By her novels classed as “socialistic,”
Madame Sand had, as we have seen, incurred the public
hostility of those whom her doctrines alarmed.
And yet her “communist” heroes and heroines
are the most pacific and inoffensive of social influences.
They merely aspire to isolate themselves, and personally
to practice principles and virtues of the highest
order; unworldliness such as, if general, might indeed
turn the earth into the desired Utopia. Nothing
can be said against their example, unless that it
is too good, and that there is little hope of its
being widely followed.
Charges of another sort, no less bitter,
and though exaggerated, somewhat better founded, assailed
her after the appearance in 1847 of Lucrezia Floriani,
a novel of character-analysis entirely, but into which
she was accused of having introduced an unflattering
portrait of Frederic Chopin, whose long and long-requited
attachment to her entitled him to better treatment
at her hands.
With respect to the general question
of such alleged fictitious reproductions, few novelists
escape getting into trouble on this head. It
has been aptly observed by Mr. Hamerton that the usual
procedure of the reading public in such cases is to
fix on some real personage as distinctly unlike the
character in the book as possible, for the original,
and then to complain of the unfaithfulness of the resemblance.
Madame Sand’s taste and higher art-instincts
would have revolted against the practice now
unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers of
forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet
of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise;
and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful
though he was, read her work without perceiving in
it any intention there to portray their relations
to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially
from those of the personages in the romance.
Lucrezia Floriani is a cantatrice
of genius, who, whilst still young, has retired from
the world, indifferent to fame, and effectually disenchanted so
she believes with passion. Despite
an experience strange and stormy, even for a member
of her Bohemian profession, Lucrezia has miraculously
preserved intact her native nobility of soul, and
appears as a meet object of worship to a fastidious
young prince on his travels, who becomes passionately
enamored of her. He over-persuades Lucrezia
into trusting that they will find their felicity in
each other. Their happiness is of the briefest
duration, owing to the unreasonable character of the
prince, who leads the actress a miserable life; his
love taking the form of petty tyranny and retrospective
jealousy. After long years of this material and
moral captivity, the heroic Lucrezia fades and
dies.
Not content with identifying the intolerable,
though it must be owned severely-tested, Prince Karol
with Chopin, imaginative writers have gone so far
as to assert that the book was conceived and written
from an express design on the novelist’s part
to bring about the breach of a link she was beginning
to find irksome!
Madame Sand has described how it was
written as are all such works of imagination in
response to a sort of “call” some
striking yet indefinable quality in one idea among
the host always floating through the brain of the
artist, that makes him instantly seize it and single
it out as inviting to art-treatment. It would
be preposterous to doubt her statement. But whether
the inspiration ought not to have been sacrificed
is another question. Her gift was her good angel
and her evil angel as well, but in any case something
of her despot. Here, assuredly, it ruled her
ill. It is indisputable that, as she had pointed
out, the sad history of the attachment of Lucrezia
the actress and Karol the prince deviates too widely
from that which was supposed to have originated it
for just comparisons to be drawn between the two, that
Karol is not a genius, and therefore has none of the
rights of genius including, we presume,
the right to be a torment to those around him that
to talk of a portrait of Chopin without his genius
is a contradiction in terms, that he never suspected
the likeness assumed until it was insinuated to him,
and so forth. But there remains this, that in
the work of imagination she here presented to the
public there was enough of reality interwoven to make
the world hasten to identify or confound Prince Karol
with Chopin. This might have been a foregone conclusion,
as also that Chopin, the most sensitive of mortals,
would be infinitely pained by the inferences that
would be drawn. Perhaps if only as a genius, he
had the right to be spared such an infliction; and
one must wish it could have appeared in this light
to Madame Sand. It seems as though it were impossible
for the author to put himself at the point of view
of the reader in such matters. The divine spark
itself, that quickens certain faculties, deadens others.
When Goethe, in Werther, dragged the private
life of his intimate friends, the Kestners, into publicity,
and by falsifying the character of the one and misrepresenting
the conduct of the other, in obedience to the requisitions
of art, exposed his beloved Charlotte and her husband
to all manner of annoyances, it never seems to have
entered into his head beforehand but that they would
be delighted by what he had done. Nor could he
get over his surprise that such petty vexations
on their part should not be merged in a proud satisfaction
at the literary memorial thus raised by him to their
friendly intercourse! This seems incredible, and
yet his sincerity leaves no room for doubt.
Madame Sand’s transgressions
on this head, though few, have obtained great notoriety,
on account of the extraordinary celebrity of two of
the personages that suggested characters she has drawn.
To the supposed originals, however obscure, the mortification
is the same. But what often passes uncommented
on when the individuals said to be traduced are unknown
to fame, sets the whole world talking when one of the
first musicians or poets of the century is involved;
so that Madame Sand has incurred more censure than
other novelists, though she has deserved it more rarely.
But regret remains that for the sake of Lucrezia
Floriani, one of the least pleasant though by no
means the least powerful of her novels, she should
have exposed herself to the charge of unkindness to
one who had but a short while to live.
Other causes had latterly been combining
to lead to differences of which it would certainly
be unfair to lay the whole blame on Madame Sand.
The tie of personal attachment between Chopin and
herself was not associated by identity of outward
interests or even of cares and family affections,
such as, in the case of husband and wife, make self-sacrifice
possible under conditions which might otherwise be
felt unbearable, and help to tide over crises of impatience
or wrong. Madame Sand’s children were now
grown up; cross-influences could not but arise, hard
to conciliate. Without accrediting Chopin with
the self-absorption of Prince Karol, it is easy to
see here, in a situation somewhat anomalous, elements
of probable discord. It was impossible that he
should any longer be a first consideration; impossible
that he should not resent it.
For some years his state of health
had been getting worse and worse, and his nervous
susceptibilities correspondingly intensified.
Madame Sand betrayed some impatience at last of what
she had long borne uncomplainingly, and their good
understanding was broken. As was natural, the
breach was the more severely felt by Chopin, but that
it was of an irreparable nature, one is at liberty
to doubt. He bitterly regretted what he had lost,
for which not all the attentions showered on him by
his well-wishers could afford compensation, as his
letters attest.
But outward circumstances prolonged
the estrangement till it was too late. They met
but once after the quarrel, and that was in company
in March, 1848. Madame Sand would at once have
made some approach, but Chopin did not then respond
to the appeal; and the reconciliation both perhaps
desired was never to take place. Political events
had intervened to widen the gap between their paths.
Chopin had neither part nor lot in the revolutionary
movement that just then was throwing all minds and
lives into a ferment, and which was completely to engross
Madame Sand’s energies for many months to come.
It drove him away to England, and he only returned
to Paris, in 1849, to die.
In May, 1847, the tranquility of life
at Nohant had been varied by a family event, the marriage
of Madame Sand’s daughter Solange with the sculptor
Clesinger. The remainder of the twelvemonth was
spent in the country, apparently with very little
anticipation on Madame Sand’s part that the
breaking of the political storm, that was to draw her
into its midst, was so near.
The new year was to be one of serious
agitations, different to any that had yet entered
into her experience. Political enterprise for
the time cast all purely personal interests and emotions
into the background. “I have never known
how to do anything by halves,” she says of herself
very truly; and whatever may be thought of the tendency
of her political influence and the manner of its exertion,
no one can tax her with sparing herself in a contest
to which, moreover, she came disinterested; vanity
and ambition having, in one of her sex, nothing to
gain by it. But in political matters it seems
hard for a poet to do right. If, like Goethe,
he holds aloof in great crises, he is branded for it
as a traitor and a bad patriot. The battle of
Leipzig is being fought, and he sits tranquilly writing
the epilogue for a play. If, like George Sand,
he throws the whole weight of his enthusiastic eloquence
into what he believes to be the right scale, it is
ten to one that his power, which knows nothing of
caution and patience, may do harm to the cause he has
at heart.
Madame Sand rested her hopes for a
better state of things, for the redemption of France
from political corruption, for the amelioration of
the condition of the working classes, and reform of
social institutions in general, on the advent to power
of those placed at the head of affairs by the collapse
of the government of Louis Philippe, a crisis long
threatened, long prepared, and become inevitable.
“The whole system,” wrote
Heine prophetically of the existing monarchy, five
years before its fall, “is not worth a charge
of powder, if indeed some day a charge of powder does
not blow it up.” February, 1848, saw the
explosion, the flight of the Royal Family, and the
formation of a Provisional Government, with Lamartine
at its head.
It is hard to realize in the present
day, when we contemplate these events through the
sobering light of the deplorable sequel, how immense
and wide-spreading was the enthusiasm that at this
particular juncture seemed to put the fervent soul
of a George Sand or an Armand Barbes into the
most lukewarm and timid. “More than one,”
writes Madame d’Agoult, “who for the last
twenty years had been scoffing at every grand thought,
let himself be won by the general emotion.”
The prevailing impression can have fallen little short
of the conviction that a sort of millennium was at
hand for mankind in general and the French in particular,
and that all human ills would disappear because a
bad government had been got rid of, and that without
such scenes of blood and strife as had disfigured
previous revolutions.
The first task was firmly to establish
a better one in its place. Madame Sand, though
with a strong perception of the terrible difficulties
besetting a ministry which, to quote her own words,
would need, in order to acquit itself successfully,
“the genius of a Napoleon and the heart of Christ,”
never relaxed an instant in the enforcement, both by
example and exhortation, of her conviction that it
was the duty of all true patriots and philanthropists
to consecrate their energies to the cause of the new
republic.
“My heart is full and my head
on fire,” she writes to a fellow-worker in the
same cause. “All my physical ailments, all
my personal sorrows are forgotten. I live, I
am strong, active, I am not more than twenty years
old.” The exceptional situation of the country
was one in which, according to her opinion, it behooved
men to be ready not only with loyalty and devotion,
but with fanaticism if needed. She worked hard
with her son and her local allies at the ungrateful
task of revolutionizing Le Berry, which, she sighs,
“is very drowsy.” In March she came
up to Paris and placed her services as journalist and
partizan generally at the disposal of Ledru-Rollin,
Minister of the Interior under the new Government.
“Here am I already doing the work of a statesman,”
she writes from Paris to her son at Nohant, March 24.
Her indefatigable energy, enabling her as it did to
disdain repose, was perhaps the object of envy to
the statesmen themselves. At their disgust when
kept up all night by the official duties of their posts,
she laughs without mercy. Night and day her pen
was occupied, now drawing up circulars for the administration,
now lecturing the people in political pamphlets addressed
to them. To the Bulletin de la Republique,
a government journal started with the laudable purpose
of preserving a clear understanding between the mass
of the people in the provinces and the central government,
she became a leading contributor. For the festal
invitation performances given to the people at the
“Theatre de la Republique,”
where Rachel sang the Marseillaise and acted in Les
Horaces, Madame Sand wrote a little “occasional”
prologue, Le Roi Attend, a new and democratic
version of Moliere’s Impromptu de Versailles.
The outline is as follows: Moliere is discovered
impatient and uneasy; the King waits, and the comedians
are not ready. He sinks asleep, and has a vision,
in which the muse emerges out of a cloud, escorted
by AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and
Beaumarchais, to each of whom are assigned a few lines where
possible, lines of their own in praise
of equality and fraternity. They vanish, and
Moliere awakes; his servant announces to him that the
King waits but the King this time is, of
course, the people, to whom Moliere now addresses
his flattering speech in turn.
But the fervor of heroism that fired
everybody in the first days of successful revolution,
that made the leaders disinterested, the masses well-behaved,
reasonable, and manageable, was for the majority a
flash only; and the dreamed-of social ideal, touched
for a moment was to recede again into the far distance.
It was Madame Sand’s error, and no ignoble one,
to entertain the belief that a nation could safely
be trusted to the guidance of a force so variable
and uncontrollable as enthusiasm, and that the principle
of self-devotion could be relied upon as a motive
power. The divisions, intrigues, and fatal complications
that quickly arose at head-quarters confirmed her first
estimation of the practical dangers ahead. She
clung to her belief in the sublime virtues of the
masses, and that they would prove themselves grander,
finer, more generous than all the mighty and the learned
ones upon earth. But each of the popular leaders
in turn was pronounced by her tried and found wanting.
None of the party chiefs presented the desirable combination
of perfect heroism and political genius. Michel,
the apostle who of old had converted her to the cause,
she had long scorned as a deserter. Leroux, in
the moment of action, was a nonentity. Barbes
“reasons like a saint,” she observes, “that
is to say, very ill as regards the things of this
world.” Lamartine was a vain trimmer; Louis
Blanc, a sectarian; Ledru-Rollin, a weathercock.
“It is the characters that transgress,”
she complains naively as one after the other disappointed
her. Her own shortcomings on the score of patience
and prudence were, it must be owned, no less grave.
Her clear-sightedness was unaccompanied by the slightest
dexterity of action. Years before, in one of
the Lettres d’un Voyageur, she had passed
a criticism on herself as a political worker, the accuracy
of which she made proof of when carried into the vortex.
“I am by nature poetical, but not legislative,
warlike, if required, but never parliamentary.
By first persuading me and then giving me my orders
some use may be made of me, but I am not fit for discovering
or deciding anything.”
Such an influence, important for raising
an agitation, was null for controlling and directing
the forces thus set in motion. In the application
of the theories she had accepted she was as weak and
obscure as she was emphatic and eloquent in the preaching
of them. Little help could she afford the republican
leaders in dealing with the momentous question how
to fulfill the immense but confused aspirations they
had raised, how to show that their principles could
answer the necessities of the moment.
The worst, perhaps, that can be said
of Madame Sand’s political utterances is that
they encouraged the people in their false belief which
belief she shared that the social reforms
so urgently needed could be worked rapidly by the
Government, providing only it were willing. Over-boldness
of expression on the part of advanced sections only
increased the timidity and irresolution of action complained
of in the administration. As the ranks of the
Ministry split up into factions, Madame Sand attached
herself to the party of Ledru-Rollin in
whom at that time she had confidence, a
party that desired to see him at the head of affairs,
and that included Jules Favre, Etienne Arago, and
Armand Barbes. No more zealous political
partizan and agent than Madame Sand. The purpose
in view was to preserve a cordial entente between
these trusted chiefs and the masses whose interests
they represented and on whose support they relied.
To this end she got together meetings of working-men
at her temporary Parisian abode, addressing them in
speech and in print, and seemingly blind in the heat
of the struggle to the enormous danger of playing
with the unmanageable, unreasoning instincts of the
crowd. She still cherished the chimera dear to
her imagination the prospective vision
of the French people assembling itself in large masses,
and deliberately and pacifically giving expression
to its wishes.
Into the Bulletin de la Republique
there crept soon a tone of impatience and provocation,
improper and dangerous in an official organ.
The 16th number, which appeared on April 16, at a moment
when the pending general elections seemed likely to
be overruled by reactionaries, contained the startling
declaration that if the result should thus dissatisfy
the Paris people, these would manifest their will
once more, by adjourning the decision of a false national
representation.
This sentence, which came from the
pen of Madame Sand, was interpreted into a threat
of intimidation from the party that would make Ledru-Rollin
dictator, and created a considerable stir. There
was, indeed, no call for a fresh brand of discord
in the republican ranks. Almost simultaneously
came popular demonstrations of a menacing character.
Ledru-Rollin disavowed the offending Bulletin;
but the growing uneasiness of the bourgeoisie, the unruly discontent
among the workmen, the Government, embarrassed and utterly disorganized, was
powerless to allay. Madame Sand began to perceive that the republic of her
dreams, the republican republic, was a forlorn hope, though still unconscious
that even heavier obstacles to progress existed in the governed many than in the
incapacity or personal ambition of the governing few. She writes to her
son from Paris, April 17:
I am sad, my boy. If this goes
on, and in some sense there should be no more
to be done, I shall return to Nohant to console myself
by being with you. I shall stay and see the
National Assembly, after which I think I shall
find nothing more here that I can do.
At the Fte de la Fraternite,
April 20th, the spectacle of a million of souls putting
aside and agreeing to forget all dissensions, all
wrongs in the past and fears for the future, and uniting
in a burst of joyous exultation, filled her with enthusiasm
and renewed hope. But the demonstration of the
15th of May, of which she was next a spectator, besides
its mischievous effect in alarming the quiet classes
and exciting the agitators afresh, gave fatal evidence
of the national disorganization and uncontrollable
confusion everywhere prevailing, that had doomed the
republic from the hour of its birth.
Madame Sand, though she strenuously
denied any participation or sympathy with this particular
manifestation, was closely associated in the public
mind with those who had aided and abetted the uprising.
During the gathering of the populace, which she had
witnessed, mingling unrecognized among the crowd,
a female orator haranguing the mob from the lower
windows of a cafe was pointed out to her, and
she was assured that it was George Sand. During
the repressive measures the administration was led
to take she felt uncertain whether the arrest of Barbes
might not be followed by her own. Some of her
friends advised her to seek safety in Italy, where
at that time the partisans of liberty were more united
and sanguine. She turned a deaf ear. But
she was severed now from all influential connection
with those in authority. Before the end of May
she left for Nohant, with her hopes for the rapid
regeneration of her country on the wane. “I
am afraid for the future,” she writes to the
imprisoned Barbes, shortly after these events.
“I suffer for those who do harm and allow harm
to be done without understanding it.... I see
nothing but ignorance and moral weakness preponderating
on the face of the globe.”
Through the medium of the press, notably
of the journal La Vraie Republique, she continued to give plain
expression to her sentiments, regardless of the political enmities she might
excite, and of the personal mortification to which she was exposed, even at
Nohant, which with its inmates had recently become the mark for petty hostile
demonstrations. Alluding to these, she writes:
Here in this Berry, so romantic, so
gentle, so calm and good, in this land I love
so tenderly, and where I have given sufficient proof
to the poor and uneducated that I know my duties towards
them, I myself in particular am looked upon as
the enemy of the human race; and if the Republic
has not kept its promises, it is I, clearly,
who am the cause.
The term “communist,”
caught up and passed from mouth to mouth, was flung
at Madame Sand and her son by the peasants, whose ideas
as to its significance were not a little wild.
“A pack of idiots,” she writes to Madame
Marliani, “who threaten to come and set fire
to Nohant. Brave they are not, neither morally
nor physically; and when they come this way and I
walk through the midst of them they take off their
hats; but when they have gone by they summon courage
to shout, ’Down with the communists.’”
The ingratitude of many who again
and again had received succor from her and hers, she
might excuse on account of their ignorance, but the
extent of their ignorance was an obstacle to immediate
progress whose weight she had miscalculated.
“I shall keep my faith,”
she writes to Joseph Mazzini at this crisis “the
idea, pure and bright, the eternal truth will ever
remain for me in my heaven, unless I go blind.
But hope is a belief in the near triumph of one’s
faith. I should not be sincere if I said that
this state of mind had not been modified in me during
these last months.”
The terrible insurrection of June
followed, and overwhelmed her for the time. It
was not only that her nature, womanly and poetical,
had the greatest horror of bloodshed. The spectacle
of the republicans slaughtering each other, of the
evil passions stirred, the frightful anarchy, ended
but at a frightful cost, the complete extinction of
all hopes, nothing left rampant but fear,
rancor and distrust, was heart-rendering
to her whose heart had been thrown into the national
troubles. Great was the panic in Berry, an after-clap
of the disturbances in the capital. Madame Sand’s
position became more unpleasant than ever. She
describes herself as “blasee d outrages threatened
perpetually by the coward hatreds and imbecile terrors
of country places.” But to all this she
was well-nigh insensible in her despair over the public
calamities oppressing her nation the end
of all long-struggling aspirations in “frightful
confusion, complete moral anarchy, a morbid condition,
in most which the courageous of us lost heart and
wished for death.
“You say that the bourgeoisie
prevails,” she writes to Mazzini, in September,
1848, “and that thus it is quite natural that
selfishness should be the order of the day. But
why does the bourgeoisie prevail, whilst the
people is sovereign, and the principle of its sovereignty,
universal suffrage, is still standing? We must
open our eyes at last, and the vision of reality is
horrible. The majority of the French people is
blind, credulous, ignorant, ungrateful, wicked, and
stupid; it is bourgeoisie itself!”
Under no conceivable circumstances
is it likely that Madame Sand would not very soon
have become disgusted with active politics, for which
her temperament unfitted her in every respect.
Impetuous and uncompromisingly sincere, she was predestined
to burn her fingers; proud and independent, to become
something of a scape-goat, charged with all the follies
and errors which she repudiated, as well as with those
for which she was more or less directly responsible.
For some time to come she remained
in comparative seclusion at Nohant. She had not
ceased her propaganda, though obliged to conduct it
with greater circumspection. After the horrors
of civil warfare, had come the cry for order at any
price, and France had declared for the rule of Louis
Bonaparte. During the course of events that consolidated
his power, Madame Sand withdrew more and more from
the strife of political parties. She had been,
and we shall find her again, inclined to hope for
better things for France from its new master than time
showed to be in store. Other republicans besides
herself had been disposed to build high their hopes
of this future “saviour of society” in
his youthful days of adversity and mysterious obscurity.
When in confinement at the fortress of Ham, in 1844,
Louis Napoleon sent to George Sand his work on the
Extinction of Pauperism. She wrote back a flattering
letter in which, however, with characteristic sincerity,
she is careful to remind him that the party to which
she belonged could never acknowledge any sovereign
but the people; that this they considered to be incompatible
with the sovereignty of one man; that no miracle, no
personification of popular genius in a single individual,
could prove to them the right of that individual to
sovereign power.
Since then she had seen the people
supreme, and been forced to own that they knew not
what they wanted, nor whither they were going, divided
in mind, ferocious in action. Among the leaders,
she had seen some infatuated by the allurements of
personal popularity, and the rest showing, by their
inability to cope with the perplexities of administrative
government, that so far philosophical speculations
were of no avail in the actual solution of social
problems.
The result of her disenchantment was
in no degree the overthrow of her political faith.
A conviction was dawning on her that her social ideal
was absolutely impracticable in any future that she
and her friends could hope to live to see. But
the belief on which she founded her social religion
was one in which she never wavered; a certainty that
a progress, the very idea of which now seemed chimerical,
would some day appear to all as a natural thing; nay,
that the stream of tendency would carry men towards
this goal in spite of themselves.