it has much occurred to us, touching those further liberations of the subordinate sex which fill our ears just now with their multitudinous sound, that the promoters of the great cause make a good deal less than they might of one of their very first contentious “assets,” if it may not indeed be looked at as quite the first; and thereby fail to pass about, to the general elation, a great vessel of truth. is this because the life and example of george sand are things unknown or obscure to the talkers and fighters of to-day—present and vivid as they were to those of the last mid-century, or because of some fear that to invoke victory in her name might, for particular, for even rueful reasons, not be altogether a safe course? it is difficult to account otherwise for the fact that so ample and embossed a shield, and one that shines too at last with a strong and settled lustre, is rather left hanging on the wall than seen to cover advances or ward off attacks in the fray. certain it is that if a lapse of tradition appeared at one time to have left a little in the lurch the figure of the greatest of all women of letters, of letters in truth most exactly, as we hold her surely to have been, that explanation should have begun to fail, some fourteen years ago, with the publication of the first volume of madame wladimir karénine’s biography, and even in spite of the fact that this singularly interesting work was not till a twelvemonth ago to arrive at the dignity of a third,[7] which leaves it, for all its amplitude, still incomplete. the latest instalment, now before us, follows its predecessors after an interval that had alarmed us not a little for the proper consummation; and the story is even now carried but to the eve of the revolution of 1848, after which its heroine (that of the revolution, we may almost say, as well as of the narrative) was to have some twenty-seven years to live. madame karénine appears to be a russian critic writing under a pseudonym; portions of her overbrimming study have appeared dispersedly, we gather, in russian periodicals, but the harmonious french idiom, of which she is all-sufficient mistress, welds them effectively together, and the result may already be pronounced a commemorative monument of all but the first order. the first order in such attempts has for its sign a faculty of selection and synthesis, not to say a sense of composition and proportion, which neither the chronicler nor the critic in these too multiplied pages is able consistently to exhibit; though on the other hand they represent quite the high-water mark of patience and persistence, of the ideal biographic curiosity. they enjoy further the advantage of the documented state in a degree that was scarce to have been hoped for, every source of information that had remained in reserve—and these proved admirably numerous—having been opened to our inquirer by the confidence of the illustrious lady’s two great-granddaughters, both alive at the time the work was begun. add to this that there has grown up in france a copious george sand literature, a vast body of illustrative odds and ends, relics and revelations, on which the would-be propagator of the last word is now free to draw—always with discrimination. ideally, well-nigh overwhelmingly informed we may at present therefore hold ourselves; and were that state all that is in question for us nothing could exceed our advantage.
[7]
george sand, sa vie et ses ?uvres, vol. iii. (1838-1848). par wladimir karénine. paris, plon, 1912.
i
just the beauty and the interest of the case are, however, that such a condition by no means exhausts our opportunity, since in no like connection could it be less said that to know most is most easily or most complacently to conclude. may we not decidedly feel the sense and the “lesson,” the suggestive spread, of a career as a thing scarce really to be measured when the effect of more and more acquaintance with it is simply to make the bounds of appreciation recede? this is why the figure now shown us, blazed upon to the last intensity by the lamplight of investigation, and with the rank oil consumed in the process fairly filling the air, declines to let us off from an hour of that contemplation which yet involves discomfiture for us so long as certain lucidities on our own part, certain serenities of assurance, fail correspondingly to play up. we feel ourselves so outfaced, as it were; we somehow want in any such case to meet and match the assurances with which the subject himself or herself immitigably bristles, and are nevertheless by no means certain that our bringing up premature forces or trying to reply with lights of our own may not check the current of communication, practically without sense for us unless flowing at its fullest. at our biographer’s rate of progress we shall still have much to wait for; but it can meanwhile not be said that we have not plenty to go on with. to this may be added that the stretch of “life,” apart from the more concrete exhibition, already accounted for by our three volumes (if one may discriminate between “production” and life to a degree that is in this connection exceptionally questionable), represents to all appearance the most violently and variously agitated face of the career. the establishment of the second empire ushered in for madame sand, we seem in course of preparation to make out, the long period already more or less known to fame, that is to criticism, as the period of her great placidity, her more or less notorious appeasement; a string of afternoon hours as hazily golden as so many reigns of antonines, when her genius had mastered the high art of acting without waste, when a happy play of inspiration had all the air, so far as our spectatorship went, of filling her large capacity and her beautiful form to the brim, and when the gathered fruit of what she had dauntlessly done and been heaped itself upon her table as a rich feast for memory and philosophy. so she came in for the enjoyment of all the sagesse her contemporaries (with only such exceptions as m. paul de musset and madame louise colet and the few discordant pleaders for poor chopin) finally rejoiced on their side to acclaim; the sum of her aspects “composing,” arranging themselves in relation to each other, with a felicity that nothing could exceed and that swept with great glosses and justifications every aspect of the past. to few has it been given to “pay” so little, according to our superstition of payment, in proportion to such enormities of ostensibly buying or borrowing—which fact, we have to recognise, left an existence as far removed either from moral, or intellectual, or even social bankruptcy as if it had proceeded from the first but on the most saving lines.
that is what remains on the whole most inimitable in the picture—the impression it conveys of an art of life by which the rough sense of the homely adage that we may not both eat our cake and have it was to be signally falsified; this wondrous mistress of the matter strikes us so as having consumed her refreshment, her vital supply, to the last crumb, so far as the provision meant at least freedom and ease, and yet having ever found on the shelf the luxury in question undiminished. superlatively interesting the idea of how this result was, how it could be, achieved—given the world as we on our side of the water mainly know it; and it is as meeting the mystery that the monument before us has doubtless most significance. we shall presently see, in the light of our renewed occasion, how the question is solved; yet we may as well at once say that this will have had for its conclusion to present our heroine—mainly figuring as a novelist of the romantic or sentimental order once pre-eminent but now of shrunken credit—simply as a supreme case of the successful practice of life itself. we have to distinguish for this induction after a fashion in which neither madame sand nor her historian has seemed at all positively concerned to distinguish; the indifference on the historian’s part sufficiently indicated, we feel, by the complacency with which, to be thorough, she explores even the most thankless tracts of her author’s fictional activity, telling the tales over as she comes to them on much the same scale on which she unfolds the situations otherwise documented. the writer of “consuelo” and “claudie” and a hundred other things is to this view a literary genius whose output, as our current term so gracefully has it, the exercise of an inordinate personal energy happens to mark; whereas the exercise of personal energy is for ourselves what most reflects the genius—recorded though this again chances here to be through the inestimable fact of the possession of style. of the action of that perfect, that only real preservative in face of other perils george sand is a wondrous example; but her letters alone suffice to show it, and the style of her letters is no more than the breath of her nature, her so remarkable one, in which expression and aspiration were much the same function. that is what it is really to have style—when you set about performing the act of life. the forms taken by this latter impulse then cover everything; they serve for your adventures not less than they may serve at their most refined pitch for your lélias and your mauprats.
this means accordingly, we submit, that those of us who at the present hour “feel the change,” as the phrase is, in the computation of the feminine range, with the fullest sense of what it may portend, shirk at once our opportunity and our obligation in not squeezing for its last drop of testimony such an exceptional body of illustration as we here possess. it has so much to say to any view—whether, in the light of old conventions, the brightest or the darkest—of what may either glitter or gloom in a conquest of every license by our contemporaries of the contending sex, that we scarce strain a point in judging it a provision of the watchful fates for this particular purpose and profit: its answers are so full to most of our uncertainties. it is to be noted of course that the creator of lélia and of mauprat was on the one hand a woman of an extraordinary gift and on the other a woman resignedly and triumphantly voteless—doing without that boon so beautifully, for free development and the acquisition and application of “rights,” that we seem to see her sardonically smile, before our present tumults, as at a rumpus about nothing; as if women need set such preposterous machinery in motion for obtaining things which she had found it of the first facility, right and left, to stretch forth her hand and take. there it is that her precedent stands out—apparently to a blind generation; so that some little insistence on the method of her appropriations would seem to be peculiarly in place. it was a method that may be summed up indeed in a fairly simple, if comprehensive, statement: it consisted in her dealing with life exactly as if she had been a man—exactly not being too much to say. nature certainly had contributed on her behalf to this success; it had given her a constitution and a temperament, the kind of health, the kind of mind, the kind of courage, that might most directly help—so that she had but to convert these strong matters into the kind of experience. the writer of these lines remembers how a distinguished and intimate friend of her later years, who was a very great admirer, said of her to him just after her death that her not having been born a man seemed, when one knew her, but an awkward accident: she had been to all intents and purposes so fine and frank a specimen of the sex. this anomalous native turn, it may be urged, can have no general application—women cannot be men by the mere trying or by calling themselves “as good”; they must have been provided with what we have just noted as the outfit. the force of george sand’s exhibition consorts, we contend, none the less perfectly with the logic of the consummation awaiting us, if a multitude of signs are to be trusted, in a more or less near future: that effective repudiation of the distinctive, as to function and opportunity, as to working and playing activity, for which the definite removal of immemorial disabilities is but another name. we are in presence already of a practical shrinkage of the distinctive, at the rapidest rate, and that it must shrink till nothing of it worth mentioning be left, what is this but a war-cry (presenting itself also indeed as a plea for peace) with which our ears are familiar? unless the suppression of the distinctive, however, is to work to the prejudice, as we may fairly call it, of men, drawing them over to the feminine type rather than drawing women over to theirs—which is not what seems most probable—the course of the business will be a virtual undertaking on the part of the half of humanity acting ostensibly for the first time in freedom to annex the male identity, that of the other half, so far as may be at all contrivable, to its own cluster of elements. individuals are in great world and race movements negligible, and if that undertaking must inevitably appeal to different recruits with a differing cogency, its really enlisting its army or becoming reflected, to a perfectly conceivable vividness, in the mass, is all our demonstration requires. at that point begins the revolution, the shift of the emphasis from the idea of woman’s weakness to the idea of her strength—which is where the emphasis has lain, from far back, by his every tradition, on behalf of man; and george sand’s great value, as we say, is that she gives us the vision, gives us the particular case, of the shift achieved, displayed with every assurance and working with every success.
the answer of her life to the question of what an effective annexation of the male identity may amount to, amount to in favouring conditions certainly, but in conditions susceptible to the highest degree of encouragement and cultivation, leaves nothing to be desired for completeness. this is the moral of her tale, the beauty of what she does for us—that at no point whatever of her history or her character do their power thus to give satisfaction break down; so that what we in fact on the whole most recognise is not the extension she gives to the feminine nature, but the richness that she adds to the masculine. it is not simply that she could don a disguise that gaped at the seams, that she could figure as a man of the mere carnival or pantomime variety, but that she made so virile, so efficient and homogeneous a one. admirable child of the old order as we find her, she was far from our late-coming theories and fevers—by the reason simply of her not being reduced to them; as to which nothing about her is more eloquent than her living at such ease with a conception of the main relevance of women that is viewed among ourselves as antiquated to “quaintness.” she could afford the traditional and sentimental, the old romantic and historic theory of the function most natural to them, since she entertained it exactly as a man would. it is not that she fails again and again to represent her heroines as doing the most unconventional things—upon these they freely embark; but they never in the least do them for themselves, themselves as the “sex,” they do them altogether for men. nothing could well be more interesting thus than the extraordinary union of the pair of opposites in her philosophy of the relation of the sexes—than the manner in which her immense imagination, the imagination of a man for range and abundance, intervened in the whole matter for the benefit, absolutely, of the so-called stronger party, or to liberate her sisters up to the point at which men may most gain and least lose by the liberation. she read the relation essentially in the plural term—the relations, and her last word about these was as far as possible from being that they are of minor importance to women. nothing in her view could exceed their importance to women—it left every other far behind it; and nothing that could make for authority in her, no pitch of tone, no range of personal inquiry nor wealth of experience, no acquaintance with the question that might derive light from free and repeated adventure, but belonged to the business of driving this argument home.
ii
madame karénine’s third volume is copiously devoted to the period of her heroine’s intimacy with chopin and to the events surrounding this agitated friendship, which largely fill the ten years precedent to ’48. our author is on all this ground overwhelmingly documented, and enlisted though she is in the service of the more successful party to the association—in the sense of madame sand’s having heartily outlived and survived, not to say professionally and brilliantly “used,” it—the great composer’s side of the story receives her conscientious attention. curious and interesting in many ways, these reflections of george sand’s middle life afford above all the most pointed illustration of the turn of her personal genius, her aptitude for dealing with men, in the intimate relation, exactly after the fashion in which numberless celebrated men have contributed to their reputation, not to say crowned their claim to superiority, by dealing with women. this being above all the note of her career, with its vivid show of what such dealing could mean for play of mind, for quickening of gift, for general experience and, as we say, intellectual development, for determination of philosophic bent and education of character and fertilisation of fancy, we seem to catch the whole process in the fact, under the light here supplied us, as we catch it nowhere else. it gives us in this application endlessly much to consider—it is in itself so replete and rounded a show; we at once recognise moreover how comparatively little it matters that such works as “lucrezia floriani” and “un hiver à majorque” should have proceeded from it, cast into the shade as these are, on our biographer’s evidence, by a picture of concomitant energies still more attaching. it is not here by the force of her gift for rich improvisation, beautiful as this was, that the extraordinary woman holds us, but by the force of her ability to act herself out, given the astounding quantities concerned in this self. that energy too, we feel, was in a manner an improvisation—so closely allied somehow are both the currents, the flow of literary composition admirably instinctive and free, and the handling power, as we are constantly moved to call it, the flow of a splendid intelligence all the while at its fullest expressional ease, for the actual situations created by her, for whatever it might be that vitally confronted her. of how to bring about, or at the least find one’s self “in for,” an inordinate number of situations, most of them of the last difficulty, and then deal with them on the spot, in the narrowest quarters as it were, with an eloquence and a plausibility that does them and one’s own nature at once a sort of ideal justice, the demonstration here is the fullest—as of what it was further to have her unfailing verbal as well as her unfailing moral inspiration. what predicament could have been more of an hourly strain for instance, as we cannot but suppose, than her finding herself inevitably accompanied by her two children during the stay at majorca made by chopin in ’38 under her protection? the victory of assurance and of the handling power strikes us as none the less never an instant in doubt, that being essentially but over the general kind of inconvenience or embarrassment involved for a mother and a friend in any real consistency of attempt to carry things off male fashion. we do not, it is true, see a man as a mother, any more than we easily see a woman as a gentleman—and least of all perhaps in either case as an awkwardly placed one; but we see madame sand as a sufficiently bustling, though rather a rough and ready, father, a father accepting his charge and doing the best possible under the circumstances; the truth being of course that the circumstances never can be, even at the worst, or still at the best, the best for parental fondness, so awkward for him as for a mother.
what call, again, upon every sort of presence of mind could have been livelier than the one made by the conditions attending and following the marriage of young solange dudevant to the sculptor clésinger in 1846, when our heroine, summoned by the stress of events both to take responsible action and to rise to synthetic expression, in a situation, that is in presence of a series of demonstrations on her daughter’s part, that we seem to find imaginable for a perfect dramatic adequacy only in that particular home circle, fairly surpassed herself by her capacity to “meet” everything, meet it much incommoded, yet undismayed, unabashed and unconfuted, and have on it all, to her great advantage, the always prodigious last word? the elements of this especial crisis claim the more attention through its having been, as a test of her powers, decidedly the most acute that she was in her whole course of life to have traversed, more acute even, because more complicated, than the great occasion of her rupture with alfred de musset, at venice in ’35, on which such a wealth of contemplation and of ink has been expended. dramatic enough in their relation to each other certainly those immortal circumstances, immortal so far as immortalised on either side by genius and passion: musset’s return, ravaged and alone, to paris; his companion’s transfer of her favour to pietro pagello, whom she had called in to attend her friend medically in illness and whose intervention, so far from simplifying the juncture, complicated it in a fashion probably scarce paralleled in the history of the erotic relation; her retention of pagello under her protection for the rest of her period in venice; her marvellously domesticated state, in view of the literary baggage, the collection of social standards, even taking these but at what they were, and the general amplitude of personality, that she brought into residence with her; the conveyance of pagello to paris, on her own return, and the apparent signification to him at the very gate that her countenance was then and there withdrawn. this was a brilliant case for her—of coming off with flying colours; but it strikes us as a mere preliminary flourish of the bow or rough practice of scales compared to the high virtuosity which madame karénine’s new material in respect to the latter imbroglio now enables us ever so gratefully to estimate. the protagonist’s young children were in the venetian crisis quite off the scene, and on occasions subsequent to the one we now glance at were old enough and, as we seem free to call it, initiated enough not to solicit our particular concern for them; whereas at the climax of the connection with chopin they were of the perfect age (which was the fresh marriageable in the case of solange) to engage our best anxiety, let alone their being of a salience of sensibility and temper to leave no one of their aspects negligible. that their parent should not have found herself conclusively “upset,” sickened beyond repair, or otherwise morally bankrupt, on her having to recognise in her daughter’s hideous perversity and depravity, as we learn these things to have been, certain inevitabilities of consequence from the social air of the maternal circle, is really a monumental fact in respect to our great woman’s elasticity, her instinct for never abdicating by mere discouragement. here in especial we get the broad male note—it being so exactly the manly part, and so very questionably the womanly, not to have to draw from such imputations of responsibility too crushing a self-consciousness. of the extent and variety of danger to which the enjoyment of a moral tone could be exposed and yet superbly survive madame karénine’s pages give us the measure; they offer us in action the very ideal of an exemplary triumph of character and mind over one of the very highest tides of private embarrassment that it is well possible to conceive. and it is no case of that passive acceptance of deplorable matters which has abounded in the history of women, even distinguished ones, whether to the pathetic or to the merely scandalous effect; the acceptance is active, constructive, almost exhilarated by the resources of affirmation and argument that it has at its command. the whole instance is sublime in its sort, thanks to the acuteness of all its illustrative sides, the intense interest of which loses nothing in the hands of our chronicler; who perhaps, however, reaches off into the vast vague of chopin’s native affiliations and references with an energy with which we find it a little difficult to keep step.
in speaking as we have done of george sand’s “use” of each twist of her road as it came—a use which we now recognise as the very thriftiest—we touch on that principle of vital health in her which made nothing that might by the common measure have been called one of the graver dilemmas, that is one of the checks to the continuity of life, really matter. what this felicity most comes to in fact is that doing at any cost the work that lies to one’s hand shines out again and yet again as the saving secret of the soul. she affirmed her freedom right and left, but her most characteristic assertion of it throughout was just in the luxury of labour. the exhaustive account we at any rate now enjoy of the family life surrounding her during the years here treated of and as she had constituted it, the picture of all the queer conflicting sensibilities engaged, and of the endless ramifications and reflections provided for these, leaves us nothing to learn on that congested air, that obstructive medium for the range of the higher tone, which the lady of nohant was so at her “objective” happiest, even if at her superficially, that is her nervously, most flurried and depressed, in bravely breasting. it is as if the conditions there and in paris during these several years had been consistently appointed by fate to throw into relief the applications of a huge facility, a sort of universal readiness, with a rare intelligence to back it. absolutely nothing was absent, or with all the data could have been, that might have bewildered a weaker genius into some lapse of eloquence or of industry; everything that might have overwhelmed, or at least have disconcerted, the worker who could throw off the splendid “lucrezia floriani” in the thick of battle came upon her at once, inspiring her to show that on her system of health and cheer, of experiential economy, as we may call it, to be disconcerted was to be lost. to be lacerated and calumniated was in comparison a trifle; with a certain sanity of reaction these things became as naught, for the sanity of reaction was but the line of consistency, the theory and attitude of sincerity kept at the highest point. the artist in general, we need scarcely remind ourselves, is in a high degree liable to arrive at the sense of what he may have seen or felt, or said or suffered, by working it out as a subject, casting it into some form prescribed by his art; but even here he in general knows limits—unless perchance he be loose as byron was loose, or possess such a power of disconnection, such a clear stand-off of the intelligence, as accompanied the experiments of goethe. our own experiments, we commonly feel, are comparatively timid, just as we can scarce be said, in the homely phrase, to serve our esthetic results of them hot and hot; we are too conscious of a restrictive instinct about the conditions we may, in like familiar language let ourselves in for, there being always the question of what we should be able “intellectually” to show for them. the life of the author of “lucrezia floriani” at its most active may fairly be described as an immunity from restrictive instincts more ably cultivated than any we know. again and yet again we note the positive premium so put upon the surrender to sensibility, and how, since the latter was certain to spread to its maximum and to be admired in proportion to its spread, some surrender was always to have been worth while. “lucrezia floriani” ought to have been rather measurably bad—lucidity, harmony, maturity, definiteness of sense, being so likely to fail it in the troubled air in which it was born. yet how can we do less than applaud a composition throwing off as it goes such a passage as the splendid group of pages cited by madame karénine from the incident of the heroine’s causing herself to be rowed over to the island in her italian lake on that summer afternoon when the sense of her situation had become sharp for her to anguish, in order to take stock of the same without interruption and see, as we should say to-day, where she is? the whole thing has the grand manner and the noblest eloquence, reaching out as it does on the spot to the lesson and the moral of the convulsions that have been prepared in the first instance with such complacency, and illustrating in perfection the author’s faculty for the clear re-emergence and the prompt or, as we may call it, the paying reaction. the case is put for her here as into its final nutshell: you may “live” exactly as you like, that is live in perfect security and fertility, when such breadth of rendering awaits your simply sitting down to it. is it not true, we say, that without her breadth our wonderful woman would have been “nowhere”?—whereas with it she is effectively and indestructibly at any point of her field where she may care to pretend to stand.
this biographer, i must of course note, discriminates with delicacy among her heroine’s felicities and mistakes, recognising that some of the former, as a latent awkwardness in them developed, inevitably parted with the signs that distinguished them from the latter; but i think we feel, as the instances multiply, that no regret could have equalled for us that of our not having the display vivid and complete. once all the elements of the scarce in advance imaginable were there it would have been a pity that they should not offer us the show of their full fruition. what more striking show, for example, than that, as recorded by madame karénine in a footnote, the afflicted parent of solange should have lived to reproduce, or rather, as she would herself have said, to “arrange” the girlish character and conduct of that young person, so humiliating at the time to any near relation, let alone a mother, in the novel of “mademoiselle merquem,” where the truth to the original facts and the emulation of the graceless prime “effects” are such as our author can vouch for? the fiction we name followed indeed after long years, but during the lifetime of the displeasing daughter and with an ease of reference to the past that may fairly strike us as the last word of superiority to blighting association. it is quite as if the close and amused matching of the character and its play in the novel with the wretched old realities, those that had broken in their day upon the scared maternal vision, had been a work of ingenuity attended with no pang. the example is interesting as a measure of the possible victory of time in a case where we might have supposed the one escape to have been by forgetting. madame sand remembers to the point of gratefully—gratefully as an artist—reconstituting; we in fact feel her, as the irrepressible, the “healthy” artist, positively to enjoy so doing. thus it clearly defined itself for her in the fulness of time that, humiliating, to use our expression, as the dreadful solange might have been and have incessantly remained, she herself had never in the least consented to the stupidity or sterility of humiliation. so it could be that the free mind and the free hand were ever at her service. a beautiful indifferent agility, a power to cast out that was at least proportioned to the power to take in, hangs about all this and meets us in twenty connections. who of her readers has forgotten the harmonious dedication—her inveterate dedications have always, like her clear light prefaces, the last grace—of “jeanne,” so anciently, so romantically readable, to her faithful berrichon servant who sits spinning by the fire? “vous ne savez pas lire, ma paisible amie,” but that was not to prevent the association of her name with the book, since both her own daughter and the author’s are in happy possession of the art and will be able to pass the entertainment on to her. this in itself is no more than a sign of the writer’s fine democratic ease, which she carried at all times to all lengths, and of her charming habit of speech; but it somehow becomes further illustrational, testifying for the manner in which genius, if it be but great enough, lives its life at small cost, when we learn that after all, by a turn of the hand, the “paisible amie” was, under provocation, bundled out of the house as if the beautiful relation had not meant half of what appeared. fran?oise and her presence were dispensed with, but the exquisite lines remain, which we would not be without for the world.
iii
the various situations determined for the more eminent of george sand’s intimate associates would always be independently interesting, thanks to the intrinsic appeal of these characters and even without the light reflected withal on the great agent herself; which is why poor chopin’s figuration in the events of the year 1847, as madame karénine so fully reconstitutes them, is all that is wanted to point their almost nightmare quality. without something of a close view of them we fail of a grasp of our heroine’s genius—her genius for keeping her head in deep seas morally and reflectively above water, though but a glance at them must suffice us for averting this loss. the old-world quality of drama, which throughout so thickens and tones the air around her, finds remarkable expression in the whole picture of the moment. every connection involved bristles like a conscious consequence, tells for all it is worth, as we say, and the sinister complexity of reference—for all the golden clearings-up that awaited it on the ideal plane—leaves nothing to be desired. the great and odd sign of the complications and convulsions, the alarms and excursions recorded, is that these are all the more or less direct fruits of sensibility, which had primarily been indulged in, under the doom of a preparation of them which no preparation of anything else was to emulate, with a good faith fairly touching in presence of the eventual ugliness. madame sand’s wonderful mother, commemorated for us in “l’histoire de ma vie” with the truth surely attaching in a like degree to no mother in all the literature of so-called confession, had had for cousin a “fille entretenue” who had married a mechanic. this adèle brault had had in the course of her adventures a daughter in whom, as an unfortunate young relative, madame dupin had taken an interest, introducing her to the heiress of nohant, who viewed her with favour—she appears to have been amiable and commendable—and eventually associated her with her own children. she was thus the third member of that illegitimate progeny with which the nohant scene was to have become familiar, george sand’s natural brother on her father’s side and her natural sister on her mother’s representing this element from the earlier time on. the young augustine, fugitive from a circle still less edifying, was thus made a companion of the son and the daughter of the house, and was especially held to compare with the latter to her great advantage in the matter of character, docility and temper. these young persons formed, as it were, with his more distinguished friend, the virtual family of chopin during those years of specifically qualified domestication which affect us as only less of a mystification to taste than that phase of the unrestricted which had immediately preceded them. hence a tangled tissue of relations within the circle that became, as it strikes us, indescribable for difficulty and “delicacy,” not to say for the perfection of their impracticability, and as to which the great point is that madame sand’s having taken them so robustly for granted throws upon her temperamental genius a more direct light than any other. the whole case belongs doubtless even more to the hapless history of chopin himself than to that of his terrible friend—terrible for her power to flourish in conditions sooner or later fatal to weaker vessels; but is in addition to this one of the most striking illustrations possible of that view or theory of social life handed over to the reactions of sensibility almost alone which, while ever so little the ideal of the anglo-saxon world, has largely governed the manners of its sister societies. it has been our view, very emphatically, in general, that the sane and active social body—or, for that matter, the sane and active individual, addressed to the natural business of life—goes wrongly about it to encourage sensibility, or to do anything on the whole but treat it as of no prime importance; the traps it may lay for us, however, being really of the fewest in a race to which the very imagination of it may be said, i think, to have been comparatively denied. the imagination of it sat irremovably, on the other hand, and as a matter of course, at the nohant fireside; where indeed we find the play and the ravage chiefly interesting through our thus seeing the delicate chopin, whose semi-smothered appeal remains peculiarly pathetic, all helpless and foredoomed at the centre of the whirl. nothing again strikes us more in the connection than the familiar truth that interesting persons make everything that concerns them interesting, or seldom fail to redeem from what might in another air seem but meanness and vanity even their most compromised states and their greatest wastes of value. every one in the particular nohant drama here exposed loses by the exposure—so far as loss could be predicated of amounts which, in general, excepting the said sensibility, were so scant among them; every one, that is, save the ruling spirit of all, with the extraordinary mark in her of the practical defiance of waste and of her inevitable enrichment, for our measure, as by reflection from the surrounding shrinkage. one of the oddest aspects of the scene is also one of the wretchedest, but the oddity makes it interesting, by the law i just glanced at, in spite of its vulgar side. how could it not be interesting, we ask as we read, to feel that chopin, though far from the one man, was the one gentleman of the association, the finest set of nerves and scruples, and yet to see how little that availed him, in exasperated reactions, against mistakes of perverted sympathy? it is relevant in a high degree to our view of his great protectress as reducible at her best to male terms that she herself in this very light fell short, missed the ideal safeguard which for her friend had been preinvolved—as of course may be the peril, ever, with the creature so transmuted, and as is so strikingly exemplified, in the pages before us, when madame karénine ingenuously gives us chapter and verse for her heroine’s so unqualified demolition of the person of madame d’agoult, devotee of liszt, mother to be, by that token, of richard wagner’s second wife, and sometime intimate of the author of “isidora,” in which fiction we are shown the parody perpetrated. if women rend each other on occasion with sharper talons than seem to belong on the whole to the male hand, however intendingly applied, we find ourselves reflect parenthetically that the loss of this advantage may well be a matter for them to consider when the new approximation is the issue.
the great sign of the nohant circle on all this showing, at any rate, is the intense personalism, as we may call it, reigning there, or in other words the vivacity, the acuity and irritability of the personal relations—which flourished so largely, we at the same time feel, by reason of the general gift for expression, that gift to which we owe the general superiority of every letter, from it scarce matters whom, laid under contribution by our author. how could people not feel with acuity when they could, when they had to, write with such point and such specific intelligence?—just indeed as one asks how letters could fail to remain at such a level among them when they incessantly generated choice matter for expression. madame sand herself is of course on this ground easily the most admirable, as we have seen; but every one “knows how” to write, and does it well in proportion as the matter in hand most demands and most rewards proper saying. much of all this stuff of history seems indeed to have been susceptible of any amount of force of statement; yet we note all the while how in the case of the great mistress of the pen at least some shade of intrinsic beauty attends even the presentation of quite abominable facts. we can only see it as abominable, at least, so long as we have madame sand’s words—which are somehow a different thing from her word—for it, that chopin had from the first “sided” with the atrocious solange in that play of her genius which is characterised by our chronicler as wickedness for the sake of wickedness, as art for the sake of art, without other logic or other cause. “once married,” says madame karénine, “she made a double use of this wickedness. she had always hated augustine; she wished, one doesn’t know why, to break off her marriage, and by calumnies and insinuations she succeeded. then angry with her mother she avenged herself on her as well by further calumnies. thereupon took place at nohant such events that”—that in fine we stop before them with this preliminary shudder. the cross-currents of violence among them would take more keeping apart than we have time for, the more that everything comes back, for interest, to the intrinsic weight of the tone of the principal sufferer from them—as we see her, as we wouldn’t for the world not see her, in spite of the fact that chopin was to succumb scarce more than a year later to multiplied lacerations, and that she was to override and reproduce and pre-appointedly flourish for long years after. if it is interesting, as i have pronounced it, that chopin, again, should have consented to be of the opinion of solange that the relations between her brother maurice and the hapless augustine were of the last impropriety, i fear i can account no better for this than by our sense that the more the genius loci has to feed her full tone the more our faith in it, as such a fine thing in itself, is justified. almost immediately after the precipitated marriage of the daughter of the house has taken place, the clésinger couple, avid and insolent, of a breadth of old time impudence in fact of which our paler day has lost the pattern, are back on the mother’s hands, to the effect of a vividest picture of maurice well-nigh in a death-grapple with his apparently quite monstrous “bounder” of a brother-in-law, a picture that further gives us madame sand herself smiting clésinger in the face and receiving from him a blow in the breast, while solange “coldly,” with an iciness indeed peculiarly her own, fans the rage and approves her husband’s assault, and while the divine composer, though for that moment much in the background, approves the wondrous approval. he still approves, to all appearance, the daughter’s interpretation of the mother’s wish to “get rid” of him as the result of an amorous design on the latter’s part in respect of a young man lately introduced to the circle as maurice’s friend and for the intimate relation with whom it is thus desirable that the coast shall be made clear. how else than through no fewer consistencies of the unedifying on the part of these provokers of the expressional reaction should we have come by innumerable fine epistolary passages, passages constituting in themselves verily such adornments of the tale, such notes in the scale of all the damaged dignity redressed, that we should be morally the poorer without them? one of the vividest glimpses indeed is not in a letter but in a few lines from “l’histoire de ma vie,” the composition of which was begun toward the end of this period and while its shadow still hung about—early in life for a projected autobiography, inasmuch as the author had not then reached her forty-fifth year. chopin at work, improvising and composing, was apt to become a prey to doubts and depressions, so that there were times when to break in upon these was to render him a service.
but it was not always possible to induce him to leave the piano, often so much more his torment than his joy, and he began gradually to resent my proposing he should do so. i never ventured on these occasions to insist. chopin in displeasure was appalling, and as with me he always controlled himself it was as if he might die of suffocation.
it is a vision of the possibilities of vibration in such organisms that does in fact appal, and with the clash of vibrations, those both of genius and of the general less sanctioned sensibility, the air must have more than sufficiently resounded. some eight years after the beginning of their friendship and the year after the final complete break in it she writes to madame pauline viardot:
do you see chopin? tell me about his health. i have been unable to repay his fury and his hatred by hatred and fury. i think of him as of a sick, embittered, bewildered child. i saw much of solange in paris, the letter goes on, and made her my constant occupation, but without finding anything but a stone in the place of her heart. i have taken up my work again while waiting for the tide to carry me elsewhere.
all the author’s “authority” is in these few words, and in none more than in the glance at the work and the tide. the work and the tide rose ever as high as she would to float her, and wherever we look there is always the authority. “i find chopin magnificent,” she had already written from the thick of the fray, “to keep seeing, frequenting and approving clésinger, who struck me because i snatched from his hands the hammer he had raised upon maurice—chopin whom every one talks of as my most faithful and devoted friend.” well indeed may our biographer have put it that from a certain date in may 1847 “the two leitmotive which might have been called in the terms of wagner the leitmotif of soreness and the leitmotif of despair—chopin, solange—sound together now in fusion, now in a mutual grip, now simply side by side, in all madame sand’s unpublished letters and in the few (of the moment) that have been published. a little later a third joins in—augustine brault, a motive narrowly and tragically linked to the basso obligato of solange.” to meet such a passage as the following under our heroine’s hand again is to feel the whole temper of intercourse implied slip straight out of our analytic grasp. the allusion is to chopin and to the “defection” of which he had been guilty, to her view, at the time when it had been most important that she might count on him. what we have first, as outsiders, to swallow down, as it were, is the state of things, the hysteric pitch of family life, in which any ideal of reticence, any principle, as we know it, of minding one’s business, for mere dignity’s sake if for none other, had undergone such collapse.
i grant you i am not sorry that he has withdrawn from me the government of his life, for which both he and his friends wanted to make me responsible in so much too absolute a fashion. his temper kept growing in asperity, so that it had come to his constantly blowing me up, from spite, ill-humour and jealousy, in presence of my friends and my children. solange made use of it with the astuteness that belongs to her, while maurice began to give way to indignation. knowing and seeing la chasteté de nos rapports, he saw also that the poor sick soul took up, without wanting to and perhaps without being able to help it, the attitude of the lover, the husband, the proprietor of my thoughts and actions. he was on the point of breaking out and telling him to his face that he was making me play, at forty-three years of age, a ridiculous part, and that it was an abuse of my kindness, my patience, and my pity for his nervous morbid state. a few months more, a few days perhaps, of this situation, and an impossible frightful struggle would have broken out between them. foreseeing the storm, i took advantage of chopin’s predilection for solange and left him to sulk, without an effort to bring him round. we have not for three months exchanged a word in writing, and i don’t know how such a cooling-off will end.
she develops the picture of the extravagance of his sick irritability; she accepts with indifference the certainty that his friends will accuse her of having cast him out to take a lover; the one thing she “minds” is the force of evil in her daughter, who is the centre of all the treachery. “she will come back to me when she needs me, that i know. but her return will be neither tender nor consoling.” therefore it is when at the beginning of the winter of this same dreadful year she throws off the free rich summary of what she has been through in the letter to m. charles poncy already published in her correspondence we are swept into the current of sympathy and admiration. the preceding months had been the heaviest and most painful of her life.
i all but broke down under them utterly, though i had for long seen them coming. but you know how one is not always overhung by the evil portent, however clear one may read it—there are days, weeks, even whole months, when one lives on illusion and fondly hopes to divert the blow that threatens. it is always at last the most probable ill that surprises us unarmed and unprepared. to this explosion of unhappy underground germs joined themselves sundry contributive matters, bitter things too and quite unexpected; so that i am broken by grief in body and soul. i believe my grief incurable, for i never succeed in throwing it off for a few hours without its coming upon me again during the next in greater force and gloom. i nevertheless struggle against it without respite, and if i don’t hope for a victory which would have to consist of not feeling at all, at least i have reached that of still bearing with life, of even scarcely feeling ill, of having recovered my taste for work and of not showing my distress. i have got back outside calm and cheer, which are so necessary for others, and everything in my life seems to go on well.
we had already become aware, through commemorations previous to the present, of that first or innermost line of defence residing in george sand’s splendid mastery of the letter, the gift that was always so to assure her, on every issue, the enjoyment of the first chance with posterity. the mere cerebral and manual activity represented by the quantity no less than the quality of her outflow through the post at a season when her engagements were most pressing and her anxieties of every sort most cruel is justly qualified by madame karénine as astounding; the new letters here given to the world heaping up the exhibition and testifying even beyond the finest of those gathered in after the writer’s death—the mutilations, suppressions and other freedoms then used, for that matter, being now exposed. if no plot of her most bustling fiction ever thickened at the rate at which those agitations of her inner circle at which we have glanced multiplied upon her hands through the later ’forties, so we are tempted to find her rather less in possession of her great moyens when handling the artificial presentation than when handling what we may call the natural. it is not too much to say that the long letter addressed to the cynical solange in april ’52, and which these pages give us in extenso, would have made the fortune of any mere interesting “story” in which one of the characters might have been presented as writing it. it is a document of the highest psychological value and a practical summary of all the elements of the writer’s genius, of all her indefeasible advantages; it is verily the gem of her biographer’s collection. taken in connection with a copious communication to her son, of the previous year, on the subject of his sister’s character and vices, and of their common experience of these, it offers, in its ease of movement, its extraordinary frankness and lucidity, its splendid apprehension and interpretation of realities, its state, as it were, of saturation with these, exactly the kind of interest for which her novels were held remarkable, but in a degree even above their maximum. such a letter is an effusion of the highest price; none of a weight so baffling to estimation was probably ever inspired in a mother by solicitude for a clever daughter’s possibilities. never surely had an accomplished daughter laid under such contribution a mother of high culture; never had such remarkable and pertinent things had to flow from such a source; never in fine was so urgent an occasion so admirably, so inimitably risen to. marvellous through it all is the way in which, while a common recognition of the “facts of life,” as between two perfectly intelligent men of the world, gives the whole diapason, the abdication of moral authority and of the rights of wisdom never takes place. the tone is a high implication of the moral advantages that solange had inveterately enjoyed and had decided none the less to avail herself of so little; which advantages we absolutely believe in as we read—there is the prodigious part: such an education of the soul, and in fact of every faculty, such a claim for the irreproachable, it would fairly seem, do we feel any association with the great fluent artist, in whatever conditions taking place, inevitably, necessarily to have been. if we put ourselves questions we yet wave away doubts, and with whatever remnants of prejudice the writer’s last word may often have to clash, our own is that there is nothing for grand final rightness like a sufficiently general humanity—when a particularly beautiful voice happens to serve it.
