective, adroitness in combination, and especially action, again action, and always ac- tion ; the author must possess the natural gayety that raises the laugh, or the secret of the strong emotion — of the unforeseen situa- tion — that thrills the mind. Lively and rapid action was not the gift of Madame Sand. She had neither the dramatic mind nor the vis 72 George Sand. comica. Her dramatic work lacks relief; the too simple and bare forms of her art, her habit of nice analysis and delicate sentiment, even the style of marvellous ease, but a trifle pro- lix and at times a bit declamatory, now shining only by masterly simplicity and anon glowing with the lyric fire which is quite in its place in a novel, — all these are so many obstacles to her popularity on the stage. However this may be, for many years of the latter period of her life, from "Francois le Champi" and "Vic- torine's Marriage" (1851) up to "The Marquis de Villemer " (1864), Madame Sand was pas- sionately occupied, though with unequal suc- cess, with her dramatic works. She appreciated very warmly in others that dramatic gift which she made such efforts to acquire and to thrust upon the public. What- ever has since been said, she never completely succeeded in this. Nevertheless, we have been present at recent revivals of some of her pieces, originally somewhat too quickly aban- doned, which have been very well received by the new public ; we have lately l applauded that pretty romantic comedy, " The Fine Gen- tlemen of Bois-Dore\" and the sentimental drama " Claudie," which, in spite of the super- annuated, sermonizing tone of Father Remy, 1 May, 1887. Order and Succession of her Novels. 73 has succeeded. I am assured that the same experiment would be equally successful with other dramatized pastorals, such as " Francois le Champi," or plays like " Master Favilla," devoted to the study of the artistic spirit. In order to understand this kind of success, which does honor to the lettered public, one must take account of the very marked reactionary movement in men's minds in favor of the ideal- istic drama. In spite of this and other consid- erations based upon this tardily ■■ rediscovered charm of sentiment, it may be asserted that Madame Sand succeeded in a durable way upon the stage only twice, — in " Victorine's Marriage," and in "The Marquis de Villemer." Further, it is just to say that on these two occasions she had two valuable collaborators : for the first play, Sedaine; for the second, Alexandre Dumas the younger. During this period, in which the ascendency of the novel was disputed and in part usurped by dramatic attempts, Madame Sand did not abandon the path of her true vocation. IV. She produced successively historical ro- mances like " The Fine Gentlemen of Bois- DoreY' dramatized almost immediately under the same name; that strange hallucination', 74 George Sand. that retrospective dream of antediluvian re- ligion and love, entitled " Evenor and Leu- cippe ; " some agreeable novels, like " The God-daughter," " Adriani," " Mont-RevSche," which seem to us particularly significant by the very sharp and finished delineation of character, by the graceful variety of situation, by the movement of the plot, and especially by the author's very marked disinterestedness with reference to all social theories, — her foregone determination to return to her early conception of the novel, free from all pre- occupation with unconcerning things. 1 Bucolics cannot last forever. They had brought to Madame Sand an aftermath of success, and a popularity that had for some time taken the tone of enthusiasm; for a moment there was reason to fear that she would linger too long in these rusticities, which had so happily released her from de- testable politics. It was therefore with great 1 Let us mention here, without remark — " La Daniella," a very romantic tale ; " Narcisse," " The Brisk Ladies," " The Snow Man," " Constance Verrier," " The Family of Ger- mandre," " Valvedre," " The Black City," " Tamaris " ( 1862), "Mademoiselle de la Quintinie" (1863), "A Young Girl's Confession" (1865), "Monsieur Sylvestre," "The Last Amour," "Cadio" (1868), "Mademoiselle Merquem," "A Rolling Stone," " Pictordu Castle," " Flamarande," etc.; then the "Rustic Legends," "Impressions and Souvenirs," " Around the Table," the " Tales of a Grandmother," etc. Order and Succession of her Novels. 75 pleasure that her return was witnessed to the true home of the novel, — society at large with its infinite complexity. To-day she leads us, but not long, among the workingmen of the Black City; yesterday we were in the respectable puritanical drawing-room of the Obernays; the day before, in the aristocratic boudoir of the old Marchioness of Villemer, or on the mountains of Auvergne. In the long series of works that crown with a still living but at times languishing flame the final labors of Madame Sand, two especially deserve to fix the attention of posterity : " Jean de la Roche " and " The Marquis de Villemer." I have just re-read these two novels, and have yielded to the charm of former days, — a charm fresh and penetrating as ever. How- many works of pure imagination are there that stand the test of a second reading after they have lost for us the attraction of the un- known, and that first bloom of novelty often so fragile and so artificial? C These two works are in George Sand's best inner, bearing marks of the improvement which the most delicate experience of life made in her early conceptions of her art, while age has not chilled the inspiration. Of " Jean de la Roche " the subject is perhaps the most original and the simplest. It does not escape j6 George Sand. the canon of its kind condemning every novel to be, to a greater or less extent, merely the tale of an unhappy love. It will be, therefore, the eternal struggle of love against the sur- rounding obstacles which divert it from its smooth course. The novelty here consists in the nature of the obstacle. Jean de la Roche is, by birth at least, the equal of Miss Love; his fortune is suitable, and Mr. Butler has, thank Heaven ! nothing in common with the cruel fathers who fill novels and dramas with outbursts of their wrath. When all seems to conspire to the happiness of this requited and favored affection, whence is to come the ob- stacle? Where shall the fount of tears spring up? Miss Love has a youthful brother, a ter- rible boy, who, seeing that his sister is about to marry, falls into a kind of despair. In his way he is jealous, — chastely but morbidly jealous. His silent and obstinate languor, a nervous fever, his distressing relapses, constitute the whole plot of the story. The child is dying of jealousy, and, as she adores him, as she is sacrifice itself, — a smiling sacrifice, — she un- hesitatingly yields up her dearest hopes. In the analysis of this strange passion of a child lies the originality of the story. Not by main force can an obstacle of this kind be set aside ; numberless attentions and endless caution are Order and Succession of her Novels. 77 required in the treatment of this soul-sickness, which threatens at every moment to carry off a frail life ; there is especially needed a gay res- ignation and that most difficult courage which fears not to measure itself against time, and to await, almost without hope, an improbable change. Through what varied incidents does her ingenious art conduct our interest and sus- tain it by incessantly shading and varying it; how all is finally unravelled under the au- thor's delicate hand ; how the trial of these two brave hearts is closed and consecrated by a happiness that is merely the natural result and the work of their generous qualities, — all this is stamped with the mark of Madame Sand's renewed talent. The latter part of the novel, — the meeting of the Butler family with Jean de la Roche, disguised and unrecognizable; a very picturesque excursion to Mont-Dor6, which gives him an opportunity to assure him- self whether, after five long years of absence and of- misunderstanding, he is still loved ; the tardy repentance of Hope Butler and the expiation he offers for the harm already done, — a repentance which exhibits in the young man as in the child a touch of the same strange and morbid character, — these last natural scenes, for which the way is so well pre- pared, complete the reader's emotion. 78 George Sand. The story of " The Marquis de Villemer," popularized by the stage as well as by the novel, we do not purpose to relate. Many times before had the drama or the novel dealt with analogous plots. Neither in English lit- erature nor in our own is the story of the gov- erness or the lady's companion a new thing. What is new here is the character-analysis, traced with equal precision and elegance ; es- pecially new is the abundance and variety of the .most charming interior details. What bright conversations between Caroline de Saint- Geneix and the old marchioness ! The latter is a complicated personage, warped by the abuse of social relations, incapable of living alone, incapable even of thinking when alone ; but;when in communication with the mind of another, a charming person, whose sole delight in the world is conversation, which does her the service of lubricating her ideas, of render- ing them by movement " gay," of withdrawing her from herself. What strikes the reader is the grand air reigning from beginning to end in this charming tale, — the attitude and the tone of aristocratic life so naturally caught and so naturally kept throughout the novel. This characteristic of Madame Sand's mind has not been sufficiently. noted in her early works. The democracy of her ideas has deceived critics, and Order and Succession of her Novels. 79 has put them off the scent with respect to the breeding and noble bearing of this style, which is never more at home than in pictures of high life where it excels without effort and moves with marvellous ease. How easy her superior- ity in this respect in comparison with Balzac ! It is the mark of really superior minds to be able to continue without repetition ; they pos- sess the secret of self-renewal. Not all the works of the last period merit, however, the same praise. The author exhibits traces of fatigue; the most marked trace being a pro- lixity to which some traits of moral analysis and some pages of thrilling description cannot give life. None the less is it true that this literary life of Madame Sand, viewed in its whole extent, is a miracle of fruitfulness. She has enchanted with her fictions or haunted with her dreams four or five generations ; throughout so many catastrophes, public or private, she has remained almost constantly equal to herself, exhaustless in her art, dis- concerting at every turn the critics who think to have finally grasped her, holding ever new surprises in reserve ; while all around her and along the path she has travelled, so many in- tellectual ruins have heaped themselves up, — so much rubbish, so many incomplete talents smitten with impotence or with absurdity, and, 80 George Sand. in their infatuation, not even perceiving that they have ceased to exist, j In the intervals of her^novel-writing, which formed the chief labor of her life, she found time to mingle actively, even in a literary way, with the life of others. This she did in all sorts of stories related to her grandchildren, — " Pictordu Castle," " Percemont Tower," " The Talking Oak," " The Brisk Ladies," " The Demon of the Field," — in which her imagina- tion is inexhaustible ; or writing with negligent pen upon a leaf of the family table her some- what vague impressions of the literature of the day ; or again, latterly, in " The Journal of a Traveller during the War," written in the ter- rible year under the impulse of the keenest emotions, describing the public agony, the private sorrows and distresses of the time, in a style gloomy but virile, and all tremulous with patriotism. The rest of this enormously active life — if there could be an overflow of leisure moments in such busy days — was the part reserved to an indefatigable correspondence, which became a kind of daily supplement to that autobiography begun upon so large a scale. For " The History of My Life " goes much too far back into the genealogy of her family, ends too soon, but abounds in curious pages and in others simply exquisite, like the Order and Succession of her Novels. 8 1 narrative of the sojourn at the convent of the English nuns. — In this rapid enumeration, how many works we omit, how many little masterpieces we leave in the shade ! We have endeavored to make a history of the works of Madame Sand. It is something like a biography of her talent, divided into four periods: The first (1831-1840), that of personal lyricism, in which the emotions pent up during a solitary and dreamy youth break forth in brilliant and impassioned fictions. The second (1840-1848) is one of less personal inspiration, in which the author abandons her- self to the influence of the doctrines of others ; it is the period of the systematic novel. The third (1848-1860 about) is marked by an evident weariness of theories, by a tendency to a simple, naive, and true art, by the tri- umph of the idyl, and by the pursuit of a new form of success, — that of the theatre. The last, embracing the whole clqse of this fruitful life ( 1 860-1 876), is marked by a return to the novel of the first manner, in which, however, the fire is tempered by experience, at times even abated by age, and somewhat languishing, — notwithstanding the masterpieces that re- main and seem to protest against such an im- pression by the purity of their inspiration and by their vigor, perennially youthful. 6 CHAPTER III. THE SOURCES OF HER INSPIRATION. HER IDEAS AND HER SENTIMENTS. CAN the principal sources of Madame Sand's inspiration throughout her long literary life be precisely traced and classified? What was her doctrine upon the great subjects of human meditation with which she deals so feelingly, — upon social laws, upon love, Nature, ideas, upon the sentiment of the divine in life and in the world? How does she control and mingle these diverse inspirations? Have they not at times produced, by their clashing, some discordant effect, some confusion in hefcwork? It would certainly be a piece of wanton ped- antry to call up the light and charming shades of her several novels, only to inquire of each what it stands for, and to reduce to syllogisms these fancies of a mind of such freedom and variety. Strictly speaking, there is no doctrine in Madame Sand, no development of a theory, but rather the free play of a powerful imagina- tion. Furthermore, passion is much stronger and more vital in her than thought; and when The Sources of her Inspiration. 83 it is a principle, true or false, that inspires her, this principle has first had to be stripped of its abstractness and to be embodied in a feeling. It is said that Madame Sand had several mas- ters in philosophy. I am willing to believe* so, since she herself implies it. But her first master in philosophy was her heart, — a master full of illusions and hobbies, and through it alone were the others permitted to act and to be heard. There is, then, no occasion for a very close investigation into Madame Sand's doctrine, but simply for an analysis of her ideas through the medium of her feelings. In Madame Sand three sources of inspira- tion seem inexhaustible, — love, the humani- tarian passion, the sentiment of Nature. By the side of these several others can be distin- guished; but they are imperceptibly absorbed and' finally disappear. It would seem, according to her, that the sole business of life is love ; that life itself, that is to say, action in its most varied forms, has no other end or occupation. Before having loved, one does not live ; when one no longer loves or is loved, one has scarcely the right to live on. This alone — to love or to be loved — gives value to existence. I perceive indeed another motive, vaguely in the novels of the 84 George Sand. first period, very distinctly in those of the second, — the humanitarian passion; but this motive is itself subordinated to the first. In novels like " The Companion of the Tour of Trance," " The Countess o'f Rudolstadt," " The Miller of Angibault," love is the supreme apostle of the levelling doctrine. Count Al- bert devotes himself to the great work, but Consuelo is the reward hoped for and foreseen. To deserve or to conquer love is the end of all manly activity and of all heroism. If social opinion or the accidents of life have placed a gulf between one of Madame Sand's heroes and his loved one, he displays colossal energy in bridging it. Here, indeed, is a touching conception, which the author has several times employed with singular felicity. What energy is displayed by the half-educated peasant Simon, in his hard battle with fate ! In order to raise himself to a level with Fiamma, he will have strength to conquer fortune and even talent. Mauprat, his heart possessed by the image of Edm^e, will with incredible difficulty and determination convert himself from the bandit and wildman that he is, into an honest man and a hero. When there is no gulf to cross, her personages simply fold their arms and love ; in the little world governed by Ma- dame Sand's amorous fancy this is all their skill. The Sources of her Inspiration. 85 Consider Octave, in " Jacques ;" it never occurs to him that there is here below any other oc- cupation or duty. He has loved Sylvia ; when he no longer loves her, he falls in love with Fernande. His uselessness in the world is for him neither a care nor a remorse'; besides, he does not think of it, or, if he thinks of it, does not credit it. His social function is to love; Heaven knows whether he does not conscien- tiously fulfil it ! Nor does Benedict, in " Val- entine," imagine that his mind or his hands can be of any other service. From the day he meets Valentine, his outward life stops. He lays aside his activity, renounces his future, forgets that life has requirements and duties. He lives with his love and by his love, in the inertness of an Oriental trance, which is only disturbed by his transports and his despairs. The end of life is love; with it the right to live ceases. Those who persist in dragging out the superfluous burden of a loveless ex- istence are feeble souls unable to find within themselves the strength of a supreme deter- mination. But be sure that these weak wills, lacking the energy to die, have also lacked the energy of genuine love. After the death of Genevieve, Andre\ being ill, walks slowly along the woodland lanes leaning upon the arm of Joseph Marteau, with downcast eyes as if he 86 (Jeorge Hand. still feared to encounter his father's glance. "The wretched man," says Madame Sand, " had not had the energy to die." For Andre had thrown into his passion only the agitation and the terrors of his weakness. Look at the true heroes of love; they will know how to lay down life when bereft of love. Valentine dies of the death of Benedict. Indiana will not outlive her heart. Jacques, when forsaken, seeks a lonely death among the glaciers. So the aesthetics of the novel requires it. What a contrast with the ideas of the English thinker Carlyle upon the same subject: "What he most violently abhorred in Thackeray's novels was that love is there represented (in the French fashion) as extending over the whole of life and forming its chief concern ; while on the contrary love (' the thing they call love ') is restricted to a very few years of man's life, and, even in this insignificant fraction of time, is only one amid a crowd of infinitely more important objects of human interest. ... To tell the truth, the whole business of love is so wretched a futility that, in a heroic age, no one would give himself the pains to think of it, much less to open his mouth con- cerning it!" 1 Which is right? 1 "Mrs. Carlyle. — Portraits of Women," by Arvede Barine. The Sources of her Inspiration. 87 If any one 4s amazed that love should be 1 called, not the greatest, but almost the sole duty of life, Madame Sand will explain it by saying that love comes from God. It is well • known that it was much the fashion, at that time, j to mingle the divine name with the wildest' transports of passion. Our poets then threw a kind of mysticism over the most desperate affairs of the heart. But no poet, no novelist, has made free with the name of God in relation to love more openly, I may say more can- didly, than Madame Sand. Doubtless there are noble passions that enlarge the soul, and, as human reason seeks the divine ideal in all that is great and beautiful, we may at times, when we feel the stirrings of the better nature, believe in a secret interference of God in these privileged sentiments. But how indiscreet and perilous the enthusiasm that applies this kindly favor of Providence to all love, of whatever kind ! Of what guilty laxity of heart, of what faithlessness, of what moral weaknesses, one thus makes Providence the unwilling accom- plice ! Let Madame Sand trace for us, in her own' way, the lofty lineage of love : " What constitutes the immense superiority of this sentiment over all others, what proves its di- vine essence, is that it is not born of man himself, and that man cannot dispose of it; 88 George Sand. that he neither gives nor withholds it by an act of the will ; that the human heart receives it from above, doubtless that it may be di- rected toward the creature chosen among all others by the designs of Heaven ; and, when a strong soul has received it, it were in vain that all human considerations should com- bine to destroy it; it subsists alone, and of its proper strength. All the aids that love receives, or rather draws to itself, — friendship, ' confidence, sympathy, even esteem, — are but subaltern allies; it has created them, it com- mands them, it survives them." And she adds, some lines farther on : " Had not Su- preme Providence, which in defiance of men is everywhere, presided over this union? The one was necessary to the other, — Benedict to Valentine, in order to acquaint her with those emotions without which life is incomplete; Valentine to Benedict, in order to bring repose and consolation into a stormy and harried life. But there was society between them, declaring their choice absurd, guilty, impious ! Provi- dence made the admirable order of nature, men have destroyed it; whose the blame?" That Benedict and Valentine were united by divine predestination, is somewhat difficult for me to believe ; but that God may intervene ex- pressly to authorize even infidelity in love, — The Sources of her Inspiration. 89 this I cannot in conscience concede to Jacques. " I have never wrought upon my imagination," says he, " in order to kindle or to quicken with- in me the sentiment which was not yet there, or that which was no longer there ; I have never imposed upon myself the r61e of constancy. When I felt my love expiring, I said so without? shame and without remorse, and I obeyed Provi-\ dence, which drew me elsewhere'' A strange) function for Providence, — to call Jacques to new amours ! For all that, Jacques wins prose- lytes to his doctrine, his wife being the first. For when, later, his wife betrays him, she does it, if I may say so, religiously. Never had piety been carried so far, in adultery. Imagine the plan formed by the amiable Fernande to con- secrate her joy. " Oh, my dear Octave," she writes to her lover, " never shall we pass a night together without kneeling and praying for Jacques." A fine consolation for a husband ! After that, one need not be surprised if Ma- \ dame Sand's heroes think to render God a \ kind of worship by yielding to love. Sud- denly, in the midst of their transports, lovers assume the mien of inspiration. They relate their joys with a species of pious exaltation. They seem to see here something like sacred rites to be regarded with softened pride. They are no longer lovers, they are high priests. 90 George Sand. In what a religious tone does Valreg speak of the inconceivable happiness that has befallen him, — of the fantastic lie and the shameless heroism by which Daniella delivered herself to him ! I shall not press this, — I wish simply to indicate the note that prevails in this strange thanksgiving. The most mystical metaphors flow from his rapturous pen. " A wise virgin slandering her purity, putting out her light like a foolish virgin, in order to quiet the weak and evil conscience of him whom she loves and who misinterprets her! Why, what a dream is this ! . . . I am in a preternatural state. ... I find myself as God made me. Primordial love, chief effluence of divinity, is shed abroad in the air I breathe; my bosom is filled with it. . . . It is like a new fluid, per- meating and quickening. . . . At length I live by that intellectual sense which sees, hears, and understands an unchangeable order of things ; which consciously co-operates in the endless and boundless labor of the higher life, of the life in God," etc. He is no longer an apostle of love, he is one of the illuminated. Love, proceeding from God, is sacred. To yield to it is a pious act ; to resist it would be a sacrilege, to blame it in others an impiety. Is not the desire of nature the very summons of God to this new class of the elect ? Is there The Sources of her Inspiration, gi need of adding that love is its own justifica- tion? Being divine, it is irresponsible. The disorders to which it leads find the largest indulgence on the part of the author and of her principal characters. Says Eugenie, in the novel of " Horace " : " Martha, why this grief? Is it regret for the past, is it fear for the future? You have disposed of yourself; you were free, no one has the right to humili- ate you." Even those who might have some right to complain, such as deserted husbands, are the first, when they have great souls, to bestow their heroic benediction upon the adul- terous pair. " Curse not these two lovers," writes Jacques to Sylvia. " They are not guilty ; they love. Where there is sincere love, there is no crime." And again : " To-day Fernande yields to a passion which a year of struggles and of resistance has but rooted the deeper in her heart. I am forced to admire her, for, even had she yielded at the end of a month, I could have loved her still. No human being can govern love, and none is guilty for feeling it or for losing it." But where then is this indulgence for the disorders of love to cease? I am afraid it will extend very far, even to the extreme limits to which free life may extend. Involuntarily I recall a very animated apology {fro domo sua) of 92 George Sand. Isidora the courtesan, demonstrating to Laurent that all those women of pleasure and of de- bauch, despised by a puerile stoicism, are the rarest and strongest types that have come from the hands of Nature. Madame Sand may say that Isidora speaks thus by force of circumstance and situation, and that, besides, the mad thoughts exchanged at a masked ball are not to be so severely discussed. Be it so ; but farther on in the same book Laurent de- velops to the noble Alice an analogous theme, and boldly concludes that to the powers of a beautiful and intelligent woman born in pov- erty society has given no outlet but corrup- tion. And the modest Alice, with sorrowful open-heartedness, replies, " You are right, Laurent." This time the word comes from a^very grave mouth. / In all the faults by which woman may be led astray, in those very ones that degrade her in the eyes of the world, the only guilty party is society, which fetters the free movements of God in the heart. This theory is far-reaching. I fear the souls who should be unfortunate enough to take it seriously would stagnate in a kind of Oriental fatalism. It is faith in free- dom that makes us free. Vigorously believe in it and you will feel it quicken and act within you. Cease to believe in it, and you will fall • The Sources of her Inspiration. 93 into the ranks of those slavish souls whom pas- sion lashes under her iron yoke. Man is free in proportion as he believes himself to be so, for it is precisely this affirmation of our strength that sets us free. This is a dogma of the purest philosophy; it is also a religious dog- ma, for religion tells us that grace is refused to no one who by effort deserves it. I do not contend that man should be faultless, nor that opinion should arm itself with absurd severity to punish his weaknesses. What I wish is simply to put responsibility back where it be- longs, and to prevent the aggravation of weak- nesses that are only too real, by the doctrinal concessions of those eager to absolve them. There is a certain moral grandeur in recog- nizing one's self to be the free author even of a fault, instead of seeking a miserable excuse for it in a fatality which, by believing in it, we ourselves create. Sensual ideality, — such is the secret vice of almost all the love-passages in Madame Sand. Her heroes rise to the loftiest summits of Platonism. But look closely into the heart, and you will discern a delicate or a violent sensualism tainting the noblest aspirations. One example shall suffice. Lelia is less a woman than a symbol. Among all the noble sentiments she symbolizes, stands incontest- 94 George Sand. ably pure love. Madame Sand wished to make her the most brilliant exemplar of pas- sionate idealism. Certainly she speaks nobly when she cries out: " Love, Stenio, is not what you think ; it is not that violent aspira- tion of all our powers toward a created being, it is the holy aspiration of the soul's ethereal part toward the unknown. We finite beings are ever seeking to deceive those insatiable desires that consume us ; we seek a goal near ourselves, and, poor prodigals that we are, we adorn our perishable idols with all the incor- poreal charms beheld in our visions. Sensual emotions do not suffice us. Nature has nothing exquisite enough, in the treasure-house of her simple joys, to quench the thirst for happiness within us; we need heaven, and we have it not." And her discourse, soaring thus toward the infinite on the pinions of a sublime and impetuous thought, does not pause here. The soul follows after it, climbing the highest mountain-tops of sentiment. iBut turn the leaf : the soul is going down the moun- tain. What a scene ; and how near to fainting is Lelia's " great heart " ! Let the reader recall the burning pages beginning thus : " Lelia passed her finger through Stenio's perfumed hair, and, drawing his head to her bosom, covered it with kisses. . . ." The Sources of her Inspiration. 95 There is in these pages such an indefinable mingling of Platonism and of voluptuousness, the one repeatedly seizing what the other has snatched, — conquered voluptuousness return- ing to mock the now indignant and now soft- ened Platonism, — there is in this perilous and too protracted struggle something so titillating to the imagination, that I do not hesitate to judge Pulcherie, the priestess of pleasure, less shameless in her transports than the sublime Lelia in the visions of her immodest chastity. The very nobility of the thoughts that appear in the midst of this delirium only enhances the strange abandonment. " How hard the heart beats within your breast, young man ! 'T is well, my child ; but does this heart con- tain the germ of some manly virtue? Will it pass through life without becoming corrupt or withered? . . . You smile, my gracious poet; fall asleep so." I cannot endure this solicitude, at such a moment, for the future virtue of Stdnio. In vain does Lelia protest against our suspicions. In vain she declares that she de- lights in Stenio's beauty with " candor," with " maternal childishness." I cannot help dis- trusting such candor, such factitious maternity. One of the results of the theory of the provi-"r dential origin of the passion is the romantic axiom that love equalizes classes. It is society 96 George Sand. alone that forms castes ; God has no hand in our puerile combinations. Whence it must be concluded that Providence, in predestinating souls to each other, makes no account of the- degrees of the social hierarchy where chance and prejudice shall distribute these souls at their entrance into life. There is equality be- fore God, there will be equality in love, which is His work. And all those noble heroines, Valentine de Raimbault, Marcelle de Blanche- mont, Yseult de Villepreux, and so many oth- ers, eager to lift up their downtrodden brothers and to put each in his rightful place, will be found seeking their ideal beneath the peas- ant's smock or the workingman's jacket. Thus in the world of Madame Sand's novels are formed the soul-marriages uniting bottom and top of the social ladder. In the play of her fancy she delights to reconcile conditions, and to prepare, as she believes, for the fusion of castes by love. What truth is there in this thought? Does love equalize ranks, in life as in the novel? This is one of those delicate questions admit- ting no absolute answer ; a question requiring the instincts and the fine inductive faculty of other judges than men. If I may believe some testimony, this idea of Madame Sand would have much attraction for the imagination of The Sources of her Inspiration. 97 women. There is, in fact, in the heart of each of them a tendency to devotion in love, a kind of chivalric instinct which is elated at thought of a generous struggle with the unmerited spurns of society or of fortune. What femi- nine soul would resist, in imagination at least, the delight of uplifting a great intelligence buried in hopeless obscurity, — a valiant soul, baffled by the chances of a perverse fate and wandering in the shadow of humble life ? But does such heroism go beyond a dream? Can a woman of high birth, reared in the luxury and splendor that form the natural setting of the higher social existence, from this region in which she lives distinguish in the crowd that nobleman of Nature whom she is to lift to his true level? And if, by a miraculous chance, she discovers him, will circumstances be found sufficiently in league with her desire to unite these two hearts, between whom the world places a more impassable interval than ocean deeps or desert spaces? Suppose these ob- stacles overcome, and the two souls united by a propitious destiny, will there not suddenly arise, by the very effect of a closer acquaint- ance, barriers unforeseen and this time insur- mountable? Will love survive the crucial test of familiar intimacy? Consider that one of these two souls bears that ineffaceable stamp 7 98 George Sand. of breeding, of language, of tone, which has become a second nature more necessary than the first. Consider the different origin of the other, and the fact that no distinction of heart will atone for the inexperience of social life, the ignorance which is sublime only in books. It were at least necessary that these abysses be filled by intellectual culture and by pecul- iarly delicate instincts, or love, cruelly disap- pointed, would run a sad risk of being swal- lowed up. Love, doubtless, does not consult the rules of the social hierarchy; but it will be difficult to admit that these rules are abso- lutely preposterous. To define my thought: I concede to Madame Sand that Edm6e can love Mauprat, — he is of her family, and will be, after some years of training, very much of a gentleman ; or that the last Aldini may al- low first her imagination, then her heart, to be enamoured of Ldlio, — he is a celebrated artist, a charming intelligence, a noble soul; that Valentine may overlook some roughness of manner in Benedict,^ he is a kind of genius, rough only upon the surface, full of natural eloquence and strong thought But I doubt whether the great ladies and the noble dam- sels of Madame Sand can love, except in novels, the one a crassly ignorant gondolier, the other an illiterate workingman ; especially The Sources of her Inspiration. 99 whether, having suffered the infatuation of these disproportioned amours, they can push their imprudence still farther, and dream of unions more impossible than their love. In all this I am only expressing doubts and not- ing distinctions. I ask questions, — I shall take good care not to answer them. What person in his senses would venture to affirm that there is anything love cannot do? But these miracles are exceptional. We have pointed out the theory of love in Madame Sand, — if, after all, it be not forcing the sense of words to see a theory in these glowing inspirations of a sensibility working by no rule. And in spite of all, notwithstand- ing the justest criticisms, it is difficult not to yield to the spell. Reason must be extremely vigilant to escape being swept off its feet. Never has paradox been set forth with more eloquent candor, nor error with more enthusi- astic loyalty. And then, how unjust to see in Madame Sand only the seductive painter of the mistakes or the sophistry of passion ! In her conception of love how much that is great and noble ! What generosity, what delicate pride, what chivalric devotion in her most beloved types ! About some of them hovers the imperishable halo of ideal grace. Gene- vieve, fresher and purer than the flowers that ioo George Sand. bloomed by thy life's little stream, until the fatal day when its purity was troubled and thy happiness gone ; Consuelo, proud and lovely image of conscience in art and of honor in love, spotless maiden, piously faithful to a memory throughout the chances of your wan- dering life; Edmee, type envied by women, one of the most touching creations of the modern novel, — how often, gentle heroine, have you visited the dreams of enthusiastic young souls, in that fanciful hunting costume in which your wild lover first saw you, with that air of smiling tranquillity, of courageous frankness, and of inviolable honor; you too, Marie, heroine of " The Haunted Pool," who to inspire a deep love had but your innocence, and who conquered with this the rude soul of a peasant, — a soul in which your disinter- estedness awakened an unsuspected generosity, and in which your artless goodness brought to light justice and devotion where sordid cal- culation had reigned undisputed; you finally, Caroline de Saint-Geneix, who subdued a foe more potent than a peasant's ruggedness, — the implacable pride of a prejudice, — and who by virtue of reserve, of modesty, of nobility of soul, of simple unassuming heroism, put down all opposition, made all hearts better, trans- formed all about you the fatalities of race and The Sources of her Inspiration. 101 education, — you have all known how to love nobly and delicately; you have each revealed for a day, for an hour, the true greatness that abides in true love. You have stirred the souls of sev- eral generations. Henceforward you will live among that ideal race which genius creates, and which breathes the immortal breath of art. Madame Sand's conception of love is no tri- fling matter ; it has had consequences of con- siderable scope. It was by the idea of irre- sponsible passion that Madame Sand began her struggle against opinion and social law, and that this struggle was first transferred to the novel, where it has since found so wide an arena. Here is revealed a flaw in the moral nature of George Sand, so conspicuous that it would be useless to attempt to conceal it. The one thing needful to this soul, so strong, so rich in enthusiasm, is a humble moral quality that she disdains, and, when she has occasion to speak of it, even slanders, — namely, resignation. This is not, as she seems to think, the slug- gish virtue of base souls, who in their super- stitious servitude to force hasten to crouch beneath every yoke. That is a false and degrading resignation ; genuine resignation grows out of the conception of the universal order, weighed against which individual suf- ferings, without ceasing to be a ground of 102 George Sand. merit, cease to constitute a right of revolt. What would become of society if every one, giving rein to his passion, should override legitimate claims and contrary rights? It would be the elementary society of Hobbes,-^- the wolfish strife of man against man. Res- ignation, in the true, the philosophical, the Christian sense, is a manly acceptance of moral law and also of the laws essential to the social order ; it is a free adherence to order, a sacri- fice approved by reason of a part of one's private good and of one's personal freedom, not to might nor to the tyranny of a human caprice, but to the exigencies of the common weal, which subsists only by the concord of individual liberty with obedient passions. To Madame Sand this conception was wholly wanting. She cannot resign herself, and the pride of superb and rebellious passion throbs in all her works. \js Hence those famous declamations on the right of the human being to shake off the yoke of social laws, laws pitiless and unintelli- gent, lacerating the heart and violating free- dom. Hence all those indignant prophecies, and that Utopia of the ideal wedlock. " I doubt not," cries Jacques, " that marriage will be abol- ished, if the human race makes any progress toward justice and right. It will be replaced by The Sources of her Inspiration. 103 a tie more humane and not less sacred, and a way will be found to assure the existence of the children who shall be born, without ever fetter- ing the freedom of the man or of the woman. But men are too gross and women too craven to demand a nobler law than the iron law that binds them ; creatures without conscience and virtue must bear heavy chains." To demand a law is easily said, — a law that shall release husband and wife without destroying the fam- ily founded upon their free covenant. Let any one try to conceive such a law, in the con- tradiction of its terms ! By any other way than that of free love I defy the legislators of the future to escape this dilemma: the man and the woman must alienate their liberty, or the family must perish. And yet, were there only the man and the woman, the problem would be soon solved. They would part as soon as they ceased to love, provided always they could subsist apart. This is a convenient panacea for the pair when each has a fortune, or even when they have nothing. But under the law of these ephemeral marriages, what will become of the children ? With this ques- tion Madame Sand does not concern herself. Nor does the Sibyl, when she prepares the decrees of the future in the temple of the " Invisibles." " ' Yes,' said she, ' the surren- 104 George Sand. der of two wills that blend in one is a miracle, for every soul is free by virtue of a God-given right. Away, then, with sacrilegious oaths and vulgar laws! Leave to lovers the ideal; do not bind them to reality by legal chains. Leave to God the care of continuing the mir- acle.' " Admirable ! But suppose, after all, God should not continue the miracle? What if the enthusiasm that has led this man and this woman to unite themselves by the always revocable compact of love ; what if the fervor that made them whisper in the first hour of devotion, " Not for this life only but for eternity," — what if, in short, passion cools and dies out, will the ideal marriage, by vir- tue of this circumstance, be dissolved? En- thusiasm is a very frail basis for the family. The story of " Jacques " shows us a woman who married in the fulness of her freedom, who knew and felt the fervor required in the ideal wedlock, and who also had said, " For eternity." Some years pass, and where are Fernande and the family she has founded? Madame Sand evades the difficulty: she sends to the children a disease that carries them off; she advises Jacques to go kill himself in some out-of-the-way place, in order to leave his wife free to love another. Very fine ! But in real life the affair is not so easily managed. The Sources of her Inspiration. 105 Suppose the children cling to life? SuppQse Jacques to be unwilling to die? In sooth, it would be too cruel to commend the example of Jacques to all the husbands whom their wives have ceased to love. What a hecatomb ! Had George Sand, in her first novels, been guilty of similar intentions? She had denied it in a very curious reply, courteous but sharp, to M. Nisard, which must have been written about 1836, and which was appended, in the form of a postscript, to " The Letters of a Traveller." It is a kind of personal apology for the novels of her first style, and for their tendency. " Had it been for me simply a question of satisfied vanity," said she to the severe and delicate critic who had occupied himself with the social phase of her works, " I should have nothing but thanks to offer you, for you bestow upon the imaginative part of my stories much more praise than they deserve. But the more your approbation touches me, the more impossible it is for me to accept your blame in certain respects. . . . You say, sir, that hatred of wedlock is the animus of all my books. Permit me to except four or five of them, among the rest ' Lelia,' which you number among my pleas against the social institution, and in which I do not know that there is a word upon the subject. . . . 106 George Sand. Nor did it seem to me, when I wrote 'Indiana,' that it could be mistaken for an apology for adultery. In this story (where, if I recollect aright, there is no adultery committed) the lover (' that king of my books,' as you wittily call him), has a worse part to play than the husband. . . . ' Andrd' is neither against mar- riage nor for adulterous love. . . . Finally, in ' Valentine,' the development of which is, I admit, neither new nor skilful, the old fatality intervenes to hinder the adulterous woman from enjoying in a second marriage the hap- piness for which she was unable to wait. . . . There remains ' Jacques,' the only one, I believe, that has been fortunate enough to receive some attention from you." And the very dexterous apology begins with the admission that the artist may have sinned ; that her hand, without experience and without rule, may have betrayed her thought ; that her history may have some resemblance to that of Benvenuto Cellini, who dwelt too long upon details while neglecting the form and the pro- portions of the whole. Something like this must have befallen her in writing this novel; and doubtless all her other novels also bear marks of this haste of the eager and unskilful workman who yields to the whim of the moment, and who misses his aim by dint of dallying with the Her Ideas and Sentiments. 107 means. This first excuse once admitted, she urges kind consideration of the fact that she shares more of the nature of the poet than of the legislator ; that she does not deem her- self sufficiently strong to be a reformer; that it has often happened to her to write " social laws " instead of the true words which should have been the " abuses," the " absurdities," the " prejudices," and the " vices " of the time ; and these, she thinks, belong by good right within the province of the novel quite as well as within that of the comedy. To those who have asked her what she would put in the place of husbands, she has replied simply that she would put marriage ; just as she thinks religion should be put in the place of the priests who have compromised religion. She has perhaps committed another great sin against language in using the word " society" when speaking of the "abuses" and of the "vices" of society; she takes oath that she has never thought of remodelling the Charter ; and she has not had the intention attributed to her of publishing to the world her personal misfortune in proof of her thesis, thus turning a private case into a social question. She has confined herself to developing aphorisms as undeniable as the following: "The disorder of the woman is very often provoked by the ferocity or infamy 108 George Sand. of the man." " A husband who wantonly de- spises his duties while swearing, laughing, and drinking, is sometimes less excusable than the wife who fails in her own, amid tears, and agony, and expiation." But what, in fine, is her con- clusion ? Plainly this love, which she sets up and crowns over the ruins of the " infamous thing," is her Utopia ; this love is great, noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal ; this love " is wed- lock as Jesus made it, as Saint Paul explained it, — nay, if you will, as its reciprocal duties are expressed in Title V. Chapter VI. of the Civil Code." In a word, this is at once the true, the ideal, the humanitarian, and the Christian wedlock, which is to substitute con- jugal fidelity, real repose, and real family purity, for the species of shameful contract and stupid despotism engendered by " the de- crepitude" of society. In spite of all, the fundamental objection still remains. How derive an irrevocable com- pact from an element so shifting, so volatile as love? How can the social sacrament of mar- riage have any chance whatever of stability, if it consists simply in an affirmation of passion? Must it not ever find its rule and its support in some solider element, such as honor, or a so- cial oath, or a religious obligation? And in the hazard of these facile and easily dissolved Her Ideas and Sentiments. 109 unions, what security for the weakness of the forsaken wife, or for that of the abandoned child? It would seem that the force of the objec- tion was tardily recognized by Madame Sand herself. Her later novels show a great reform i'n this respect. Take for example " Valvedre," the counterpart of " Jacques," remembering that the logical conclusion from the latter was that marriage breaks down of itself with the decline of love. Nothing is more interesting than to see the same subject treated a second time by a sincere author, after an interval of twenty-seven years, with the different interests which life has brought, and which impose such different destinies upon the heroes of the novel, and upon the novel itself a contrary develop- ment. The subject is the same, — the struggle between the husband and the lover ; but how differently this struggle terminates ! Unfor- tunately "Valvedre" is inferior to "Jacques." The spirit and the charm are no longer the same. Alida is still Fernande, but robbed of her poetry, passionate in cold blood, and in the wrong. The lover is little changed. Be his name Octave or Francis, he is still the same personage, lavish of heroism in words, and beginning life by sacrificing a woman to his self-love.' But the husband is no longer no George Sand. that sublime madman who kills himself in or- der that he may not be a stumbling-block in the life of her whom he fondly loves, and that his wife's happiness may be no crime. The name of Jacques is now Valvedre; he has reflected; he has sought consolation in study; he has killed within himself the madness of despair; he does not give up his place and his duty as a husband; he no longer voluntarily yields his wife to Octave ; and when she has abandoned him, when she is about to die of the false situation in which vexation rather than love has placed her, he appears at her bedside and wins back from the weak and idle lover the affection of that passing soul. He crushes Francis with his generosity, while de- priving him of the joy of the last "lingering thought of Alida. It will be seen that the conclusion is quite the reverse of that of the early novel. Reflection has done its work, — life also. It is certain that it was the sharp attack up- on the laws relating to marriage that opened the way for the introduction into George Sand's novels of the entire social question. She made bold to go beyond the limits which she had first drawn around her thought. She was not, as in 1836, checked by the fear of setting up as a reformer of society ; she under- Her Ideas and Sentiments. 1 1 1 took to propose remedies for some of the principal phases of " the shameful decrepitude of the world." The social theories of Madame Sand are marked by exaltation of sentiment, weakness and incoherence of conception. We shall not dwell upon this side of her works, — a side so well known and so often discussed, — where there would be many questions of ownership or of boundaries to settle between her and those whom she was pleased to call her mas- ters in the work of destruction and of recon- struction. Since those remote ages of politi- cians and philosophers whose minds were busy with future reforms, this portion of Madame Sand's novels has, it must be admitted, grown strangely obsolete. When we re-read them now, at a distance of some fifty years, we seem to be present at the exhumation of antedilu- vian doctrines. Grand and wonderful supe- riority of poetry, or fiction in art, over Utopia, or the violent fiction of social reality ! What- ever pure disinterested art there was in the tales of that period, preserves across the years the serenity of an . incorruptible and radiant youth. Those cherished figures which it is such a delight to meet in the intervals of the declamatory discussion, still people our imagination and invest remembrance with a 112 George Sand. perennial charm. On the other hand, all that smacks of the system, all those doctrines so delusive, so vague, so full of specious promises and sibylline formulas, all that recalls those great epics of the philosophy of the future, — all this is dead, irremediably dead. Who would have courage, to-day, to re-read or to discuss pages like those — written, neverthe- less, with burning conviction under the dicta- tion of great prophets — which fill the second volume of " The Countess of Rudolstadt," three fourths of " The Sin of M. Antoine," and that " Evenor " which I cannot recall without an unspeakable dread ? Is it needful to recall even the fundamental features of the doctrine, a medley of the " historical " mysticism elab- orated by Pierre Leroux, and of a revolution- ary radicalism na'rvely imitated from Michel [de Bourges] ? Madame Sand always had an eager taste, a real passion for ideas; hut in interpreting them she jumbles and confuses all. Her metaphysics is very uncertain and shadowy. She is certainly an idealist, and is thereby sharply distinguished from the school of novelists that has succeeded her. But who could clearly define her thought in the various works in which she has endeavored to express it? She soars upon vigorous pinions toward regions of mystery; but what precise report Her Ideas and Sentiments. 113 of these sublime explorations does she bring back ? Let the reader attempt simply to understand what meaning she attributes, in certain solemn circumstances, to that great word God, of which she makes a somewhat lavish use. For what does this name stand at the end of all the transformations of her thought under the several masters to whom she listened with docile and eager curiosity? In that immense humanitarian laboratory, what becomes of the God of pure love whom Lelia, in the church of the Camaldulians, called upon in her despairing prayer; the God of truth whom Spiridion, his heart aflame, in- voked from out the gloomy visions of the cloister and amid the persecutions of the monks? Under the influence of Pierre Le- roux she seems to have understood the name as signifying the beginning and the end of the universal circulus. Later on, when eman- cipated from sect, Madame Sand will give back to the name of God a part of its com- promised signification and of its lost attributes. But it would be a long story to relate the Odyssey of this God successively transformed, annihilated, and at last found again. It is a complete avatar whose meaning often remains a riddle. Far from us all thought of irony! These 1 14 George Sand. are serious matters, about which it would be flippant to laugh; besides, these philosophic and social ideas have lived in a sincere soul, — a sufficient reason for not making a jest of them. With all my heart I grant my respect, not to the theories themselves, but to the loyal enthusiasm with which they were held. For the rest, it must be said that these doctrines are quite dead ; they have succumbed to their impotence in face of the facts, and the doc- trinal socialism of 1848 has been found in- capable of a practical solution of the slightest problem. Not dead, however, are the prob- lems themselves ; not dead is the economic and moral necessity of confronting them and of seeking at least a partial solution; not dead, in fine, is distress and the imprescripti- ble obligation, for whoever has conscience and heart, to devote a part of his thought and of his life to these sufferings of our unknown brethren. The theories of that time have re- ceived their quietus, I believe, but the cause that gave them birth survives them ; and it is not going too far to declare that this cause is that of Christianity itself, that these two causes form but one, and that no man is truly a Christian or a philosopher who is not deter- mined to oppose the sad encroachments of distress with the increasing effort of sympathy Her Ideas and Sentiments. 1 1 5 and devotion. Let us not concern ourselves too much to learn whether progress be indefi- nite and continuous. We know at least that it does not depend upon fate, and that it does .depend upon us. To labor for partial prog- ress upon an atom of space, upon a point of time, is perhaps all that we can do : let us do it. Let us occupy ourselves less with the love of future humanity, and more with the love of the men beside us, within reach of our hand and of our heart. All this is nothing new; it is the socialism of charity, and the genuine. Which is the nearer, Madame Sand or our- selves, to M. de Lamennais, the only truly philosophical mind with which she came in contact? Had she read those admirable lines in the " Posthumous Works "? " Men cannot be more dangerously deluded than in being taught that the end of earthly life is happiness.. Happiness is not of the earth ; and to imagine that one will find it, is the surest means of losing the enjoyment of the goods that God has placed within our reach.- We have a great and sacred function to perform, which, how- ever, compels us to a stern and perpetual strife. They feed the people with envy and hatred, in other words, with suffering, who con- trast the pretended felicity of the rich with the popular anguish and wretchedness." And 1 1 6 George Sand. with an admirable movement of soul the illus- trious thinker exclaims : " I have known them well, — these so happy rich people ! Their insipid pleasures result in a cureless satiety that has given me a conception of the infernal torments. There are doubtless rich people who escape this fate, more or less, but by means not of those which opulence procures. Peace of mind is the foundation of real hap- piness; and this peace is the fruit of duty perfectly fulfilled, of moderation in desire, of blessed hopes, of pure affections. Nothing lofty, nothing beautiful, nothing good is done on earth save at the cost of suffering and of self-abnegation ; and the sacrifice alone is fruit- ful." For this simple page of a true thinker who tempers with traits of so strong a reason his indignation and his wrath, I would gladly give all the speeches of Pierre Leroux, and especially the famous conversation on the bridge of the Saint-Peres, one evening when the Tuileries sparkled with the splendor of a festival. Here M. Michel [de Bourges] at- tempted to initiate the truly simple intelligence of Madame Sand into wild doctrines, while she listened astounded and almost scandalized by that rabid eloquence let loose at that hour in a kind of apocalyptic ferocity. Can the artless- ness of genius be denied when, notwithstand- Her Ideas and Sentiments. 1 1 7 ing her confessed horror of that conversation composed wholly of bloody dithyrambics, Madame Sand still continued for some time to believe in the political intelligence of her prolix and noisy friend? For my part, I shall never pardon this friend and many others for having given a false ex- altation to an artistic sensibility so plastic to strong impressions, and for having subdued that lively imagination to the service of their violent and chimerical doctrines. After all, they found a ready accomplice in her heart, which was slow to perceive the too easy tran- sition from thoughts of reform to sanguinary Utopias. She herself confessed this later ; her heart was the first dupe. While still a child in the fields of Berry, and later on at the convent, her most marked trait was a great goodness, a wide compassion, a deep tenderness for human distress. It was impossible to approach her, even with the most hostile prepossessions, without being disarmed by this radiant grace of sentiment. Rarely did she become angry either with men or with things, even when she suffered by them most cruelly. She retired with sadness, but without wrath, from the connections or situations most offensive to her dignity; and when she looked about her, it was with an eye of deep and ten- n8 George Sand. der sympathy. After many different attempts to find a moral code applicable to her life, she had finally adopted a morality summed up in this single rule, — " To be good." Every one constructs a moral system according to his nature. The day she rose to this clear con- ception .of the end and the use of life, the great emotions that had stirred the deeps of her own life became calmed. A higher light had penetrated the storm and tumult of her heart, which had till then been governed only by instincts easily misled. The thought that constitutes, in fact, a summary of social eth- ics had assumed in her mind an importance amounting to a kind of intellectual royalty, — "the duty of going outside one's self." By dint of painful experiences she had come to understand what implacable selfishness there is in passion. She had come to see that the true life consists in thinking not always of and for one's self, but of and for others, and also of all that is great, noble, beautiful, of all that can withdraw us from this me which is ever ready to make itself the object of its monoto- nous analysis and of its gloomy idolatry. Through this noble side of her nature it was, through her ready impressibility and her abso- lute kindness of heart, that she had been so easily made the prey of social theories spring- Her Ideas and Sentiments. 1 19 ing from the brain of every unattached re- former. What were these" theories themselves but varied forms of the Utopia which had be- guiled her from childhood, and the first motive of which had been the deep feeling of human, of social evil, — an Utopia that could deem it- self innocent and sacred so long as it had not attempted to reign outside of the imaginations and the hearts of men, and had not yet tried violence as the last weapon of its apostleship ? " There is in me," said she one day, " noth- ing strong save the need of loving." By this need of loving it was that she succeeded in maintaining within herself, above the tempta- tions of doubt and even somewhat against the opinion of her century, " which did not for the moment take that direction," a doctrine pertaining wholly to sentiment and to the ideal, — something like a kind of Christian Platonism. Leibnitz at the outset, then La- mennais, Lessing, then Herder explained by Quinet, Pierre Leroux, finally Jean Reynaud, are the chief masters whose successive aids prevented her from fluctuating too much in her course through the various experiments of modern philosophy. " All aid from the wis- dom of the masters comes in season in this world, where there is no such thing as an abso- lute and definitive conclusion. When, in com- 1 20 George Sand. mon with the youth of my time, I shook the leaden vault of mystery, Lamennais came in season to stay the sacred portions of the tem- ple. When, after the September laws, we were again ready to overthrow the inner sanctuary, Leroux came, eloquent, ingenious, sublime, to promise us the reign of heaven on this same earth which we were cursing. And in our days, as we were again despairing, Reynaud, already great, arose greater still, to open to us in the name of science and of faith, in the name of Leibnitz and of Jesus, the infinitude of worlds as a fatherland that claims us." What various and contradictory names suc- cessively invoked ! She had not had too many such aids to re- main faithful to some of the ideas which, couched in more or less varied formulas, give worth to life and a meaning to hope. After the period of ecstatic devotion at the convent of the English nuns, and after the succeeding years with their various fluctuations, ending, one day, in a complete rupture with the old faith, she had suffered great perplexities and much despondency. She had known doubt, and had revealed her spiritual state in several of her books. " You ask me," says she to one of those real or imaginary friends, the convenient con- Her Ideas and Sentiments. 121 fidants of the "Traveller," "whether this book which you have read so seriously [" Lelia"] is a comedy. I answer, yes and no, according to the days. There were nights of meditation, of austere sorrow, of enthusiastic resignation, in which I penned fine phrases in good faith. There were mornings of- weariness, of insom- nia, of wrath, in which I thought all the blasphemies I wrote. There were afternoons of ironical and facetious humor, when I took delight in making Trenmor [the philosophic convict] hollower than a gourd." All the types had, at certain moments, represented states of her struggling soul. These person- ages are neither wholly real nor wholly alle- gorical. PulcheYie was the epicureanism that inherited the worldly and frivolous part of the last century; Stenio was the enthusiasm and the weakness of an age without landmarks and without support ; Magnus represented the wreck of a corrupt and besotted clergy; Lelia, sublime aspiration, the very essence of lofty minds. Such was her plan. To what extent she carried it out, to what extent she deprived it of those ideal half-lights in which all her characters are bathed, in order to impart to it here and there a discordant reality, — this is a question of art and of artistic responsibility. As to the philosophic idea pervading the 122 George Sand. book, it stands out from every page; it is an idea conceived " under the stroke of a deep dejection" before the riddle of existence, which had never more cruelly and heavily weighed upon her. She was astonished at the fury excited by this book, not understand- ing how an author can be hated through his work. It was a book written in good faith, that is to say with sincere doubt, — a doubt that stirs the great deeps of men's thoughts and souls. Only such were scandalized as did not understand or did not hear this cry of con- science, this fevered sob-broken wail. The one thing permanent in her life, her unfailing consolation in hours of sorrow, was the love of Nature, — one of the rare loves that never disappoint. This love was her surest inspiration, and constituted half, at least, of her genius. No one has succeeded, like her, by means of words, — of simple words selected and combined, of the words we all use to ex- press common sensations with such hopeless frigidity, — in translating into the living reality of a landscape those lights and shades, those harmonies and contrasts, that magic of sounds, those symphonies of color, the glades and far- away glimpses of the forest, the, moving deep of ocean, the starry deep of the sky. Above all, no one has equalled her in seizing and Her Ideas and Sentiments. 123 expressing that inner lurking soul of things which sheds over the mysterious face of Na- ture the charm of life. What is the explanation of that superiority as a painter of Nature which strikes one at first glance in Madame Sand? The first reason that offers itself is so simple that I scarcely dare express it. Madame Sand sees Nature, she looks at it, she does not invent it. The proof of this is in that sharpness of detail and outline which exhibits precisely what she her- self sees. The reader's thought easily recon- structs the great scenes painted by her full and flexible pencil. The explanation of an effect so simple and still so rare I have found in the following lines at the foot of a random page. " It is certain," says Madame Sand, " that what we see is not always as good as what we dream of. But this is true only in matters of art and of human workmanship. As to myself, whether my imagination is usually indolent, or whether God has more talent than I (which is not im- possible), I have for the most part found Na- ture incomparably more beautiful than I had fancied her, and I remember never to have found her sulky save at hours when I was so myself." Madame Sand's distinctive trait is precisely an imagination that does not antici- pate her eye, that does not deflower her pleas- 1 24 George Sand. ure, that does not interpose the refraction of a personal prism between herself and Nature. She gazes long and profoundly at Nature as it is. The picture that has passed before her eyes she holds graven in ineffaceable lines; she preserves it unaltered. It might be said that she employs more of imaginative memory than of imagination in her recollections and her visions of reality. It is this very freedom from a brilliant fault which gives the features of her landscape such luminous precision. One of the great descriptive writers of her time, M. de Lamartine, had too many splendors in his soul to see well what was outside. I would wager that he always found Nature less beau- tiful than he had fancied her. So long as the reality was before his eyes, the splendor of his dream eclipsed it; and when he afterwards wished to call to mind the half-seen landscape, when he wished to paint it, his imagination still labored as much as his memory. His picture was brilliant but confused ; it had the scintillating unsteadiness of a ray of light : the dazzled eye could neither rest upon it nor seize any part of it with tranquillity. In the long run, art fatigues the mind ; Na- ture perennially rests and refreshes it When Madame Sand was travelling in Italy, her com- panion, Alfred de Musset, was eager only for Her Ideas and Sentiments. 125 " cut marble." People inquired : " Who is this young man that concerns himself so much about the whiteness of the statues ? " After a few days he was satiated with statues, with fres- cos, with churches, and with galleries. His sweetest memory was that of a cool and lim- pid fountain in a garden at Genoa, in which he laved his hot and tired brow. "It is be- cause the creations of art speak to the mind alone, while the spectacle of Nature speaks to all the faculties. It penetrates us by the pores as well as by our thoughts. To the wholly intellectual sentiment of admiration, the sight of the fields adds the pleasures of sense. The freshness of the waters, the fragrance of the plants, the harmonies of the wind, circulate with the blood and through the nerves ; while the glory of the colors and the symmetry of the forms steal into our imagination." All Nature pervades man, speaking to him a language of infinite variety. There are some pages at the end of the first volume of " La Daniella" which are an astonishing attempt to express the orchestral effect upon sensitive ears of these sonorous braided harmonies of rural sounds. Jean Valreg has ascended, at eventide, the little terrace of Mondragon Cas- tle, and there he opens his senses to all the noises arising from the hills and dales; he 126 George Sand. studies the concert produced by the blending of the scattered sounds which constitute the natural music of the locality. " There are re- gions like this which are always singing," he says, and this is the most melodious place in which he has ever been. And in very cu- rious language he enumerates all these diverse noises, — the song of the great weathercocks, so regularly phrased at the start that he found himself able to write six perfectly musical measures, which invariably return at every breath of the east wind. These whimpering and drivelling weathercocks, with their notes of piping shrillness, are like the sharp tenors that dominate the whole. " Surely some spirit of the air attunes them to the sound of the Camaldulian bells. . . . With these noises are mingled other songs, — the refrains of the peas- ants scattered through the country. . . . The incessant bass is formed by the hollow sough of the enormous pines, and by the boom of a cascade which receives the waste waters of the ruins. Then there are the screams of the birds, of the vultures, and especially of the eagles." While listening to all this, Valreg pursues a thought often suggested to him by these chance harmonies of Nature; namely, that by the very fact that they transcend fixed rules they attain effects of extraordinary power Her Ideas and Sentiments. 127 and significance ; they fill the air with a fan- tastic symphony like the mysterious speech of the Infinite. To the revealed or divined reality of the landscape is joined, in the works of Madame Sand, a charm of sentiment and an attraction peculiar to her. We are not merely interested in her picture, we are moved by it and we love it. This new effect is due to the delicate art, or rather the happy instinct, of never describing solely for description's sake, and of always as- sociating with Nature some thought or feeling of the human soul. For her, the landscape never stands alone ; it is chosen for its har- mony or contrast with the mood of the soul that broods over it. But this very contrast is a still more penetrative kind of inward harmony. At the moment when everything else seems forgotten in the awful solitude of the moun- tains, there rises from the shadow of the rock a little Spanish shepherdess, and behold ! here in the corner of the landscape is her sharp profile, her pretty smile, her tresses " flying in the -breeze like the tail of a young mare." And thus the soul, at the sight of the human figure, unbends from the too austere grandeur of the mountain-peaks and the torrents. If our gaze is lost in the horizon of ocean, we are shown a sail, and under this sail we divine 1 28 George Sand. the homely, toil-worn laborer. If she directs our eyes toward the depthless spaces of the sky, she makes us fancy them populous with unknown spirits, animating the blue deeps with their joys or with their sorrows. Hover- ing forever above the landscape is a senti- ment, which blends with the infinity of Nature the more mysterious infinity of the soul. A flower, an herb, — everything is harmonized with our thoughts. Interspersed at every turn with the dialogues and the reveries are charm- ing flashes like the following: "Putting my hands to my face, I breathed the fragrance of a sage whose leaves I had touched some hours before. This little plant was now blooming upon the mountain-side, several leagues away. I had respected it ; I had brought from it only its exquisite savor. Why had the plant parted with it? What a precious thing is perfume, which, without loss to the plant that exhales it, clings to the hand of a friend and follows him afar, to delight him and to recall to him, long after, the beauty of the flower he loves ! The perfume of the soul is remembrance. . . ." This page has always struck me as an example of the happy ease of Madame Sand in blending the soul with things, and man with Nature. These landscapes are never forgotten. They are so thoroughly wedded to the situation or Her Ideas and Sentiments. 129 to the character of the actors in the story that the two memories remain inseparable and soon merge in one. Is it possible to think of Valentine without recurrence to that en- chanting scene when her soul, full of vague longing, forebodes the mysterious call of love in the deserted country which she is traversing alone on the evening of the festival, mindless of the lazy amble of her horse, — when all at once, borne upon the rising breeze and min- gling with the murmur of the neighboring stream, comes the clear song of a young and vibrant voice?* It is Benedict approaching, it is the meeting, it is love ; destiny performs its work. And Andr6 — which of us, were he lost, could not find him again? Surely there he is, wandering in a dream of his agitated and romantic adolescence, where the river silently flows between banks of ver- dure through that lonely gorge. There I have seen him calling up his heroines, Alice and Diana Vernon, behind that clump of aspens where he thought, one day, he saw a shadow pass, a fairy who shall be Genevieve. — -Then there are attitudes that remain graven upon the mind. " He wrapped me in my counter- pane of rose-colored satin, and bore me to the window. I uttered a cry of joy and admira- tion at sight of the sublime prospect spread 9 1 30 George Sand. beneath my eyes. This wild and romantic sight delights me to distraction. . . . Ah, Jacques ! let us alter nothing in the scenes that you love. How could I have other tastes than yours? Do you think that I have eyes of my own? " Thus wrote, thus spoke Fernande; and long afterward, when Octave has come into her life, when Jacques has been betrayed, involuntarily we shall behold her again at that window where she first saw her wide domain, and there, in that momentary attitude, we shall perceive the facile ecstasy of a feeble soul. — Mauprat ! His very name calls up the ominous shadows of his dilapidated castle, the broken portcullis, the traces of fire still fresh upon the walls, and the half-filled donjon-vault where Edmee felt her courage sink. — Stenio, too, the charming poet ! go look upon him in his last slumber, the first that was not disturbed by the proud and stormy image of Lelia. There he lies, bathed by the blue water, his feet buried in the sand of the shore, his head rest- ing upon a cushion of lotus, his gaze fixed upon the sky. — Thus all these memories come back to us in the happy frame that received them first and that holds them forever. Each of George Sand's novels is summed up in a situation and in a landscape whose poetic anion nothing can break or render discordant. Her Ideas and Sentiments 131 Man identified with Nature, Nature with man, — this is a great law of art. No painter has practised it with a subtler and surer instinct. The truth is that Nature crushes us with its silence and its grandeur when the voice of mart comes not to stir it, when its mute harmonies express no imaginary spirit to be understood and interpreted by our own. Madame Sand somewhere remarks that man is not made to live forever with trees, with stones, nor even with the streams that flow among flowers or through mountain passes, but rather with his fellow- men. In the stormy days of youth one dreams of living in the desert ; one fancies soli- tude to be the great refuge from the injuries, the great remedy for the wounds suffered in the conflict of life. This is a grave error; experience soon undeceives us and teaches us that no poetic admiration, no delight in art, is capable of filling the void produced by iso- lation from one's fellows. Thought, suffering, the human gift of feeling or of loving, — these shed life without, and inform the landscape with the particular soul that contemplates it. To aid in this work of idealization, Nature lends her forms, her harmonies, her colors; and the whole, thus combined, becomes the undying material of art. Passion and Nature : the whole of Madame 132 George Sand. Sand is in these words. Everything outside this double inspiration is foreign to her, comes as it were from an exterior soul; and if the moulds of her talent still yield, with their admirable flexibility, to some new kind of in- spiration that comes not from the very centre, one soon has a sense of effort and of delibera- tion. She is really herself, in the plenitude of her strength and the freedom of her art, only in describing the delicate agitations of young love or the violent emotions of hearts tried by life ; or, again, when she sketches the grand features of mountain scenery, as in her jour- ney to the Pyrenees, 1 or the life and scenes of Venice, as in her " Letters of a Traveller," or the tranquil champaign of Berry, the vision of which pursued her throughout the enchant- ments of Italy. She reaches the height of her art when she combines these two inspi- rations, and when, blending the soul of man with Nature, she softens the landscape and adds sympathy to sublimity. She had not merely learned this love of Nature at the school of Jean Jacques Rous- seau, she had found it within herself. She had felt the religious grandeur of Earth, the fruitful nurse; her Vergilian soul had lived, during a great part of her childhood and 1 History of my Life, vol. viii. Her Ideas and Sentiments. 133 youth, in intimacy with the fields and woods ; she was truly the daughter of that natal soil which had cradled her in its furrows, nourished her with the little shepherds, moulded her in its image, formed her with its familiar influ- ences, consoled her in many causeless sorrows, enchanted her with its vague terrors. By this community of sensations she had made herself the sister of the little peasants who had been through long months her strolling playmates, and who, since then, had grown up. Thus nothing was more natural to her than a taste for the bucolic and for the idyl, — forms which appear in almost all her works, and which at one period of her life will even become a ref- uge from the violence of political feeling, and, as it were, a privileged style. It is at such a period that, in presence of the social injustice that galled her, she will call up the picture of rustic life and of rural firesides; from the scene of the society she has condemned as artificial she will transfer to a scene equally human, and to her mind more natural, the con- flict of passions and the dramas of the heart which she is forever enacting. To this scene she will also transfer some of the illusions of her imagination; her characters will often seem nothing more than embellished or cor- rected types of the peasant poet, Nature's 134 George Sand. priest, officiating, blessing the labors of the country, or of the virtuous, sentimental, roman- tic, even heroic peasant woman (like Jeanne, the great shepherdess). This is certainly poe- try, and so sincere as to seem natural. Balzac and the modern school will form a different [conception of the peasant, and will depict him as hard, coarse, even brutish; will this not je an exaggeration in a different direction? fhat I should be disposed to censure in George Sand, is not her delineation of the good peasant, — who, after all, has his reality, provided he be aided to free himself from his disguise of vulgar sensations and impressions, — it is her illusory conception of the lettered, philosophic peasant like Patience, who would be, were he real, rather a fugitive from society, a renegade from the city, a Jean Jacques Rous- seau escaped to the woods, — and in whom we feel nothing of the elementary spirit of the fields. As to George Sand's slightly idealized peas- ant, he is not as false as he has been pro- nounced ; that concert of good sentiments and of germs of rustic poesy may be found in him, by happy chance, in certain circumstances. The author has done nothing but free these qualities from their native crudity, and illus- trate them by means of language. She has Her Ideas and Sentiments. 135 not created, she has expressed them. All her rustic characters are strictly possible; each of them needs, in order to become what her narrative represents him, only a favorable op- portunity, an incitement from without, a com- bination of circumstances raising him above his common mode of feeling and of speaking, and revealing him to himself. This is the part of the artist, who does not, properly speaking, invent, but who endows human reality with the consciousness by which it becomes aware of itself, and with the voice by which it.translates itself to others. Such is the peculiar work of George Sand in her delightful sketches of peasant life. Except as to certain false and artificial personages who, having nothing of the peasant but the garb and the name, have smuggled themselves into her pastorals, she is an interpreter rather than a creator. CHAPTER IV. HER INVENTION AND OBSERVATION. HER STYLE. THE PERISHABLE AND THE PER- MANENT IN HER WORK. WHAT are the respective places of imagi- nation and observation in George Sand? In the different situations she describes, and in the characters she sets in motion, how are her various and fertile powers of invention com- bined with the experience of real life? The question has often been cut short by the dic- tum: Idealistic and romantic, Madame Sand does not observe. This is soon said. It would, however, be a mistake to think that these faculties are always contrary and separate, and to conclude that there are two radically opposed schools of novel-writing, — that of George Sand and that of Balzac. There would even be no paradox in the assertion that Madame Sand observes very keenly, and that Balzac, in turn, imag- ines with a kind of intrepidity. At bottom, it may very well be that there are not, as people Her Invention and Observation. 137 delight to repeat, two contrary schools in litera- ture, — that of imagination or idealism, and that of observation or realism. For my part, I attach but slight importance to these sharp distinctions of program, to these absolute claims of different parties. Perhaps even in reality there are, properly speaking, no liter- ary schools, but merely different temperaments, organized more especially for observation or for imagination, — some the more alive to pre- cision of detail, others giving freer rein to their inventive power. A school is artificially cre- ated when a writer of a given temperament, having tested his initiative or his success in a certain direction, sets up some fine day as the master in a new style. He gets himself ac- cepted as such by a crowd of secondary minds that take his watchword and gather about him, exaggerating the manner of the innovator and taking a lesson from his success, which often indicates merely a fluctuation in public taste. So a system comes to be constructed simply from the qualities, and more especially the defects of an individual. All this strife about schools seems to us vain. There was originally no absolute dis- sension between Madame Sand and Balzac, whom she met several times during the years of her literary novitiate at Paris. She herself 138 George Sand. declares, with easy eclecticism and intelligent tolerance, that every style is good and every subject fruitful for the one who knows how to handle it. "It is fortunate," says she, "that it should be so. Were there but a single doc- trine in art, art would soon perish for lack of boldness and of fresh attempts." Balzac was a living confirmation of her theory, flihe sought that idealization of sentiment which formed the subject of her novels, while Balzac sacrificed that ideal to the truth of his pic- ture." But Balzac took care not to erect this sacrifice into the program of a school; it was a simple tendency of his mind which he thus expressed. More liberal than his dis- ciples after him, he equally admitted the op- posite tendency, and congratulated Madame Sand upon remaining faithful to it. Thus stood these two great artists, mutually just and tolerant. Nor was Balzac, on his part, the slave of a dogma. He tried everything ; he sought and groped on his own account. It was not until much later that the school, hav- ing formed itself, attributed to the master an absolute system that had at the outset been merely a preference of taste. Still more is this true of the dynasties that have succeeded Balzac, the crowned heads of which have indicated in their programs sim- Her Invention and Observation. 1 39 ply the master-qualities of their minds. It is true of Flaubert, the man of a single master- piece and of colossal industry; of the Gon- court brothers, artists in subtle and sharp sen- sational effects ; of Alphonse Daudet, whose deep and cruel observation has taken so strong a hold upon the minds of his time ; of Zola also, creator of the ultra-democratic epic tale, master in " The Assommoir" and in " Germinal ; " it is true up to the recent acces- sion of Paul Bourget and of Guy de Maupas- sant, — the one an accomplished psychologist suffering " with the malady of life," the other gifted with a natural humor and a high-bred style that ill conceal a frightful background of contempt for man, perhaps even, to the deeper view, an almost tragic sadness. Can it in re- ality be said that each of these names stands for a school? Assuredly not; what one is compelled to see is an infinite variety of minds, each one of which takes the initiative and the sovereignty of a new manner ; there are varia- tions of manner from mind to mind, just as there are, at certain moments, variations in the public taste. Fashions have their day, suc- ceeding without destroying and even without replacing one another, with a kind of regular rhythm. No one can tell in what direction the next generation will turn, when men shall 140 George Sand. have become weary of the excesses of cynical observation. This weariness will perhaps fur- nish an occasion for a return to George Sand, who is for the time being too much neglected by an epoch exclusively positive, enamoured rather of facts than of ideas, infatuated with experimental methods even where they are out of place, and suspicious of fine illusions. In alert minds there already appear symptoms of a reaction toward the creator of so many beautiful stories. George Sand's temper of mind drew her to the conception of more or less fanciful ad- ventures, to the conflict of ideal passions with imaginary events; in this she exceedingly de- lighted. But it would be a great mistake to deem her an inferior observer of real life, and to suppose that she was seldom inspired by it. How many proofs we could give to the con- trary ! Will it be denied that she is not only a marvellous contriver of superb inventions, but also, at least in certain parts of nearly every one of her works, a penetrating psycholo- gist? At the time when she wrote her first novels, in the dawn of her literary life, what fine and varied observation she already dis- plays, what deeply felt experience of real life is manifest ! This is much less exterior than in the case of Balzac, less spread upon the Her Invention and Observation. 141 surface; but it is very delicate and perfectly true in tone, up to the moment when fantasy takes possession of the author and bears her with the reader to heaven or to the pit. Opening at random one of her first works, let the reader recall the glacial interior of the little castle of La Brie. How plainly all is seen, how keenly observed ! How have all these attitudes been registered- in an exact memory ! How thoroughly all the interior details are rendered ! How we, in common with all her actors, feel oppressed by the burden of the rainy autumn evening, following a day still more monotonous ! That old drawing-room, furnished in Louis Quinze style, where Colo- nel Delmare strides fitfully up and down with sulky gravity; the pale, slender young Creole, Indiana, crouching in the chimney-corner, elbow on knee, in her first attitude of sadness not yet rebellious, but ready to become so at the first signal of passion ; opposite her, Ralph, dumb as a stone, as if he feared to break the spell of silence, just as throughout the story he will fear to disturb, by his modest personality, the course of events, until the day when cir- cumstances impose upon him a^,heroic part which will find him ready, — is {there not in each of these strokes a sort of personal expe- rience, an impression of real life, a preparation 142 George Sand. for the destinies about to be fulfilled? How curious, too, in another work near this one in date, is the psychology of Andr6, with his artless sensitiveness, stormy within, timid with- out, — with the tenderness of heart that ren- dered him almost repentant before reproaches, even unjust ones ! These are admirable studies . of character. The invincible languor of Andre, his sad and soft inertia, his dread of recrimina- tions, his vague and feverish longing for the unknown, — how all this constitutes him a pre- destined victim of the conflict in which his life is crushed between the Marquis de Morand, his father, — a tyrant without ill-humor, a cheery and loyal brute, — and his mistress Genevieve, the poor flower-girl to whom shall fall the whole of this disinherited heart, and who shall die of this love ! There is not a page, not a line here, that does not belong to the experi- mental novel, save only the poesy by which all, even the analysis, even the observation, is transfigured. The same inquiry would lead to the same result, even in "Jean deja Roche" and " The Marquis de Villemer." \lj: must be insisted that the situations described and the characters drawn are almost always the result of the surest observation of real life ; and that it is only in the sequel, and under the pressure of an imagination no longer to be restrained, that Her Invention and Observation. 143 the characters become altered, deformed, or excessively idealized.^ There is one of ffer novels, especially, of which she herself says " that it is made up wholly of analysis and of meditation," which seems to me to stand out from the mass of her works as one of the ablest studies ever made of one of the morbid states of love, — jealousy. This novel is "Lucrezia Floriani." It matters little whether this be a chapter of private psy- chology, in which the real actors in the drama of her life may recognize themselves under new names. It matters still less that George Sand has made a feeble denial of having intended, -in this novel, to make very exact portraitures. 1 What matters very much, is the exactness of the moral portrait she has given us, whatever be the living exemplar from which she has cop- ied its features. The point of departure was one of those loves, reputed impossible, which manifest themselves with the greatest violence. " How could a man so fine, so young, so chaste, so pious, so poetical, so fervent, and so refined in thought, in feeling, in conduct, as 1 It has been asserted that in this novel I had depicted the character of Chopin with great exactitude, under the name of Prince Karoll. Thinking to recognize some of his traits, and proceeding by a system too convenient to be safe, critics have been seriously misled. — History of My Life, vol. x. p. 231. 144 George Sand. Prince Karoll, fall unawares and without a struggle under the sway of a woman worn by so many passions, disabused of so many illusions, of sceptical and rebellious attitude toward the things he most respected, credulous to fanaticism toward the things he had always denied, must always deny?" It was indeed a terrible mistake, nor was the punishment long delayed. Scarcely has the destiny of this improbable love been fulfilled, when Prince Karoll's imagination becomes aroused respect- ing all the circumstances of Lucrezia's life, even respecting her past which has not been concealed from him; troubles begin; suspi- cion clouds his soul ; the common life of these two beings is henceforward one long storm. How jealousy is bred ; how it drops its furtive poison into the fleeting joys of a happiness which is a surprise to its partakers; how it taints without destroying that happiness, pro- ducing the short fits of madness, the frantic anguish, the wraths which burst forth or those which eat the heart in long silence ; how moral ruins rise apace under the strokes of a mad- dened lover, up to the fatal, the vulgar, the bitter end, — all these things this book tells with a logic of deduction, a sureness of touch, a depth of analysis, revealing a close observation and a deep feeling of real life. In- Her Invention and Observation. 145 curable jealousy of the past is the distemper of Prince Karoll. The details and the gradation of the disease are noted with almost scientific precision. Knowing all and despite all, he has loved this woman when she was no longer either very young or very handsome, notwith- standing the fact that her character was pre- cisely the opposite of his own, and that he has never been able to accommodate himself to her imprudent conduct, to her unrestrained at- tachments, to that weakness of heart and that hardihood of mind which seemed a violent protest against all the principles and the senti- ments that had hitherto controlled his life. He has never been able to pardon this woman for being so different from himself. He will pur- sue her with his growing infatuation, which at length becomes almost frantic, up to the day when Lucrezia falls without having for a single hour inspired confidence in her strange lover, without having conquered his esteem, with- out having ceased to be loved by him as a mis- tress, never as a friend. Let those who deny to George Sand the faculty of analysis re-read this novel, and let them say whether it is not a deep and admirable study of passion, whether every page is not written from observation or from memory. What has misled people concerning the 146 George Sand. alleged want of observational power in George Sand is, that there comes a moment, even in her finest tales, when a strong infusion of the romantic is introduced, completely absorbing the novel and expelling everything else. The romantic is the exaltation of the fanciful; it marks an epoch and determines the date of a book; it is known by the fashion of loving — especially of telling one's love — by the mode of conceiving and of imagining events, by the more or less excited and overcharged style of writing. A master in criticism, M. Brunetiere, has strongly indicated these features : " This frenetic fashion of loving was that of the whole generation of the romanticists. Not all people love in the same way, and everybody has his own; but the romanticists loved in a man- ner unparalleled before or since. . . . Cer- tainly ' Indiana,' ' Valentine,' ' Lelia ' even, and ' Jacques,' are curious studies of romantic love. Following her instinct, George Sand takes the real world only as a point of departure or of support, from which she soon returns to the inward vision of her imagination. ... In these novels there is a romantic and sentimental por- tion that has grown strangely obsolete." J Let us take two of the most celebrated of her early works, " Valentine " and " Mauprat," 1 Revue des Deux Mondes, Literary Review, Jan. 1, 1887. Her Invention and Observation. 147 and let us see how this judgment is verified, and also how the promise of the outset is ful- filled. In each the subject-matter is rich, new, varied ; the invention natural, and as much as possible like the truth. Soon, however, appears a mingling of exaggeration in character or in details, which surprises or shocks the most docile and credulous imagination. That the enchanting Edmee loves her cousin Bernard, and has loved him since she first met him in the grim society of the Mauprats; that she has tacitly chosen this boor, this savage who scarcely knows how to sign his name ; that she has made it her task to render him worthy of her by civilizing him ; that she has finally suc- ceeded, by dint of. active and silent devotion, in making him a brave and honest man, rais- ing him to the level of her own character, — all this goes to make up the true novel ; and how fine and noble it is ! But across this mingling of two life-streams, separated at first by mountain barriers and drawn together by the sincerest love, there creeps the element of improbability, which, in- creasing, breaks the spell, checks at every turn the noble and wholesome emotions of the tale, and prevents their free development. The per- petual turning-up of father Patience at every cross-road of the country and at every page of 148 George Sand. the novel ; the inevitable intermeddling of this man, who has learned everything in rural life, who knows the whole of the present and of the future, this grand justiciary, this self- constituted magistrate who silences the pro- vincial potentates, this peasant who plays on every occasion the part of a Mirabeau, who guides events by his word, who twists and untwists the plot, — is this not the false and the improbable incarnate? Who shall deliver us from this artificial type, from his twaddle and from his infallibility? It is really asking too much of our good-nature to impose upon us this prolix collaborator, lurid with the flames of the coming revolution, laboring in the name of the social compact for the justifi- cation of Bernard, who is not guilty, and for the development of the plot which would de- velop very well without him. He is a romantic element, and the more censurable that he is useless. Goodman Patience seems to be play- ing " the Fly on the Coach-wheel," and the dumb activity of Marcasse does ten times as much work, quite unassumingly, — although he also has a good share of the romantic. By the side of " Mauprat," " Valentine " is one of the most charming and tragic tales of love. For what are we to expect of Madame Sand? At bottom, she understands nothing Her Invention and Observation. ,149 but love. Here also she has lavished the most wonderful delineations of this sentiment, and has given them as a background the scene of her long and continual reveries, the land- scapes of the Berry country she loved so well. With the charm of an inimitable pencil she has betrayed the incognito of the modest re- gion of the Vallde-Noire, of which she said: " It was myself, it was the frame, the garment of my own existence." All this she gave to the public, as if she had been attracted by the secret charm by which she fascinated others. Thence issued that unforgettable analysis of passion which makes every reader the accom- plice of Benedict. We follow him, we see him stop to gaze on Valentine ; we see him, seated on the ashen log by Indre stream, rapturously intent upon the glassy mirror whose ruffled surface soon shatters her image. In that mo- ment he thinks not, he enjoys, he is happy; he drinks in through the eyes the fatal poison of which he shall die. In the course of events, some of the characters sketched at the outset become altered and distorted. Benedict is the sublime and impassioned peasant. M. de Lansac, Valentine's betrothed, at the begin- ning very much of a gentleman, becomes the type, first slightly exaggerated, then mon- strously debased, of a man of the world desti- 150 George Sand. tute of generous feeling, without moral youth, worn and shrivelled within, rapacious and debauched, — everything that is required to make the struggle difficult to Valentine, easy to Benedict. Madame de Raimbault, who is simply a prejudiced woman of the world, sud- denly becomes an elderly coquette, a frequent- er of provincial ballrooms, and unconcerned about her daughter to an improbable degree, just as afterward M. de Lansac is unconcerned about his wife. Doubtless this is in order to allow the gravest incidents to develop freely, without the embarrassment of family life in which the simplest surveillance would shackle the free movement of the story. Such is the explanation of that going and coming of per- sons the most compromising and the easi- est to compromise, who, at all hours of the day and even of the night, enter and issue from the park and the mansion at their pleas- ure. Benedict profits by this freedom, first on the very evening of the wedding, in order to attempt to slay in ambush the bridegroom, M. de Lansac, under the astonishing pretext of punishing " a heartless mother who would coldly condemn her daughter to a legal shame, to the last shame that can be inflicted upon a woman, to violation." He profits by it again, in order to steal furtively into the mansion Her Invention and Observation. 151 and to take the absent husband's place in the nuptial chamber. Hence, one of the most incredible extravagances that could visit an inflamed imagination, — that culminating scene of the wedding night between Valentine ill, beside herself, fallen by despair into a kind of somnambulism, and Benedict, who passes the distracting hours with her, exalted by her dear presence and a prey to all the furies of passion, — which, owing to a fortunate series of chances, finds vent only in an inoffensive and delirious monologue. All this is passing strange. " It must not be forgotten," says Madame Sand ingenuously, "that Benedict's nature was exceptional and excessive." This he will to the last demonstrate, throughout numberless incidents, throughout surprises and interviews to no purpose, up to an absurd murder by the stroke of a fork which pierces the hero in consequence of a ridiculous mis- take. All this second portion of the novel is a series of vulgar and frantic scenes, made uninteresting by their improbability. The charm has vanished ; but, in the first part of the' book, how great, how irresistible it was ! George Sand was herself conscious of that strange impulse which urged her to romantic exaggeration. In the preface to " Lucrezia Floriani " she said : " I avow my great liking 152 George Sand. for romantic events, for the unforeseen, for intrigue, for action, in the novel. ... I have, however, made every effort to hold the litera- ture of my time to the beaten path between the calm lake and the torrent. ... By the unreflecting eagerness with which my eyes and ears seek dramatic effects, I feel that my instinct would have driven me toward the deeps ; but when calmer thoughts return I do as the reader does: I revert to what I have seen and heard, and ask myself the why and the how of the action that has moved and transported me. I then perceive abrupt im- probabilities, or bad reasons for the incidents that the torrent of the imagination has borne over the obstacles of reason or of moral truth. Hence the retrograde movement that carries me back, like so many others, toward the smooth and monotonous lake of analysis." A study of this kind could be made of the majority of George Sand's novels, so as to fix the variable proportions of the two elements that she employs, — the fanciful pushed to extravagance, and the real keenly observed. This would reveal the great shortcoming of that fine creative imagination, She does not know how to compose a work, nor to preserve in it either the unity of the subject, which often changes, or the unity of the characters, which Her Style. 153 vary incessantly. She has beforehand deter- mined neither the aim nor the proportions. When she does chance to preserve the unity of her work, it is unconsciously, and as if by special grace. She conceives characters in a given situation, almost always a state of passion; she becomes captivated with them, interesting herself in their fates eagerly and for her own satisfaction, while she paints them by the light of inner fires. She abandons herself to the chances of inspiration, which bring great struggles, but which she controls very little, — so little, she said, that she knew not beforehand how these life-conflicts would end, or how the story would come out. It was a veritable triumph of what has since been called the "unconscious" in talent or in gen- ius. In fact, I cannot better characterize this singularity in her method of work than by saying that it was a phenomenon of superb unconsciousness, but very uncertain in result. Nothing, apparently, calculated, nothing pre- meditated, — not even the main outlines deter- mined ; in her art everything goes forward as in life. When a dramatic meeting takes place, when a great adventure begins, who can say what, in the course of events, will happen to- morrow? So it was in the realm of her imagi- nation. She knew not, in advance, what would 154 George Sand. become of her heroes or what would befall them. She gave them over to the fatality of her art, as life gives men over to the fatality of events. Hence the sharp contrast in her works : the dash, the fire, the marvellous pre- ludes, the enchanting beginnings of almost all her tales, — of the finest ones. Then, at a certain point, is manifest a kind of lassitude ; the wealth of incidents becomes prolixity ; the narrative drags on in useless meanderings ; the style also becomes fatigued and negligent. Nevertheless, an end must be made, but it is an end of reason, not of inspiration. The composition languishes simply because there is no preconceived plan, and because the fire of thought or of passion does not suffice to inform the composition to the end. The denouement never equals the prelude. We saw her thor- oughly preoccupied with the idea of a novel, possessed by its subject to such an extent that all those she had hitherto treated seemed no longer to exist for her ; and a short time after we find her in haste to bid farewell to charac- ters that had been so dear to her for one day. The fire of her imagination has consumed the most beautiful children of her dream ; with a turn of her hand she flings them back into the past, — I might say into annihilation. For what but relative annihilation was that for- Her Style. 155 getfulness which so swiftly succeeded the real presence of all those personages, whose very- names sometimes escaped her memory? The fiery furnace had cooled ; in order to rekindle herself she awaited other moulds from which should issue a new society. When the fantastic appears in her works, forcing the events and the characters, it is a proof that her inspiration is failing, that the fatigued author feels a certain haste to be done with a subject the substance and the flower of which she has already expressed. But one must take good care not to confuse this ro- mantic mediocrity, which marks the lassitude of her talent, with another kind of romance which produces exquisite works full of the enchanting play of her imagination. In order plainly to indicate this distinction, two names suffice, though we might cite ten, — "Teverino" and "The Private Secretary." These are tales conceived in an hour of happy fruitfulness, which seem to have been written, from the first page to the last, under the same fresh and unfailing inspiration, without an interval of repose or of fatigue. Midsummer-night dreams, spring-time reveries, — one knows not with what name to designate these magical tales whose spell suspends you in a slightly ideal world, where everything succeeds according 1 56 George Sand. to the author's wish, with a compliance on the part of the events and a docility on the part of the characters that one does not always find in this world. " The Private Secretary " is a fantasy " that came to her after re-reading Hoffmann's ' Fantastic Tales ; ' " it has kept something of its origin. Everything is im- probable in that principality constructed be- tween heaven and earth, and in the commands of that lovely and enigmatical sovereign, Quin- tilia Cavalcanti. This princess is now infatu- ated with luxury and pleasure, and anon devoted to the- most serious effort of thought ; suspected of the blackest crimes of love, a Margaret of Burgundy in a region of enchantment, then suddenly revealed, throughout the most con- trary adventures, as an admirable and virtuous wife, faithful to the husband whom she adores in the incognito of his wandering exile. What a dream realized at length by Madame Sand, — legitimate love under the guise of adven- ture ! It would seem that this is the only way to make marriage endurable. And what trials for the young Count de Saint-Julien, who, thrown by a chance of travel plumply into this mystery, is admitted on the highway into the carriage of the princess, to the great displeas- ure of her reading-woman and of the abb6 and to the stupefaction of the fabulous little Her Style- 157 stormy court at which his appearance is an event, — there rising in rank and favor with a rapidity that makes his head swim, and in that fatal giddiness conceiving an impossible love leading him to the brink of the greatest dan- gers. The denouement comes. The happy husband, the mysterious Marx, saves Julien from the consequences of his imprudence. From that fairy-land our hero issues, at once charmed, terrified, humiliated, lacerated. His recovery will take place only after the indis- pensable illness that follows great weaknesses and after his return to his family, to which he will bring back a calmer imagination, a more indulgent disposition, and the memory — the dream, rather — of the dazzling and tragic adventures that have passed before his eyes throughout the year. There is no good sense in this plot; but what a pretty sequel to Hoff- mann's " Tales " ! It is thus that a great artist imitates and finds inspiration. It was from the same lucky fountain of ro- mance that " Teverino " issued. It often hap- pens that George Sand, desirous of escaping at any price from the flatness and vulgarity of life, tells herself wonderful stories, like those which had taken so great a place in her childish exist- ence, and which finally formed for her a dream- life almost as important as the real, and tenfold 158 George Sand. dearer and more precious. It was on one of these occasions, when, like Scheherazade in the " Thousand and One Nights," she was amusing and delighting herself with such tales, — to sat- isfy the caprice of her own imagination, not that of a ferocious sultan, — that she conceived the idea of that singular day ; and the idea once con- ceived as in a dream, she threw it upon paper, its animation and freshness hardly impaired by the almost insensible labor of composition. Certainly there is some reason for raising the cry of improbability, when one sees that . happy-go-lucky travelling-party gathering at daybreak in Sabina's villa. Leonce urges Sabina to permit herself to be conducted at his will, without intimation where, through the most varied scenes, as far as one can journey in a single day. He has touched the magic chord of the unknown ; fancy leaps the last barriers ; Leonce shall be the arbiter of this day. The pair set forth, with Sabina's negress and the coachman on the box. Soon the adventures begin: they take up a good curate who is walking gravely along the road, breviary in hand; a little farther on, they join to their party a lovely wandering peasant girl, who is by specialty a bird-tamer; still farther, after many adventures, appears the hero of the tale, strangest and most wonderful of heroes, a trav- Her Style. 159 eller whom Leonce finds bathing in a lake, and who, in his noble nakedness, is very different from what he appeared a moment before un- der his sordid rags. By giving him decent garments, Leonce makes a gentleman of him: a touching apologue, teaching us that the distinctions between men are frequently but a matter of garb, — at all events in Madame Sand's stories ! This is a favorite idea with the author, and she will frequently return to it, but never with such felicity and grace. Teverino has been revealed to Leonce in his native nobleness; he is the handsomest of mortals and the most eloquent of artists. From that moment he takes his place, and the first place, in that romantic day. In every capacity he exhibits superiority, — as musician, as philoso- pher, as a devoted (although improvised) friend, as a chivalric lover ; so that he fills all the re- mainder of the day, the evening that closes it, and the morning that begins it anew, with the subtlest, brightest, most poetical sayings, the doughtiest deeds, the boldest engagements of heart, which are checked with a timely discre- tion beyond the scope of a man of the world. With his artist voice he enchants the little Italian town where they spend the evening; more and more he astonishes Ldonce, irritates him even, and masters him by the nobility of 160 George Sand. his bearing ; for a moment he almost wins the love of the elegant and haughty Sabina ; and it is only through generosity that, after having disturbed her as if but to make trial of his power, he detaches from himself that momen- tarily surprised and fragile heart, returns it to L^once, and vanishes. This improvised sov- ereign of a day is the spoiled child of George Sand. He is the adventurous artist she always loved ; one of those Bohemians of genius, tat- tered but refined, noble and superb, who, in- debted to Nature for their rich endowments, have preserved them with care, thanks to their independence, to their indolence, to the disin- terestedness that makes them poor but keeps them pure. This time she has seen him move and act before her eyes ; she has seen him dominate the little world where she has placed him. She has been happy in this success of a cherished son of her imagination People may smile at this facile happiness. But the fea- tures of real life are here so well mingled with the fable, there are such charming episodes in this day presided over by the kindliest and most ingenious providence, the conversations are so elegant and so delicate, that one must needs yield to the fancy of the author; and truly the most grudging reader could hardly resist a spell so winning and so penetrative. / Her Style. 16 1 A Thus conceived, the novel is simply poetry. / Be it so. Is this, after all, anything very un- L--fortunate, and will an accusation of this kind be so fatal to George Sand? The novel must perforce approximate either to poetry or to science. The scientific novel is, in our day, in high esteem. The science of manners, of institutions, of social classes, of characters and temperaments, of the physiological and sani- tary influences that determine the individu- ality of every one, of the hereditary influences that pervade us from beyond the generations, — such is the undefined and ever-varied ma- terial of the experimental novel. But must we sacrifice to this single style all others, and in particular that style which regards the novel as a work at once of analysis and of poetry, as George Sand instinctively defined it? Let us beware : the novel, according to her defini- tion, is the true national romance ; 1 if we are to believe the interpreters of the origins of our literature, it is born of the ancient chan- sons de geste; 2 it is of the same family as 1 Our distinction between the novel and the romance does not exist in French. This is the only instance in which I have ventured to render the word roman by " romance." See the next note. — Tr. 2 In the Middle Ages roman means a composition in the Romance language, that is to say in French, and the com- positions most in favor being the chansons de geste, it takes 11 1 62 George Sand. poetry. Who will convict us of error in this interpretation? Critics will note with pedantic care the im- probabilities abounding in the stories of George Sand. But would it not be easy to note, in connection with the improbability of incidents that may be remarked in her, the want of con- sistency in the characters of the most popular naturalistic writers, the incoherence of the sen- timents, the morbid oddity of conduct under pretext of disease or of heredity? One might be tempted to inquire on which side is the greater improbability. This is a strife which will long continue, and into which we have no intention of entering. It would, however, be interesting to know whether the pretended observers of reality do not make as great con- cessions as other novelists to a certain con- ventionality as artificial, as arbitrary, as false, as that of which they make so terrible a grievance against the school they would de- the special sense of chanson de geste [that is, a narrative poem dealing with a heroic family of legendary or historical France]. At the end of the mediaeval period it means suc- cessively chanson de geste put in prose [roman de chcvalerie) ; prose history of some great imaginary adventures ; then prose history of some adventures freely invented ; finally, a tale freely invented. In this last evolution of meaning let any one discover, if he can, the original sense of poetry written in the Romance language I — Ars^ne Darmesteter, The Life of Words, p. 16. Her Style. 163 stroy, — as if temperaments and tastes could be destroyed ! To her understanding of the novel, the style of George Sand corresponds. Though her style deserves separate treatment, we shall in- dicate only certain features of it, recognizable throughout the infinite variety of the subjects treated by her in the long course of a life forty-six years of which were occupied with the most fruitful labors. Certainly it cannot be affirmed that she did not, during this long interval of time, complete her education as a writer, or that she did not modify her instrument of expression and its resources. From the outset, however, her lan- guage was formed, already ample and flexible, full of movement and fire. The long labor of a literary life did not create, but merely develop it. As soon as, in her Nohant retreat, she in- trusted to some scattered leaves her sadness, her tears, her revolts, the whole substance of her inward dream, that language had come to her as by instinct. Already words obeyed her unresistingly; images came of their own accord and readily coalesced, with a propriety that is only attained, at the first stroke, by writers of the purest strain. For certain persons it is as natural to write as to breathe. George Sand wrote in prose as Lamartine wrote in verse ; for 164 George Sand. both it was a kind of function of life which they fulfilled without having studied it ; neither cotild have explained it to himself or to oth- ers. Neither of them was an artist by dint of effort or determination; they were artists by nature ; they were born great writers, and they were so from the first page. This gift of facility is also a snare. George Sand was unable to escape this peril of a too heedless self-abandonment to the current that swept her on. She exhibits undue willingness to develop her ideas ; she sometimes nods, drowsing away into self-beguiling prolixity ; she has her negligences. A certain tendency to bombast has been so often remarked, that this accusation must have some ground. In the con- versations, or rather the speeches in dialogue, of " Lelia," of " Spiridion," of " Consuelo," of "The Countess of Rudolstadt," it is certain that her fine style falls a prey to a very cloudy philosophical lyricism; that it dissolves in drifting vapors, or darkens into a kind of vol- untary obscurity. Clouds are unsuited to the wholesome and natural temper of this writer. She is glad to dissipate them, when the philo- sophical fit is over, and to recover her entire self either in descriptions of scenery, which, as in " Lelia," are of marvellous art, or in de- lineations of character. In the latter she sue- Her Style. 165 ceeds only when she descends from those insecure regions of semi-reality, when she touches the ground, when she keeps her hold upon actual life, or when she amuses herself with one of those invented situations, like the various encounters of the travellers in "Tev- erino." Portions of her dialogues are very animated and witty, others very elegant; there are remarks and conversations marked by a note of distinction and high breeding, even when the personages are of doubtful character. Perhaps this quality of wit in George Sand's style has not been sufficiently noted. "The romanticists," it has been said, " did not understand the art of pleasantry, — neither Chateaubriand, nor Lamartine, nor Vigny, nor Hugo, nor Balzac, nor George Sand." This is not quite just to Madame Sand. She had no wit in conversation; her chats did not sparkle with repartee. But she was very different with pen in hand. She then followed with rapid movement the conversa- tions she heard within herself; she became absorbed in them, and naturalness, grace, spirit, ingenious tact, abounded in the im- provisations she drew from her imaginary interlocutors; the situation within her was so sharply outlined that she seemed to be merely its echo ; but the inner voice that die- 1 66 George Sand. tated to her those keen and lively repartees was quite her own, — it was herself and another, very different from what she was in real life. " It is," we are told again, " neither by ex- traordinary splendor nor by plastic perfection that her style commends itself to us, but by qualities that seem to partake of her goodness of heart, and to be akin to it. For her style is copious, easy, generous, and no word seems better to fit it than this one of the ancients, lac- tea ubertas, — an abundance of milk, a rich and beneficent flow from the nourishing breast; " and the image suggests a bold and charming apostrophe to the " sweet Io of contemporary fiction." 1 Assuredly, nothing could be more appreciative. This is the homage of one who, among the younger writers, is one of those who have loved her most and best. One word, however, disturbs us. Her style, so expressive and so full of color, is reproached with not being sufficiently plastic. What is meant by this? Doubtless it is not so firmly modelled upon real forms as it should be ; it does not outline contours rigorously enough, as does the style of Victor Hugo, of TWophile Gau- tier, or of Flaubert, and it does not study to give them relief. Is this a fault? If it be not plastic, that is to say sculptural, this style is 1 M. Jules Lemaitre, " Revue Bleue," Jan. 8, 1887. Her Style. 167 nevertheless extremely picturesque, and in the matter of description it is like a beautiful paint- ing. Is not this a compensation ? This style is a wonderfully transparent medium, at the bottom of which one sees the reality just as the painter saw it, plus the very thought of the interpreter. Whether in description, or in analysis, or in the succession of incidents, the style follows the thought with a contin- uous movement, expressing and manifesting it with an ease, a fluidity, that is no obstacle to the force of the current. In a nook of the Jura Mountains I have seen a spring called the Blue Spring, because of the tinge it receives from the reflection of the surrounding landscape, from a bit of sky above, perhaps also from the nature of the rock in which it has hollowed its azure chal- ice. Calm and deep, it attracts as by some spell of enchantment. One cannot see this spring without loving it and worshipping the Naiad who hallows it Following its flight across the neighboring meads, you see it grow animated by the slope which it obeys ; swiftly descend- ing its pebbly bed, it murmurs noisily; at the foot of the hill it dashes and foams against an immovable and stolid rock that bars its way ; turning its wrath and its course aside from this barrier, but complaining still, its current 1 68 George Sand. is swollen at every step by the tributary tor- rents it receives and absorbs. For a moment, too full of the treasures of these alien streams, it overflows its banks, and, exhausted by this excess, loses a portion of its useless waters around islets of bare sand ; at length, making a final effort to collect itself, and drawing home its waters to their bed, it calmly offers itself to the contemplation of men, after having flashed its crystal current past so many changing land- scapes, so many varied scenes of town and field. Such is the style of George Sand, — always faithful to the inner movement of her thought, which it interprets and depicts in its elation, its distress, and in its sudden calms. It is useless to tell us that, after a lapse of forty or fifty years, her style, like other parts of her work, has, in certain portions at least, grown obsolete. There is, indeed, a whole equipment of exterior ideas, of conventional sentiments, of language, peculiar to each gen- eration, — an equipment which, when we see it again by broad daylight, affects us like a faded dress or an old-fashioned garment. This law of inevitable decay, affecting only the out- side of the human being, the temporary choice he has made, affecting some of his modes of being and seeming, and fixing his date, — this law has made havoc with the sentimental part Her Style. 169 of Madame Sand's works, with the romantic expression of violent feelings or the romantic invention of situations, with the extreme im- probability of incidents, with the extravagance of arguments, with the floods of declamation, with the excesses of a too lyrical manner, which at times provoked a smile from the author herself. These decayed and condemned portions have foundered forever, and would, in the case of any other writer, have drawn the rest of the work into like irreparable shipwreck. But the loss of so many works in parts su- perior, of tales touched by the radiance of art, — what a disaster it would have been ! What though an unjust oblivion has overtaken them, how many things will revive and will abide ! All that is easy in grace, elegant in creation, enchanting in revery, sincere in passion, won- drous in fancy, charming in style, — does not all this deserve to live ? Here, as elsewhere, time" will more and more surely do its work. And after this labor of elimination performed for every great fame by the infallible justice of time, this court of last resort will proclaim immortal honor to that creative power which did not exclude the faculty of analysis, but which formed for it so marvellous a back- ground ; it will proclaim that, thanks to her unfailing wealth of imagination and to her 1 70 George Sand. expressive gift of style, George Sand remains a poet with few equals, — one of the greatest poets of her time and race. We now seem to be able to answer the question raised in the first line of this study. Yes; after some years of neglect and some necessary eliminations in her work, the public will return to Madame Sand. She will again attract the new generations by the splendor of that poesy which we have endeavored to de- fine. Were it but to console us, by some of her works, for the profligate excess of the con- temporary naturalism, she would have had reason to write, even for us, even for what is called posterity. She will have a fixed place in the inevitable revival of the novel, the drama, the poetry of idealism ; and whatever may be done to check that flight of the spirit, idealism will have a considerable following in the humanity of to-morrow, and long after. New manners have given the novel its great place in modern life. But there is nothing to lead us to believe that this great place will be eternally occupied by the naturalistic novel. As has already been said, there will be a divi- sion between the two opposing theories, or per- haps a periodic oscillation of the public mind between them. What has given the novel its literary supremacy is in great part the modern Perishable and Permanent Work. 171 ennui, a disease much less known to the less excited and more believing generations of former times ; ennui, that absolute vacuum of mind and heart, is an undeniable badge of the men of our day. For diversion and occupa- tion in the intervals of daily labor, men for- merly had either the passion of intellect and conversation, as in the eighteenth century, or the religious passions, as in the seventeenth, or the curiosity violently stimulated by the Reformation and the Renaissance, as in the sixteenth. To-day, when the jaded man of business is forced to take repose, what resource can he find in that vast desert of ideas which stands, in the minds of most men, for the in- tellectual or moral world? The novel it is which then takes the place occupied in by- gone centuries by bgoks of controversy, or in the last century by questions of criticism and social renewal. The excessive development of practical life has brought with it the peremp- tory need of escaping from it. Nothing, not even the desire to make a rapid fortune and to expend that fortune in rapid pleasures, can still certain requirements of the mind. In vain is the man of the present fed upon violent amusements or diversions : at most, he is en- tertained for a moment, stimulated for an hour or two ; his activity is diverted, — he is excited 172 George Sand. and exhausted. At the very moment when you think him most forgetful of his inward me, he shakes off the grasp of these outward things ; he makes sudden returns within him- self; fatigued with the course of life he led yesterday and will lead to-morrow, he looks within. Almost immediately, however, being so long unaccustomed to reflection, he be- comes dismayed by the lifeless solitude, the silence he finds within himself; he has forgot- ten to furnish and adorn with solid thoughts that inner chamber of the soul which he occupies at such rare intervals. This soul, devoted to vulgar and facile divinities, is now scarcely visited by the philosophic or the re- ligious ideal. Pure letters have long been repugnant to this class of minds, which lie barren under a layer of commonplace culture. What resource remains by which such a mind may fill this great void opening before it? The theatre remains, and the novel, which differs from the theatre only in the circum- stance that the action takes place upon the inner stage. Moreover, the novel is always within reach ; it serves to fill up certain hours when the man is alone with himself and can do nothing but think. He takes up some story that is making a great deal of talk, lays it aside, and takes it up again at will. The novel Perishable and Permanent Work. 173 seems specially adapted for these unoccupied ■ intervals of modern life ; it fills with action or with business those hours of leisure when even the most ordinary man feels a certain vague weariness, or a gloomy unrest resembling a need of reflection. But the influence of the novel does not stop here; it is something more than the intellec- tual entertainment and diversion of a great number of empty or half-cultivated minds. Even the highest intelligences do not escape it; it is a kind of habit into which the mind has fallen. I asked a distinguished philoso- pher of our time what article of the " Revue des Deux Mondes" he usually read first. He replied, with candor, that he always began his reading with the novel. The most serious mind of our age, the one who was supposed, especially in the latter years of his life, to be naturally absorbed in the loftiest philosophical or religious meditations, — M. Guizot, — told me that he labored during the first part of the day, then took a walk or a drive according to the weather, and that every day of his life he returned home at four o'clock to have an English novel read to him. But it is in the lives of young men and women that the novel has taken the largest place, being necessarily the principal nourishment of their intelligence. 174 George Sand. It may be asserted that for many the novel is the sole representative of letters. This is the natural place for the expression of a wish, or a hope, for a revival of George Sand as one of the undeservedly forgotten masters. If we dream that the novel is to be something more than the trivial diversion of a mind in distress, the element x of a vulgar curiosity; if it must, like other forms of art, make good its sovereignty by a lofty purpose, justify it, in a word, have an aim, — must it not be on condition that it throw something of the ideal into this poor life, which is ap- parently so agitated, outwardly so overstrained, noisy at the surface, dull and gloomy within? Would it not be going counter to this aim to proscribe that ideal of the feigned life that plays before the inward eye of the imagination, as we so assiduously proscribe it in real life ? And what art is it, if it be an art, to give us, under the pretext of a study of manners, in a succession of degraded types, of situations by turns dull and violent, of trivial scenes, of odious or petty scandals, a representation of the realities that beset our every-day life, so- liciting and occupying our attention? The incurable vice of the novel thus conceived 1 The translator suspects this word (element) of being a misprint for aliment. Perishable and Permanent Work. 175 seems to be the very negation of its proper aim, — which is to raise man for a moment above all the sorrows and miseries, the petty cares and the dulness of daily life ; to give him, for an hour or two, the illusion of a world where he can at least change the direction of his thoughts and shut out his vulgar solici- tudes, — a world where the sentiments have more power, the characters more consistency, the passions more nobility, love more elevation and permanence, the sun more splendor. The English novel, which was long since natural- ized in our language, and the Russian novel, which has recently made so superb and trium- phant an entrance into our literature, are much less remote from this conception than one would think. These two most recent forms of the novel, exemplified respectively in George Eliot and in Count Tolstoi, join to a fund of realism, which is one of the natural require- ments of the modern spirit, a totality of severe aspirations and high pursuits that bring them singularly near, at certain points, to the ideal we have just set forth. Such, as we have seen, was the ideal George Sand had formed of the novel at the outset of her literary life. 1 !-*!'© transform the reality of characters and passions by raising it above vulgarity and ugliness ; to fear, above all, lest 1 See Chapter II. 1 76 George Sand. this higher reality become tarnished in the chance sequence of events, — what is this if it be not to seek by every means the completest and most striking expression of the dream of life, to shed some rays of the ideal over our sad and colorless existence? Is this not art, — true and great art? Our life here below is harsh, says George Sand, and we can never be so well satisfied either with ourselves or with others as to lose our delight in day-dreaming. No one has scattered about us with a more lavish and potent hand the enchantments of this waking dream. We shall never be able to still this thirst for fiction, unless indeed our world becomes transformed into a kind of paradise where the ideal of a better life shall be no longer possible. Till then, we shall ever long to escape from ourselves; our imagina- tion will ever find solace and intoxication in delicious draughts of poesy in its several forms of poem, drama, and novel. What is to become of me if, instead of this exquisite brewage, your pitiless hand pours me a second time the vulgar drink with which I am cloyed? It is the glory of George Sand that throughout her long career she always escaped this peril, and always spared her unknown friends that nauseous aftertaste. In this, at least, she never disappointed them. CHAPTER V. PRIVATE LIFE AT NOHANT. HER METHOD OF WORK. HER FINAL CONCEPTION OF ART. "DEFORE taking leave of George Sand we -*-' purpose to study for a moment her pri- vate life, and to obtain some retrospective glimpse of her. Without such a study one has never a complete conception of a writer, especially if that writer be a woman. This phase of her life really begins only with her definitive establishment at Nohant, where she went to live in 1839, after her journey to Switzerland with Liszt and Madame d'Agoult; and after a residence of several months at Majorca with Chopin, the great musician, who was already grievously ill. There were still occasional temporary sojourns at Paris, for the education of her children, Maurice and Solange; but from this time Nohant became her habitual residence, her centre of action. Here her existence was settled, and she was enabled to realize her dream of a life arranged for herself, for her children, and for her friends. 178 George Sand. Here was developed and perfected, within de- fined and familiar limits, what I might call George Sand's final manner, upon which it is desirable to dwell, and to fix the reader's attention. We must, however, recall some features of her previous life, which has been the object of so many legends, or the pretext for them. In this connection does the reader recall Alfred de Musset's little tale, " The Story of a White Blackbird "? It was a very old story that was transacted at Paris and at Venice between 1833 and 1834; but it indicates well the origin and the point of departure of that portion of her life which was at first so fantastic and so ad- venturous. Everything, even the story of others, is to be found in that somewhat dis- guised but transparent fantasy of the poet relating the misconceptions he has to en- counter at his entrance into life, the unkind- ness he suffers in his own family on account of his unusual plumage and voice, the accidents and the disappointments of all kinds that cause him every day to feel how painful, though glorious, it is in this world to be " an exceptional blackbird " ! After several adventures, from which he comes off with the loss, on each occasion, of many of his illusions and a few of his feathers, Private Life at Nohant. 1 79 he at last finds his consolation in the shape of the female blackbird of his dreams, the ideal hen-blackbird. " ' Accept my hand without delay; let us marry in the English fashion without ceremony, and let us start together for Switzerland.' ' Not so,' replies the young hen-blackbird; 'I desire that my wedding be magnificent, and that all the blackbirds in France, of passably good family, be attendant at the festivity.' " The marriage takes place, nevertheless, " in the English fashion," but be- fore a great concourse of feathered artists, and they set out for Switzerland, Venice, or elsewhere. " I did not then know that my be- loved was a woman of the pen ; she at length confessed the fact to me, and even went so far as to exhibit the manuscript of a novel in which she had imitated both Walter Scott and Scarron. I leave you to guess the pleasure that so delightful a surprise gave me. . . . From that moment we worked together. While I was composing my poems, she blotted reams of paper. I recited my verses aloud to her, and this in no wise hindered her from writing at the same time. ... It never occurred to her to strike out a line or to make a plan before setting to work. She was the typical hen- blackbird of letters." Many of the strokes in this sketch are accurate ; a single one is at 180 George Sand. variance with the character of the novelist. At no time did her pen, free as it was in the atmosphere of ideas, abase itself to caricature or to parody. We can understand that the hen-blackbird of letters should have reminded her friend of Walter Scott and his large and powerful romances ; but we are astounded when the unjust satirist joins with this name that of Scarron. Lelia remains Lelia, even in her boldest flights of thought ; and never did this lover of free flight and of sunshine stoop on her wing to graze a dubious insinuation or an unclean jest. We shall not relate the conclusion of the story, the counterpart of which may be found in " She and He." In both narratives the end is sad ; it had been so in reality. Every one knows enough of it; it is the affair of a scandal-monger to enter, beyond what truth requires, into intimacies of this kind. It has been our purpose simply to indicate, without insistence, the attitude of the first George Sand, — quick to be on, as well as to be off, with such relations, staking everything on a passion, swallowing all the chagrin of her losses, soon cured of every passion but not of the game itself, bringing to these various ex- periments a kind of incorrigible simplicity and easy good-nature, mingling with these chang- Private Life at Nohant. 1 8 1 ing devotions episodical devotions to this or the other art or science, — poetry with one, music with another, philosophy with a third. It is she whose image, in the intoxication of her youth and of her first triumphs, took such a hold upon the imaginations of her contem- poraries; she who lived, now as a student or an artist, again as a pilgrim, in masculine garb, in the Latin Quarter or on all the highways of Europe, — and especially on the highways of Bohemia and other imaginary lands ; abandon- ing her life to the risks of good and evil shel- ters and to the boon-companionship of chance travellers whose personality is for the moment illumined with the fires of her imagination, and whose adventurous hospitality, strange crotchets, irreparable passions, she shares or suffers. Heinrich Heine, who saw her often at the close of this period (1833 to 1 840), has left us a lively portrait of her that must be lifelike. " Her face," said he, " may be pro- nounced beautiful rather than interesting; the outline of her features is not, however, of antique severity, but is softened by the mod- ern sentimentality which spreads over her face, as it were, a veil of sadness. Her forehead is not high, and her abundant hair, of the finest chestnut, falls on both sides of her head to her shoulders. Her somewhat dull eyes are soft 1 82 George Sand. and tranquil. She has neither an aquiline and emancipated nose, nor a witty little snub nose. It is simply a straight and ordinary nose. About her mouth there plays habitually a smile full of kindliness, but no.t very attractive ; her lower lip, which hangs a little, seems to betray a certain weariness. Her chin is full, but of very fine shape ; also her shoulders, which are superb. . . . Her voice is dull and muffled, with no sonorous ring, but soft and pleasant. . . . She shines little in conversation. She has absolutely none of the sparkling wit characteristic of Frenchwomen, but also noth- ing of their endless chatter. With an amiable and sometimes singular smile, she listens when others speak, as if she sought to absorb into herself the best of your words. . . . To this peculiarity M. de Musset one day called my attention. 'This gives her a great advantage over the rest of us,' said he." 1 And the por- trait is tranquilly continued in this moderate tone, brightened by some of those epigrams from which this author could not long abstain. There seems to be no reason to revert again to this first portrait. The second and much the longer part of her life offers us this pecul- iar feature of interest, that it is organized and controlled by her own proper choice, " which 1 Lutfece. Private Life at Nohant. 183 withdraws it as much as possible from the haz- ard of circumstance and from the caprice of affection." Let us follow her, when she has definitively retired from her adventurous life, from her wandering and homeless existence, to the intimacy of Nohant, the relics and the souvenirs of which she has so dearly bought back. Here she brings home her children, here sees them grow up, here marries them. Here, still later, the deep, calm joy of the young grandmother sheds its benediction upon the heads of her grandchildren, without for a moment suspending her incessant productive- ness, without checking the prodigality of a talent that fills almost half a century with its inventions and with its dreams, with its thoughts- or with its passions, charming or shocking or stirring the souls of five or six generations. For it is a circumstance to be noted that silence, that form of oblivion, set in, for her, only after her death. So long as she lived she wrote, and thus acted powerfully upon her contemporaries; for certainly thus to stir the minds of an age is to act, — thus to disturb consciences, to produce those great movements of sympathy or antipathy which are the ebb and flow of public opinion. And who, in the present century, has been more potent in this than George Sand? 1 84 George Sand. She depicted herself, almost unconsciously, as she was in this second portion of her life, by means of her " Correspondence," which is in this respect much more instructive than the " History of my Life," — breaking off, as the latter does, at the finest moment of her lit- erary career. I have re-read the " Correspon- dence," — especially the very copious portion extending over the last twenty-five years, — in order to compare the impressions of the author with my memories of a visit at Nohant in the month of June, 1861. At about that already remote time George Sand, in a letter urging a friend to visit her, wrote as follows : " We still have fine days here. Our climate is clearer and milder than that of the neighborhood of Paris. The coun- try about us is in general not beautiful; the calcareous soil, very productive of grain, is un- suited to the growth of great trees ; the con- tours of the landscape are soft and harmo- nious ; many trees, but small ; a great air of solitude, — this is its whole merit You must be forewarned that my country is, like myself, of insignificant aspect. It gains upon acquaint- ance ; but it is hardly more opulent and more demonstrative than its inhabitants." Undemonstrative, it is true, as Heinrich Heine had before indicated, and even insignifi- Private Life at Nohant. 185 cant in appearance, — why not say so, for this also was true at the first glimpse of her? When I saw her, her fifty-seven years had stamped their traces upon her whole person, and had deadened the effect of it, quenching that young and passionate grace of former days, that brightness of countenance which, lighting up the heaviness of certain features, had formed her principal beauty. Her form had grown stout; her eyes remained fine, but seemed drowned in a certain vagueness and in- dolence which had increased with age ; there was altogether a little inertia and a sort of intellectual lassitude. She seemed at first to shrink from new acquaintances and from com- merce with fresh ideas that did not at once harmonize with her own ; or, at least, she gave herself up to them only with effort. She was hospitable, but with gravity and in silence ; and, had one relied upon this first im- pression, one might have judged her severely enough. It was, however, not to be relied upon, and, according to her own expression, she and her country gained upon acquaintance. It will perhaps be thought that this, first appearance of coldness was an accidental circumstance, personal to the unexpected visitor of 1861. It would be natural to think so ; such is, how- ever, not the case. We have been told a very 1 86 George Sand. pretty story of the impression received at his arrival by one of her most expected and most welcome guests, Theophile Gautier. For her sake he had made the great sacrifice of leav- ing his boulevard, and he arrived with the con- viction of the Parisian who imagines himself a hero if he visits a provincial friend. Full of the thought of his own heroism, and expecting to see it rewarded by the delight of George Sand, he gauged beforehand the rapture of the reception by the animation — the vio- lence almost — of the invitation. Meanwhile George Sand remained calm, — more than calm, silent, — with that indolent and weary air that had struck me in her. She leaves him a moment to give orders to her servants. He, surprised, more and more dissatisfied, complains of his reception to his travelling companion, a frequenter of the house ; his dissatisfaction in- creases as he speaks ; he will depart forthwith, and he gathers up his cane, his hat, his valise. The witness of this great wrath hastens to warn George Sand, that she may avert its con- sequence. At first, she does not comprehend a word of what is told her. As the truth dawns upon her, she trembles at thought of such a mishap; so great a disappointment overcomes her, and throws her into despair. " And you did not tell him," she cries ingenu- Private Life at Nohant. 187 ously, " that I was a stupid creature ! " She is dragged toward Theophile Gautier; explana- tions begin. They were not long; he soon perceived by her disconsolate tone how great was his misunderstanding, and his return was triumphal. George Sand's conversation was in keeping with her manner. She had never been talka- tive ; as she grew old she became still less so, except in family games and children's tales. Wit she had none, either of the Parisian or of the frank Gallic kind. In others she admired it beyond reason, though comprehending it with some difficulty; she had to make an effort of attention in order to catch its play and to accustom herself to the surprises it always gave her. For her own part, she pre- ferred to be a mere spectator of those bewil- dering fancies, those keen sallies, that nimble gymnastics of thought, that game of thrust and parry, in which some of her friends and contemporaries excelled ; she would have made a sad figure among them, had the high qual- ity of her intelligence not been known before- hand. It is hard to imagine her at those famous dinners at Magny's, where gathered then the most brilliant tilters with pen and word. She herself feared in going there, — which she failed not to do every time she 1 88 George Sand. went to Paris, — lest she might embarrass the rest and impose constraint upon that dazzling, paradoxical conversation which always so as- tonished her. " Thanks to you," she wrote to one of her most zealous correspondents, " I see the Magny dinner as if I were there. Only I think it must be still gayer without me; for Theo 1 sometimes suffers remorse when he makes too free in my hearing. Heaven knows, however, that I would on no account put a damper upon his wit. It sets off so well the unalterable gentleness of the adorable Renan, with his head of Charles the Wise" One cannot imagine George Sand retorting the dreadful sly thrusts of Sainte-Beuve, the leader of the chorus, or the irony of Flaubert, or the " exuberant " paradoxes of Theophile Gautier. She often complained of this merciless wit and of what she called — in a word that often recurs in her correspondence — the "blague" 2 of the Parisian artists and men of letters. She feels the need of protesting in the name of good sense, of good taste, and of the serious- ness of life, when the mark is overshot She writes to Flaubert: "I know not whether you were present at Magny's one day when I told them they were all fine gentlemen. They said that one ought not to write for the ignorant; 1 TMophile Gautier. 2 Chaff, Or blarney. Private Life at Nohant. 1 89 they flouted me because I would write only for such, seeing that they alone have need of anything. The masters are furnished, rich, satisfied. The stupid lack everything; I pity them. Love and pity are inseparable. Such is the simple mechanism of my thought." By talking thus she converted no one, but she gave each a new reason for esteeming her. Thus she appeared on the day which I spent in chatting with her. Many fundamental mat- ters separated us ; but among celebrated writ- ers, and even among those not celebrated, I have not known a single one who respected more and better the opinions of others, and who was less inclined to impose his own. She set her adversaries at ease by a tone of good fellowship in which there was nothing assumed; she indicated her own view in a simple and sober way; she did not insist Even in her letters she had little fondness for discussion, and, at least in the order of her political and social ideas, she did not willingly prolong it. Although she threw her whole might into these ideas, she did not seek an opportunity for controversy in behalf of them ; she feared to compromise them. " I have no faculty for discussion," she said, " and I avoid all disputes because I am always beaten, were I ten thousand times in the right." And i go George Sand. when she chances to venture upon the burning ground where her humanitarian dreams are endeavoring to find a foothold, she interrupts the discussion as soon as she can. " It seems that I am not clear in my sermons ; I have this in common with the orthodox, although I am not of them. Neither in the notion of equality nor in that of authority have I any determined plan. You seem to think I desire to convert you to a doctrine; but no, I do not think of such a thing. Every one sets out from a point of view the free choice of which I respect. I think I can sum up my own rule in few words : Not to stand behind the opaque glass wherein you behold nothing but the re- flection of your own nose." The insignificance of her appearance was but for the first glance. Did chance or a happy inspiration lead the conversation to cer- tain topics that were familiar to her, her cold and sluggish tone became somewhat quick- ened, and her great languid eyes regained movement and lustre. Upon two subjects especially she loved to talk, — upon family life and upon the theatre. It was not easy to draw her out upon the novel, even upon her own novels. Singularly enough, she had for- gotten them almost all, and this was no affec- tation, — it was one of the forms, or one of the Private Life at Nohant. 1 9 1 signs, of that, natural genius which labored within her almost without an effort of will. With the lapse of years, other inspirations had taken the place of the first. It is therefore with perfect sincerity that she relates in her correspondence how she is in the act of renew- ing her acquaintance with some of her most celebrated novels. It is literally something new for her. What she had told me of the singular sensation of an author who regains possession of himself, she expresses admirably, at about the same time, in one of her letters to the younger Dumas. " During the past few days I have been trying, for my own part, to become a reader of this poor novelist. It happens to me every ten or fifteen years to devote myself to this as to a sincere study, — a study as disinterested as if it related to an- other, since I have forgotten even the names of the characters and retain the recollection only of the subject, — none whatever of the method of execution. I have not been at all satisfied, — far from it. I have re-read ' The Snow Man,' and ' The Castle in the Wilder- ness.' What I think of them is a matter of little interest; but the phenomenon I sought and have found is curious enough, and may be useful to you." At that moment she had fallen into one of those states of temporary 192 George Sand. sterility which all writers know. It was neces- sary, however, to set herself at her trade again. " But then, your humble servant ! Nobody at home. George Sand was as completely absent from himself as if he had passed into the fossil state. At first not an idea; and then, the ideas returning, no power to write a word." In a fit of despair she took up one or two of her own novels. For some time she under- stood nothing. " Little by little it dawned upon me. I recognized myself in my qualities and in my defects, and I resumed possession of my literary personality. Now I have done ; it will be long before I shall read myself again." She had a kind of modesty quite peculiar to herself; she was a man of letters without the principal fault of the tribe, — an overmaster- ing preoccupation with one's self and with one's works. She was alive to praise, and did not fail to appreciate her own worth ; but she valued herself upon the gift of producing, rather than upon such or such a book. Never of her own motion did she recall the name of one of her novels ; and when such a name was mentioned she had but a confused recollection of it. I have rarely seen such self-detachment on the part of an author ; I chanced several times to surprise her by the fidelity of my Private Life at Nohant. 193 memory, less ungrateful than her own toward so many charming and impassioned works. She was at bottom a bourgeoise} — though I scarcely venture to say so, so much is the word decried by the school of delicate artists. She had the habits and instincts of that class, — notably the instinct of maternity, which was her predestined condition, although often mis- applied arid turned from its proper function. She was a plain soul with a Byronic imagina- tion. The constant element in her correspond- ence is her care for her home, her housekeep- ing, her children. Everything leads back to this ; she incessantly urges her friends to come and see her where her roots are cast. How different she shows herself, in this latter part of her life, from that fantastic and superb Amazon of a chimerical ideal, who had driven a coach and four over so many broken hearts ! It is she, it is the same who, having returned to somewhat normal conditions of existence in the bosom of her family, thus describes the life that had become her most cherished habit, and, as it were, her final religion. " At Nohant there is always the same monastic regularity: the breakfast, the hour of exercise, the five hours of work for those who work, the din- ner, the hundred-up at dominos, the fancy-work 1 A plain, respectable woman of the middle class. 13 1 94 George Sand. while Manceau x is reading me some novel ; Nini 2 sitting on the table, embroidering also ; friend Borie snoring, with his nose against the stove, and pretending that he is no longer asleep at all; Solange teasing him, Smile [Aucante] uttering maxims." Such is the family picture, including the profiles of some friends. For this Nohant is a hospitable inn, altogether Scotch, open to its frequenters throughout the year. In the daytime, when she is well, she works at her "Little Trianon ; " she wheels pebbles in a barrow, pulls weeds, plants ivy ; she drudges in a bit of a garden, and this makes her sleep, she says, and eat prodigiously. I see her yet, that good tiller of the soil, in the careless costume in which I surprised her ! She had, indeed, always desired a home life, even in circumstances the most untoward, pro- vided always that the interior arrangements be subject to herself, and that she be allowed certain liberties, usually irreconcilable. What was the predominating sentiment when she went to establish herself with her children at Majorca, dragging with her poor Chopin, who was already seriously ill? In order to under- 1 A young engraver, who, being ill, was received at her house. 2 One of her grand-daughters. Private Life at Nohant. 195 stand the species of overwrought maternity into which all other affection had been trans- formed, and which she extended to the great suffering musician, one must read her letters of the winter of 1839, written from the Abbey ofValdemosa. In this family, so oddly com- posed, is he not like another child of her own, for whom she thus cares and thus devotes herself? Might the relation not be so under- stood? The old Carthusian abbey was incom- parably poetical; Nature was beautiful, sub- lime, and wild ; eagles swept the air above their heads. But the climate became horrible, rain fell in torrents ; the hostile inhabitants looked upon them as plague-smitten. All this would have seemed endurable had Chopin been able to bear it; but his chest, mortally diseased, constantly grew worse. A waiting-maid, who had been brought from France at great ex- pense, began by refusing the service as too severe. The time came when Lelia, having swept the rooms and prepared the dinner, was also ready to fall with fatigue; for, be- sides her work as the teacher of Maurice and Solange, besides her literary work, there were the continual attentions required by the patient, and the mortal distress that he caused. And — mu6t it be told ? — Lelia was racked with rheu- matism. Finally they departed; Chopin was ig6 George Sand. also able to travel, and, thanks to her, to reach Paris. 1 But there had been no time to lose. Without pressing this subject, it may simply be said that in George Sand's most diverse af- fections there was always an indeterminate or wandering maternal instinct; and this consid- eration led a wit to remark that " she was the daughter of Jean Jacques Rousseau and of Madame de Warens." The moral infirmity of this incomplete and lavish nature was to con- fuse utterly different sentiments, in a kind of medley which even the most indulgent public opinion deemed questionable and refused to understand. When this maternal instinct began to be freed from alloy and to be directed toward its proper objects, it mastered and almost tyran- nized over her life. Family life took posses- sion of her. She is the slave of her children and of her grandchildren; she arranges her whole existence in order to amuse them with playthings, with tales, in order to educate them, and later, in order to earn them por- tions and to marry them suitably. It is for them that she founds her famous puppet the- atre, which takes so great a place in her life. Maurice is the manager, herself the composer 1 See especially the letters of Nov. 14, Dec 14, 1838 ; of Jan. 15, Jan. 20, Feb. 22, March 8, 1839. Private Life at Nohant. 197 of these little plays. 1 " I am still very gay, without initiative for amusing others, but know- ing how to help them amuse themselves.'' After a halt in the garden, — not far from the river where, in a fit of youthful despair, she had once sought to end an existence the outlook upon which already distressed her, — she invited, me to look through her house. It was into the little theatrical hall that she first led me, as to a place consecrated by the merry rites of the family. But the hall was empty and unfurnished. On the humid wall was still visible " the torn play-bill of yester- day." Everything was expressive of the mo- mentary abandonment of the pretty hall, which was wont to echo the applause and the laughter of family and friends. The winter and spring had been passed at Tamaris, near Toulon, on the shore of the Mediterranean. They had returned, homesick and somewhat bewildered, to Nohant, and the customary life had not yet resumed its course. The mistress of the house did not yet know " where to thrust herself 1 Madame Sand carefully collected the best of these plays in a separate volume, " The Theatre of Nohant," in which are found " The Drac," " Plutus," " The Pavement," " Christ- mas Eve," " Marielle." These pieces are not given exactly as they were recited upon the Nohant stage, in accordance with a detailed outline, but as the author afterwards wrote them from the impression that had remained with her. 198 George Sand. with her old books and papers." A study- was being fitted up for her. At Tamaris, Maurice had grown tired " of forever beholding the sea without crossing it." He had taken flight into Africa; thence he had set out in Prince Napoleon's yacht for Cadiz and Lisbon ; there was even talk of his going to America. The ordinary comedians of Nohant were all away on vacation, and I think I recollect that " Balandard," the great puppet so often men- tioned in the letters, was being repaired. Those who visited Nohant escaped with difficulty from that gentle mania which per- vaded the whole house. I escaped, on that day, only because of the absence of the prin- cipal characters of the famous theatre. At ordinary seasons Madame Sand gave herself up, heart and soul, to it, with her magic fingers. She composed stage-directions and made costumes for her manikins ; she sought new effects of disguises or of words, and she was frankly delighted with those invented by her son Maurice. It was for her a perpetual fairy-scene with which she was simply en- chanted, not mistrusting that there could be any greater pleasure for the friends whom she invited. 1 There is no doubt that her very 1 See the letter to Flaubert, so curious from this view- point, of Dec. 31, 1867. Private Life at Nohant. 199 questionable vocation as a writer for the stage, was created and developed by contact with her puppets. During several consecutive winters passed in the retirement of Nohant, she and her chil- dren, together with some friends, had found their sole amusement and their chief occupa- tion in these plays, which, on account of the care taken in their preparation, finally came to usurp entire days, — to the great astonish- ment of the immediate neighbors and of the peasants, mystified by such aimless bustle. In one of her most interesting tales Madame Sand has depicted, in bright colors upon a larger background, this double life, — this mingling of the real and the artistic. The substance is quite the same. It is " a sort of mystery, naturally resulting from the uproar prolonged far into the night in the isolated country-house shut in by snow or mist, where even the servants, whose services were required neither for the changes of scene nor for the suppers, left the premises early in the evening. The stage thunder, the pistol-shots, the beat- ing of drums, the outcries of the actors, and the music of the ballet, — in all this there was something weird, and the benighted wayfarer who caught distant snatches of it did not hesitate to pronounce us mad or bewitched." 200 George Sand. Such is doubtless the origin of that ingenious and charming tale which serves as an exercise in the analysis of some ideas concerning art, and in which the " Castle in the Wilderness " is distinctly recognizable as a kind of idealized Nohant; just as we perceive, in Celio and in Stella, the children of her who had taken pleasure in limning some of her own features in the touching portrait of Lucrezia Floriani. Thus under her dexterous ..hand the reality became art, often high art. In " The Snow Man," one of George Sand's most dramatic tales, we cannot but remark the considerable prominence given to a puppet-show. It is something like the scene of the play in Hamlet, rendered in smaller proportions upon a smaller stage. But, as in Shakspeare's tragedy, this scene is central ; the greatest interests, the rev- elation and the punishment of the unknown but suspected crime, — all hangs upon this play, in which Christian Waldo and lawyer Socfle exercise their whole wit and their whole mind in combining the stage-tricks and the dramatic surprises of the imagined conver- sation whence is to issue the denouement Another dramatized memory of the " Theatre of Nohant." A devoted mother, entirely wrapped up in the home life she created around her, Madame Private Life at Nohant. 20 1 Sand loved to be represented in this light ; and it was in conformity with this feeling that she replied to the questions of M. Louis Ulbach, who was intending to write a sketch of her for a journal. She assured him that her life had been for twenty-five years very commonplace. " What can you expect? " she says ; " I cannot elevate myself. I am simply a plain woman to whom have been attributed quite fantastic ferocities of disposition." She much desired to have the public mind disabused of the legend of her former life. " I have been ac- cused of an incapacity for passionate attach- ments. It seems to me that I have lived by love, and that this ought to be found suffi- cient. Now, thank Heaven, no more is asked of me; and those who are kind enough to love me, notwithstanding the want of brilliancy in my life and in my mind, do not complain of me." She told me much the same thing, in very simple terms. In summarizing this biographi- cal letter, it seems to me that I am repro- ducing some features of her conversation. She wrote easily, she said, and with pleasure, — it was her recreation ; for her correspondence was enormous, and this was her work. If, indeed, she had only to write to her friends ! But she was beset. " How many touching or 202 George Sand. preposterous requests! Whenever I can do nothing, I answer nothing. Some deserve that I should try, even with small hope of success. Then I am obliged to answer that I will try. ... I hope, after my death, to be translated to a planet where reading and writ- ing shall be unknown." Each one frames an image of Paradise in his own way. During her life she had written so much, that she wished to rest from writing throughout eter- nity. And in fact she was kindness itself, but without the usual commonplaces. In going over her vast correspondence, it is impossible not to be touched by the benevolence, I may even say the charity, of soul and of art, with which this superior woman places herself at the disposition of the talents, or the fractions of talent, that solicit her, — by the frank eulogy with which she encourages some, by the sin- cerity, not without tact, intended to discourage others. The political pleader is especially indefatigable in her. Freer than her party, — although, as she says, a republican by birth, — she is incessant in her petitions, not by any means for herself, but for friends or political clients who were threatened or struck down after the Coup d'fitat; she prays that they be allowed to remain in France, or that they be recalled from exile. And of whom does she Private Life at Nohant. 203 ask this ? Of Prince Louis Napoleon himself, first president, then emperor, who granted her an almost unlimited credit of influence. George Sand did not spare this credit; without yielding any of her personal opinions, she al- most always obtained what she asked, — and the fact is one that does the greatest honor both to the petitioner and to the granter. This is one of the rare cases in which human rights triumphed over the pride of irreconcilable par- ties and over the pride of arbitrary power. George Sand concealed nothing, or next to nothing, of her private affairs. She inter- rupted the regularity of her life only to make some excursions through France, which were necessary in order to find scenes for her novels. I do not speak of an establishment that she set up, toward the last, at Palaiseau, in order, she said, to be more within reach of the Parisian theatres, where she had several pieces in preparation. This rather short epi- sode apart, it was at Nohant that she had deter- mined to live and die; and here, indeed, she died, on the 8th of February, 1876, at the age of seventy-two. She had no reason to be reti- cent touching her material condition. " My accounts are not entangled. I have earned by my labor a good million 1 [in 1 869] ; I have 1 Of francs. 204 George Sand. not laid aside a cent ; I have given away all save twenty thousand francs, which I have invested in order that, should I fall sick, my herb-tea may not cost my children too much; and I am not even very sure of keeping this capital ; for people will be found who will have need of it, and if I am well enough to renew it, I shall be obliged to let my savings go. Keep the secret for me, in order that I may keep them as long as possible." When she chanced to make an allusion to any circumstance of her past life, she had a way of absolving herself, while dissimulating nothing, that did not lack a certain good- humored originality. " I must have great faults; like everybody else, I do not see my own. Nor do I know that I have qualities or virtues. If I have done right, I do not plume myself upon it ; I find that I have been logical, that is all. If I have done wrong, it is because I knew not what I was doing. Better enlight- ened, one would never do so." Possibly this scrutiny of conscience may be found too self- indulgent and too convenient. I give it for what it is and for what it is worth, as a very naive proof of that universal charity by which it seemed just that she should herself profit. She adds humorously: "You wish to know more than exists. . . . The individual named Her Method of Work. 205 George Sand picks flowers, classifies plants, sews frocks and capes for his little people and costumes for his puppets, reads music, but above all spends hours with his grandchildren. . . . Affairs did not always go so well as this. He was once stupid enough to be young; but as he neither did any harm, nor knew evil passions, nor lived for vanity, he has the hap- piness of being at peace and of taking delight in everything." When I met her at Nohant, she had just arrived laden with plants picked on the shores of the Mediterranean and in Savoy. She was dreading the task of arranging them ; indeed, she devoted herself to this labor almost all day, while chatting with me. But there was an arrangement of much more importance to be made in the house. Her study was fright- ful; the mere sight of it gave one the blues. Another was being fitted up, where she ex- pected to take pleasure in working. Mean- while, her bedroom was her workshop. Upon a very simple table, she showed me a pile of great sheets of blue paper cut in quarto size. " After your departure this evening," she said, " I shall set to work, and I shall not sleep until I have filled twelve of these pages." This was her daily stint, her labor being thus planned beforehand; she reckoned upon the promp- 2o6 George Sand. titude of her inspiration, which almost never failed her. This was for me an almost unlooked-for opportunity of acquainting myself intimately with her method of work, the results of which had always surprised me by their abundance no less than by their exact regularity. At this period of her life she made at least "her little novel " every year, together with a piece for the theatre. " Behold in me only an old troubadour retired from business, singing now and then his ballad to the moon with no great anxiety whether he sing well or ill, provided he express the idea running in his head ; and the rest of the time lounging deliciously." In my careful study of her works two charac- teristics had struck me, — the surprising facility of her talent, sometimes deteriorating into neg- ligence ; and the too evident want of composi- tion in her best novels. As I spoke to her of my impressions, she clearly perceived that, even from the literary point of view, quite apart from fundamental questions, I made reserves. She seemed displeased, not that I should make reserves, but that I kept them to myself; she required of me entire frankness. I therefore explained myself with sincerity upon those two points, as I should have done. For this she thanked me, and herself carried the criticism Her Method of Work. 207 much farther. This gave, me an extremely favorable idea of her literary nature, eager for truth, and strong enough to resist the petty temptations of flattery. In the act of awaken- ing my own recollections and of supplement- ing them with the numerous disclosures found in her most interesting letters, I have arrived at a sufficiently exact notion of her method of work, and of her ideas touching the conditions and requirements of her art, — an art which she possessed as an instinct until the day when, in a famous discussion, she was compelled to find for it a clear expression and a definitive formula. It indeed seems that it was the mere pleas- ure of writing that impelled her, almost with- out premeditation, to throw upon paper, in some confusion, but in concrete and living form, her dreams, her affections, her medita- tions, and her whimseys. In order to account for her almost incredible facility in writing, it was needful to bear in mind that, together with the natural gift for which there is no substitute, she possessed that fund of experience and of acquired knowledge which multiplies the resources of talent and permits it to be varied, doubtless not with- out fatiguing, but without ever exhausting it. The natural gift is evident, but it can hardly be analyzed. How explain with precision this 208 George Sand. extraordinary fact of an imagination that be- comes warmly enamoured of its own creations, of a faculty of expression that exhibits itself, one day, without having been trained, and adapts itself almost without groping and with- out effort to the most various subjects, — to analysis and to action, — as if the author found nothing easier and more natural than to relate her inward visions, and to depict to others, by means of a style which is merely her thought made visible, the characters and the dramas that move within her soul? Such is her un- deniable gift, — for there is no disputing the existence of these predestined minds which play in luminous ease and graceful freedom with the difficulties of expression ; while other writers, profound but laborious artists, must harry themselves and weary their intelligence in order to accomplish their work, not indeed without success, but with an effort that leaves its trace upon every page, every phrase, every word. The furrow is ploughed deep, but the reader feels that he has lent a hand. Hence, according to the place of the author, an esteem or an admiration that is not exempt from a certain feeling of lassitude. But to this natural gift George Sand joined a very wide and varied culture. She had read much, and although she had read at random Her Method of Work. 209 there had remained to her from these diverse studies alluvial deposits of great richness, which mingled with her own soil, singularly- enriching it and promoting its fertility. No one has better understood and expressed the necessity of study for art. " I know nothing," said she ; " but nevertheless something re- mains to me from having read and learned much. ... I know nothing, because I have no longer any memory ; but I have learned much, and at seventeen I spent my nights in study. If things have not stayed by me in their dis- tinct shapes, they have, for all that, left their honey in my hive." We have seen, indeed, from the " History of my Life," how many books she had travelled through at random but not fruitlessly, since from each author, whether poet, philosopher, or publicist, — from Byron, from Goethe, from Leibnitz, and from Rousseau, — there had remained some particle rolling rather confusedly in the broad and powerful current of her cerebral life. She never ceased to recommend this method to the dilettanti, to the amateurs, or to the young idlers who addressed themselves to her as to an easy adviser who would say to them, " You have genius ; trust to it, and go forward fearlessly." Such is the answer usually given by the great promoters of their own glory to 210 George Sand. all the solicitors who harass them, to be rid of whom they promptly send some stereotyped compliment with their literary benediction. George Sand abstained from tossing this sor- did coin to the young aspirants to art. She wrote to one of them : " I know very well that you wish to be a man of letters. As I have said to you, you can become such if you study everything. The gift of art cannot dispense with an extended knowledge in every direc- tion. . . . You may be struck by the want of solidity in most present writings and produc- tions : all comes of lack of study. Never will a good intellect be formed without conquer- ing the difficulties of every kind of labor, or at least of certain kinds that exact tension of will." Toward those in whom she interests herself she is implacable touching this pre- paratory hygiene of the will, which does not lead to erudition, properly so called, but which develops a special aptitude to understand any- thing whenever it becomes necessary, or when the writer desires it. Art alone, left to itself, devours and consumes itself. "You have the instincts and the tastes of art," she says to one of the favorite objects of her criticism ; " but you can at every moment testify that the artist who is merely an artist is either impotent, that is, mediocre, or excessive, that is mad. . . . You Her Method of Work. 2 1 1 think you can produce without having stored up. . . . You think to acquit yourself by means of reflection and advice. No ; one does not thus acquit one's self. It is needful to have lived and to have sought. It is needful to have digested many things, to have loved, suffered, waited, while laboring ever. In fine, one must thoroughly understand fence before trusting to the sword. Would you be like all those literary gamins who fancy themselves fine fellows because they print platitudes and nonsense? Flee them as you would the plague ; they are the microscopic eels of liter- ature." 1 This is, it will be agreed, a mascu- 1 By the side of this advice let us place another passage from her unpublished letters to Count d'A , whose daugh- teT-in-law afterward became one of our best novelists. Madame Sand desired above all things that the originality of every mind entering the career of letters should be re- spected. "You know," said she, "that I am quite at your service. But, believe me, submit the talent and the future of your young writer to the result of no consultation, not even with me. Let her venture, let her manifest herself in her spontaneity. I know by experience that the most sin- cere advice may check the genial impulse and cause the individuality to swerve. . . . She knows how to write, her taste is good, she is quite capable of criticising justly. As to imagination, if she has none, no advice will supply her with it ; if she has it, advice may chance to deprive her of it. Tell her that so long as I took counsel of others I had no inspiration, and that it came to me on the day when I ven- tured to walk alone." (Aug. 6, i860.) 212 George Sand. line and intrepid chapter in rhetoric which is worth all the rhetoric of the schools. It is the powerful voice of a ripened talent The counsels of her old age to the impatient youth of her petitioners bordered upon the highest morality. " Art is a sacred thing," she cried ; " a chalice not to be touched save after fast- ing and prayer. Forget it, unless you are able to carry on the study of fundamental things while testing to the utmost your inventive powers." " The study of fundamental things " is the condition of the future writer. If he has not laid up beforehand a hoard of solid acquire- ments in some order of ideas in which the great human curiosity has exercised itself, — history, natural science, law, political economy, philosophy, — what signifies it that he pos- sesses the tool ? The tool works upon nothing. What becomes of the artist in his frivolous labor, if he does not apply it to some resistant material ; if, indifferent to things, he occupies himself only with form ; if he does not make it his law to penetrate into every subject be- yond the commonplace and the accepted, and to give bottom and solidity to his painting? Excellent advice, which she had throughout her life applied on her own account, never ceasing to carry her active and enthusiastic Her MetJiod of Work. 2 1 3 curiosity into the most diverse orders of hu- man knowledge. Furthermore, since in art as in life roots are necessary, she had them run- ning far back ; nor did she cease to develop and strengthen them in the soil whence sprang the superb growths of her talent. She was always interested in some science, as natural history, of which she had made a constant study; or, in a broader way, Nature, which she had never ceased to contemplate with the inward as well as with the outward eye. She was powerfully attracted by a problem in natu- ral history ; such a problem she did not leave till she had solved it, and while she was pur- suing its solution nothing else existed for her. It happened to her, for example, to be occu- pied for entire months in researches of this kind, together with her son Maurice, who was likewise captivated with them; at such times her brain teemed with more or less barbarous names. In her dreams she saw nothing but rhomboid prisms, chatoyant reflections, lustre- less fractures, resinous fractures ; they passed entire hours in asking each other such ques- tions as, " Have you a piece of orthoclase? Have you a bit of albite ? " After these scien- tific orgies she had great difficulty in applying herself, at first, to ordinary life and its round of duties; but she returned to them with 214 George Sand. added power. At other times it was botany that engrossed her. " What. I should like would be to devote myself exclusively to it ; it would be heaven upon earth for me." Were not her annual excursions throughout France another labor of the same kind? " I like to have seen what I describe. Were it but three words that I have to say of a place, I like to behold it in my memory and to deceive my- self as little as possible." She had a way of her own of contemplating Nature in silence. But it was an active silence; she absorbed every detail presented to her eyes, and carried it away living before her inward vision, as distinct afterward as at the moment of per- ception. Hence the charm and the truth of her landscapes. Even when one has not seen the reality, one cries out involuntarily, as be- fore a portrait by a great master the original of which one does not know, — " How nat- ural ! " The art of it makes you believe in the resemblance. Still deeper were the roots that, from youth up, had attached her to a whole body of philo- sophical, political, and religious ideas. 1 They 1 What she tolerated least was the opinion of certain light-headed critics who say " that one has no need of a personal belief in order to write, and that it is enough to reflect facts and forms like a mirror. . . . No, this not true : Her final Conception of Art. 2 1 5 had early sunk into that open and eager soul ; early, too, had they become exaggerated and distorted ; some, however, had in the lapse of time been corrected by the natural strength of a good intellect; others had relaxed, in the harsh school of life, from their primitive rigid- ness. I shall not insist again upon the aber- rations of taste and good sense that had early made her an object of alarm to the public conscience, — an object even of the terrible hate and vengeance of two very different sides of public opinion, the side of Proudhon and the side of Louis Veuillot. It were better to portray George Sand in the latter period of her life ; to represent her, not as a convert to moderation, nor as a renegade from her convic- tions, but as applying herself with praiseworthy good faith to bringing these opinions within bounds more acceptable to herself, and in re- conquering, on some sides at least, the free- dom of her ego and her independence of mind. Certainly there ever remains within her, both in politics and in philosophy, a sufficient leaven of exaggeration and of paradoxes. But how the reader attaches himself only to a writer, only to a person- ality, whether pleasing or shocking to him. He feels that he has to deal with a person, not with an instrument." (March I, 1863. Unpublished Correspondence, cited above.) 216 George Sand. far is she, both in the order of time and in the order of thought, from being the rebel she once was ! After the experience of the war and the Commune it is only by very rare touches, scattered here and there in her cor- respondence, that one would recognize the for- mer friend of Mazzini and of Armand Barbes, the Utopian dreamer of reforms in the condi- tion of woman and in marriage, the enthusi- astic and fiery disciple of the gospel according to Pierre Leroux, the zealot of Christianity as reformed by the sombre pantheism of Lamen- nais; later on, the ardent revolutionist of 1848, the collaborator of Ledru-Rollin, the threaten- ing editor of the " Bulletins of the Republic," which emanated from the Ministry of the In- terior. So many events in politics and in so- cial philosophy have not been lost upon her. Of this I will give here only a few evidences. I will not even draw them from that famous " Journal of a Traveller during the War," pub- lished in the " Revue des Deux Mondes," with so much success, to the great scandal of some readers. I will take them from the Correspond- ence itself, — a witness that cannot lie. On the 28th of April, 1 871, she wrote to Flaubert: " The experiment that Paris is trying, or suffer- ing, proves nothing against the laws of prog- ress ; and if I have any principles, good or bad, Her final Conception of Art. 2 1 7 laid up in my mind, they are neither shaken nor modified. Long ago I learned to accept patience as one accepts the weather, the length of the winter, old age, failure in all its forms. But I think that partisans (sincere ones) must change their formulas, or perhaps recognize the emptiness of every a priori formula." And to Madame Adam, the 15th of June of the same year : " Let us weep tears of blood over our illusions and our errors. . . . Our princi- ples can and must remain the same ; but the application is put off, and it may be that we shall be condemned to will what we should not like." Whatever she may say, her principles were not shaken to their foundation, but modified in their application. To a young enthusiast who sent her political poetry, she replied : " Thanks ; but do not dedicate those verses to me. ... I hate the shedding of blood, and I will hear no more of the argument, ' Let us do evil that good may come. Let us kill in order to create.' No, no; my old age pro- tests against the tolerance in which my youth wavered. We must disentangle ourselves from the theories of 1793; they have ruined us. Whether reign of terror or Saint Bartholo- mew, the path is the same. . . . Curse all who build charnel-houses ; no life issues from 2 1 8 George Sand. them. This is an historic error from which we must free ourselves. Evil engenders evil." (Oct. 21, 1871.) And in the familiar style of which she is excessively fond, and which is a reminiscence of her Bohemian life, she wrote to Flaubert : " Day by day during the crisis I have written my impressions and my reflections. The ' Revue des Deux Mondes ' publishes this journal. If you read it, you will see that life has everywhere been rent asunder, even in the regions where the war has not penetrated ! You will also see that, although very much of a gudgeon, I have not swallowed the party bunkum." The style is not noble, but how expressive ! She smiles at her uncritical and distrustless enthusiasm of former days, at that impatient optimism which wished to realize progress im- mediately and at any cost, even by force. She had done much meanwhile to better her own nature, and now the events at Paris cause her again to call everything in question. " I had gained much over my own character, I had ex- tinguished the useless and dangerous outbursts, over my volcanoes I had sown grass and flowers which were flourishing, and I imagined that all the world could enlighten, correct, or restrain itself . . . and behold ! I am awakening from a dream. ... It is, however, wrong to despair. Her final Conception of Art. 219 . . . All this will pass, I hope. But I am sick with the disease of my nation and of my race." " Let us resist death ! " she cries unceasingly ; and she adds : " I talk as though I had long to live, and I forget that I am very old. What does it signify? I shall live in those who live after me." (1871.) Thus in everything, even in the philosophic order of thought, there appears in her a not- able mellowing; the excessive passion that flamed stormily in all her ideas has been calmed. She remains what she has always been, an ardent spiritualist, 1 but she no longer deems it necessary to make war upon Chris- tianity; she remains outside; she no longer fulminates. One would look in vain in the correspondence of her later years for those furious declamations against the priest, which twenty years earlier appeared in season and out of season in her novels and in her letters. As to her philosophic convictions, she defends them with indomitable and praiseworthy ob- stinacy against the cross-grained intolerance of the materialism that styles itself scientific. She cannot endure being told, " Believe this with me on pain of standing with the men of the past; let us destroy in order to prove, let us beat down in order to build up." She replies : 1 Not a spiritist, but a denier of materialism. — Tr. 220 George Sand. " Confine yourself to proof, and refrain from issuing commands. The r61e of science is not to beat down by means of wrath and with the help of the passions. . . . You say, ' Faith must burn and kill science, or science must drive out and dissipate faith.' Such mutual extermination seems to me neither the aim of a battle nor the business of a generation. Freedom would perish in the struggle." She sees no necessity of forcing her understanding in order to dispel from it noble ideas, nor of destroying certain faculties within herself in order " to play a trick upon the devotees.'' " It is not necessary, it is not useful to make so strong an affirmation of annihilation, of which we know nothing. It seems to me that at this moment men go too far, both in sci- ence and in art, in the affirmation of a nar- row and rather coarse realism." It will be seen that she has gradually freed herself from the yoke of coteries that had so heavily weighed her down, and from the ex- cessive influence of certain personages who had almost dispossessed her of herself. She regains herself and resumes possession with her convictions and also with her hobbies, — hobbies that are, at all events, her own, and a part of her personality. She rises again to a plane whence her own passion — but more Her final Conception of Art. 221 frequently the passion of others — had too fre- quently dragged her down. In the interval new talents had arisen. In the order of her own activity, at least, she wished to be ignorant of none. She interested herself keenly in these various manifestations of the literary life. She had stood in relations of exquisite courtesy with Octave Feuillet, whose " Romance of a Poor Young Man " she praised warmly and spontaneously ; she even remained on excellent terms with him up to the publication of " The Story of Sibyl," which provoked from her a bitter and impassioned reply, — " Mademoiselle de la Quintinie." She had followed with interest the maiden efforts of Edmond About, and had applauded them, not without some protestations against the system of perpetual raillery. " Our despairs of thirty years ago have been much ridiculed. You of the present laugh at them, but your laughter is sadder than our tears." She was especially surprised that the younger talents persisted " in seeing and exhibiting life in such a man- ner as to cause a grievous shock to all the, in- tegrity of one's heart. We were painting man as suffering, wounded in the battle of life. You paint the passionate man who recalcitrates against suffering, and who, instead of rejecting the cup, fills it to the brim and drains it. But 222 George Sand. this cup of strength and life destroys you; witness the fact that all the characters in ' Madelon ' are dead at the end of the play, shamefully dead, save Her, the personification of vice, ever young and triumphant." This sort of one-sidedness of success, if not of sympathy, irritates her. " What then, — such vice is alone a power, honor and virtue none? ... I agree with you that Feuillet and I, each from his own view-point, make legends rather than novels of manners. I ask you, for my part, only to make that which we cannot make ; and since you know so well the sores and leprosies of this society, to kindle the sense of strength in the environment you depict so truly." x For Alexandre Dumas she had a real devotion made up of ■ admiration and affection. She rejoices profoundly in his suc- cess ; she reads " The Clemenceau Affair " with maternal solicitude; she immediately suggests a counterview which will be devel- oped some time later, with a change of sex, in " Princess Georges." When, after the war and .the Commune, Alexandre Dumas, borrow- ing the mask and the pen of Junius, turns pub- licist for once, she applauds rapturously, and declares the book a sheer masterpiece. " How you go to the bottom of things, and how well 1 Letter to M. Edmond About, March, 1863. Her final Conception of Art. 223 you know how to put deeds where I put only- intentions ! Then, too, how it is expressed, — at once developed and compact, vigorous, stirring, and solid ! " She was never weary of admiring his scenic knowledge and power, the vis dramatica predestined to the great suc- cesses which she prided herself upon having foreseen. " Do you remember that I told you, after ' Diane de Lys,' that you would eclipse them all? I remember it, if you do not, for my impression was one of complete force and certitude. You appeared to have no presenti- ment of it, you were so young! Perhaps I revealed you to yourself, and it is one of the good things that I have done in my life." She who had so much trouble in transforming her novels into dramas, and who did not, indeed, credit herself with much skill in scenical dis- position, was struck with Dumas' freedom of movement, with his strong accent of truth in situations and sentiments in dealing with which others do not escape conventionality. " And what progress since that time ! You have come to understand what you are about, and to im- pose your will upon the public. You will go farther still, and ever farther." J It is for the 1 Letter to Alexandre Dumas, May 23, 1871. For the beginning of this friendship, see the letter to M. Charles Edmond, of the 2^th of November, 1857. 2 24 George Sand. public to decide whether this amiable proph- ecy, which she sent him with her maternal benediction, has been realized. Were I to define George Sand's mind, with- out reference to the episodes and adventures of her literary life, I should say that it was a dogmatic and impassioned mind, — dogmatic in the sense that she held firm convictions upon fundamental matters. Distinction must be made between the value of one's ideas and one's faith in them. Whatever the value of hers, she stoutly believed them, and took them very seriously; in whatever company, scep- tical or bantering, she found herself, she per- mitted no one to make light of them ; to them she instinctively subordinated the best part of herself, — her art. Now ideas, even when questionable, possess the virtue of communi- cating something of their own power to the minds that are nourished upon them; such minds receive a character of elevation and generosity in comparison with those which erect absolute indifference into a kind of aes- thetics. This is the secret of the superiority she seems to have held in her long correspond- ence with Flaubert, in which some of the most delicate questions in literature were touched upon, and in which two wholly diverse and Her final Conception of Art. 225 almost opposite conceptions of art had an op- portunity for mutual criticism. This friendly controversy lasted nearly twelve years, — from 1864 to 1876. It matters little what was the beginning of this literary friend- ship between two such different personages ; doubtless they had met one day at one of those famous Magny dinners where George Sand did not fail to appear when she came to Paris, — were it only to get the news from that republic of letters which she forgot during her long sojourns at Nohant. After this more or less fortuitous meeting Flaubert had applauded with all his strength at the first representation of " Villemer," and George Sand gratefully wrote him " that she loved him with all her heart." The acquaintance was established; letters became more and more frequent; they were to continue as long as her life. She had admired " Madame Bovary;" as for " Salamm- bd," she had immediately detected its weak point. " A very fine and able work," said she, " but really of interest only to artists and scholars. They discuss it all the more, in- asmuch as they are its only readers ; while the public contents itself with saying, ' It is per- haps superb, but the people of that time do not in the least interest me.' " x 1 Letter to Maurice Sand, June 20, 1865. IS 226 George Sand. She had doubtless allowed something of this impression to appear in chatting with Flau- bert, who in his turn seems to have rallied her as " the old troubadour of the tavern clock, who sings and will ever sing of perfect love." Troubadour, — the name pleases her ; she laughingly adopts it, and so designates herself from that day forth. The artist and the trou- badour, — these two picturesque words marked the opposition of the two authors, and this gave a natural occasion for controversy. Al- though before this time George Sand had very often touched casually upon this subject of art, it is very probable that she had never, till now, reflected upon her personal art, — that she had never rendered herself a very exact account either of her processes of composition or of the end that she pursued. In this, as in other things, she had obeyed her instincts, and particularly that turn for writing, in order to narrate and to paint, which manifested itself in her with irresistible power, and with an ease bordering upon the miraculous. What led her to reflect upon these subjects, and to form- ulate a definition of herself, was the spectacle of the counter-tendencies that were appearing all about her, and the enforced comparison of herself with men of the most various talents. Realism in fiction was but just beginning; she Her final Conception of Art. 227 could hardly have witnessed the first great success of M. Zola. But Flaubert, and Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, revealed in each of their works a new art, combining Balzac's in- tensity of observation with Theophile Gautier's preoccupation and care about the form. Here were symptoms that fascinated the alert curi- osity of George Sand. She profited, at first by the chances of life, then by the friendly relations between herself and Flaubert, to de- termine, as opportunity offered, the differences of literary temperament which she felt within herself in presence of these new groups or of the personalities that best summed up their tendencies. The contrast between her nature and that of a writer like Flaubert was striking : she, lavish to excess, pouring her full heart into her books, perennially fruitful, with a flow of expression so spontaneous and so natural that she compared herself to " spring-water which runs on mindless of the things it might mirror were it to pause ; " Flaubert, a mind of laborsome invention and expression, as exact- ing toward himself as toward others, anxious and dissatisfied about his work, one of the representatives of a group and of a race of over-refined artists, — great craftsmen in form, jewellers in style, carvers of rare cameos, — a dogged searcher for the most expressive word 228 George Sand. or the most decorative epithet, torturing him- self over a page as if the future of the world — or rather the future of art — were at stake, tormented by literary sensations of morbid acuteness and subtlety, and so frittering away his rich artistic nature in details, indifferent to the ' substance of things, neither enlisting on the side of the great ideas that lead the world nor interesting himself in them, curious only to mark the variety of the characters they in- spire or of the follies they provoke, an im- passive observer of the human puppets and of the hidden wires that move them. It had not been always thus. In the history of his mind " Madame Bovary " had represented a mo- ment of dilation and expansion, an opulent breadth of composition, a pleasure in produ- cing, a joyous fertility, that he never afterward regained. That broad talent withdrew from the moving spectacle of human life to brood over archaeological curiosities, or the oddities of pathological cases. The consequence was a certain disaffection on the part of the public, a growing unpopu- larity, and on the writer's part much umbrage and discouragement. George Sand does not cease to cheer him in his despondency; she lavishes upon him the best advice, as her heart chances to dictate it to her pen; she Her final Conception of Art. 229 rouses and reassures him, flinging broadcast through her correspondence the sanest ideas touching the true attitude of the artist, who should not too proudly isolate himself from his fellowmen, touching the conditions of art, touching the duties art imposes, which must not be confused with servitude to an ex- acting coterie. In all this part of her corre- spondence, while delineating herself to the life, George Sand maintains a very high level of heart and reason. Full of solicitude for the dear sick and tormented artist, she does what in her lies to infuse into him something of her serenity and of her wholesome mental vigor. Let him abandon himself a little more to his natural imagination ; let him torture it less, at the risk of paralyzing it. " You always sur- prise me with your painful labor; is it a bit of coquetry? There is so little appearance of it. . . . As to style, I hold it cheaper than you. The wind plays at random upon my old harp. It has its high and its low tones, its coarse notes and its dying tones ; but it is pretty much all one to me, provided the emotion comes. But I can find nothing in myself ; it is the other who sings at his caprice, well or ill ; and when I try to think of that it frightens me, and I say to myself that I am nothing, — nothing at all. But there is a saving wisdom ; 230 George Sand. we can say to ourselves : ' After all, if we be absolutely nothing but instruments, it is still a pleasant condition and an unparalleled sensa- tion to feel one's self vibrate.' . . . Then let the wind sweep through your chords a little. It is my opinion that you take more than need- ful pains, and that you should more frequently let the other act." At every moment she re- turns to this advice, which contains in germ a whole hygiene suited to the talent of Flau- bert, who had become the torturer and the victim of himself. " Be, therefore, less cruel toward yourself. Get under way, and when inspiration shall have done its work you will raise the general tone, and will sacrifice what- ever should not be brought into the fore- ground. Is this not practicable? It seems to me that it is. What you write seems so easy, so abundant ! It is a constant overflow. I can in no wise understand your pangs." It troubles her also to see that he becomes an- gry with the public on every occasion, that his wrath is unquenchable. " At your age, I should like to see you less irritated, less occu- pied with the stupidity of others. For me this is lost time, as it would be to cry out against the tedium of the rain or of the flies. The public, when so frequently told that it is stu- pid, grows angry, and thus becomes all the Her final Conception of Art. 231 more stupid. Perhaps, however, this chronic indignation is a necessity of your nature; it would kill me." She untiringly opposes her pet heresy, that an author writes for twenty intelligent persons and snaps his finger at the rest. " This is not true, since the want of suc- cess irritates and grieves you." Let there be no contempt for the public ! We must write for all who are hungry to read, and who can profit by a good book. None of this proud isolation from humanity ! She can- not admit that, on pretext of being an artist, one ceases to be one's self, and that the man of letters destroys the man. What an odd mania, to wish, as soon as one writes, to be another than the real man, — to wish to disappear, to ef- face one's self, to cease to exist ! What a false rule of taste ! For her part, she puts as much as she can of herself into " the skins of her good people." Every writer must do thus if he desires to interest It is not a question of putting one's person upon the scene, — that is indeed to be avoided. " But what is this mor- bid fancy of withdrawing one's soul from what one does ? To conceal one's own opinion of the characters portrayed, and consequently to leave the reader uncertain what opinion he should have of them, is to desire not to be under- stood. From that moment the reader forsakes 232 George Sand. you ; for if he is to understand the story you relate to him, it is on condition that you show him clearly that this is a strong and that a weak character." Herein consists the unpar- donable fault of Flaubert's " Sentimental Edu- cation," and the sole cause of its failure. "This desire to paint things as they are, the incidents of life as they present themselves to the eye, is not, it seems to me, very rational. It is all one to me whether you paint inert things as a realist or as a poet ; but the moment you touch the movements of the human heart, the case is altered. You cannot abstract yourself while contemplating this object, for you are a man, and men are your readers." Flaubert rejoined that he preferred a well- turned phrase to a whole system of meta- physics, and he fell back with a kind of jealous mystery upon the worship of form. Very re- cently the " Journal of the Brothers Goncourt " gave us a sketch from life of one of the sit- tings of the club of the initiated at the office of the " Artist" It exhibited the unwieldy figure of Theophile Gautier repeating this phrase, and amorously ringing the changes upon it: "The form is parent of the idea; " a phrase which Flaubert had given him that very morning, and which he regarded as the supreme formula of the school, suitable to be Her final Conception of Art. 233 engraved upon its walls. It is against this school that George Sand uses the last weapons of her dialectic, — a dialectic ever young, de- spite her age. These are deplorable formulas, extreme foregone conclusions in words. " At bottom," said she to Flaubert, " you read, you dig, you toil more than I, and more than a crowd of others. You are a hundred-fold more opulent than we all ; you are a rich man, and you whine like a beggar. A little for charity to a poor wretch who has his mattress stuffed with gold, but who wishes to feed only upon well-turned phrases and choice words ! . . . Why, blockhead, rummage in your mattress and eat your gold ! Nourish yourself upon the ideas and sentiments hoarded in your head and in your heart; these digested, the words and phrases — the form which you esteem so much — will take care of themselves. You deem the form an end ; it is but an effect. . . . Supreme impartiality is an anti-human thing; a novel must be, above all, human. If it is not so, it is not. saved by being well written, well composed, and well observed in details. It lacks the one thing needful, — interest." And the affectionate note followed, to temper the austerity of the counsel: "You need a suc- cess after this mischance which has so deeply disturbed you ; I am telling you the certain 234 George Sand. conditions of this success. Retain your faith in form, but occupy yourself more with sub- stance [by which she meant the ideas and the precise meaning of the work]. Do not take true virtue to be a commonplace in literature. Give it a representative; let the strong and the honest mingle with the fools and idiots whom you love to ridicule. Quit the cavern of the realists, and return to true reality, which is a blending of the beautiful and the ugly, of the dull and of the brilliant, but in which the desire for what is good finds, despite all, its place and its use." I have wished to conclude this study with these fine and simple words, which give the por- trait its true relief and its true color. Whatever may be said of George Sand, of her adven- tures of every' kind, of the issues of thought or act to which the ardor of her imagination drew her, — in fine, of her chimeras, which at one time went to the length of violence of thought, it is certain that, as one follows her life as recorded almost from day to day in her correspondence, one sees' the wealth of her experience and her reason — her intellectual fortune — increasing, and the employment of these dear-bought riches becoming better de- fined. And whatever may one day be thought of her, of her life, and of her works, there is Her final Conception of Art. 235 revealed in her letters an exalted image of the rare qualities by virtue of which her books will retain their privileged place in the lit- erary history of this time, — her wonderful fertility of conception, her natural genius for style, and that proud ideal of art which con- stitutes the rectitude of her talent. THE END. J-