They are books, these, which possess little literary interest for the reader of to-day: the characters are vague idealisations; the plots are improbable, as in Indiana, or unreal, as in Lélia and Jacques_ the harmonious sonority of her style does not save the author from the reproach of frequent lapses into magniloquence; in the letters and monologues she is often the poetical sermoniser. And yet there is a fire in these works of George Sand's youth which gives light and warmth to this day; they struck a note which will go on sounding for ages. They emit both a wail and a war-cry, and where they penetrate they carry with them germs of feelings and thoughts, the growth of which this age has succeeded in checking, but which in the future will unfold and spread with a luxuriant vigour of which we can only form a faint conception.
Indiana is the young, full heart's first outburst of bitterness and woe. The youthful heroine is the embodiment of refined intellectality and noble-mindedness; her husband, Colonel Delmare, is a rather better-tempered Monsieur Dudevant; Indiana's affectionate, enthusiastic heart turns, wounded, from husband to lover. The originality of the book lies in its delineation of the latter's character. For to him even the husband is infinitely preferable. Raymon is the average young Frenchman under the restored Legitimist monarchy; he is what the society of the period has made him, emotional and calculating, love-sick and egotistical, influenced by public opinion and the verdict of society to such an extent that his hard-heartedness develops into heartlessness, his unreliability into worthlessness; his thorough mediocrity is at last plainly discernible through its glittering husk of brilliant qualities and talents. In this first work George Sand at once introduces us to several distinct types of male character. There is the man with the coarse nature, whom the power which society puts into his hands has made brutal, and the man with the weak nature, whom congenital irresolution and acquired submissiveness to the dictation of society have made unreliable and cowardly. Woman-like, she starts with a spirited exposure of man's egotism. But in this her first book she also at once presents us with her ideal man, in the person of the reserve lover, the apparently phlegmatic but really ardent Ralph, who, taciturn as George Sand herself, appears (like her) to the superficial observer stiff and cold, but is in reality the embodiment of self-sacrificing, noble, faithful love. This was a character she rang changes on for years. We find him in Lélia_in the noble and hardly tried Trenmor, the galley-slave who passes judgment on society with stoic calm; in Jacques he is the hero who with almost superhuman magnanimity commits suicide, that he may not stand in the way of his young wife's alliance with another; in Léone Léoni he is the quiet, manly Don Aleo, to the very last prepared to marry that unfortunate Juliette whom an almost magic fascination binds to the incredibly rascally Leone, a species of male Manon Lescaut. In Le Secrétaire Intime he is the modest German, Max, whose distinguishing qualities are naïve kind-heartedness and poetical enthusiasm, and who is secretly married to the princess whom every one worships; in Elle et Lui he is Palmer, the Englishman, the foil to the gifted and dissipated Parisian, Laurent; in Le Dernier Amour, he is called Sylvestre and is a weaker Jacques. All these figures have a fault which is not uncommon in ideals; they are bloodless. But the men of the Raymon type, the men who represent the world, the selfishness, the vanity, and the weaknesses of society, are much more successful creations. Raymon himself is much more real than the other characters in Indiana; the local colouring in his case is stronger, more definite. The authoress (in chapter x.) attributes his unmanliness to "the conciliatory and yielding tendency" of the age, which she calls the age "of mental reservations"; she shows how Raymon, who is the advocate of political moderation, imagines that because he is devoid of political passions he is also devoid of political self-interest, and therefore stands on a higher level than that of any party—the fact of the matter being, that the existing condition of society is too advantageous to him for him to wish it changed. He is "not so ungrateful to Providence as to reproach it with the misfortunes of others." The numerous successors of this character in George Sand's novels all bear witness to a penetrating and delicate observation of human nature, from Sténio, the poet in Lélia, and Octave, the lover in Jacques, slightly sketched, weak characters, mere playthings of passion, to the carefully drawn, distinctly characterised figures like the dissolute young Italian singer, Anzoleto, in Consuelo, the ultra-refined, morbidly nervous and self-centred Prince Karol (Chopin) in Lucrezia Floriani, and the extravagantly capricious young painter, Laurent (Alfred de Musset), in Elle et Lui.
In the end Indiana goes the length of discovering the ruthless egotism of the male sex in all the outward developments of society, even in the religion taught by men. They have made of God a man in their own image. She writes to her hypocritical lover: "I do not serve the same God as you, but I serve mine better and more purely. Yours is the man's God, a man, a king, the founder and the patron of your race; mine is the God of the universe, the creator, the preserver, and the hope of every living being. Yours has made everything for you alone; mine has made all his creatures for each other." Two things are noticeable in these words—a naïve protest against that order of society which is founded upon the subordination of woman to man, and the optimism of an innocent, youthfully trustful faith in God. This attitude George Sand did not long maintain. Only a few years later she brings Lélia to a conclusion with an outburst of despairing pessimism. Shortly before her death the heroine says: "Alas! despair reigns, and moans of suffering emanate from every pore of the created world. The wave casts itself writhing and moaning on the beach, the wind weeps and wails in the forest. All those trees which bend and only rise to fall again under the lash of the storm, suffer frightful torture. There exists one miserable, cursed being, terrible, immense—the world which we inhabit cannot contain him. This invisible being is in everything, and his voice fills space with one eternal sob. Imprisoned in the universe he writhes, strives, struggles, beats his head and his shoulders against the confines of heaven and earth. He cannot pass beyond them; everything crushes him, everything curses him, everything torments him, everything hates him. What is this being and whence does he come?... Some have called him Prometheus, others Satan; I call him desire; I, the hopeless sibyl, the spirit of departed ages.... I, the broken lyre, the dumb instrument whose sounds would not be understood by those who inhabit the earth to-day, but in whose breast the eternal harmonies lie murmuring; I, the priestess of death, who feel that I once was Pythia, that I wept then, that I spoke then, but who cannot remember the healing word! ... O truth, truth! to find thee I descended into abysses the very sight of which would make the bravest giddy with fear. But truth! thou hast not revealed thyself; I have sought thee for ten thousand years and have not found thee! For ten thousand years the only answer to my cries, the only consolation of my agony, has been the sound, audible throughout this whole accursed world, of that despairing sob of impotent desire! For ten thousand years I have shouted into infinity: Truth! Truth! For ten thousand years infinity has answered: Desire! desire! O miserable Sibyl! O dumb Pythia! dash thy head against the rocks of thy cave and mingle thy blood, which is foaming with rage, with the foam of the sea!"
In such an outburst as this, the soulful melancholy of those youthful years reaches its climax. Condensed as I have given it here—it is six times as long in the original—it is a beautiful, poetical expression of George Sand's fully developed youthful self-consciousness. At the time she wrote Indiana, neither her feeling of her own superiority nor her pessimism had reached this stage. That unpretending tale she composed as the sympathising spokeswoman of the victims of existing social conditions. In it she did not consciously attack any social institution—not even marriage, as the opponent of which she was at once stigmatised. She is evidently speaking the truth when (in the preface of 1842) she declares that long after writing the original preface to Indiana under the influence of a remnant of respect for existing social institutions, she continued her attempt to solve the insoluble problem, to find a means of securing the happiness and dignity of the individuals oppressed by society which should be consonant with the existence of society. And she is also perfectly truthful when, in a letter to Nisard (the last in Lettres d'un Voyageur), she maintains that she has only attacked husbands, and not marriage as a social institution. It was in the rôle of the psychologist and story-teller, not in that of the reformer, that she at first appeared before the public. In Indiana, as in Valentine, the fervour, the poetical impulses, the enthusiastic passions and stormy protests of youth, are the proper contents of the book; there is much psychological and little personal history. Nevertheless there was in the nature of the feelings described (feelings free from any trace of viciousness, yet at variance with the decrees of society), and still more in the reflections interspersed throughout the tale, something which actually struck at the foundations of society. Therefore it was not pure stupidity which found expression in the clumsy and violent attacks made upon these books and their author by the partisans of the existing order of things. Men had a foreboding that such feelings and thoughts would sooner or later remould the laws governing society. They have begun to do so, and their influence will increase day by day.
Their very idealism and enthusiasm makes these books essentially revolutionary. For, as only the inner world exists for the authoress, she allows it to develop freely without taking any thought of the possibility of its development destroying the outer world; and, depicting as she does, chiefly strong feelings, or rather only one, infinitely varied feeling—love, she shows how its laws and the laws of society perpetually come into conflict. Although she casts no doubt upon the necessity and indispensability of marriage in our days, she undermines the belief in its eternal continuance. She certainly at first only attacks husbands, but an examination of her demand for an ideal husband shows that it is a demand which cannot be satisfied under existing conditions. In much the same manner, at a somewhat later period, Kierkegaard undermines Christianity by making an extravagantly ideal demand of the individual Christian.
The French Naturalistic School of forty years later, which has often suffered from more or less groundless accusations of immorality, has, in revenge, re-directed the accusation against these enthusiastic early works of George Sand's. When Émile Zola made one of his periodical protests against the idealistic novel, he never omitted to point out the dangers for the family and for society which lie in this constant aspiring beyond the bounds which restrain the individual, this continual representation of a craving for greater intellectual and emotional liberty. He prided himself on never representing unlawful love in a beautiful or inviting light, but always bedraggled with mire. He might have added that he and his successors in the school of Balzac have never felt the need of a higher morality than that in common vogue, and never hold out the prospect of social conditions different from the present. They have imposed a crushing restriction on themselves by limiting themselves to the representation of the outward realities visible to their own eyes, and resolutely refusing to draw any conclusions from their observations. Hence it is that their boldness in representing social relations and situations which literature hitherto had been chary of approaching, is equalled by their weakness, nay insignificance, as thinkers and moralists. They are constantly reduced to seek support from the indubitable harmony of their morality with the universally accepted moral code; they plume themselves on calling vice what other people call vice, and on inspiring horror of that vice. They are not as that sinner George Sand. But it is time to observe that it is just in this "morality" of theirs that their literary weakness lies; and that the strength of George Sand's works, with their far more idealistic and chaste delineations, lies in their "immorality." In the apparently extremely audacious works of the Realistic School, there is not an utterance to compare in real audacity with that which George Sand has put into the mouth of one of the chief characters in Horace, and which gives admirably condensed expression to her ideas of morality in the matter of love: "I believe that that love should be defined as a noble passion, which elevates and strengthens us by beautiful feelings and thoughts, and that love as an evil passion, which makes us selfish and cowardly and gives us over to all the meannesses of blind instinct. Every passion, therefore, is lawful or criminal according to its production of one or the other of these results—it being a matter of no consequence that official society, which is not the supreme court of justice of humanity, sometimes legalises the evil, and condemns the beneficent passion."[1]
In Lélia and Jacques (1833 and 1834) their authoress's Byronic "Weltschmerz" and declamatory tendency reach high-water mark. In Lélia she represented her ideal great, unsensual, profoundly feeling woman, and provided her with an opposite in her sister, Pulchérie, a luxurious courtesan. Taking her own character and separating the two sides of it, she formed Lélia after the Minerva-image, Pulchérie after the Venus-image in her own soul; the result being, not unnaturally, rather two symbolic personages than two human beings of flesh and blood. In Jacques she approached the problem of marriage from a new side. In Indiana she had portrayed a brutal, in Valentine a refined, cold husband; but now she equipped the husband with the qualities which in her eyes were the highest, and wrecked his happiness upon the rock of his own elevated character, which his insignificant young wife is not capable of understanding and continuing to love. The authoress has endeavoured to impart additional force to her own opinions by putting them into the mouth of the wronged husband. He himself excuses his wife: "No human being can control love; and no one is guilty because he loves or ceases to loves. What degrades the woman is the lie; what constitutes the adultery is not the hour she grants her lover, but the night she spends in her husband's arms afterwards." Jacques feels it his duty to make way for his rival: "Borel, in my place, would calmly have beaten his wife, and would probably not have blushed to embrace that same night the woman degraded alike by his blows and his kisses. There are men who, in the Oriental fashion, calmly kill their faithless wives, because they regard them as their lawful property. Others challenge their rival, kill him or put him out of the way, and then beg the woman whom they declare they love, for kisses and caresses, which she either refuses or gives in despair. These are perfectly ordinary proceedings in conjugal love. It seems to me that the love of swine is less vile and coarse than such love." These truths, already regarded as elementary by people of the highest culture, were in 1830 the most atrocious heresy. They are the salt which has kept this youthful work from becoming stale in spite of its antiquated plot and the diffuseness of the tedious letter-style. The extravagance of Romanticism is most noticeable in the final catastrophe. Jacques can think of no better means of liberating Fernande than a suicide committed in a manner which to her will give it the appearance of an accident. This transports us at once into the region of unreality. But the unreality in this novel is, generally speaking, more apparent than actual. It is easy for modern criticism to point out the absence of any indications of locality, of real occupations, &c., &c.; the personages in George Sand's early novels have no occupation and no aim but to love. The reality of these books is a spiritual reality, the reality of feeling. Even this, however, has been disputed in our day. It is the fashion to regard emotions such as those here described—this wild despair caused by social conditions, this passionate, erotic tenderness, this pure, ardent friendship between man and woman—as unnatural and unreal.[2] But we must remember that George Sand's characters are not supposed to be average men and women. She describes unusually gifted beings. Indeed, in these early works she has done little else than delineate and explain her own emotional life. She places her own character in every variety of outward circumstance, and then, with a marvellous power of self-observation and unerring skill, draws the natural psychological conclusions. It is interesting to observe how the constant craving to find a masculine mind which is the equal of her own, leads her to a kind of self-duplication in two sexes. Ardently as she exalts love, strongly as she allows it to influence the life of the great woman and of the great man, nevertheless both of these, Jacques as well as Lélia, are inspired by a still stronger, still more ideal feeling, that of friendship for a noble member of the opposite sex, by whom they are understood. In comparison with this profound mutual understanding, Lélia's love for Sténio, Jacques' for Fernande, seem merely the weaknesses of these two great souls. Lélia has an understanding friend and equal in Trenmor, Jacques in Sylvia. Jacques would love Sylvia if she were not his half-sister, or rather if he were not compelled to suspect that she is; but there is a beauty in their mutual relationship, such as it is, to which merely erotic relations could hardly attain. I remember distinctly what a powerful impression this friendship between Jacques and Sylvia made upon me when I read the book (probably in 1867) for the first time. I saw plainly enough that Jacques is to a certain extent an unreal character—and Sylvia also; for she is nothing more than Jacques' understanding confidante; but the ideal current between them is real, and it electrified me. Sylvia has her origin in the distressful cry of the genius for its equal and mate; she is undoubtedly nothing more than the expression of the urgent craving and demand of the great, lonely heart—but what is poetry else than this? Imperfect as the novel otherwise may be, the friendship between Jacques and Sylvia lends it an atmosphere of real poetry; we feel, while reading of it, as if, above the low-lying world of the passions, we caught a glimpse of a higher one, where purer, yet still quite earthly beings, love and understand each other.
Characters such as these illustrate the strong instinct of friendship which George Sand possessed, and which was quite in the spirit of the youthful Romanticism of the period. Her Lettres d'un Voyageur, which follow the first group of novels, and begin immediately after the separation from Alfred de Musset in Venice, give us an insight into her friendships. These letters belong to the works in which she has most directly revealed her own personal feelings, although they are written with a reserve concerning actual events which makes them obscure to the uninitiated. In them we follow her from the days of her life with the handsome, stupid Italian, Dr. Pagello, for whom she gave up De Musset, to the period of her devotion to Everard (Michel de Bourges), her counsel in the divorce suit, who inspired her with the idea of the pretty tale, Simon. Between these two extremes lie all the good, cordial friendships, with François Rollinat, Jules Néraud, &c.—frank, clever men, with whom she felt a constant desire to exchange ideas and letters, with whom she studied, from whom she learned much, and whom, in the Romantic spirit of good fellowship, she addressed with the familiar "thou"; as also all the genuine artistic comradeships with Franz Liszt, the Comtesse d'Agoult, Meyerbeer, and many others—the men and women of genius of the day.
In no other of her works is she so eloquent, in none of the later ones do her periods flow in such long, lyrically rhetorical waves. Nowhere better than here can we study her personal style, as distinguished from the dialogue of her novels. Sonority is its most marked feature. It rolls onward in long, full rhythms, regular in its fall and rise, melodious in joy, harmonious even in despair. The perfect balance of George Sand's nature is mirrored in the perfect balance of her sentences—never a shriek, a start, or a jar; a sweeping, broad-winged flight—never a leap, nor a blow, nor a fall. The style is deficient in melody, but abounds in rich harmonies; it lacks colour, but has all the beauty that play of line can impart. She never produces her effect by an unusual and audacious combination of words, seldom or never by a fantastic simile. And there is just as little strong or glaring colour in her pictures as there is jarring sound in her language. She is romantic in her enthusiasms, in the way in which she yields unresistingly to feelings which defy rules and regulations; but she is severely classical in the regularity of her periods, in the inherent beauty of her form, and the sobriety of her colouring.[3]
The letters from Venice, and still more those written after her return to France, tell the understanding reader how humiliated George Sand felt by the loss of De Musset's friendship, how sadly she missed it, and what a fictitious account of the whole episode it was which she gave to the public some twenty years later in Elle et Lui. There is little doubt that there were times when she felt utterly overwhelmed with longing, shame, and grief. In a letter to Rollinat written in January 1835, there is a significant and, as far as I know, hitherto unnoticed passage, which, beautiful in itself, also contains a confession: