George Sand, some aspects of her life and writings Part 10

The following is a fragment of a letter which George Sand sent to Grzymala, in 1847: "For seven years I have lived with him as a virgin.

If any woman on earth could inspire him with absolute confidence, I am certainly that woman, but he has never understood. I know, too, that many people accuse me of having worn him out with my violent sensuality, and others accuse me of having driven him to despair by my freaks.

I believe you know how much truth there is in all this. He himself complains to me that I am killing him by the privations I insist upon, and I feel certain that I should kill him by acting otherwise."(29)

(29) Communicated by M. Rocheblave.

It has been said that when Chopin was at Nohant he had a village girl there as his mistress. We do not care to discuss the truth of this statement.

It is interesting to endeavour to characterize the nature of this episode in George Sand's sentimental life. She helps us herself in this.

As a romantic writer she neglected nothing which she could turn into literature. She therefore made an a.n.a.lysis of her own case, worked out with the utmost care, and published it in one of her books which is little read now. The year of the rupture was 1847, and before the rupture had really occurred, George Sand brought out a novel ent.i.tled _Lucrezia Floriani_. In this book she traces the portrait of Chopin as Prince Karol. She denied, of course, that it was a portrait, but contemporaries were not to be deceived, and Liszt gives several pa.s.sages from _Lucrezia Floriani_ in his biography of the musician. The decisive proof was that Chopin recognized himself, and that he was greatly annoyed.

As a matter of fact, there was nothing disagreeable about this portrait.

The following fragments are taken from it: "Gentle, sensitive, exquisite in all things, at the age of fifteen he had all the charms of youth, together with the gravity of a riper age. He remained delicate in body ind mind. The lack of muscular development caused him to preserve his fascinating beauty. . . . He was something like one of those ideal creatures which mediaeval poetry used for the ornamentation of Christian temples. Nothing could have been purer and at the same time more enthusiastic than his ideas. . . . He was always lost in his dreams, and had no sense of reality. . . ." His exquisite politeness was then described, and the ultra acuteness and nervosity which resulted in that power of divination which he possessed. For a portrait to be living, it must have some faults as well as qualities. His delineator does not forget to mention the att.i.tude of mystery in which the Prince took refuge whenever his feelings were hurt. She speaks also of his intense susceptibility. "His wit was very brilliant," she says; "it consisted of a kind of subtle mocking shrewdness, not really playful, but a sort of delicate, bantering gaiety." It may have been to the glory of Prince Karol to resemble Chopin, but it was also quite creditable to Chopin to have been the model from which this distinguished neurasthenic individual was taken.

Prince Karol meets a certain Lucrezia Floriani, a rich actress and courtesan. She is six years older than he is, somewhat past her prime, and now leading a quiet life. She has done with love and love affairs, or, at least, she thinks so. "The fifteen years of pa.s.sion and torture, which she had gone through, seemed to her now so cruel that she was hoping to have them counted double by the supreme Dispenser of our trials." It was, of course, natural that she should acknowledge G.o.d's share in the matter. We are told that "implacable destiny was not satisfied," so that when Karol makes his first declaration, Lucrezia yields to him, but at the same time she puts a suitable colouring on her fall. There are many ways of loving, and it is surely n.o.ble and disinterested in a woman to love a man as his mother. "I shall love him," she says, kissing the young Prince's pale face ardently, "but it will be as his mother loved him, just as fervently and just as faithfully. This maternal affection, etc. . . ." Lucrezia Floriani had a way of introducing the maternal instinct everywhere. She undertook to encircle her children and Prince Karol with the same affection, and her notions of therapeutics were certainly somewhat strange and venturesome, for she fetched her children to the Prince's bedside. "Karol breathed more freely," we are told, "when the children were there. Their pure breath mingling with their mother's made the air milder and more gentle for his feverish lungs." This we shall not attempt to dispute. It is the study of the situation, though, that forms the subject of _Lucrezia Floriani_. George Sand gives evidence of wonderful clear-sightedness and penetration in the art of knowing herself.

She gives us warning that it is "a sad story and sorrowful truth"

that she is telling us. She has herself the better _role_ of the two naturally. It could not have been on that, account that Chopin' was annoyed. He was a Pole, and therefore doubly chivalrous, so that such an objection would have been unworthy of a lover. What concerns us is that George Sand gives, with great nicety, the exact causes of the rupture.

In the first place, Karol was jealous of Lucrezia's stormy past; then his refined nature shrank from certain of her comrades of a rougher kind. The invalid was irritated by her robust health, and by the presence and, we might almost say, the rivalry of the children. Prince Karol finds them nearly always in his way, and he finally takes a dislike to them. There comes a moment when Lucrezia sees herself obliged to choose between the two kinds of maternity, the natural kind and the maternity according to the convention of lovers.

The special kind of sentiment, then, between George Sand and Chopin, Just as between Lucrezia and Prince Karol, was just this: love with maternal affection. This is extremely difficult to define, as indeed is everything which is extremely complex. George Sand declares that her reason for not refusing intimacy with Chopin was that she considered this in the light of a duty and as a safeguard. "One duty more," she writes, "in a life already so full, a life in which I was overwhelmed with fatigue, seemed to me one chance more of arriving at that austerity towards which I felt myself being drawn with a kind of religious enthusiasm."(30)

(30) _Histoire de via vie._

We can only imagine that she was deceiving herself. To accept a lover for the sake of giving up lovers altogether seems a somewhat heroic means to an end, but also somewhat deceptive. It is certainly true that there was something more in this love than the attraction she felt for Musset and for Michel. In the various forms and degrees of our feelings, there is nothing gained by attempting to establish decided divisions and absolute demarcations for the sake of cla.s.sifying them all. Among sentiments which are akin, but which our language distinguishes when defining them, there may be some mixture or some confusion with regard to their origin. Alfred de Vigny gives us in _Samson_, as the origin of love, even in man, the remembrance of his mother's caresses:

_Il revera toujours a la chaleur du sein._

It seems, therefore, that we cannot apply the same reasoning, with regard to love, when referring to the love of a man or of a woman. With the man there is more pride of possession, and with the woman there is more tenderness, more pity, more charity. All this leads us to the conclusion that maternal affection in love is not an unnatural sentiment, as has so often been said, or rather a perversion of sentiment. It is rather a sentiment in which too much instinct and heredity are mingled in a confused way. The object of the education of feeling is to arrive at discerning and eliminating the elements which interfere with the integrity of it. Rousseau called Madame de Warens his mother, but he was a man who was lacking in good taste. George Sand frequently puts into her novels this conception of love which we see her put into practice in life. It is impossible when a.n.a.lyzing it closely not to find something confused and disturbing in it which somewhat offends us.

It now remains for us to study what influence George Sand's friendship with some of the greatest artists of her times had on her works. Beside Liszt and Chopin, she knew Delacroix, Madame Dorval, Pauline Viardot, Nourrit and Lablache. Through them she went into artistic circles.

Some of her novels are stories of the life of artists. _Les Maitres Mosaistes_ treats of the rivalry between two studios. _La derniere Aldini_ is the story of a handsome gondolier who, as a tenor, turned the heads of patrician women. The first part of _Consuelo_ takes us back to the singing schools and theatres of Venice in the eighteenth century, and introduces us to individuals taken from life and cleverly drawn.

We have Comte Zustiniani, the dilettante, a wealthy patron of the fine arts; Porpora, the old master, who looks upon his art as something sacred; Corilla, the prima donna, annoyed at seeing a new star appear; Anzoleto, the tenor, who is jealous because he gets less applause than his friend; and above and beyond all the others Consuelo, good kind Consuelo, the sympathetic singer.

The theatres of Venice seem to be very much like those of Paris and of other places. We have the following sketch of the vanity of the comedian. "Can a man be jealous of a woman's advantages? Can a lover dislike his sweetheart to have success? A man can certainly be jealous of a woman's advantages when that man is a vain artist, and a lover may hate his sweetheart to have any success if they both belong to the theatre. A comedian is not a man, Consuelo, but a woman. He lives on his sickly vanity; he only thinks of satisfying that vanity, and he works for the sake of intoxicating himself with vanity. A woman's beauty is apt to take attention from him and a woman's talent may cause his talent to be thrown in the background. A woman is his rival, or rather he is the rival of a woman. He has all the little meannesses, the caprices, the exigences and the weak points of a coquette." Such is the note of this picture of things and people in the theatrical world. How can we doubt its veracity!

At any rate, the general idea that George Sand had of the artist was exactly the idea adopted by romanticism. We all know what a being set apart and free from all social and moral laws, what a "monster"

romanticism made of the artist. It is one of its dogmas that the necessities of art are incompatible with the conditions of a regular life. An artist, for instance, cannot be _bourgeois_, as he is the exact opposite. We have Kean's speech in Dumas' drama, ent.i.tled _Kean, or Disorder and Genius._

"An actor," he says, "must know all the pa.s.sions, so that he may express them as he should. I study them in myself." And then he adds: "That is what you call, orderly! And what is to become of genius while I am being orderly?"

All this is absurd. The artist is not the man who has felt the most, but the man best gifted for imagining the various states of mind and feeling and for expressing them. We know, too, that an irregular life is neither the origin nor the stamp of extraordinary intellectual worth. All the cripples of Bohemian life prove to us that genius is not the outcome of that kind of life, but that, on the contrary, such life is apt to paralyze talent. It is very convenient, though, for the artist and for every other variety of "superior beings" to make themselves believe that ordinary morals are not for them. The best argument we can have against this theory is the case of George Sand. The artist, in her case, was eminently a very regular and hard-working _bourgeois_ woman.

The art in which George Sand gave evidence of the surest taste was music. That is worthy of notice. In one of her _Lettres d'un voyageur_, she celebrates Liszt attacking the _Dies irae_ on the Fribourg organ.

She devotes another letter to the praise of Meyer-beer. She has a.n.a.lyzed the different forms of musical emotion in several of her books. One of the ideas dear to romanticism was that of the union and fusion of all the arts. The writer can, and in a certain way he ought, to produce with words the same effects that the painter does with colours and the sculptor with lines. We all know how much literature romantic painters and sculptors have put into their art. The romantic writers were less inclined to accord the same welcome to music as to the plastic arts.

Theophile Gautier is said to have exclaimed that music was "the most disagreeable and the dearest of all the arts." Neither Lamartine, Hugo, nor any other of the great writers of that period was influenced by music. Musset was the first one to be impa.s.sioned by it, and this may have been as much through his dandyism as from conviction.

_Fille de la douleur, Harmonie, Harmonie, Langue que fiour l'amour invents le ginie, Qui nous viens d'Italie, et qui lui vins des cieux, Douce langue du coeur, la seule ou la pensee, Cette vierge craintive et d'une ombre ofensie, Pa.s.se en gardant son voile et sans craindre les eux, Qui sait ce qu'un enfant peut entendre et peut dire Dans tes soupirs divins nes de l'air qu'il respire, Tristes comme son coeur et doux comme sa voix?_

George Sand, who agreed with Musset, claimed for "the most beautiful of all the arts," the honour of being able to paint "all the shades of sentiment and all the phases of pa.s.sion." "Music," she says, "can express everything. For describing scenes of nature it has ideal colours and lines, neither exact nor yet too minute, but which are all the more vaguely and delightfully poetical."(31)

(31) Eleventh _Lettre d'un voyageur_: To Giacomo Meyerbeer.

As examples of music in literature we have George Sand's phrase, more lyrical and musical than picturesque. We have, too, the gentle, soothing strophes of Sully Prudhomme and the vague melody of the Verlaine songs: "_De la musique avant toute chose_." It would be absurd to exaggerate the influence exercised by George Sand, and to attribute to her an importance which does not belong to her, over poetical evolution. It is only fair to say, though, that music, which was looked upon suspiciously for so long a time by cla.s.sical writers of sane and sure taste, has completely invaded our present society, so that we are becoming more and more imbued with it. George Sand's predilection for modern art is another feature which makes her one of us, showing that her tendencies were very marked for things of the present day.

VII

THE HUMANITARIAN DREAM

PIERRE LEROUX--SOCIALISTIC NOVELS

Hitherto we have seen George Sand put into her work her sufferings, her protests as a woman, and her dreams as an artist. But the nineteenth-century writer did not confine his ambitions to this modest task. He belonged to a corporation which counted among its members Voltaire and Rousseau. The eighteenth-century philosophers had changed the object of literature. Instead of an instrument of a.n.a.lysis, they had made of it a weapon for combat, an incomparable weapon for attacking inst.i.tutions and for overthrowing governments. The fact is, that from the time of the Restoration we shall scarcely meet with a single writer, from the philosopher to the vaudevillist, and from the professor to the song-maker, who did not wish to act as a torch on the path of humanity.

Poets make revolutions, and show Plato how wrong he was in driving them away from his Republic. Sophocles was appointed a general at Athens for having written a good tragedy, and so novelists, dramatists, critics and makers of puns devoted themselves to making laws. George Sand was too much a woman of her times to keep aloof from such a movement. We shall now have to study her in her socialistic _role_.

We can easily imagine on what side her sympathies were. She had always been battling with inst.i.tutions, and it seemed to her that inst.i.tutions were undoubtedly in the wrong. She had proved that there was a great deal of suffering in the world, and as human nature is good at bottom, she decided that society was all wrong. She was a novelist, and she therefore considered that the most satisfactory solutions are those in which imagination and feeling play a great part. She also considered that the best politics are those which are the most like a novel. We must now follow her, step by step, along the various roads leading to Utopia. The truth is, that in that great manufactory of systems and that storehouse of panaceas which the France of Louis-Philippe had become, the only difficulty was to choose between them all.

The first, in date, of the new gospels was that of the Saint-Simonians.

When George Sand arrived in Paris, Saint-Simonism was one of the curiosities offered to astonished provincials. It was a parody of religion, but it was organized in a church with a Father in two persons, Bazard and Enfantin. The service took place in a _bouis-bouis_. The costume worn consisted of white trousers, a red waistcoat and a blue tunic. On the days when the Father came down from the heights of Menilmontant with his children, there was great diversion for the people in the street. An important thing was lacking in the organization of the Saint-Simonians. In order to complete the "sacerdotal couple," a woman was needed to take her place next the Father. A Mother was asked for over and over again. It was said that she would soon appear, but she was never forthcoming. Saint-Simon had tried to tempt Madame de Stael.

"I am an extraordinary man," he said to her, "and you are just as extraordinary as a woman. You and I together would have a still more extraordinary child." Madame de Stael evidently did not care to take part in the manufacture of this prodigy. When George Sand's first novels appeared, the Saint-Simonians were full of hope. This was the woman they had been waiting for, the free woman, who having meditated on the lot of her sisters would formulate the Declaration of the rights and duties of woman. Adolphe Gueroult was sent to her. He was the editor of the _Opinion nationale_. George Sand had a great fund of common sense, though, and once more the little society awaited the Mother in vain. It was finally decided that she should be sought for in the East. A mission was organized, and messengers were arrayed in white, as a sign of the vow of chast.i.ty, with a pilgrim's staff in their hand. They begged as they went along, and slept sometimes outdoors, but more often at the police-station. George Sand was not tempted by this kind of maternity, but she kept in touch with the Saint-Simonians. She was present at one of their meetings at Menilmontant. Her published _Correspondance_ contains a letter addressed by her to the Saint-Simonian family in Paris. As a matter of fact, she had received from it, on the 1st of January, 1836, a large collection of presents. There were in all no less than fifty-nine articles, among which were the following: a dress-box, a pair of boots, a thermometer, a carbine-carrier, a pair of trousers and a corset.

Saint-Simonism was universally jeered at, but it is quite a mistake to think that ridicule is detrimental in France. On the contrary, it is an excellent means of getting anything known and of spreading the knowledge of it abroad; it is in reality a force. Saint-Simonism is at the root of many of the humanitarian doctrines which were to spring up from its ashes. One of its essential doctrines was the diffusion of the soul throughout all humanity, and another that of being born anew. Enfantin said: "I can feel St. Paul within me. He lives within me." Still another of its doctrines was that of the rehabilitation of the flesh.

Saint-Simonism proclaimed the equality of man and woman, that of industry and art and science, and the necessity of a fresh repart.i.tion of wealth and of a modification of the laws concerning property. It also advocated increasing the attributions of the State considerably. It was, in fact, the first of the doctrines offering to the lower cla.s.ses, by way of helping them to bear their wretched misery, the ideal of happiness here below, lending a false semblance of religion to the desire for material well-being. George Sand had one vulnerable point, and that was her generosity. By making her believe that she was working for the outcasts of humanity, she could be led anywhere, and this was what happened.

Among other great minds affected by the influence of Saint-Simonism, it is scarcely surprising to find Lamennais. When George Sand first knew him, he was fifty-three years of age. He had broken with Rome, and was the apocalyptic author of _Paroles d'un croyant_. He put into his revolutionary faith all the fervour of his loving soul, a soul that had been created for apostleship, and to which the qualification of "a disaffected cathedral" certainly applied.

After the famous trial, Liszt took him to call on George Sand in her attic. This was in 1835. She gives us the following portrait of him: "Monsieur de Lamennais is short, thin, and looks ill. He seems to have only the feeblest breath of life in his body, but how his face beams.

His nose is too prominent for his small figure and for his narrow face. If it were not for this nose out of all proportion, he would be handsome. He was very easily entertained. A mere nothing made him laugh, and how heartily he laughed."(32) It was the gaiety of the seminarist, for Monsieur Feli always remained the _Abbe_ de Lamennais. George Sand had a pa.s.sionate admiration for him. She took his side against any one who attacked him in her third _Lettre d'un voyageur_, in her _Lettre a Lerminier_, and in her article on _Amshaspands et Darvands_. This is the t.i.tle of a book by Lamennais. The extraordinary names refer to the spirits of good and evil in the mythology of Zoroaster. George Sand proposed to p.r.o.nounce them _Chenapans et Pedants_. Although she had a horror of journalism, she agreed to write in Lamennais' paper, _Le Monde._

(32) _Histoire de ma vie._

"He is so good and I like him so much," she writes, "that I would give him as much of my blood and of my ink as he wants."(33) She did not have to give him any of her blood, and he did not accept much of her ink. She commenced publishing her celebrated _Lettres a Marcie_ in _Le Monde_. We have already spoken of these letters, in order to show how George Sand gradually attenuated the harshness of her early feminism.

(33) _Correspondance_: To Jules Janin, February 15, 1837.

These letters alarmed Lamennais, nevertheless, and she was obliged to discontinue them. Feminism was the germ of their disagreement. Lamennais said: "She does not forgive St. Paul for having said: 'Wives, obey your husbands.'" She continued to acknowledge him as "one of our saints,"

but "the father of our new Church" gradually broke away from her and her friends, and expressed his opinion about her with a severity and harshness which are worthy of note.

Lamennais' letters to Baron de Vitrolles contain many allusions to George Sand, and they are most uncomplimentary.

"I hear no more about Carlotta" (Madame Marliani), he writes, "nor about George Sand and Madame d'Agoult. I know there has been a great deal of quarrelling among them. They are as fond of each other as Lesage's two _diables_, one of whom said: 'That reconciled us, we kissed each other, and ever since then we have been mortal enemies.'" He also tells that there is a report that in her novel, ent.i.tled _Horace_, she has given as unflattering a portrait as possible of her dear, sweet, excellent friend, Madame d'Agoult, the _Arabella_ of the _Lettres d'un voyageur_.

"The portraits continue," he writes, "all true to life, without being like each other." In the same book, _Horace_, there is a portrait of Mallefille, who was beloved "during one quarter of the moon," and abhorred afterwards. He concludes the letter with the following words: "Ah, how fortunate I am to be forgotten by those people! I am not afraid of their indifference, but I should be afraid of their attentions. . . .

Say what you like, my dear friend, those people do not tempt me at all.

Futility and spitefulness dissolved in a great deal of _ennui_, is a bad kind of medicine." He then goes on to make fun, in terms that it is difficult to quote, of the silly enthusiasm of a woman like Marliani, and even of George Sand, for the theories of Pierre Leroux, of which they did not understand the first letter, but which had taken their fancy. George Sand may have looked upon Lamennais as a master, but it is very evident that she was not his favoured disciple.