ART AND HEART
GEORGE SAND AND FLAUBERT
Flaubert is, or was, the fashion in high-art circles; George Sand was never that, and to-day is little more than a name in any circle. Yet in the familiar letters, lately published in translation, translated by Aimée McKenzie, between a pair so ill-assorted in temperament, so far apart in the pigeon-holes of memory, it is she who proves herself the better man.
Gustave Flaubert will live for times to come less by what he did than by his gesture in doing it. He was, before all, the explicit artist, the art-for-art’s-sake, neck-or-nothing artist; and as such he will stand in history when these strange creatures come up for review. He made the enormous assumption of an aristocracy of intelligence. As, once upon a time, Venice, and later on we British, claimed to hold the gorgeous East in fee, so Flaubert, and the handful of poets, novelists and playwrights whom he admitted as his equals, looked upon the world at large with its hordes of busy people as so much stuff for the workshop. Bourgeois all, Philistines all. They were the quarry; upon them as they went about their affairs he would peep and botanise. He would lay bare their hearts in action, their scheming brains, their secret longings, dreams, agonies of remorse, desire, fear. All this as a god might do it, a being apart, and for the diversion of a select Olympus. It was useless to write for the rest, for they could not even begin to understand you. More, it was an unworthy condescension. It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting word or nuance; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France saw him in 1873:
“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand bourgeois with their throats cut. Striding to and fro, the honest giant ground under his heels the brains of the municipal councillors of Rouen.”
That was the sort of man who, in 1863, struck up a friendship with George Sand.
And she, the overflowing, mannish, brown old woman, his antithesis; her vast heart still smouldering like a sleepy volcano; she who had kicked over all the traces, sown all the wild oats, made spillikins of the Ten Commandments, played leapfrog with the frying-pan and the fire; written a hundred novels, as many plays, a thousand reviews, ten thousand love-letters; grandmother now at Nohant, with a son whom she adored, a little Aurore whom she idolised; still enormously busy, writing a novel with each hand, a play with each foot, and reviews (perhaps) with her nose; she of Elle et Lui, of Consuelo and Valentine and François le Champi—how on earth came she to cope with the Berserk of Croisset, who hated every other person in the world, took four years to write a novel, and read through a whole library for the purpose? The answer is easy. She made herself his grandmother, took him to her capacious bosom, and handled him as he had never been handled before. Affectionately—to him she was “cher maitre,” to her he was her “pauvre enfant” or her “cher vieux”—but she could poke fun at him too. She used to send him letters from imaginary bourgeois, injured by his attacks, or stimulated by them, as might be. One was signed, “Victoire Potelet, called Marengo Lirondelle, Veuve Dodin”:
“I have read your distinguished works, notably Madame Bavarie, of which I think I am capable of being a model to you.... I am well preserved for my advanced age and if you have a repugnance for an artist in misfortune I should be content with your ideal sentiments. You can then count on my heart not being able to dispose of my person being married to a man of light character who squandered my wax cabinet wherein were all figures of celebrities, Kings, Emperors ancient and modern and celebrated crimes....”
A delicious letter to write and to receive.
With all that, in spite of her impulse to love, to admire, to fall at his feet, she saw what was the matter with her “pauvre enfant.” Madame Bovary hurt her because it was heartless. She understood the prosecution of that dreadful book; she saw that the passionless analysis of passion may be exceedingly indecent. She is guarded in her references to it, but she saw quite well that the book was condemned, not because it was indecent (though it was indecent), but because it was cruel. She thought L’Education Sentimentale a failure; ugly without being reasonable:
“All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with ... when people do not understand us it is always our fault.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise. It is false in the highest degree. When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality. One wants to sink or swim with him. If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.”
Not a doubt but she was right. You cannot with impunity leave your heart out of your affair. I will not say that a good book cannot be written with the intellect and the will; but I am convinced that a great book was never yet so written. The greatest books in the world’s history are those which the world at large knows to be good; and to the making of such books goes the heart of a man as well as his brain.
But eighteen-seventy was at hand. Isidore, as they called him, was diddled into war. Everything went badly. French armies blew away like smoke, France was invaded, the Prussians were at Rouen, and there was no time to theorise about art. Sedan; the Prussians in Paris; then the senseless rage of the Commune. Flaubert took it all à sa manière:
“I shall not tell you all I have suffered since September. Why didn’t I die from it?... And I cannot get over it! I am not consoled! I have no hope!”
And in another letter:
“Ah! dear and good master, if you could only hate! That is what you lack—hate.... Come now. Cry out! Thunder! Take your lyre and touch the brazen string; the monsters will flee.”
Poor wretch, with the only remedy of the arrogant! But the fine old priestess of another heaven and earth did as he bid her; cried out, thundered, in a noble letter, which should be engraved on gold plates and hung up on the Quai d’Orsay:
“What then, you want me to stop loving? You want me to say that I have been mistaken all my life, that humanity is contemptible, hateful, that it has always been and will always be so?... You assert that the people has always been ferocious, the priest always a hypocrite, the bourgeois a coward, the soldier a brigand, the peasant a beast?... The people, you say? The people is yourself and myself.... Whoever denies the people cheapens himself, and gives the world the shameful spectacle of apostasy....”
That is plain speaking; but she goes on to be prophetic. It would seem as if she had foreseen a war and its aftermath infinitely more terrible than that of 1870:
“We shall have to pity the German nation for its victories as much as ourselves for our defeats, because this is the first act of its moral dissolution. The drama of its degradation has begun.... It will move very quickly.... Well, the moral abasement of Germany is not the future safety of France, and if we are called upon to return to her the evil that has been done us, her collapse will not give us back her life.”
Is not that nobly said? And then her great cry:
“Frenchmen, let us love one another ... let us love one another or we are lost.”
She was but five years off her death-bed when she wrote that. In a sense it was her swan-song. Had she never loved so blindly, she might have been a better woman it may be. But she loved kindly, too, and will be forgiven no doubt because she loved much. Love at any rate inspired her to better purpose than Flaubert’s hate could have done. The world is not to be advantaged by intellectual arrogance; nor does it appear from these letters that poor Flaubert was at all advantaged either. It served him but ill in literature and not at all in the adventure of life. One must be a man before one can be an artist. Whether George Sand was an artist or not, she neither knew nor cared. There is no doubt at all, though, of her manliness.