She "knitted" her novels; he wrote his works in a brief, burning, blissful ecstasy which gave place on the following day to disgust with what he had written. He thought it bad, and yet was incapable of re-writing it, for he hated his pen as the galley-slave hates his oar. In spite of all his youthful arrogance he writhed and moaned as if in constant anguish, and the reason was that within his slender, pliant frame dwelt a giant of an artist, who felt more deeply and strongly and lived harder and faster than the man in whom he was incorporate could bear, and who conceived greater ideas than the brain which was his organ could bring into the world without the most distressful birth-throes. When the poet flung himself into every kind of dissipation, it was chiefly from the need of deadening the suffering that his genius caused him.
He, the youth of two-and-twenty, the spoiled son of aristocratic parents, living at home, protected by a brother's vigilant affection, and with no real experience except of a few love affairs, had the knowledge of life, the suspiciousness, the bitterness, the misanthropy of a man of forty; and where his knowledge was insufficient, he eked it out with assumed indifference and cynicism.
She, the woman of twenty-eight, with Bohemian and royal blood in her veins (she was a great-granddaughter of Maurice of Saxony), with the gravest experiences of life behind her, now without family, fortune, home, or the support of any male relative, separated from her little children, reduced to elective affinities, leading the life of the literary Bohemian, bearing a man's name, wearing male attire, and living like a man among men, was, nevertheless, in the depths of her soul, naïve, passionless, enthusiastic, tender-hearted, and as eagerly receptive of everything new as if she had had no experiences to speak of, and had never been disillusioned.
He, so original in his art, so irregular in his life, was, nevertheless, in many ways narrow-minded. We men easily become so, especially those of us who, like De Musset, are born in a good position and learn early to reverence custom and to dread ridicule.
She, in whose technique there is nothing revolutionary, who follows the beaten track as far as the literary presentment of her theme is concerned, was in her mental attitude almost a prodigy. There was not a trace of narrow-mindedness in her. She had no prejudices. Women whose fate has brought them into direct contact with the cancerous sores of society, and who have faced the verdict of society without flinching, sometimes become more open-minded than men, for the reason that they have paid more for their openmindedness. George Sand examined things for herself, weighed them well, and in most cases estimated them at their proper value.
He was her superior in culture. With the artist's genius he combined an incorruptible masculine critical faculty; keen and flexible as a Damascene blade, it clove every hollow phrase it lighted on, transfixed and burst every bubble of thought or language.
She often yielded to the inclination of her sex to let the heart speak first and loudest. Any noble enthusiasm, any beautiful Utopian theory carried her away; she had the woman's instinctive desire to serve; in her youth she was always on the look-out for a banner borne by men with great and valiant hearts, that she might fight under it. It was not her ambition to charm the fashionable world as the famous concert-player; her desire was to beat the drum as the daughter of the regiment. Her want of cultivated reasoning power, however, led her to follow and worship vague dreamers as the men of the future, chief amongst them the foolish though sincere Pierre Leroux, a philosopher and socialist to whom for many years she looked up as a daughter to a father. De Musset's aristocratic intellect rejected the claims of these prophets who could not write twenty readable pages of prose; George Sand allowed herself to be infected with their tendency to emphatic and unctuous diction.
To conclude, then, she was his inferior as an artist, though as a human being she was greater and far stronger. She had not the masculine direct artistic intuition, the faculty by virtue of which a man says, giving no reason: "Thus it must be." When they looked at a painting together, he, who made no pretension to be a connoisseur, at once perceived the merits of the picture and the characteristic qualities of the artist, and described them in a few words. She arrived in some peculiar, slow, roundabout way at an understanding of the picture, and the expression of her feeling on the subject was often either vague or paradoxical. His intelligence was acute and nervous, hers diffuse, universally sympathetic. When they listened to an opera together, what affected him were the outbursts of heartfelt personal passion—the individual element. She, on the contrary, was affected by the choruses, the expression of the emotions of common humanity. It seemed as if a concourse of minds were required to set hers in motion.
Her writings lacked conciseness. Whilst every sentence that came from his pen was like a gold coin stamped on both sides and chiselled on the edge, hers were wordy to prolixity. The first thing De Musset involuntarily did when a copy ofIndianacame into his hands, was to score out some twenty or thirty superfluous adjectives in the first few pages. George Sand saw the book afterwards, and she was, it is said, more annoyed than grateful.
Six months before they met, she had felt some uneasiness at the idea of making De Musset's acquaintance. She first requested Sainte-Beuve to bring him to see her, and then wrote in the postscript of a letter, dated March 1833: "On further reflection I have decided that I do not wish you to bring Alfred de Musset here; he is too much of the dandy; we should not suit one another. It was more curiosity than real interest which made me wish to see him. But it is not prudent to satisfy every feeling of curiosity." One perceives a touch of anxiety or foreboding in these words.
Alfred de Musset for his part had, like all authors, a certain dread of authoresses. It was undoubtedly a male member of the profession who nicknamed these ladies bluestockings. Nevertheless, there is no denying the great attraction which a remarkable feminine mind possesses for the masculine mind. The ecstatic feeling which accompanies a perfect intellectual understanding was in this case intensified a hundredfold by a suddenly conceived, violent mutual passion.
Looking at the liaison between these two remarkable people from the historic point of view, we are struck by the strong impress it bears of the spirit of the age, of that artistic intoxication recalling the carnival mood of the Renaissance, which took possession of men's minds while Romanticism prevailed in France. The born artist, whose first duty it always is to break with traditional convention within the domain of his art, feels himself in every age tempted to defy the conventions of society also; but the generation of 1830 was more youthfully naïve in its rebellion against conventionality than any preceding generation had been in France for centuries, or than any of its successors has been. In all artists there is something of the Bohemian or of the child; the artists of that day allowed the Bohemian and the child in them free play. It is characteristic that the first fancy which seizes these two chosen spirits after they have found each other, and the first breathless, burning ecstasy of bliss is past, is to dress themselves up and play tricks upon their acquaintances. The first time Paul de Musset is invited to spend an evening with the young couple, he finds Alfred in the garb of an eighteenth-century marquis, and George Sand in hoops and panniers. When George Sand gives her first dinner-party after she and De Musset become friends, he waits at table, unrecognised by the guests, in the dress of a young Norman servant girl; and as a suitablevis-à -visfor the guest of the evening, Monsieur Lerminier, a well-known professor of philosophy, she has invited Debureau, the famous Pierrot of the Funambules Theatre, whom no one present has seen except on the stage, and whom she introduces as an eminent member of the English House of Commons charged with secret despatches to the Austrian government. To give both him and Lerminier an opportunity to display their accomplishments, the conversation is turned upon politics. But Sir Robert Peel, Lord Stanley, and other such personages are mentioned in vain; the foreign diplomat either maintains an obstinate silence or answers in monosyllables. At last some one employs the expression, "the European balance of power." Then the Englishman speaks. "Would you like to know," he says, "what my idea of the European balance of power at this serious conjuncture in English and continental politics is?—This!" And the diplomat throws up his plate so that it spins round in the air, then cleverly catches it on the point of his knife and balances it as it whirls there. The astonishment of the other guests may be imagined. Does not a little anecdote like this show us the connection between De Musset and George Sand in a curious light of youthfulness and childishness? It is like a reflected gleam from the days of the Renaissance; we know at once that we are in the romantic France of the Thirties.
The connection has its commonplace, sordid side, of which enough has been made, and on which I shall not dwell. Every one knows that De Musset and George Sand travelled in Italy together, and that he tormented her with his jealousy, she him with a surveillance of his actions and habits to which he was totally unaccustomed; that their life together was not happy; that he was very ill in Venice (withdelirium tremens, we are led to understand); and that during his illness she had a love affair with the Italian doctor, Pagello by name, who attended him, the consequence of which was that De Musset left her and went home in a state of extreme depression.
But there is yet another and more attractive aspect of the connection—namely, the psychological or aesthetic. The history of literature tells of many such intimacies between remarkable men and women; but in this one there is something unusual and new. A masculine genius of the highest rank, one stage of whose artistic career is already run, but who is still quite young—a feminine genius, great and complete in herself, in appraising whom it may safely be affirmed that no woman before her ever displayed such exuberant creative power—these two influence each other during the exaltation of a passionate attachment.
The science of psychology is still in such a backward condition that the difference between a man's imagination and a woman's has scarcely been determined; still less has it been clearly ascertained how they act upon each other. Here for the first time in modern civilisation the masculine literary creative mind and the feminine come into contact—the highest, finest development of each. The experiment (which was ere long to be repeated in England, on approximative lines, in the case of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) had never been made on so grand a scale. These are the Adam and Eve of Art. They meet and share the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The curse, that is to say the quarrel, follows; he goes his way, she hers. But they are no longer the same. The works they now produce are of a different stamp from those which they produced before they met.
He leaves her, his feelings lacerated, disappointed, despairing, with a new and heavy complaint against her sex, convinced that: Treachery! thy name is woman!
She leaves him, her soul torn with conflicting emotions, first half-consoled, then distracted with grief, but soon feeling the relief of being past a crisis which was pain to her calm, productive nature; she has a new feeling of woman's superiority to man, and is more strongly convinced than before that: Weakness! thy name is man!
He leaves her with his aversion for all enthusiasms, Utopias, and philanthropic projects strengthened, feeling more than ever convinced that for the artist art is everything. Nevertheless, the contact with the great feminine intellect has not been fruitless. The very suffering makes him truthful. He throws off his affected egotism; we no longer see him making a display of assumed hardness and coldness. The influence of her open-mindedness and charitableness and of her enthusiasm for ideals is plainly perceptible in the works which he now writes—in Lorenzaccio's enthusiastic republicanism, in Andrea del Sarto's whole character—possibly even in the vehement personal protest against Thiers' press laws.
She leaves him, more convinced than ever that the male sex is by nature narrow-minded and egotistical, more prone than ever to yield to the fascination of general ideas. InHoraceshe devotes her talent to the service of Saint-Simonism; she writesLe Compagnon du Tour de Francein the interests of socialism; in 1848 she composes the bulletins for the Provisional Government. Nevertheless, it was contact with De Musset's virile, classic genius which finally moulded her pure and classic style. She learned to love form, to seek the beautiful for its own sake. Dumas, the younger, has said of a sentence of hers that "it is drawn by Leonardo and sung by Mozart"; he should have added that her hand was guided and her ear trained by Alfred de Musset.
After the separation, both artists are fully matured. Henceforward he is the poet with the burning heart, she the sybil with the eloquently prophetic tongue.
Into the gulf which opened between them she cast her immaturity, her tirades, her faults of taste, her man's clothes, and thenceforward was altogether feminine, altogether natural.
Into the same gulf he cast his Don Juan costume, his bravado, his admiration for Rolla, his boyish insolence, and thenceforward was the man, the emancipated intellectual force.
Alfred de Musset lived to be forty-seven, but all his works, except three charming little plays and a few poems, were written before he was thirty.
The whole series of remarkable and admirable productions was given to the world during the six years following on his rupture with George Sand. Although she had deceived him, his inclination to dwell upon deceit and treachery becomes ever slighter; and along with it he loses his affectation of world-weariness. In his works, even in his choice of subjects, we can trace the author's personal struggle to throw off his mask of vice and to free himself from the attraction vice has for him.
The first important work De Musset produced after his return from Italy was the dramaLorenzaccio, the idea of which he had conceived in Florence. Lorenzo de Medici is cousin to Alexander de Medici, the bestially cruel and sensual Duke of Florence. By nature Lorenzo is a pure, high-strung, energetic character. He early determines, taking Brutus as his model, to rid the world of a tyrant. To attain his aim he plays the part of a heartless libertine, becomes Alexander's follower, tool, counsellor, and pander. As Hamlet assumed madness, Lorenzo assumes the mask of a weak, cowardly sensualism, in order to allay suspicion and secure his victim. But the disguise under which he conceals his real nature adheres to him like a Nessus garment; he gradually becomes nearly everything that he only desired to appear; against his will he inhales and absorbs the corruption with which he himself has assisted to impregnate the atmosphere of the court and capital; when he reflects on his life he loathes himself. And yet he is misunderstood; for through all the wickedness and the feigned, sickly cowardice, he is pursuing his plan of murdering Alexander at the right moment and re-establishing the Republic.
He is consumed by misanthropical scorn. He despises the Duke as a satyr and a bloodhound; the people, because they allow such a man to reign over them, and because they permit him, Lorenzaccio, to walk unassailed, unpunished along the streets of Florence; the Republicans, because they have no energy and no comprehension of the political situation. His dream is to purge himself of all the impurity of his life by a single, great, decisive deed, the assassination of the Duke; and the poet allows him thus to purify himself. Lorenzo throws off his assumed character and judges and punishes like an avenging angel. De Musset's political pessimism shows itself in what follows. Lorenzaccio falls by the hands of an assassin, who is tempted by the price set upon his head, and the Florentine republican leaders are too indifferent and unpractical, the mass of the citizens too degenerate, to profit by the death of the Duke; they sit still and allow themselves to be surprised and overpowered by another tyrant. The imperfectly concealed contempt of the author for the Republicans is undoubtedly due to impressions received in 1830. De Musset had himself seen a revolution which promised a Republic end in a Monarchy. In his play, however, the Republicans are represented in a more unfavourable light than they deserve. The evening before the assassination Lorenzaccio undoubtedly informs them at what hour he will kill the Duke, yet we can hardly blame them for not making their preparations. Is not the man who shouts this startling intelligence into their houses from the street, the Duke's inseparable comrade, his companion in guilt, his court-fool? What wonder that they shrug their shoulders and do nothing! In De Musset's injustice to them we are conscious of a personal feeling which has no connection with his literary subject. Of chief importance to him, however, has been the representation of Lorenzo's character, with its nobility under a repulsive mask. In Lorenzo's soul there is an ideal element, of which he is not ashamed; he aspires; he believes in the expiating power of deeds. What purifies him in the hour of his death is not an accident, like Rolla's pure kiss, but an action of which he has dreamed ever since he grew up.
InLe Chandelierwe are still in very depraved company; but the principal character, the young clerk, Fortunio, stands out against the dark background, a figure of light, with his intense, boundless devotion to Jacqueline. He is badly used by her and her lover, who employ him as a screen, a blind, in their low intrigue. He finds them out, but goes on loving as before, and is ready to encounter certain death to hide the disgraceful amour of the woman he loves. This young page has the determination and courage of a hero, and the power of his pure devotion is so great that it moves and overcomes Jacqueline and wins her from Clavaroche. He is an ideal youthful lover.
Octave inLes Caprices de Marianneis a frivolous and in many ways depraved young man, who neither will nor can love any woman seriously. He declares that he disdains to spend more time on the conquest of a woman than it takes him to break the seal on his bottle of Grecian wine. But in one relation, that of friendship, he is as simple-hearted and trusting as a boy. He loves his friend, young Cœlio, with such ardour that he is ready to die for him or to revenge his death, with such fidelity that he scornfully rejects the favour of the lady whom Cœlio vainly worships. He is an ideal friend. A striking contrast to him is Cœlio, a character in whom De Musset, who in this drama divided his own personality, represented the other half of his nature. Cœlio is the youthful lover, whose love is a longing adoration, a passion so melancholy in its ardour that it will kill him if it remain unsatisfied. A halo of Shakespearean romance surrounds his head, his words are music, his hopes poetry. He describes himself in the words: "Il me manque le repos, la douce insouciance qui fait de la vie un miroir où tous les objets se peignent un instant et sur lequel tout glisse. Une dette pour moi est un remords. L'amour, dont vous autres vous faites un passe-temps, trouble ma vie entière."
We feel in these male characters how De Musset is maturing as an author. His desire is no longer only to delineate the seething instincts of youth, or the wild play of the passions with its accompaniment of deceit, treachery, and violence; he dwells long and with predilection on the innocent and deep feeling which is only made guilty by outward circumstances, on the love which in reality is pure, and which appears criminal only because it is an infraction of social laws, on the friendship which in its essence is heroic devotion, even when it assumes the degrading form of eloquent panderage—in short upon friendship and love in their purity, on those forces in human life which we are wont to call ideal.
Nor is it only De Musset's male characters who become purer and purer; his women undergo the same gradual transformation. In his early works they are either Delilahs or Eves. But his ever-increasing inclination to represent the spiritually beautiful and morally pure, leads him to idealise them also more and more. It is noteworthy that the first female character which he creates after his final breach with George Sand in 1835, namely, Madame Pierson inLa Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, is to a great extent a highly idealised portrait of that lady. His prose tales, of which at least three,Emmeline, Frédéric et Bernerette, andLe Fils du Titien, are among the best love-stories our century has produced, bear witness to their author's increasing tendency to ennoble and glorify love and, consequently, his female characters. He takes, for example, the outward semblance of some little grisette or other he has known, some sweet-tempered, frivolous, loose-living, gay young creature, and this figure he invests with a virginal charm which it has long lost, and makes of it a Mimi Pinson; or he paints for us a young girl as soulful, as naïve in all her mistakes and false steps, as beautiful and delicate in her manner of expressing herself, and as touchingly simple in the hour of her death as that Bernerette, whose last letter few have read without tears. To him, the love-poet, love is so autocratic a power that he subordinates even art to it. To be the lover and the beloved seems to him at last such a much greater thing than to be the artist, that his final conception of ideal art is: art consecrated and exclusively devoted to one person, the only beloved. InLe Fils du Titienthe hero, a gifted young artist, is arrested in a dissolute career by a noble woman's love. He shows his gratitude by determining to paint one single picture, the portrait of his mistress. On it he concentrates all his powers, and by it alone he is to be known to posterity. In its honour he writes a sonnet, in which he praises the beauty and the pure soul of his beloved, tells why it is he has determined that his brush shall never be used in the service of another, and declares that, beautiful as the picture may be, it is as nothing compared with a kiss from its model.
But of all De Musset's stories,Emmelineis certainly the most charming. It was inspired by the author's own first worthy attachment after his quarrel with George Sand—a short but happy one, which in its main features resembled that of the story. A young man falls violently in love with a young married lady, whose charms are painted in the most delicate colours, but colours chosen with an accurately observing eye. There is nothing in recent literature which can be compared with this art except Turgenev's most delicate delineations of female character; but Turgenev's women are more spiritual, less real, are beheld with the lover's less critical eye and represented with less artistic boldness. After long admiring the lady without any hope of awakening her interest in him, the young man wins her love and she gives herself to him. Then they abruptly part for ever, because she is too truthful to deceive her husband, and her lover has too much delicacy of feeling to remain in her neighbourhood under such circumstances.
A poem in this story, which the young lover asks his lady to read, seems to me to be the most beautiful of the love poems of De Musset's second period. It speaks the language of ideal feeling. It is the well-known "Si je vous disais pourtant que je vous aime." One verse runs:
"J'aime, et je sais répondre avec indifférence;J'aime, et rien ne le dit; j'aime et seul je le sais;Et mon secret est cher, et chère ma souffrance;Et j'ai fait le serment d'aimer sans espérance,Mais non pas sans bonheur;—je vous vois, c'est assez."
Whilst he was bringing out these charming stories, which are as delicate as if they had been written upon flower petals, De Musset also wrote a few short plays, in which love appears as the terrible force with which man cannot trifle, as the fire with which he cannot play, as the electric flash which kills; and one or two others in which the wit of the aristocratic man of the world sparkles in the tissue of the soulful, highly emotional style.[1]Of these little plays,Un Capriceis the most finished and has the most sparkling dialogue. Not without reason is it included among the works the names of which are carved upon De Musset's tombstone in Père-Lachaise. In this play the erotic caprice, the momentary infatuation, is made to yield to the discipline of marriage. The man in this case is frivolous and untrustworthy; the women, who join forces, have their hearts in the right place, and one of them has, besides, all the charm of high-bred cleverness. Madame de Léry is aParisienne. And no one drew theParisienneof that day with such genius as De Musset. He stood on the same plane with her. She is the genuine fine lady, but also the genuine woman. The beautiful thing about this character is that in it we see unadulterated, genuine, fresh nature piercing through the extremest refinement of fashionable life—nature, in spite of all the sparkling and tinselly cleverness and all the premature experience and the ennui resulting therefrom; nature even in dissimulation, nature even in the little comedy which Madame de Léry is woman and actress enough to play. "Oh! how true it is," exclaims Goethe in one of his letters, "that nothing is wonderful except the natural, nothing great except the natural, nothing beautiful except the natural, nothing &c., &c.!" In the gay, supercilious, society art of this creation of De Musset's, nature is preserved. The idea underlyingUn Capriceis a moral idea. But whereas many writers represent and conceive of love as something so firm and solid that it can be taken hold of and deposited here or there as if it were a piece of granite rock, to De Musset, even when he is most moral, it is always only the most delicately powerful, and consequently most volatile essence of life. At its full strength it can kill, but it can also evaporate.
In his last plays De Musset exalted the feminine fidelity and purity in which he believed, though it had not fallen to his lot to find them. InBarberinethe idea of which he took from an old legend, he had already depicted an ideally faithful wife of the type of Shakespeare'sImogen. But the play was an uninteresting one. The heroines of the last two he writes are wonderfully beautiful creations. In the little masterpiece,Bettine, he has, apparently with the greatest ease, accomplished one of the most difficult tasks for a delineator of character. Bettine enters, and she has not spoken three or four times before we feel that we are in the presence of a strong, brave, tender-hearted, noble-minded woman; and we are conscious of more than this, for we feel certain that she is a woman of parts, an artist, accustomed to triumph, accustomed to feel herself intellectually superior to her surroundings; and to pay little heed to petty conventionalities. It is her wedding morning. She comes singing on to the stage, where the notary is waiting, goes straight up to him, and to his astonishment addresses him asthou: "Ah! te voilà , notaire, ô cher notaire, mon cher ami! As-tu tes paperasses?" His official dignity has so little existence for her that she has no hesitation in letting him see her delight because it is her wedding-day. The kindly happiness of her nature overflows on every occasion. She is not brilliant like the aristocratic woman of the world, but frank, large-minded, confident, like the true artist; and her healthy human nature affects us the more pleasantly from being seen against the background of that moral corruption which is represented by her cold and exacting bridegroom.
The beautiful little drama,Carmosinethe idea of which is taken from a tale of Boccaccio, is intended to show how a strong, ardent, worshipful love, which outward circumstances separate from its object, can be cured by magnanimous kindness and tenderness. Carmosine, a young girl of the middle class, loves King Pedro of Arragon with a hopeless, consuming passion; this feeling makes it impossible for her to give her hand to her faithful and sorrowing adorer, Perillo. She determines to suffer silently and die. But the playfellow of her childhood, Minuccio the singer, is led by his compassion for her to tell the King and Queen of her love. Far from being indignant, the Queen goes to her in disguise and gradually alleviates her suffering with sisterly and queenly words. She tells her that a love so deep and great is too beautiful a thing to be torn out of the heart, and that the Queen herself wishes her to be made one of her ladies-in-waiting, so that she may see the King every day—because such a love, born of the soul's aspiration after the highest, ennobles:
"C'est moi, Carmosine, qui veut vous apprendre que l'on peut aimer sans souffrir, lorsque l'on aime sans rougir, qu'il n'y a que la honte ou le remords qui doivent donner de la tristesse, car elle est faite pour le coupable, et, à coup sûr, votre pensée ne l'est pas."
"C'est moi, Carmosine, qui veut vous apprendre que l'on peut aimer sans souffrir, lorsque l'on aime sans rougir, qu'il n'y a que la honte ou le remords qui doivent donner de la tristesse, car elle est faite pour le coupable, et, à coup sûr, votre pensée ne l'est pas."
And the King comes, under pretext of wishing to see her father, and in the Queen's presence says to her:
"C'est donc vous, gentille demoiselle, qui êtes souffrante et en danger, dit-on? Vous n'avez pas le visage à cela.... Vous tremblez, je crois. Vous défiez-vous de moi?""Non, Sire.""Eh bien, donc, donnez-moi la main. Que veut dire ceci, la belle fille? Vous qui êtes jeune et qui êtes faite pour réjouir le cœur des autres, vous vous laissez avoir du chagrin? Nous vous prions, pour l'amour de nous, qu'il vous plaise de prendre courage, et que vous soyez bientôt guérie.""Sire, c'est mon trop peu de force à supporter une trop grande peine qui est la cause de ma souffrance. Puisque vous avez pu m'en plaindre, j'espère que Dieu m'en délivrera.""Belle Carmosine, je parlerai en roi et en ami. Le grand amour que vous nous avez porté vous a, près de nous, mise en grand honneur; et celui qu'en retour nous voulons vous rendre, c'est de vous donner de notre main, en vous priant de l'accepter, l'époux que nous vous avons choisi. Après quoi nous voulons toujours nous appeler votre chevalier, et porter dans nos passes d'armes votre devise et vos couleurs, sans demander autre chose de vous, pour cette promesse, qu'un seul baiser."The Queen, to Carmosine: "Donne-le mon enfant, je ne suis pas jalouse.""Sire, la reine a répondu pour moi."
"C'est donc vous, gentille demoiselle, qui êtes souffrante et en danger, dit-on? Vous n'avez pas le visage à cela.... Vous tremblez, je crois. Vous défiez-vous de moi?"
"Non, Sire."
"Eh bien, donc, donnez-moi la main. Que veut dire ceci, la belle fille? Vous qui êtes jeune et qui êtes faite pour réjouir le cœur des autres, vous vous laissez avoir du chagrin? Nous vous prions, pour l'amour de nous, qu'il vous plaise de prendre courage, et que vous soyez bientôt guérie."
"Sire, c'est mon trop peu de force à supporter une trop grande peine qui est la cause de ma souffrance. Puisque vous avez pu m'en plaindre, j'espère que Dieu m'en délivrera."
"Belle Carmosine, je parlerai en roi et en ami. Le grand amour que vous nous avez porté vous a, près de nous, mise en grand honneur; et celui qu'en retour nous voulons vous rendre, c'est de vous donner de notre main, en vous priant de l'accepter, l'époux que nous vous avons choisi. Après quoi nous voulons toujours nous appeler votre chevalier, et porter dans nos passes d'armes votre devise et vos couleurs, sans demander autre chose de vous, pour cette promesse, qu'un seul baiser."
The Queen, to Carmosine: "Donne-le mon enfant, je ne suis pas jalouse."
"Sire, la reine a répondu pour moi."
In what world does this happen? In what world do we breathe so pure an air? Where does such equity flourish? where is love at one and the same time so humble, so ardent, and so noble? and where are such chivalry, such fidelity, such freedom from jealousy, and such benignity to be found? Where such a king? Where such a queen?
The answer must undoubtedly be: In the land of the ideal; nowhere else. It is upon its coast that the wanton, cynical De Musset, in his capacity of author, lands at last. De Musset, the man, suffered shipwreck on other shores. He fell a victim to the abuse of narcotics. His undisciplined, ill-regulated character was his bane. In his writings he became ever more spiritual, ever more moral; in his life he sank ever deeper into mechanical sensual indulgence. He early lost control over himself; for a time he rose by the aid of his art above the ruin of his life; but in the end even the wings of art became powerless.
He had hoped much from the Constitutional Monarchy. He had expected from it, or under it, an art-loving court, a liberal policy, a revival of national glory, and a blossoming time in literature. We can imagine his disappointment. It is not impossible that a court with a keen appreciation of literature and art might have exercised a saving influence upon Alfred de Musset, have drawn him into its circle, compelled him to preserve his self-respect, and made his pleasures, and even his excesses, more refined. But Louis Philippe, that polished and well-educated peace-lover, had no real love of literature and no literary taste. He was even less capable of attaching Alfred de Musset than Victor Hugo to himself. De Musset wrote a sonnet on the occasion of Meunier's attempt to assassinate the King, in 1836. It was not printed, but the Duke of Orleans, who had been a school-fellow of De Musset's, saw it, thought it excellent, and read it to His Majesty. The King never knew who had written it; as soon as he heard that the author presumed to address him in the second person singular, he became so indignant that he would hear no more. To make amends for this slight, the Duke procured De Musset an invitation to the court balls. When the poet was presented to Louis Philippe, he was astonished by the reception he met with. The King came up to him with a smile of pleasant surprise and said: "You have just come from Joinville; I am very glad to see you." De Musset had too muchsavoir-vivreto betray any surprise. He made a low bow and tried to think what the King's words could mean. At last he remembered that a distant relation of his was inspector of forests on the crown property of Joinville. The King, who did not burden his memory with the names of authors, had a perfect acquaintance with all the names of the officials in charge of the crown lands. Every winter for eleven years in succession he saw the face of his supposed forest-inspector with the same pleasure, and favoured him with such gracious nods and smiles that many a courtier turned pale with envy. The honour was supposed to be shown to literature; but this much is certain, that Louis Philippe never knew that there lived in France during his reign a great poet who bore the same name as his inspector of forests.
Such a lack-lustre rule as Louis Philippe's could not but be abhorrent to De Musset. His haughty, wildly defiant answer to Becker'sRheinlied, points to lyric possibilities in him which might have developed under other political conditions. As things were, he felt himself restricted to being the poet of youth and love; and when youth was past he was incapable of reviving his powers. His virtues were as fatal to him as his vices. Proud and distinguished, he had not a trace of the ambition which leads a man to husband his intellectual resources, not an atom of the desire of gain which compels to industry, or of the egotism which makes the writer attribute supreme importance to his own work. He lived his life with such greedy haste that at forty he was as exhausted as a man of seventy, without having attained to either composure or wisdom. His premature physical exhaustion brought intellectual exhaustion in its train. He was destitute of that higher instinct which compels the author to live altogether for his art, and he had not a trace of the social or political instinct which bends the productive mind to the yoke of duty to others. He was so incapable of self-control that the slightest temptation proved irresistible. His life became as absolutely aimless as his art was; there was no cause he desired to advance, nothing that he was determined at any cost to say; and his character was too uncontrollable, too little reflective, for self-development, as Goethe understood it, to be the aim which rendered all others superfluous. When Alfred de Musset died in 1857, his creative capacity had been extinct for several years.
[1]His tour in Italy with George Sand lasted from December 1833 to April 1834. In 1834 he wroteOn ne badine pas avec l'AmourandLorenzaccio; in 1835Barberine(his most insignificant play),Le Chandelier, Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, andLa Nuit de Mai; in 1836EmmelineandIl ne faut jurer de rien; in 1837Un Caprice, Les deux Maîtresses, andFrédéric et Bernerette; in 1838Le Fils du Titien. Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou ferméewas written in 1845,Bettinein 1851,Carmosinein 1852.
[1]His tour in Italy with George Sand lasted from December 1833 to April 1834. In 1834 he wroteOn ne badine pas avec l'AmourandLorenzaccio; in 1835Barberine(his most insignificant play),Le Chandelier, Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle, andLa Nuit de Mai; in 1836EmmelineandIl ne faut jurer de rien; in 1837Un Caprice, Les deux Maîtresses, andFrédéric et Bernerette; in 1838Le Fils du Titien. Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou ferméewas written in 1845,Bettinein 1851,Carmosinein 1852.
"I believe," writes George Sand in the introduction toLa Mare au Diable, "that the mission of art is a mission of sentiment and love, and that the novel of our day ought to supply the place of the parable and fable of the childish days of old. The aim of the artist should be to awaken love for the objects he represents; and I, for my part, should not reproach him if he beautified them a little. Art is not an examination of the given reality, but a pursuit of the ideal truth." What the mature woman here proclaims as her aesthetic creed is what she had felt all her life. She had never regarded the calling of the author in any other light than that of an aspiration after the highest of which humanity is capable; or, to put it more correctly, she had considered it to be the author's calling to elevate the mind above the imperfection of the existing conditions of society, with the aim of giving it a wide horizon, and thereby imparting to it the power, when it descended to earth again, to combat in its own fashion the prejudices, the conventions, the coarseness of mind and hardness of heart to which that imperfection was due.
In the introduction toLe Compagnon du Tour de Franceshe says: "Since when has it been obligatory for the novel to be a transcription of what is, of the hard and cold reality of contemporary men and things? It may be this, I know; and Balzac, a master to whose talent I have always done homage, has written theComédie humaine. But, although I was united by the ties of friendship to that illustrious man, I saw human affairs under quite a different aspect. I remember saying to him: 'You are writing the Human Comedy, The title is a modest one. You might quite as well call it the Human Drama, the Human Tragedy.' 'Yes,' said he, 'and you, you are writing the Human Epic.' 'The title in this case,' I replied, 'would be too imposing. What I should like to write is the human pastoral, the human ballad, the human romance. To put it plainly, you have the desire and the ability to paint the human being as you see him. Good! I, on the other hand, feel impelled to paint him as I wish him to be, as I believe he ought to be.' And, as we were not competing with each other, we each recognised that the other was right."
GEORGE SAND
GEORGE SAND
The passage is part of a protest made by George Sand against the charge that it was her desire to flatter the lower classes by producing idealised representations of them—this explains how she came to give such pointed, dogmatic expression to the idealism of her nature. Most undoubtedly she was the idealist, all her life long; but it was not really the desire to delineate human beings as "they ought to be" which inspired her to write, but the desire to show what they could be if society did not hamper their spiritual growth, corrupt them, and destroy their happiness; hence, in her delineations of the representatives of "society" no leniency was shown. What George Sand originally meant to give was a picture of life as it is, of reality as she had experienced and observed it; what she gave was the feminine enthusiast's view of reality. The section she saw was a patch of earth with the brightness of heaven over it. Her clear-sightedness was the clear-sightedness of the poet.
The period was the period of enormous productivity. Victor Hugo, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, wrote ceaselessly, piling work upon work. Dumas at last regularly manufactured books; he published four or five novels at a time, and with the help of numerous collaborators produced a good-sized shelf of volumes in a year. George Sand's productivity was almost as remarkable. Her works fill 110 closely printed volumes. I can make no attempt here to criticise them all. It is only of consequence that I should indicate the main features of the most important works, the ideas which permeate them, the results which remain even when the details of the books are forgotten.
The real life story lying behind the first group of George Sand's novels is familiar to every one. She was born in 1804; lost her father at an early age; had a foolish, passionate mother, and a wise, distinguished grandmother; grew up on the family property of Nohant in Berry, a regular country child, romping out of doors, loving nature and freedom, and mixing on equal terms with the children of the peasantry. Her tastes were the tastes of the people, but she was not the less romantic for that. As Chateaubriand in his early youth evolved for himself the image of an ideally charming woman, of whom he constantly dreamed, so George Sand's young imagination created a hero, to whom she built an altar of stone and moss in a corner of her garden, and whom she credited with all the wonderful deeds suggested by her fertile invention. At the age of thirteen she was sent to a convent school in Paris. At first she sadly missed the free country life; then she became for a time ardently religious; but even before she returned to Nohant this enthusiasm had been superseded by a lively interest in the stage and in political literature. In her country surroundings, the grown-up girl reads Rousseau for the first time, and is fascinated, as we all are, when our own nature is revealed to us. Henceforward, to her life's end, she is Rousseau's faithful disciple. His understanding and worship of nature, his faith in God, his belief in and love of equality, his defiant attitude towards so-called civilised society, appealed to all her instincts and, as it were, forestalled feelings that were slumbering in her soul. Shakespeare, Byron, and Chateaubriand also enrapture her; they cause her to feel solitary in her surroundings, and communicate to her that first, vague melancholy which in young, passionate, enthusiastic souls generally precedes the melancholy of real disappointment. In 1822 this girl, who, with her powerful intellect, her rich imagination, and her inability to live her life independently, would never have been satisfied with the companionship of one man, however noble his character and great his gifts, was married to a Monsieur Dudevant, a perfectly ordinary country gentleman, neither better nor worse than most of his kind. He was uncultivated and passionate, and quite incapable of understanding his wife; but it is evident that, even if he had been a much better husband, the ultimate consequences of the marriage would have been the same. Only the first three years were spent in peace and amity. By 1825, George Sand was beginning to look down upon her husband, and, with her natural craving for sympathetic understanding, to form friendships with other men, as a relief from what to her were the insulting and cruelly degrading conditions of her home life. Monsieur Dudevant, who was enough of the husband to be exasperated by intellectual independence in his wife, though he was far too insignificant a personage to be able to profit by that want of intellectual self-sufficiency which impelled her to seek a leader and guide, regarded even her most innocent interchange of sympathies with other men as a transgression of duty. Incessant conjugal friction and disputes at last put an end to all community of feeling. Even the two children who were the fruit of the marriage could not keep their parents together. In 1831 George Sand went to live in Paris alone.
The documents connected with the ensuing separation suit, as also George Sand's own letters, give us an adequate understanding of what her married life was. I have read in theGazette des Tribunaux(30th July and 1st and 19th August 1836, and 28th June and 12th July 1837) the pleas advanced on both sides. They were horrible, disgraceful accusations which this great woman was obliged to hear from the lips of her husband's counsel. With her beautiful dark hair falling over a black velvet jacket, or else dressed, in the fashion of the day, in white, with a flowered shawl round her shoulders, George Sand sat and listened without a trace of emotion. Her husband accused her of having conceived and yielded to a criminal passion for another man within three years of her marriage. "Monsieur Dudevant soon discovered that he was being deceived by the woman he worshipped (!), but was magnanimous enough to forgive." The lawyer read a long letter from Madame Dudevant to her husband, in which she confessed, and reproached herself for, various faults, and attributed the misunderstanding between them to an incompatibility in their characters which by no means implied an absence of generosity and amiability on his part. This letter, Monsieur Dudevant's counsel most illogically argued, was equivalent to a confession of unfaithfulness on the lady's part. He went on to show how the couple had lived from 1825 to 1828 in voluntary separation, and how Madame Dudevant, even after she left her husband in 1831 to lead "the life of an artist," had carried on an amicable correspondence with him and accepted 300 francs (!) a year. (He did not mention that she had brought her husband a dowry of 500,000.) At the beginning of the year 1835 the couple had come to a private agreement each to take a child, to divide the fortune, and to allow each other full liberty of action; but before this agreement came into force George Sand had drawn back and sued for a judicial separation. (In the course of a dispute about their son, Monsieur Dudevant had tried to strike her, had even in the presence of witnesses taken up his gun to fire at her.) In spite of exaggerated accusations her application, the lawyer reminded the court, had been refused. Now it was Monsieur Dudevant's turn to complain. He denied all the charges brought against him, and brought others, of the gravest character, against his wife; he maintained that any woman who had written such immoral books as hers was unfit to educate her children; he accused her of intimacy with the secrets of "all the most shameful licentiousness." It was on account of these accusations, accusations which he, Monsieur Dudevant's counsel, asserted to be fully justified, that George Sand was once more suing for a separation. His eloquence reached its climax in the outburst: "It is, then, your opinion, Madame, that a woman has the right, if she chooses, to squander the half of a fortune, to embitter her husband's life, and to adopt, when she feels inclined to indulge still more freely in the most unbridled excesses, the convenient and simple plan of bringing against him in the court of justice a purely fictitious accusation of revolting conduct!"
It must have been hard for the proud woman to sit, the observed of all observers, listening to this besmirching of her name and fame. It cannot have afforded her much consolation that her counsel and friend, Michel de Bourges, immediately afterwards extolled her as a genius, and produced a profound impression by reading remarkably beautiful passages from her letters and recounting all the insulting words and brutal actions of which her husband had been guilty towards her. She was accustomed to see her novels reviled in the newspapers as so many shameless defences of immorality, but to hear her private life maligned in this style was a new experience. These public proceedings which terminated her married life, give us, however, as it were, a retrospective view of that life, and explain the indignation which finds its first expression inIndiana, Valentine, Lélia, andJacques.
They are books, these, which possess little literary interest for the reader of to-day: the characters are vague idealisations; the plots are improbable, as inIndiana, or unreal, as inLéliaandJacques_the harmonious sonority of her style does not save the author from the reproach of frequent lapses into magniloquence; in the letters and monologues she is often the poetical sermoniser. And yet there is a fire in these works of George Sand's youth which gives light and warmth to this day; they struck a note which will go on sounding for ages. They emit both a wail and a war-cry, and where they penetrate they carry with them germs of feelings and thoughts, the growth of which this age has succeeded in checking, but which in the future will unfold and spread with a luxuriant vigour of which we can only form a faint conception.
Indiana is the young, full heart's first outburst of bitterness and woe. The youthful heroine is the embodiment of refined intellectality and noble-mindedness; her husband, Colonel Delmare, is a rather better-tempered Monsieur Dudevant; Indiana's affectionate, enthusiastic heart turns, wounded, from husband to lover. The originality of the book lies in its delineation of the latter's character. For to him even the husband is infinitely preferable. Raymon is the average young Frenchman under the restored Legitimist monarchy; he is what the society of the period has made him, emotional and calculating, love-sick and egotistical, influenced by public opinion and the verdict of society to such an extent that his hard-heartedness develops into heartlessness, his unreliability into worthlessness; his thorough mediocrity is at last plainly discernible through its glittering husk of brilliant qualities and talents. In this first work George Sand at once introduces us to several distinct types of male character. There is the man with the coarse nature, whom the power which society puts into his hands has made brutal, and the man with the weak nature, whom congenital irresolution and acquired submissiveness to the dictation of society have made unreliable and cowardly. Woman-like, she starts with a spirited exposure of man's egotism. But in this her first book she also at once presents us with her ideal man, in the person of the reserve lover, the apparently phlegmatic but really ardent Ralph, who, taciturn as George Sand herself, appears (like her) to the superficial observer stiff and cold, but is in reality the embodiment of self-sacrificing, noble, faithful love. This was a character she rang changes on for years. We find him inLélia_in the noble and hardly tried Trenmor, the galley-slave who passes judgment on society with stoic calm; inJacqueshe is the hero who with almost superhuman magnanimity commits suicide, that he may not stand in the way of his young wife's alliance with another; inLéone Léonihe is the quiet, manly Don Aleo, to the very last prepared to marry that unfortunate Juliette whom an almost magic fascination binds to the incredibly rascally Leone, a species of male Manon Lescaut. InLe Secrétaire Intimehe is the modest German, Max, whose distinguishing qualities are naïve kind-heartedness and poetical enthusiasm, and who is secretly married to the princess whom every one worships; inElle et Luihe is Palmer, the Englishman, the foil to the gifted and dissipated Parisian, Laurent; inLe Dernier Amour, he is called Sylvestre and is a weaker Jacques. All these figures have a fault which is not uncommon in ideals; they are bloodless. But the men of the Raymon type, the men who represent the world, the selfishness, the vanity, and the weaknesses of society, are much more successful creations. Raymon himself is much more real than the other characters inIndiana; the local colouring in his case is stronger, more definite. The authoress (in chapter x.) attributes his unmanliness to "the conciliatory and yielding tendency" of the age, which she calls the age "of mental reservations"; she shows how Raymon, who is the advocate of political moderation, imagines that because he is devoid of political passions he is also devoid of political self-interest, and therefore stands on a higher level than that of any party—the fact of the matter being, that the existing condition of society is too advantageous to him for him to wish it changed. He is "not so ungrateful to Providence as to reproach it with the misfortunes of others." The numerous successors of this character in George Sand's novels all bear witness to a penetrating and delicate observation of human nature, from Sténio, the poet inLélia, and Octave, the lover inJacques, slightly sketched, weak characters, mere playthings of passion, to the carefully drawn, distinctly characterised figures like the dissolute young Italian singer, Anzoleto, inConsuelo, the ultra-refined, morbidly nervous and self-centred Prince Karol (Chopin) inLucrezia Floriani, and the extravagantly capricious young painter, Laurent (Alfred de Musset), inElle et Lui.
In the end Indiana goes the length of discovering the ruthless egotism of the male sex in all the outward developments of society, even in the religion taught by men. They have made of God a man in their own image. She writes to her hypocritical lover: "I do not serve the same God as you, but I serve mine better and more purely. Yours is the man's God, a man, a king, the founder and the patron of your race; mine is the God of the universe, the creator, the preserver, and the hope of every living being. Yours has made everything for you alone; mine has made all his creatures for each other." Two things are noticeable in these words—a naïve protest against that order of society which is founded upon the subordination of woman to man, and the optimism of an innocent, youthfully trustful faith in God. This attitude George Sand did not long maintain. Only a few years later she bringsLéliato a conclusion with an outburst of despairing pessimism. Shortly before her death the heroine says: "Alas! despair reigns, and moans of suffering emanate from every pore of the created world. The wave casts itself writhing and moaning on the beach, the wind weeps and wails in the forest. All those trees which bend and only rise to fall again under the lash of the storm, suffer frightful torture. There exists one miserable, cursed being, terrible, immense—the world which we inhabit cannot contain him. This invisible being is in everything, and his voice fills space with one eternal sob. Imprisoned in the universe he writhes, strives, struggles, beats his head and his shoulders against the confines of heaven and earth. He cannot pass beyond them; everything crushes him, everything curses him, everything torments him, everything hates him. What is this being and whence does he come?... Some have called him Prometheus, others Satan; I call him desire; I, the hopeless sibyl, the spirit of departed ages.... I, the broken lyre, the dumb instrument whose sounds would not be understood by those who inhabit the earth to-day, but in whose breast the eternal harmonies lie murmuring; I, the priestess of death, who feel that I once was Pythia, that I wept then, that I spoke then, but who cannot remember the healing word! ... O truth, truth! to find thee I descended into abysses the very sight of which would make the bravest giddy with fear. But truth! thou hast not revealed thyself; I have sought thee for ten thousand years and have not found thee! For ten thousand years the only answer to my cries, the only consolation of my agony, has been the sound, audible throughout this whole accursed world, of that despairing sob of impotent desire! For ten thousand years I have shouted into infinity: Truth! Truth! For ten thousand years infinity has answered: Desire! desire! O miserable Sibyl! O dumb Pythia! dash thy head against the rocks of thy cave and mingle thy blood, which is foaming with rage, with the foam of the sea!"
In such an outburst as this, the soulful melancholy of those youthful years reaches its climax. Condensed as I have given it here—it is six times as long in the original—it is a beautiful, poetical expression of George Sand's fully developed youthful self-consciousness. At the time she wroteIndiana, neither her feeling of her own superiority nor her pessimism had reached this stage. That unpretending tale she composed as the sympathising spokeswoman of the victims of existing social conditions. In it she did not consciously attack any social institution—not even marriage, as the opponent of which she was at once stigmatised. She is evidently speaking the truth when (in the preface of 1842) she declares that long after writing the original preface toIndianaunder the influence of a remnant of respect for existing social institutions, she continued her attempt to solve the insoluble problem, to find a means of securing the happiness and dignity of the individuals oppressed by society which should be consonant with the existence of society. And she is also perfectly truthful when, in a letter to Nisard (the last inLettres d'un Voyageur), she maintains that she has only attacked husbands, and not marriage as a social institution. It was in the rôle of the psychologist and story-teller, not in that of the reformer, that she at first appeared before the public. InIndiana, as inValentine, the fervour, the poetical impulses, the enthusiastic passions and stormy protests of youth, are the proper contents of the book; there is much psychological and little personal history. Nevertheless there was in the nature of the feelings described (feelings free from any trace of viciousness, yet at variance with the decrees of society), and still more in the reflections interspersed throughout the tale, something which actually struck at the foundations of society. Therefore it was not pure stupidity which found expression in the clumsy and violent attacks made upon these books and their author by the partisans of the existing order of things. Men had a foreboding that such feelings and thoughts would sooner or later remould the laws governing society. They have begun to do so, and their influence will increase day by day.
Their very idealism and enthusiasm makes these books essentially revolutionary. For, as only the inner world exists for the authoress, she allows it to develop freely without taking any thought of the possibility of its development destroying the outer world; and, depicting as she does, chiefly strong feelings, or rather only one, infinitely varied feeling—love, she shows how its laws and the laws of society perpetually come into conflict. Although she casts no doubt upon the necessity and indispensability of marriage in our days, she undermines the belief in its eternal continuance. She certainly at first only attacks husbands, but an examination of her demand for an ideal husband shows that it is a demand which cannot be satisfied under existing conditions. In much the same manner, at a somewhat later period, Kierkegaard undermines Christianity by making an extravagantly ideal demand of the individual Christian.
The French Naturalistic School of forty years later, which has often suffered from more or less groundless accusations of immorality, has, in revenge, re-directed the accusation against these enthusiastic early works of George Sand's. When Émile Zola made one of his periodical protests against the idealistic novel, he never omitted to point out the dangers for the family and for society which lie in this constant aspiring beyond the bounds which restrain the individual, this continual representation of a craving for greater intellectual and emotional liberty. He prided himself on never representing unlawful love in a beautiful or inviting light, but always bedraggled with mire. He might have added that he and his successors in the school of Balzac have never felt the need of a higher morality than that in common vogue, and never hold out the prospect of social conditions different from the present. They have imposed a crushing restriction on themselves by limiting themselves to the representation of the outward realities visible to their own eyes, and resolutely refusing to draw any conclusions from their observations. Hence it is that their boldness in representing social relations and situations which literature hitherto had been chary of approaching, is equalled by their weakness, nay insignificance, as thinkers and moralists. They are constantly reduced to seek support from the indubitable harmony of their morality with the universally accepted moral code; they plume themselves on calling vice what other people call vice, and on inspiring horror of that vice. They are not as that sinner George Sand. But it is time to observe that it is just in this "morality" of theirs that their literary weakness lies; and that the strength of George Sand's works, with their far more idealistic and chaste delineations, lies in their "immorality." In the apparently extremely audacious works of the Realistic School, there is not an utterance to compare in real audacity with that which George Sand has put into the mouth of one of the chief characters inHorace, and which gives admirably condensed expression to her ideas of morality in the matter of love: "I believe that that love should be defined as a noble passion, which elevates and strengthens us by beautiful feelings and thoughts, and that love as an evil passion, which makes us selfish and cowardly and gives us over to all the meannesses of blind instinct. Every passion, therefore, is lawful or criminal according to its production of one or the other of these results—it being a matter of no consequence that official society, which is not the supreme court of justice of humanity, sometimes legalises the evil, and condemns the beneficent passion."[1]
InLéliaandJacques(1833 and 1834) their authoress's Byronic "Weltschmerz" and declamatory tendency reach high-water mark. InLéliashe represented her ideal great, unsensual, profoundly feeling woman, and provided her with an opposite in her sister, Pulchérie, a luxurious courtesan. Taking her own character and separating the two sides of it, she formed Lélia after the Minerva-image, Pulchérie after the Venus-image in her own soul; the result being, not unnaturally, rather two symbolic personages than two human beings of flesh and blood. InJacquesshe approached the problem of marriage from a new side. InIndianashe had portrayed a brutal, inValentinea refined, cold husband; but now she equipped the husband with the qualities which in her eyes were the highest, and wrecked his happiness upon the rock of his own elevated character, which his insignificant young wife is not capable of understanding and continuing to love. The authoress has endeavoured to impart additional force to her own opinions by putting them into the mouth of the wronged husband. He himself excuses his wife: "No human being can control love; and no one is guilty because he loves or ceases to loves. What degrades the woman is the lie; what constitutes the adultery is not the hour she grants her lover, but the night she spends in her husband's arms afterwards." Jacques feels it his duty to make way for his rival: "Borel, in my place, would calmly have beaten his wife, and would probably not have blushed to embrace that same night the woman degraded alike by his blows and his kisses. There are men who, in the Oriental fashion, calmly kill their faithless wives, because they regard them as their lawful property. Others challenge their rival, kill him or put him out of the way, and then beg the woman whom they declare they love, for kisses and caresses, which she either refuses or gives in despair. These are perfectly ordinary proceedings in conjugal love. It seems to me that the love of swine is less vile and coarse than such love." These truths, already regarded as elementary by people of the highest culture, were in 1830 the most atrocious heresy. They are the salt which has kept this youthful work from becoming stale in spite of its antiquated plot and the diffuseness of the tedious letter-style. The extravagance of Romanticism is most noticeable in the final catastrophe. Jacques can think of no better means of liberating Fernande than a suicide committed in a manner which to her will give it the appearance of an accident. This transports us at once into the region of unreality. But the unreality in this novel is, generally speaking, more apparent than actual. It is easy for modern criticism to point out the absence of any indications of locality, of real occupations, &c., &c.; the personages in George Sand's early novels have no occupation and no aim but to love. The reality of these books is a spiritual reality, the reality of feeling. Even this, however, has been disputed in our day. It is the fashion to regard emotions such as those here described—this wild despair caused by social conditions, this passionate, erotic tenderness, this pure, ardent friendship between man and woman—as unnatural and unreal.[2]But we must remember that George Sand's characters are not supposed to be average men and women. She describes unusually gifted beings. Indeed, in these early works she has done little else than delineate and explain her own emotional life. She places her own character in every variety of outward circumstance, and then, with a marvellous power of self-observation and unerring skill, draws the natural psychological conclusions. It is interesting to observe how the constant craving to find a masculine mind which is the equal of her own, leads her to a kind of self-duplication in two sexes. Ardently as she exalts love, strongly as she allows it to influence the life of the great woman and of the great man, nevertheless both of these, Jacques as well as Lélia, are inspired by a still stronger, still more ideal feeling, that of friendship for a noble member of the opposite sex, by whom they are understood. In comparison with this profound mutual understanding, Lélia's love for Sténio, Jacques' for Fernande, seem merely the weaknesses of these two great souls. Lélia has an understanding friend and equal in Trenmor, Jacques in Sylvia. Jacques would love Sylvia if she were not his half-sister, or rather if he were not compelled to suspect that she is; but there is a beauty in their mutual relationship, such as it is, to which merely erotic relations could hardly attain. I remember distinctly what a powerful impression this friendship between Jacques and Sylvia made upon me when I read the book (probably in 1867) for the first time. I saw plainly enough that Jacques is to a certain extent an unreal character—and Sylvia also; for she is nothing more than Jacques' understanding confidante; but the ideal current between them is real, and it electrified me. Sylvia has her origin in the distressful cry of the genius for its equal and mate; she is undoubtedly nothing more than the expression of the urgent craving and demand of the great, lonely heart—but what is poetry else than this? Imperfect as the novel otherwise may be, the friendship between Jacques and Sylvia lends it an atmosphere of real poetry; we feel, while reading of it, as if, above the low-lying world of the passions, we caught a glimpse of a higher one, where purer, yet still quite earthly beings, love and understand each other.
Characters such as these illustrate the strong instinct of friendship which George Sand possessed, and which was quite in the spirit of the youthful Romanticism of the period. HerLettres d'un Voyageur, which follow the first group of novels, and begin immediately after the separation from Alfred de Musset in Venice, give us an insight into her friendships. These letters belong to the works in which she has most directly revealed her own personal feelings, although they are written with a reserve concerning actual events which makes them obscure to the uninitiated. In them we follow her from the days of her life with the handsome, stupid Italian, Dr. Pagello, for whom she gave up De Musset, to the period of her devotion to Everard (Michel de Bourges), her counsel in the divorce suit, who inspired her with the idea of the pretty tale,Simon. Between these two extremes lie all the good, cordial friendships, with François Rollinat, Jules Néraud, &c.—frank, clever men, with whom she felt a constant desire to exchange ideas and letters, with whom she studied, from whom she learned much, and whom, in the Romantic spirit of good fellowship, she addressed with the familiar "thou"; as also all the genuine artistic comradeships with Franz Liszt, the Comtesse d'Agoult, Meyerbeer, and many others—the men and women of genius of the day.
In no other of her works is she so eloquent, in none of the later ones do her periods flow in such long, lyrically rhetorical waves. Nowhere better than here can we study her personal style, as distinguished from the dialogue of her novels. Sonority is its most marked feature. It rolls onward in long, full rhythms, regular in its fall and rise, melodious in joy, harmonious even in despair. The perfect balance of George Sand's nature is mirrored in the perfect balance of her sentences—never a shriek, a start, or a jar; a sweeping, broad-winged flight—never a leap, nor a blow, nor a fall. The style is deficient in melody, but abounds in rich harmonies; it lacks colour, but has all the beauty that play of line can impart. She never produces her effect by an unusual and audacious combination of words, seldom or never by a fantastic simile. And there is just as little strong or glaring colour in her pictures as there is jarring sound in her language. She is romantic in her enthusiasms, in the way in which she yields unresistingly to feelings which defy rules and regulations; but she is severely classical in the regularity of her periods, in the inherent beauty of her form, and the sobriety of her colouring.[3]
The letters from Venice, and still more those written after her return to France, tell the understanding reader how humiliated George Sand felt by the loss of De Musset's friendship, how sadly she missed it, and what a fictitious account of the whole episode it was which she gave to the public some twenty years later inElle et Lui. There is little doubt that there were times when she felt utterly overwhelmed with longing, shame, and grief. In a letter to Rollinat written in January 1835, there is a significant and, as far as I know, hitherto unnoticed passage, which, beautiful in itself, also contains a confession:
"Listen to a tale and weep! There was once an excellent artist, by name Watelet, who etched better than any other man of his day. He loved Marguerite Le Conte, and taught her to etch as well as himself. She left her husband, her home, and everything she possessed, to live with Watelet. The world condemned them, but, as they were poor and modest, it forgot them. Forty years later an idle wanderer in the neighbourhood of Paris found, in a little house called Moulin-Joli, an old man who etched and an old woman whom he called his 'meunière,' and who etched too, seated at the same table. The idler who made the wonderful discovery told others, and the fashionable world flocked to see this marvellous phenomenon—a love which had lasted for forty years; an occupation which had been pursued all that time with the same industry and the same devotion; two admirable twin talents. The thing made a great sensation. Fortunately the couple died of old age a few days later; the prying crowd would have spoilt everything. The last thing they etched was a drawing of Moulin-Joli, Marguerite's house.... It hangs in my room, above the portrait of a person whom no one here has ever seen. For a whole year he who left me this portrait sat working with me every night at a little table.... At daybreak each examined the other's work and criticised it, and we supped at the same little table, talking of art, of thoughts and feelings, and of the future. The future has broken its promise to us. Pray for me, O Marguerite Le Conte!"
This is perhaps the only occasion on which George Sand writes as if she owed anything to Alfred de Musset in her capacity as authoress.[4]I have already indicated the nature of his influence upon her. It was purely critical; it sharpened her aesthetic sense. His artistic method was powerless to affect her. To any direct influence upon her style George Sand was completely unreceptive. Madame Girardin's witty hit at her: "It is especially when the works of women authors are in question that we may say with Buffon, 'Le style, c'est l'homme,'" is as incorrect as it is amusing. For though it is, almost without exception, the case that each of George Sand's most important novels bears marks of the influence of a different man, yet the influence never extends to the style. Again and again she makes herself the organ of another's ideas, but never does she imitate another's style. Her talent was too independent for this, and she was moreover too little of the artist. She who was so silent, and, when she did speak, so laconic, was the improvisatrice when she wrote. She let her pen run over the paper without making preparatory studies, without thought of models, without conscious artistic aim; she never treated a given theme, or elaborated and completed a stylistic suggestion thrown out by another;—in short, she submitted to none of the conditions upon which purely technical progress in any art depends. In this she forms a marked contrast to De Musset. He was, at first, inspired by a spirit of revolt against conventions and rules in art, which was always incomprehensible to her. He intentionally spoiled the rhymes in his first poems, to make sure of annoying the Classicists. (In the first sketch ofL'Andalouse, the Marchioness was called Amaémoni, which in French rhymes correctly with "bruni," but in the final version she received the name of Amaégui, which hardly rhymes.) When his creative capacity was on the wane, he calmly employed seven pages of Carmontelle's Proverbe,Le Distrait, in the manufacture of his weak little comedy,On ne saurait penser à tout. In his best period he was a master of the art of delicate plagiarism. I may mention, as an example, that I have found in the Prince de Ligne's works his stylistic model for the beautiful poem, "Après une lecture," quoted in a previous chapter.[5]A similar discovery in connection with George Sand would be an impossibility. She is incapable of polishing the rough diamonds of others into brilliants for the adornment of her own muse; she presents us that muse clad in simple white, with a wild flower in her hair.
Nowhere is the peculiar beauty of George Sand's style more fascinating than in the above quoted letter to Rollinat. The profound understanding of nature acquired in her youth by this revolutionary woman of genius, blends in marvellous unison with her restless, endless longing; and through both the longing for nature and the longing for happiness runs the undertone of a loving heart's lamentation over the disappointments it has caused and the disappointments it has suffered. And in this letter and the following one to Everard, we see how George Sand's political, republican, faith springs from the ruins of her youthful, erotic, castles-in-the-air. At first she is weak in the faith, too much engrossed with herself. The poor poetess undoubtedly "feels ill at ease under the umbrella of the monarchy," but all the same her thoughts are more occupied with the forms of violet and jasmine petals than with the institutions of society or forms of government. Yet one sees the spark of enthusiasm gradually beginning to glow in her breast. She envies her men friends their faith and the energy it begets, she, "who is only a poet, onlyune femmelette!" They, in the event of a revolution, would go forth to fight with the steadfast hope of winning liberty for their fellow-men; she could do nothing but let herself be killed in the hope of being useful for once, were it only by raising a barricade the height of her dead body. But she concludes thus: "Can any of you find a use for my present and future life? So long as I am employed in the service of an idea, and not of a passion, I consent to be bound by your laws. But, alas! I warn you that all I am fit for is to execute an order bravely and faithfully. I can act, but not plan; for I know nothing and am sure of nothing. I can only obey when I shut my eyes and stop my ears so as to see nothing and hear nothing which may make me doubtful; I can march with my friends like the dog who, seeing his master sailing away, jumps into the water and swims after the ship until he dies of fatigue. The ocean is wide, my friends, and I am weak. I am fit for nothing but to be a soldier—and I am not five feet high!