George Sand: Her Life & Writings by Rene Doumic - HTML preview

The Genius Of The Writer

 Correspondence With Flaubert--Last Novels

With that maternal instinct which was so strong within her, George Sand could not do without having a child to scold, direct and take to task. The one to whom she was to devote the last ten years of her life, who needed her beneficent affection more than any of those she had adopted, was a kind of giant with hair turned back from his forehead and a thick moustache like a Norman of the heroic ages. He was just such a man as we can imagine the pirates in Duc Rollo's boats. This descendant of the Vikings had been born in times of peace, and his sole occupation was to endeavour to form harmonious phrases by avoiding assonances.

I do not think there have been two individuals more different from each other than George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. He was an artist, and she in many respects was bourgeoise. He saw all things at their worst; she saw them better than they were. Flaubert wrote to her in surprise as follows: "In spite of your large sphinx eyes, you have seen the world through gold colour."

She loved the lower classes; he thought them detestable, and qualified universal suffrage as "a disgrace to the human mind." She preached concord, the union of classes, whilst he gave his opinion as follows:

 "I believe that the poor hate the rich, and that the rich are afraid of the poor. It will be like this eternally."

 It was always thus. On every subject the opinion of the one was sure to be the direct opposite of the opinion of the other. This was just what had attracted them.

 "I should not be interested in myself," George Sand said, "if I had the honour of meeting myself." She was interested in Flaubert, as she had divined that he was her antithesis.

 "The man who is Just passing," says Fantasio, "is charming. There are all sorts of ideas in his mind which would be quite new to me."

George Sand wanted to know something of these ideas which were new to her. She admired Flaubert on account of all sorts of qualities which she did not possess herself. She liked him, too, as she felt that he was unhappy.

She went to see him during the summer of 1866. They visited the historic streets and old parts of Rouen together. She was both charmed and surprised. She could not believe her eyes, as she had never imagined that all that existed, and so near Paris, too. She stayed in that house at Croisset in which Flaubert's whole life was spent. It was a house with wide windows and a view over the Seine. The hoarse, monotonous sound of the chain towing the heavy boats along could be heard distinctly within the rooms. Flaubert lived there with his mother and niece. To George Sand everything there seemed to breathe of tranquillity and comfort, but at the same time she brought away with her an impression of sadness. She attributed this to the vicinity of the Seine, coming and going as it does according to the bar.

 "The willows of the islets are always being covered and uncovered," she writes; "it all looks very cold and sad.[52]

 [52] Correspondance: To Maurice Sand, August 10, 1866.

She was not really duped, though, by her own explanation. She knew perfectly well that what makes a house sad or gay, warm or icy-cold is not the outlook on to the surrounding country, but the soul of those who inhabit it and who have fashioned it in their own image. She had just been staying in the house of the misanthropist.

When Moliere put the misanthropist on the stage with his wretched-looking face, he gave him some of the features which remind us so strongly of Flaubert. The most ordinary and everyday events were always enough to put Alceste into a rage. It was just the same with Flaubert. Everyday things which we are philosophical enough to accept took his breath away. He was angry, and he wanted to be angry. He was irritated with every one and with everything, and he cultivated this irritation. He kept himself in a continual state of exasperation, and this was his normal state. In his letters he described himself as "worried with life," "disgusted with everything," "always agitated and always indignant." He spells hhhindignant with several h's. He signs his letters, "The Reverend Father Cruchard of the Barnabite Order, director of the Ladies of Disenchantment." Added to all this, although there may have been a certain amount of pose in his attitude, he was sincere. He "roared" in his own study, when he was quite alone and there was no one to be affected by his roaring. He was organized in a remarkable way for suffering. He was both romantic and realistic, a keen observer and an imaginative man. He borrowed some of the most pitiful traits from reality, and recomposed them into a regular nightmare. We agree with Flaubert that injustice and nonsense do exist in life. But he gives us Nonsense itself, the seven-headed and ten-horned beast of the Apocalypse. He sees this beast everywhere, it haunts him and blocks up every avenue for him, so that he cannot see the sublime beauties of the creation nor the splendour of human intelligence.

In reply to all his wild harangues, George Sand gives wise answers, smiling as she gives them, and using her common sense with which to protect herself against the trickery of words. What has he to complain of, this grown-up child who is too naive and who expects too much? By what extraordinary misfortune has he such an exceptionally unhappy lot? He is fairly well off and he has great talent. How many people would envy him! He complains of life, such as it is for every one, and of the present conditions of life, which had never been better for any one at any epoch. What is the use of getting irritated with life, since we do not wish to die? Humanity seemed despicable to him, and he hated it. Was he not a part of this humanity himself? Instead of cursing our fellowmen for a whole crowd of imperfections inherent to their nature, would it not be more just to pity them for such imperfections? As to stupidity and nonsense, if he objected to them, it would be better to pay no attention to them, instead of watching out for them all the time. Beside all this, is there not more reason than we imagine for every one of us to be indulgent towards the stupidity of other people?

"That poor stupidity of which we hear so much," exclaimed George Sand. "I do not dislike it, as I look on it with maternal eyes." The human race is absurd, undoubtedly, but we must own that we contribute ourselves to this absurdity.

There is something morbid in Flaubert's case, and with equal clearness of vision George Sand points out to him the cause of it and the remedy. The morbidness is caused in the first place by his loneliness, and by the fact that he has severed all bonds which united him to the rest of the universe. Woe be to those who are alone! The remedy is the next consideration. Is there not, somewhere in the world, a woman whom he could love and who would make him suffer? Is there not a child somewhere whose father he could imagine himself to be, and to whom he could devote himself? Such is the law of life. Existence is intolerable to us as long as we only ask for our own personal satisfaction, but it becomes dear to us from the day when we make a present of it to another human being.

There was the same antagonism in their literary opinions. Flaubert was an artist, the theorist of the doctrine of art for art, such as Theophile Gautier, the Goncourt brothers and the Parnassians comprehended it, at about the same epoch. It is singularly interesting to hear him formulate each article of this doctrine, and to hear George Sand's fervent protestations in reply. Flaubert considers that an author should not put himself into his work, that he should not write his books with his heart, and George Sand answers:

 "I do not understand at all, then. Oh no, it is all incomprehensible to me."

With what was an author to write his books, if not with his own sentiments and emotions? Was he to write them with the hearts of other people? Flaubert maintained that an author should only write for about twenty persons, unless he simply wrote for himself, "like a bourgeois turning his serviette-rings round in his attic." George Sand was of opinion that an author should write "for all those who can profit by good reading." Flaubert confesses that if attention be paid to the old distinction between matter and form, he should give the greater importance to form, in which he had a religious belief. He considered that in the correctness of the putting together, in the rarity of the elements, the polish of the surface and the perfect harmony of the whole there was an intrinsic virtue, a kind of divine force. In conclusion, he adds:

 "I endeavour to think well always, in order to write well, but I do not conceal the fact that my object is to write well."

This, then, was the secret of that working up of the style, until it became a mania with him and developed into a torture. We all know of the days of anguish which Flaubert spent in searching for a word that escaped him, and the weeks that he devoted to rounding off one of his periods. He would never write these down until he had said them to himself, or, as he put it himself, until "they had gone through his jaw." He would not allow two complements in the same phrase, and we are told that he was ill after reading in one of his own books the following words: "Une couronne de fleurs d'oranger."

"You do not know what it is," he wrote, "to spend a whole day holding one's head and squeezing one's brains to find a word. Ideas flow with you freely and continually, like a stream. With me they come like trickling water, and it is only by a huge work of art that I can get a waterfall. Ah, I have had some experience of the terrible torture of style!" No, George Sand certainly had no experience of this kind, and she could not even conceive of such torture. It amazed her to hear of such painful labour, for, personally, she let the wind play on her "old harp" just as it listed.

Briefly, she considered that her friend was the victim of a hopeless error. He took literature for the essential thing, but there was something before all literature, and that something was life. "The Holy of Holies, as you call literature, is only secondary to me in life. I have always loved some one better than it, and my family better than that some one."

This, then, was the keynote of the argument. George Sand considered that life is not only a pretext for literature, but that literature should always refer to life and should be regulated by life, as by a model which takes the precedence of it and goes far beyond it. This, too, is our opinion.

The state of mind which can be read between the lines in George Sand's letters to Flaubert is serenity, and this is also the characteristic of her work during the last period of her life. Her "last style" is that of Jean de la Rocke, published in 1860. A young nobleman, Jean de la Roche, loses his heart to the exquisite Love Butler. She returns his affection, but the jealousy of a young brother obliges them to separate. In order to be near the woman he loves, Jean de la Roche disguises himself as a guide, and accompanies the whole family in an excursion through the Auvergne mountains. A young nobleman as a guide is by no means an ordinary thing, but in love affairs such disguises are admitted. Lovers in the writings of Marivaux took the parts of servants, and in former days no one was surprised to meet with princes in disguise on the high-roads.

George Sand's masterpiece of this kind is undoubtedly Le Marquis de Villemer, published in 1861. A provincial chateau, an old aristocratic woman, sceptical and indulgent, two brothers capable of being rivals without ceasing to be friends, a young girl of noble birth, but poor, calumny being spread abroad, but quickly repudiated, some wonderful pages of description, and some elegant, sinuous conversations. All this has a certain charm. The poor girl marries the Marquis in the end. This, too, is a return to former days, to the days when kings married shepherdesses. The pleasure that we have in reading such novels is very much like that which we used to feel on hearing fairy-stories.

"If some one were to tell me the story of Peau d'Ane, I should be delighted," confessed La Fontaine, and surely it would be bad form to be more difficult and over-nice than he was. Big children as we are, we need stories which give food to our imagination, after being disappointed by the realities of life. This is perhaps the very object of the novel. Romance is not necessarily an exaggerated aspiration towards imaginary things. It is something else too. It is the revolt of the soul which is oppressed by the yoke of Nature. It is the expression of that tendency within us towards a freedom which is impossible, but of which we nevertheless dream. An iron law presides over our destiny. Around us and within us, the series of causes and effects continues to unwind its hard chain. Every single one of our deeds bears its consequence, and this goes on to eternity. Every fault of ours will bring its chastisement. Every weakness will have to be made good. There is not a moment of oblivion, not an instant when we may cease to be on our guard. Romantic illusion is, then, just an attempt to escape, at least in imagination, from the tyranny of universal order.

It is impossible, in this volume, to consider all George Sand's works. Some of her others are charming, but the whole series would perhaps appear somewhat monotonous. There is, however, one novel of this epoch to which we must call attention, as it is like a burst of thunder during calm weather. It also reveals an aspect of George Sand's ideas which should not be passed over lightly. This book was perhaps the only one George Sand wrote under the influence of anger. We refer to Mademoiselle La Quintinie. Octave Feuillet had just published his Histoire de Sibylle, and this book made George Sand furiously angry. We are at a loss to comprehend her indignation. Feuillet's novel is very graceful and quite inoffensive. Sibylle is a fanciful young person, who from her earliest childhood dreams of impossible things. She wants her grandfather to get a star for her, and another time she wants to ride on the swan's back as it swims in the pool. When she is being prepared for her first communion, she has doubts about the truth of the Christian religion, but one night, during a storm, the priest of the place springs into a boat and goes to the rescue of some sailors in peril. All the difficulties of theological interpretations are at once dispelled for her. A young man falls in love with her, but on discovering that he is not a believer she endeavours to convert him, and goes moonlight walks with him. Moonlight is sometimes dangerous for young girls, and, after one of these sentimental and theological strolls, she has a mysterious ailment. . . .

In order to understand George Sand's anger on reading this novel, which was both religious and social, and at the same time very harmless, we must know what her state of mind was on the essential question of religion.

In the first place, George Sand was not hostile to religious ideas. She had a religion. There is a George Sand religion. There are not many dogmas, and the creed is simple. George Sand believed firmly in the existence of God. Without the notion of God, nothing can be explained and no problem solved. This God is not merely the "first cause." It is a personal and conscious God, whose essential, if not sole, function is to forgive--every one.

"The dogma of hell," she writes, "is a monstrosity, an imposture, a barbarism. . . . It is impious to doubt God's infinite pity, and to think that He does not always pardon, even the most guilty of men." This is certainly the most complete application that has ever been made of the law of pardon. This God is not the God of Jacob, nor of Pascal, nor even of Voltaire. He is not an unknown God either. He is the God of Beranger and of all good people. George Sand believed also, very firmly, in the immortality of the soul. On losing any of her family, the certainty of going to them some day was her great consolation.

"I see future and eternal life before me as a certainty," she said; "it is like a light, and, thanks to its brilliancy, other things cannot be seen; but the light is there, and that is all I need." Her belief was, then, in the existence of God, the goodness of Providence and the immortality of the soul. George Sand was an adept in natural religion.

She did not accept the idea of any revealed religion, and there was one of these revealed religions that she execrated. This was the Catholic religion. Her correspondence on this subject during the period of the Second Empire is most significant. She was a personal enemy of the Church, and spoke of the Jesuits as a subscriber to the Siecle might do today. She feared the dagger of the Jesuits for Napoleon III, but at the same time she hoped there might be a frustrated attempt at murder, so that his eyes might be opened. The great danger of modern times, according to her, was the development of the clerical spirit. She was not an advocate for liberty of education either. "The priestly spirit has been encouraged," she wrote.[53] "France is overrun with convents, and wretched friars have been allowed to take possession of education." She considered that wherever the Church was mistress, it left its marks, which were unmistakable: stupidity and brutishness. She gave Brittany as an example.

 [53] Correspondance: To Barbes, May 12, 1867.

 "There is nothing left," she writes, "when the priest and Catholic vandalism have passed by, destroying the monuments of the old world and leaving their lice for the future."[54]

 [54] Ibid.: To Flaubert, September 21, 1860.

It is no use attempting to ignore the fact. This is anti-clericalism in all its violence. Is it not curious that this passion, when once it takes possession of even the most distinguished minds, causes them to lose all sentiment of measure, of propriety and of dignity.

Mademoiselle La Quintinie is the result of a fit of anti-clerical mania. George Sand gives, in this novel, the counterpart of Sibylle. Emile Lemontier, a free-thinker, is in love with the daughter of General La Quintinie. Emile is troubled in his mind because, as his fiancee is a Catholic, he knows she will have to have a confessor. The idea is intolerable to him, as, like Monsieur Homais, he considers that a husband could not endure the idea of his wife having private conversations with one of those individuals. Mademoiselle La Quintinie's confessor is a certain Moreali, a near relative of Eugene Sue's Rodin. The whole novel turns on the struggle between Emile and Moreali, which ends in the final discomfiture of Moreali. Mademoiselle La Quintinie is to marry Emile, who will teach her to be a free-thinker. Emile is proud of his work of drawing a soul away from Christian communion. He considers that the light of reason is always sufficient for illuminating the path in a woman's life. He thinks that her natural rectitude will prove sufficient for making a good woman of her. I do not wish to call this into question, but even if she should not err, is it not possible that she may suffer? This free-thinker imagines that it is possible to tear belief from a heart without rending it and causing an incurable wound. Oh, what a poor psychologist! He forgets that beliefis the summing up and the continuation of the belief of a whole series of generations. He does not hear the distant murmur of the prayers of by-gone years. It is in vain to endeavour to stifle those prayers; they will be heard for ever within the crushed and desolate soul.

Mademoiselle La Quintinie is a work of hatred. George Sand was not successful with it. She had no vocation for writing such books, and she was not accustomed to writing them. It is a novel full of tiresome dissertations, and it is extremely dull.

From that date, though, George Sand experienced the joy of a certain popularity. At theatrical performances and at funerals the students manifested in her honour. It was the same for Sainte-Beuve, but this does not seem to have made either of them any greater.

We will pass over all this, and turn to something that we can admire. The robust and triumphant old age of George Sand was admirable. Nearly every year she went to some fresh place in France to find a setting for her stories. She had to earn her living to the very last, and was doomed to write novels for ever. "I shall be turning my wheel when I die," she used to say, and, after all, this is the proper ending for a literary worker.

In 1870 and 1871, she suffered all the anguish of the "Terrible Year." When once the nightmare was over, she set to work once more like a true daughter of courageous France, unwilling to give in. She was as hardy as iron as she grew old. "I walk to the river," she wrote in 1872, "and bathe in the cold water, warm as I am. . . . I am of the same nature as the grass in the field. Sunshine and water are all I need."

For a woman of sixty-eight to be able to bathe every day in the cold water of the Indre is a great deal. In May, 1876, she was not well, and had to stay in bed. She was ill for ten days, and died without suffering much. She is buried at Nohant, according to her wishes, so that her last sleep is in her beloved Berry.

 In conclusion, we would say just a few words about George Sand's genius, and the place that she takes in the history of the French novel.

On comparing George Sand with the novelists of her time, what strikes us most is how different she was from them. She is neither like Balzac, Stendhal, nor Merimee, nor any story-teller of our thoughtful, clever and refined epoch. She reminds us more of the "old novelists," of those who told stories of chivalrous deeds and of old legends, or, to go still further back, she reminds us of the aedes of old Greece. In the early days of a nation there were always men who went to the crowd and charmed them with the stories they told in a wordy way. They scarcely knew whether they invented these stories as they told them, or whether they had heard them somewhere. They could not tell either which was fiction and which reality, for all reality seemed wonderful to them. All the people about whom they told were great, all objects were good and everything beautiful. They mingled nursery-tales with myths that were quite sensible, and the history of nations with children's stories. They were called poets.

George Sand did not employ a versified form for her stories, but she belonged to the family of these poets. She was a poet herself who had lost her way and come into our century of prose, and she continued her singing.

Like these early poets, she was primitive. Like them, she obeyed a god within her. All her talent was instinctive, and she had all the ease of instinctive talent. When Flaubert complained to George Sand of the "tortures" that style cost him, she endeavoured to admire him.

 "When I see the difficulty that my old friend has in writing his novel, I am discouraged about my own case, and I say to myself that I am writing poor sort of literature."

This was merely her charity, for she never understood that there could be any effort in writing. Consequently she could not understand that it should cause suffering. For her, writing was a pleasure, as it was the satisfaction of a need. As her works were no effort to her, they left no trace in her memory. She had not intended to write them, and, when once written, she forgot them.

 "Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, what are these books?" she asks. "Did I write them? I do not remember a single word of them."

Her novels were like fruit, which, when ripe, fell away from her. George Sand always returned to the celebration of certain great themes which are the eternal subjects of all poetry, subjects such as love and nature, and sentiments like enthusiasm and pity. The very language completes the illusion. The choice of words was often far from perfect, as George Sand's vocabulary was often uncertain, and her expression lacked precision and relief. But she had the gift of imagery, and her images were always delightfully fresh. She never lost that rare faculty which she possessed of being surprised at things, so that she looked at everything with youthful eyes. There is a certain movement which carries the reader on, and a rhythm that is soothing. She develops the French phrase slowly perhaps, but without any confusion. Her language is like those rivers which flow along full and limpid, between flowery banks and oases of verdure, rivers by the side of which the traveller loves to linger and to lose himself in dreams.

The share which belongs to George Sand in the history of the French novel is that of having impregnated the novel with the poetry in her own soul. She gave to the novel a breadth and a range which it had never hitherto had. She celebrated the hymn of Nature, of love and of goodness in it. She revealed to us the country and the peasants of France. She gave satisfaction to the romantic tendency which is in every one of us, to a more or less degree.

All this is more even than is needed to ensure her fame. She denied ever having written for posterity, and she predicted that in fifty years she would be forgotten. It may be that there has been for her, as there is for every illustrious author who dies, a time of test and a period of neglect. The triumph of naturalism, by influencing taste for a time, may have stopped our reading George Sand. At present we are just as tired of documentary literature as we are disgusted with brutal literature. We are gradually coming back to a better comprehension of what there is of "truth" in George Sand's conception of the novel. This may be summed up in a few words-- to charm, to touch and to console. Those of us who know something of life may perhaps wonder whether to console may not be the final aim of literature. George Sand's literary ideal may be read in the following words, which she wrote to Flaubert:

"You make the people who read your books still sadder than they were before. I want to make them less unhappy." She tried to do this, and she often succeeded in her attempt. What greater praise can we give to her than that? And how can we help adding a little gratitude and affection to our admiration for the woman who was the good fairy of the contemporary novel?