What the world said was: "The welfare of the human family demands that a marriage legally made shall never be questioned or undone. Marriage is not a union depending on love, or congeniality, or any such condition. It is just as sacred when made for money, or for ambition, or for lust of the flesh, or for any other purpose, however ignoble or base, as when contracted in the spirit of the purest mutual love." Against all this, George Sand, both with pen and life, protested. She contended that it was love alone which made marriage anything but a disgusting sin. We have heard much of this in these latter days, even in our own country, but it was George Sand who first struck the keynote; the doctrine is essentially hers in all its parts. That she denounced the whole system of marriages of convenience, is an honor to her; that she proclaimed love as the only true foundation for marriage, is equally an honor; but that she assailed the institution of legal marriage as a whole, and overleaped its bounds and became a law to herself in the matter, is her weakness and her shame. It is frequently denied that she did this. It is said that she did not assail the institution of marriage, but only the things that are perpetrated in its name.
"But all the same [as another has well said], her eloquent expositions of ill-assorted unions, her daring appeals from the obligations they impose to the affections they outrage, her assertion of the rights of nature over the conventions of society, have the final effect of justifying the violation of duty on the precarious ground of passion and inclination.
"Nobody who knows what the actual life of George Sand has been can doubt for a moment the true nature of her opinions on the subject of marriage. It is not a pleasant subject to touch, and we should shrink from it if it were not as notorious as everything else by which she has become famous in her time. It forms in reality as much a part of the philosophy she desires to impress upon the world as the books through which she has expanded her theory. It is neither more nor less than her theory of freedom and independence in the matter of passion (we dare not dignify it by any higher name) put into action,—rather vagrant action, we fear, but on that account all the more decisive."
Society and she were naturally at war from the beginning of her career; and she suffered from it, though she dealt many bitter blows at it even while she suffered. "What has it done," she says in one place,—
"what has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for our children, this society shielded with such care? Nothing. Those whom it calls vain complainers, and rebels, and madmen, may reply: Suffer us to bewail our martyrs, poets without a country that we are, forlorn singers well versed in the causes of their misery and of our own. You do not comprehend the malady which killed them; they themselves did not comprehend it. If one or two of us at the present day open our eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange and unaccountable good Providence? and have we not to seek our grain of faith in storm and darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the absence of all sympathy, all example, all brotherly aid, all protection and countenance in high places? Try yourselves to speak to your brethren heart to heart, conscience to conscience! Try it! but you cannot, busied as you are with watching and patching up in all directions your dykes which the flood is invading: the material existence of this society of yours absorbs all your cares, and requires more than all your efforts. Meanwhile the powers of human thought are growing into strength and rise on all sides around you. Among these threatening apparitions there are some which fade away and re-enter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no longer with the horrors of the present chaos; but there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and alive, to say, 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we, we do not mean to die.'"
But she rises after a while out of her depths of passionate contention with a world out of joint, with the reign of stupidity and the tyranny of convention, into serener heights; and in her later books she gives us exquisite pictures of nature, with which she has the closest sympathy; lovely stories of rural life and gentle tales of perfectly pure love. Her passionate resentment against the world has worn itself out, and she is calmer, wiser now. Her daughter, too, Solange, has grown to be a woman and has a lover of her own, and the household thoughts and cares, and the tenderness of a serious and unselfish cast which creep into a mother's heart upon such occasions, shed their sweetness upon this wayward soul, and inspire it with congenial utterances. Now she looks back and says:—
"My poor children, my own flesh and blood, will perhaps turn upon me and say: 'You are leading us wrong; you mean to ruin us as well as yourself. Are you not unhappy, reprobated, evil spoken of? What have you gained by these unequal struggles, by these much-trumpeted duels of yours with Custom and Belief? Let us do as others do; let us get what is to be got from this easy and tolerant world.' This is what they will say to me. Or at best, if, out of tenderness for me, or from their own natural disposition, they give ear to my words and believe me, whither should I guide them? Into what abysses shall we go and plunge ourselves, we three? for we shall be our own three upon earth, and not one soul with us. What shall I reply to them, if they come and say to me: 'Yes, life is unbearable in a world like this. Let us die together. Show us the path of Bernica, or the Lake of Sténio, or the glaciers of Jacques'?"
Again, in the later times, she said:—
"Let us all try to be saints, and if we succeed we will know all the more how difficult a thing it is, and what indulgence is owed to those who are not yet saints. Then we shall acknowledge that there is something to be modified, either in law or opinion; for the aim of society should be to render perfection accessible to all, and man is very feeble when he struggles alone against the mad torrent of custom and of ideas."
A very wise, saying truly, written out of her own experience. Sad, too, as is much of her later writing, though there is not in it the passionate despair of her earlier work.
She lived to be seventy-two years old, and had known and experienced many phases of life,—the tumultuous passions and the wild revolt of youth, the cooler and more self-contained life of middle age, and the sombre color of a rather hopeless old age. Even in age she had her pleasures, however. She delighted in her grandchildren, in books, in pictures, in nature, and in work. Her unwearied pen moved until the last, and did not lose its cunning. There was much of the old strength and power to the last. But she had ceased to desire to destroy; she sought at last to build up.