On what, in the future, will the fame
of George Sand mainly rest? According to some
critics, on her gifts of fertile invention and fluent
narration alone, which make her novels attractive in
spite of the chimerical theories, social, political
and religious, everywhere interwoven. According
to other judges again, her fictions transcend and
are likely to outlive other fictions by virtue of certain
eternal philosophic verities which they persistently
set forth, and which give them a serious interest
the changes in novel-fashions cannot effect.
The conclusion seems inevitable that
whilst the artistic strength of George Sand’s
writings is sufficient to command readers among those
most out of harmony with her views, to minds in sympathy
with her own these romances, because they express
and enforce with earnestness, sincerity and fire,
the sentiments of a poetic soul, a generous heart,
and an immense intelligence, on subjects of consequence
to humanity, have a higher value than can attach to
skillful development of plot and intrigue, mere display
of literary cleverness, or of the storings of minute
observation.
Her opinions themselves have been
widely misapprehended, perhaps because her personality or
rather that imaginary personage, the George Sand of
the myths has caused a confusion in people’s
minds between her ideal standard and her individual
success in keeping up to it. We would not ignore
the importance of personal example in one so famous
as herself. We may pass by eccentricities not
inviting to imitation; for if any of her sex ever
thought to raise themselves any nearer to the level
of George Sand by smoking or wearing men’s clothes,
such puerility does not call for notice. Still,
the influence she strenuously exerted for good as
a writer for the public would have worked more clearly
had she never seemed to swerve from the high principles
she expressed, or been led away by the disturbing
forces of a nature calm only on the surface.
Nothing is more baffling than the incomplete revelations
of a very complex order of mind, with its many-sided
sympathies and its apparent contradictions. The
self-justification she puts forward for her errors
is sometimes sophistical, but not for that insincere.
She is not trying to make us her dupes; she is the
dupe herself of her dangerous eloquence. But
her moral worth so infinitely outweighed the alloy
as to leave but little call, or even warrant, for
dwelling on the latter. “If I come back
to you,” said her old literary patron Delatouche,
into whose disfavor she had fallen awhile, when he
came years after to ask for the restitution of the
friendship he had slighted, “it is that I cannot
help myself, and your qualities surpass your defects.”
To pass from herself to her books,
no one has made more frank, clear and unchanging confession
of their heart’s faith or their head’s
principles. Her creed was that which has been,
and ever will be in some guise, the creed of minds
of a certain order. She did not invent it.
Poets, moralists, theologians, have proclaimed it
before her and after her. She found for it a
fresh mode of expression, one answering to the needs
of the age to which she belonged.
It is in the union of rare artistic
genius with an almost as rare and remarkable power
of enthusiasm for moral and spiritual truth that lies
her distinguishing strength. Most of her novels all
her best novels share this characteristic
of seeming to be prompted by the double and equal
inspiration of an artistic and a moral purpose.
Wherever one of these preponderates greatly, or is
wanting altogether, the novel falls below her usual
standard.
For in several qualities reckoned
important her work is open to criticism. “Plan,
or the want of it,” she acknowledges, with a
sort of complacency, “has always been my weak
point.” Thus whilst in many of her compositions,
especially the shorter novels, the construction leaves
little to be desired, Consuelo is only one among
many instances in which all ordinary rules of symmetry
and proportion are set at naught. Sometimes the
leading idea assumed naturally and easily a perfect
form; if simple, as in Andre and her pastorals,
it usually did so; but if complex, she troubled herself
little over the task of symmetrical arrangement.
M. Maxime Du Camp reports that she said to him:
“When I begin a novel I have no plan; it arranges
itself whilst I write, and becomes what it may.”
This fault shocks less in England, where genius is
apt to rebel against the restrictions of form, and
such irregularity has been consecrated, so to speak,
by the masterpieces of the greatest among our imaginative
writers. And even the more precise criticism of
her countrymen has owned that this carelessness works
by no means entirely to her disadvantage. In
fictions more faultless as literary compositions the
reader, whilst struck with admiration for the art with
which the whole is put together, is apt to lose something
of the illusion the impression of nature
and conviction. The faults of no writer can be
more truly defined as the defauts de ses qualites
than those of George Sand. Shorn of her spontaneity,
she would indeed be shorn of her strength. We
are carried along by the pleasant, easy stream of her
musical eloquence, as by an orator who knows so well
how to draw our attention that we forget to find him
too long. Her stories may be read rapidly, but
to be enjoyed should be read through. Dipped into
and their parts taken without reference to the whole,
they can afford comparatively but little pleasure.
In translation no novelist loses more
than George Sand, who has so much to lose!
The qualities sacrificed, though almost intangible,
are essential to the force of her charm. The
cement is taken away and the fabric coheres imperfectly;
and whilst the beauties of her manner are blurred,
its blemishes appear increased; the lengthiness, over-emphasis
of expression, questionable taste of certain passages,
become more marked. Although nevertheless many
of her tales remain pleasant reading, they suffer
as much as translated poetry, and only a very inadequate
impression of her art as a novelist can be arrived
at from any rendering of it in a foreign tongue.
Her dialogue has neither brilliancy
nor variety. Her characters characterize themselves
by the sentiments they express; their manner of expression
is somewhat uniform it is the manner of
George Sand; and although pleasant humor and good-natured
fun abound in her pages, these owe none of their attractions
to witty sayings, being curiously bare of a bon
mot or an epigram.
But we find there the rarer merits
of a poetic imagination, a vast comprehension of nature,
admirable insight into human character and power of
clear analysis; a whole science of sentiment and art
of narrative, and a charm of narrative style that
soothes the nerves like music.
She has given us a long gallery of
portraits of extraordinary variety. It is true
that her creations for the most part affect us rather
as masterly portraits than as living, walking men
and women. This is probably owing to the above-noted
sameness of style of dialogue, and the absence generally
of the dramatic quality in her novels. On the
other hand they are extremely picturesque, in the
highest sense, abounding in scenes and figures which,
without inviting to the direct illustration they are
too vivid to need, are full of suggestions to the artist.
The description in Teverino of Madeleine, the
bird-charmer, kneeling at prayer in the rude mountain
chapel, or outside on the rocks, exercising her natural
magic over her feathered friends; in Jeanne,
of the shepherd-girl discovered asleep on the Druidical
stones; the noon-day rest of the rustic fishing-party
in Valentine Benedict seated on the
felled ash-tree that bridges the stream, Athenais gathering
field-flowers on the banks, Louise flinging leaves
into the current, Valentine reclining dreamily among
the tall river-reeds, are a few examples
taken at random, which it would be easy to multiply
ad infinitum.
Any classification of her works in
order of time that professes to show a progressive
change of style, a period of super-excellence or of
distinct decadence, seems to us somewhat fanciful.
From Indiana and its immediate successors,
denounced by so many as fraught with peril to the
morals of her nation, down to Nanon (1872),
which might certainly carry off the prize of virtue
in a competition in any country, George Sand can never
be said to have entirely abandoned one “manner”
for another, or for any length of time to have risen
above or sunk below a certain level of excellence.
Andre, extolled by her latest critics as “a
delicious eclogue of the fields,” was contemporary
with the bombastic, false Byronism of Jacques;
the feeble narrative of La Mare au Diable with
the passion-introspection of Lucrezia Floriani.
The ever-popular Consuelo immediately succeeded
the feeble Compagnon du Tour de France. La
Marquise, written in the first year of her literary
life, shows a power of projection out of herself, and
of delicate analysis, hardly to be surpassed; but
Francia, of forty years’ later date,
is an equally perfect study. From the time of
Indiana onwards she continued to produce at
the rate of about two novels a year; and at intervals,
rare intervals, the product was a failure. But
we shall find her when approaching seventy still writing
on, without a trace of the weakness of old age.
The charge of “unreality”
so commonly brought against her novels it may be well
briefly to examine. Such little fantasy-pieces
in Hoffmann’s manner as Le Chateau des Desertes,
Teverino, and others, making no pretense to
be exact studies of nature, cannot fairly be censured
on this head. Like fairy tales they have a place
of their own in art. One of the prettiest of
these is Les Dames Vertes, in which the fable
seems to lead us over the borders of the supernatural;
but the secret of the mystification, well kept till
the last, is itself so pleasing and original that
the reader has no disappointing sense as of having
had a hoax played upon his imagination.
In character drawing no one can, on
occasion, be a more uncompromising realist than George
Sand. Andre, Horace, Laurent in Elle et Lui,
Pauline, Corilla, Alida in Valvedre, might be
cited as examples. But her theory was unquestionably
not the theory which guides the modern school of novel
writers. She wrote, she states explicitly, for
those “who desire to find in a novel a sort
of ideal life.” She made this her aim,
but without depreciation of the widely different aims
of other authors. “You paint mankind as
they are,” she said to Balzac; “I, as
they ought to be, or might become. You write the
comedy of humanity. I should like to write the
eclogue, the poem, the romance of humanity.”
She has been taxed with flattering nature and human
nature because her love of beauty defined
by her as the highest expression of truth dictated
her choice of subjects. An artist who paints roses
paints from reality as entirely as he who paints mud.
Her principle was to choose among realities those
which seemed best worth painting.
The amount of idealization in her
peasant sketches was naturally over-estimated by those
who, never having studied the class, could not conceive
of a peasant except conventionally, as a drunken boor.
The very just portrait of Cecilia Boccaferri, the
conscientious but obscure artist in Le Chateau
des Desertes, might seem over-flattered to such
as imagine that all opera-singers must be persons of
riotous living. The types she prefers to present,
if exceptional, are not impossible or non-existent.
An absolutely faultless heroine, such as Consuelo,
she seldom attempts to bring before us; an ideal hero;
never.
Further, even when the idealism is
greatest the essence is true. Her most fanciful
conceptions, most improbable combinations, seem more
natural than do every-day scenes and characters treated
by inferior artists. This is only partly due
to the inimitable little touches of nature that renew
the impression of reality at every page. Her
imagination modified her material, but only in order
the more vividly to illustrate truths positive and
everlasting. So did Shakespeare when he drew
Prospero and Miranda, Caliban and Ariel. Art,
as regarded by George Sand, is a search for ideal
truth rather than a study of positive reality.
This principle determined the spirit of her romances.
She was the highest in her genre; let the world
decide which genre is the highest.
When, after the publication of Indiana,
Valentine, Lelia and Jacques,
the moral tendency of her works was so sharply attacked,
it was contended on her behalf by some friendly critics
that art and social morality have no necessary connection a
line of defense she would have been the last to take
up for herself. In the present day her judges
complain rather of her incessant moralizing, and on
the whole with more reason. She indignantly denied
that her novels had the evil tendencies imputed to
them. Certainly the supposition of the antagonistic
spirit of her writings to Christianity and marriage
vanishes in proportion to the reader’s acquaintance
with her works. But against certain doctrines
and practices of the Roman Catholic Church which she
believed to be pernicious in their influence, she from
the first declared war, and by her frank audacity
made bitter enemies. M. Renan relates that when
he was a boy of fifteen his ecclesiastical superiors
showed him George Sand, emblematically portrayed for
the admonition of the youth under their care, as a
woman in black trampling on a cross! Now, it
is not merely that her own faith was eminently Christian
in character, and that the Christian ideal seemed to
her the most perfect that has yet presented itself
to the mind of man; but if unable to accept for herself
the doctrine of revelation as commonly interpreted,
she is utterly without the aggressiveness of spirit,
the petty flippancy, that often betray the intellectual
bigot under the banner of free thought. She was
too large-minded to incline to ridicule the serious
convictions of earnest seekers for truth, and she respected
all sincerity of belief all faith that produced
beneficence in action.
The alleged hostility of her romances
to marriage resumes itself into a declared hostility
to the conventional French system of match-making.
Much that she was condemned for venturing to put forward
we should simply take for granted in England, where whichever
system work the best in practice to the
strictest Philistine’s ideas of propriety there
is nothing unbecoming in a love-match. The aim
and end of true love in her stories is always marriage,
whether it be the simple attachment of Germain, the
field-laborer, for the rustic maiden of his choice,
the romantic predilection of the rich young widow
in Pierre qui roule for the handsome actor
Laurence, or the worship of Count Albert for the cantatrice
Consuelo. Her ideal of marriage was, no doubt,
a high one, “the indissoluble attachment of
two hearts fired with a like love;” a love “great,
noble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal.” Among
French novelists she should rather be noted for the
extremely small proportion of her numerous romances
that have domestic infelicity for a theme.
Her remark that their real offense
was that they were a great deal too moral for some
of their critics, hit home, inasmuch as in her attack
on the ordinary marriage system of France she struck
directly at the fashionable immorality which is its
direct result, and which she saw, both in life and
in literature, pass free of censure. It is the
selfish intriguer who meets with least mercy in her
pages, and who is there held up, not only to dislike,
but to ridicule.
Persons perplexed by the fact that
particular novels of hers which, judged by certain
theories, ought to be morally hurtful, do yet produce
a very different effect, have accounted for it in different
ways. One explains it by saying that if there
is poison on one page there is always the antidote
on the next. Another observes that a certain
morality of misfortune is never absent from her fictions.
In other words, she nowhere presents us with the spectacle
of real happiness reaped at the expense of a violation
of conscience. And in the rare cases where the
purpose of the novel seems questionable, she defeats
her own end. For truth always preponderates over
error in her conceptions, and the result is a moral
effect.
The want of delicacy that not unfrequently
disfigures her pages and offends us, offends also
as an artistic fault. As a fact it is taste rather
than conscience that she is thus apt to shock.
For the almost passing coarseness of expression or
thought is nothing more than the overflow, the negligent
frankness of a rich and active but healthy nature,
not the deliberate obliquity of a corrupt fancy or
perverted mind. Such unreserve, unfortunately,
has too commonly been the transgression of writers
of superabundant energy. But her sins are against
outward decorum rather than against the principles
upon which the rules of decorum are based. No
one was better capable of appreciating and indicating
with fine touches, delicacy and niceties of taste
and feeling in others. Her sympathy with such
sensitiveness is a corrective that should render harmless
what might vitiate taste if that qualification were
absent. And her stories, though including a very
few instances where the subject chosen seems to most
English minds too repulsive to admit of possible redemption,
and the frequent incidental introduction of situations
and frank discussion of topics inadmissible in English
fiction of that period an honorable distinction
it seems in some danger of losing in the present can
hardly be censured from the French standpoint, as
fair critics now admit. It is inconceivable that
a public could be demoralized by Indiana and
Valentine, at a time when no subject seemed
wicked and morbid enough to satisfy popular taste.
The art of George Sand in the main was sound and healthy,
and in flat opposition to the excesses both of the
ultra-romantic and ultra-realist schools.
Clear-sighted critics, perceiving
that the impression produced by her works is not one
to induce men and women to defy the laws of their
country, nor likely to undermine their religious faith,
have gone more to the heart of the matter. The
dangerous tendency is more insidious, they say, and
more general. Virtue, and not vice, is made attractive
in her books; but it is an easy virtue, attained without
self-conquest. All her characters, good and bad,
act alike from impulse. Those who seek virtue
seek pleasure in so doing, and her philosophy of life
seems to be that people should do as they like.
The morality she commends to our sympathy and admiration
is a morality of instinct and emotion, not of reason
and principle. Self-renunciation, immolation of
desire in obedience to accepted precept, is ignored.
Sentiment is supreme. Duty, as a motive power,
is set aside.
George Sand, who as a writer from
first to last appeared as a crusader against the evil,
injustice and vice that darken the world, did undoubtedly
choose rather to speak out of her heart to our hearts,
than out of her head to our heads, and considered
moreover that such was the more effectual way.
Her idea of virtue lay not in the curbing of evil
instincts, but in their conversion or modification
by the evoking of good impulses, that “guiding
and intensifying of our emotions by a new ideal”
which has been called the great work of Christianity.
It is not or not in the
first place that people should do as they
like, but that they should like to do right; and further,
that human nature in that ideal life the sentiment
of which pervades her works, and in which she saw
“no other than the normal life as we are called
to know it,” does not desire what is hurtful
to it.
The goodness that consists in doing
right or refraining from doing wrong reluctantly,
or in obedience to prescribed rules, or from mechanical
habit, had for her no life or charm. The object
to be striven for should be nothing less than the
“perfect harmony of inward desire and outward
obligation.”
Virtue should be chosen, though we
seem to sacrifice happiness; but that the two are
in the beginning identical, that, as expressed by Mr.
Herbert Spencer, “whether perfection of nature,
virtuousness of action, or rectitude of motive, be
assigned as the proper aim, the definition of perfection,
virtue, rectitude, brings us down to happiness experienced
in some form, at some time, by some person as the fundamental
idea,” is a philosophic truth of which a large
aperçu is observable in the works of George
Sand. Self-sacrifice should spring from direct
desire, altruism be spontaneous a need becoming
a second and better nature; not won by painful effort,
but through the larger development of the principle
of sympathy. Strong in her own immense power of
sympathy, she applied herself to the task of awakening
and extending such sympathies in others. This
she does by the creation of agreeable, interesting
and noble types, such as may put us out of conceit
with what is mean and base. Goodness, as understood
and portrayed by her, must recommend itself not only
to the judgment but to the heart. She worked to
popularize high sentiments, and to give shape and reality
to vague ideas of human excellence. Her idea
of virtue as a motive, not a restraint, not the controlling
of low and evil desires, but the precluding of all
temptations to yield to these, by the calling out of
stronger, higher desires, so far from being a low
one, is indeed the very noblest; yet not on that account
a chimera to those who hold, like her, to the conviction
that “what now characterizes the exceptionally
high may be expected eventually to characterize all.
For that which the highest human nature is capable
of is within the reach of human nature at large.”
“We gravitate towards the ideal,” she writes,
“and this gravitation is infinite, as is the
ideal itself.” And her place remains among
those few great intelligences who can be said to have
given humanity an appreciable impulse in the direction
of progress.