He, so original in his art, so irregular in his life, was, nevertheless, in many ways narrow-minded. We men easily become so, especially those of us who, like De Musset, are born in a good position and learn early to reverence custom and to dread ridicule.
She, in whose technique there is nothing revolutionary, who follows the beaten track as far as the literary presentment of her theme is concerned, was in her mental attitude almost a prodigy. There was not a trace of narrow-mindedness in her. She had no prejudices. Women whose fate has brought them into direct contact with the cancerous sores of society, and who have faced the verdict of society without flinching, sometimes become more open-minded than men, for the reason that they have paid more for their openmindedness. George Sand examined things for herself, weighed them well, and in most cases estimated them at their proper value.
He was her superior in culture. With the artist's genius he combined an incorruptible masculine critical faculty; keen and flexible as a Damascene blade, it clove every hollow phrase it lighted on, transfixed and burst every bubble of thought or language.
She often yielded to the inclination of her sex to let the heart speak first and loudest. Any noble enthusiasm, any beautiful Utopian theory carried her away; she had the woman's instinctive desire to serve; in her youth she was always on the look-out for a banner borne by men with great and valiant hearts, that she might fight under it. It was not her ambition to charm the fashionable world as the famous concert-player; her desire was to beat the drum as the daughter of the regiment. Her want of cultivated reasoning power, however, led her to follow and worship vague dreamers as the men of the future, chief amongst them the foolish though sincere Pierre Leroux, a philosopher and socialist to whom for many years she looked up as a daughter to a father. De Musset's aristocratic intellect rejected the claims of these prophets who could not write twenty readable pages of prose; George Sand allowed herself to be infected with their tendency to emphatic and unctuous diction.
To conclude, then, she was his inferior as an artist, though as a human being she was greater and far stronger. She had not the masculine direct artistic intuition, the faculty by virtue of which a man says, giving no reason: "Thus it must be." When they looked at a painting together, he, who made no pretension to be a connoisseur, at once perceived the merits of the picture and the characteristic qualities of the artist, and described them in a few words. She arrived in some peculiar, slow, roundabout way at an understanding of the picture, and the expression of her feeling on the subject was often either vague or paradoxical. His intelligence was acute and nervous, hers diffuse, universally sympathetic. When they listened to an opera together, what affected him were the outbursts of heartfelt personal passion—the individual element. She, on the contrary, was affected by the choruses, the expression of the emotions of common humanity. It seemed as if a concourse of minds were required to set hers in motion.
Her writings lacked conciseness. Whilst every sentence that came from his pen was like a gold coin stamped on both sides and chiselled on the edge, hers were wordy to prolixity. The first thing De Musset involuntarily did when a copy of Indiana came into his hands, was to score out some twenty or thirty superfluous adjectives in the first few pages. George Sand saw the book afterwards, and she was, it is said, more annoyed than grateful.
Six months before they met, she had felt some uneasiness at the idea of making De Musset's acquaintance. She first requested Sainte-Beuve to bring him to see her, and then wrote in the postscript of a letter, dated March 1833: "On further reflection I have decided that I do not wish you to bring Alfred de Musset here; he is too much of the dandy; we should not suit one another. It was more curiosity than real interest which made me wish to see him. But it is not prudent to satisfy every feeling of curiosity." One perceives a touch of anxiety or foreboding in these words.
Alfred de Musset for his part had, like all authors, a certain dread of authoresses. It was undoubtedly a male member of the profession who nicknamed these ladies bluestockings. Nevertheless, there is no denying the great attraction which a remarkable feminine mind possesses for the masculine mind. The ecstatic feeling which accompanies a perfect intellectual understanding was in this case intensified a hundredfold by a suddenly conceived, violent mutual passion.
Looking at the liaison between these two remarkable people from the historic point of view, we are struck by the strong impress it bears of the spirit of the age, of that artistic intoxication recalling the carnival mood of the Renaissance, which took possession of men's minds while Romanticism prevailed in France. The born artist, whose first duty it always is to break with traditional convention within the domain of his art, feels himself in every age tempted to defy the conventions of society also; but the generation of 1830 was more youthfully naïve in its rebellion against conventionality than any preceding generation had been in France for centuries, or than any of its successors has been. In all artists there is something of the Bohemian or of the child; the artists of that day allowed the Bohemian and the child in them free play. It is characteristic that the first fancy which seizes these two chosen spirits after they have found each other, and the first breathless, burning ecstasy of bliss is past, is to dress themselves up and play tricks upon their acquaintances. The first time Paul de Musset is invited to spend an evening with the young couple, he finds Alfred in the garb of an eighteenth-century marquis, and George Sand in hoops and panniers. When George Sand gives her first dinner-party after she and De Musset become friends, he waits at table, unrecognised by the guests, in the dress of a young Norman servant girl; and as a suitable vis-à-vis for the guest of the evening, Monsieur Lerminier, a well-known professor of philosophy, she has invited Debureau, the famous Pierrot of the Funambules Theatre, whom no one present has seen except on the stage, and whom she introduces as an eminent member of the English House of Commons charged with secret despatches to the Austrian government. To give both him and Lerminier an opportunity to display their accomplishments, the conversation is turned upon politics. But Sir Robert Peel, Lord Stanley, and other such personages are mentioned in vain; the foreign diplomat either maintains an obstinate silence or answers in monosyllables. At last some one employs the expression, "the European balance of power." Then the Englishman speaks. "Would you like to know," he says, "what my idea of the European balance of power at this serious conjuncture in English and continental politics is?—This!" And the diplomat throws up his plate so that it spins round in the air, then cleverly catches it on the point of his knife and balances it as it whirls there. The astonishment of the other guests may be imagined. Does not a little anecdote like this show us the connection between De Musset and George Sand in a curious light of youthfulness and childishness? It is like a reflected gleam from the days of the Renaissance; we know at once that we are in the romantic France of the Thirties.
The connection has its commonplace, sordid side, of which enough has been made, and on which I shall not dwell. Every one knows that De Musset and George Sand travelled in Italy together, and that he tormented her with his jealousy, she him with a surveillance of his actions and habits to which he was totally unaccustomed; that their life together was not happy; that he was very ill in Venice (with delirium tremens, we are led to understand); and that during his illness she had a love affair with the Italian doctor, Pagello by name, who attended him, the consequence of which was that De Musset left her and went home in a state of extreme depression.