Mme. Wladimir Karénine’s extraordinarily diffuse, but scarcely less valuable, biography, of which the first instalment,[[6]] in two large volumes, brings the story but to the year 1838, reaches us in a French version, apparently from the author’s own hand, of chapters patiently contributed to Russian periodicals. Were it not superficially ungrateful to begin with reserves about a book so rich and full, there might be some complaint to make of this wonderful tribute on grounds of form and taste. Ponderous and prolix, the author moves in a mass, escorted by all the penalties of her indifference to selection and compression. She insists and repeats, she wanders wide; her subject spreads about her, in places, as rather a pathless waste. Above all she has produced a book which manages to be at once remarkably expert and singularly provincial. Our innocence is perhaps at fault, but we are moved to take the mixture for characteristically Russian. Would indeed any but that admirable “Slav” superiority to prejudice of which we have lately heard so much have availed to handle the particular facts in this large free way? Nothing is at all events more curious than the union, on the part of our biographer, of psychological intelligence and a lame esthetic. The writer’s literary appreciations lag in other words half a century behind her human and social. She treats us to endless disquisitions on pages of her author to which we are no longer in any manageable relation at all—disquisitions pathetic, almost grotesque, in their misplaced good faith. But her attitude to her subject is admirable, her thoroughness exemplary, the spirit of service in her of the sort that builds the monument stone by stone. When we see it reared to the summit, as we are clearly to do, we shall feel the structure to be solid if not shapely. Nothing is more possible meanwhile than that a culture more homogeneous—a French hand or a German—could not have engaged in the work with anything like the same sincerity. An English hand—and the fact, for our culture, means much—would have been incapable of touching it. The present scale of it at all events is certainly an exotic misconception. But we can take of it what concerns us.
The whole thing of course, we promptly reflect, concerns at the best only those of us who can remount a little the stream of time. The author of “L’Histoire de ma Vie” died in 1876, and the light of actuality rests to-day on very different heads. It may seem to belittle her to say that to care for her at all one must have cared for her from far back, for such is not in general the proviso we need to make on behalf of the greatest figures. It describes Madame Sand with breadth, but not with extravagance, to speak of her as a sister to Goethe, and we feel that for Goethe it can never be too late to care. But the case exemplifies perhaps precisely the difference even in the most brilliant families between sisters and brothers. She was to have the family spirit, but she was to receive from the fairies who attended at her cradle the silver cup, not the gold. She was to write a hundred books but she was not to write “Faust.” She was to have all the distinction but not all the perfection; and there could be no better instance of the degree in which a woman may achieve the one and still fail of the other. When it is a question of the rare originals who have either she confirms us, masculine as she is, in believing that it takes a still greater masculinity to have both. What she had, however, she had in profusion; she was one of the deepest voices of that great mid-century concert against the last fine strains of which we are more and more banging the doors. Her work, beautiful, plentiful and fluid, has floated itself out to sea even as the melting snows of the high places are floated. To feel how she has passed away as a “creator” is to feel anew the immense waste involved in the general ferment of an age, and how much genius and beauty, let alone the baser parts of the mixture, it takes to produce a moderate quantity of literature. Smaller people have conceivably ceased to count; but it is strange for a member of the generation immediately succeeding her own that she should have had the same fate as smaller people: all the more that such a mourner may be ruefully conscious of contributing not a little himself to the mishap. Does he still read, re-read, can he to-day at all deal with, this wonderful lady’s novels? It only half cheers him up that on the occasion of such a publication as I here speak of he finds himself as much interested as ever.
The grounds of the interest are difficult to give—they presuppose so much of the old impression. If the old impression therefore requires some art to sustain and justify itself we must be content, so far as we are still under the charm, to pass, though only at the worst, for eccentric. The work, whether we still hold fast to it or not, has twenty qualities and would still have an immense one if it had only its style; but what I suppose it has paid for in the long-run is its want of plastic intensity. Does any work of representation, of imitation, live long that is predominantly loose? It may live in spite of looseness; but that, we make out, is only because closeness has somewhere, where it has most mattered, played a part. It is hard to say of George Sand’s productions, I think, that they show closeness anywhere; the sense of that fluidity which is more than fluency is what, in speaking of them, constantly comes back to us, and the sense of fluidity is fundamentally fatal to the sense of particular truth. The thing presented by intention is never the stream of the artist’s inspiration; it is the deposit of the stream. For the things presented by George Sand, for the general picture, we must look elsewhere, look at her life and her nature, and find them in the copious documents in which these matters and many others are now reflected. All this mass of evidence it is that constitutes the “intensity” we demand. The mass has little by little become large, and our obligation to Madame Karénine is that she makes it still larger. She sets our face, and without intending to, more and more in the right direction. Her injudicious analyses of forgotten fictions only confirm our discrimination. We feel ourselves in the presence of the extraordinary author of the hundred tales, and yet also feel it to be not by reason of them that she now presents herself as one of the most remarkable of human creatures. By reason then of what? Of everything that determined, accompanied, surrounded their appearance. They formed all together a great feature in a career and a character, but the career and the character are the real thing.
Such is far from usually the case, I hasten to recognise, with the complete and consistent artist. Poor is the art, a thing positively to be ashamed of, that, generally speaking, is not far more pressing for this servant of the altar than anything else, anything outside the church, can possibly be. To have been the tempered and directed hammer that makes the metal hard: if that be not good enough for such a ministrant, we may know him by whatever he has found better—we shall not know him by the great name. The immense anomaly in Madame Sand was that she freely took the form of being, with most zest, quite another sort of hammer. It testifies sufficiently to her large endowment that, given the wide range of the rest of her appetite, she should seem to us to-day to have sacrificed even superficially to any form of objective expression. She had in spite of herself an imagination almost of the first order, which overflowed and irrigated, turning by its mere swift current, without effort, almost without direction, every mill it encountered, and launching as it went alike the lightest skiff and the stateliest ship. She had in especial the gift of speech, speech supreme and inspired, to which we particularly owe the high value of the “case” she presents. For the case was definitely a bold and direct experiment, not at all in “art,” not at all in literature, but conspicuously and repeatedly in the business of living; so that our profit of it is before anything else that it was conscious, articulate, vivid—recorded, reflected, imaged. The subject of the experiment became also at first hand the journalist—much of her work being simply splendid journalism—commissioned to bring it up to date. She interviewed nobody else, but she admirably interviewed herself, and this is exactly our good fortune. Her autobiography, her letters, her innumerable prefaces, all her expansive parentheses and excursions, make up the generous report. We have in this form accordingly a literary title for her far superseding any derived from her creative work. But that is the result of a mere betrayal, not the result of an intention. Her masterpiece, by a perversity of fate, is the thing she least sat down to. It consists—since she is a case—in the mere notation of her symptoms, in help given to the study of them. To this has the author of “Consuelo” come.
But how in the world indeed was the point so indicated not to be the particular cross-road at which the critic should lie in wait for a poor child of the age whom preceding ages and generations had almost infernally conspired to trap for him, to give up, candidly astray, to his hands? If the element of romance for which our heroine’s name stands is best represented by her personal sequences and solutions, it is sufficiently visible that her heredity left her a scant alternative. Space fails me for the story of this heredity, queer and complicated, the very stuff that stories are made of—a chain of generations succeeding each other in confidence and joy and with no aid asked of legal or other artificial sanctions. The facts are, moreover, sufficiently familiar, though here as elsewhere Madame Karénine adds to our knowledge. Presented, foreshortened, stretching back from the quiet Nohant funeral of 1876 to the steps of the throne of King Augustus the Strong of Poland, father of Maurice de Saxe, great-great-grandfather of Aurore Dupin, it all hangs together as a cluster of components more provocative than any the great novelist herself ever handled. Her pre-natal past was so peopled with dramatis personæ that her future was really called on to supply them in such numbers as would preserve the balance. The tide of illegitimacy sets straight through the series. No one to speak of—Aurore’s father is an exception—seems to have had a “regular” paternity. Aurore herself squared with regularity but by a month or two; the marriage of her parents gave her a bare escape. She was brought up by her paternal grandmother between a son of her father and a daughter of her mother born out of wedlock. It all moves before us as a vivid younger world, a world on the whole more amused and more amusing than ours. The period from the Restoration to the events of 1848 is the stretch of time in which, for more reasons than we can now go into, French life gives out to those to whom its appeal never fails most of its charm—most, at all events, of its ancient sociability. Happy is our sense of the picturesque Paris unconscious of a future all “avenues” and exhibitions; happy our sense of these middle years of a great generation, easy and lusty despite the ensanguined spring that had gone before. They live again, piecing themselves ever so pleasantly and strangely together, in Madame Sand’s records and references; almost as much as the conscious close of the old régime so vaunted by Talleyrand they strike us as a season it would have been indispensable to know for the measure of what intercourse could richly be.
The time was at any rate unable to withhold from the wonderful young person growing up at Nohant the conditions she was so freely to use as measures of her own. Though the motto of her autobiography is Wahrheit und Dichtung quite as much as it had been that of Goethe’s, there is a truth beyond any projected by her more regular compositions in her evocation of the influences of her youth. Upon these influences Madame Karénine, who has enjoyed access through her heroine’s actual representatives to much evidence hitherto unpublished, throws a hundred interesting lights. Madame Dupin de Francueil and Madame Dupin the younger survive and perform for us, “convince” us as we say, better than any Lélia or any Consuelo. Our author’s whole treatment of her remarkable mother’s figure and history conveniently gives the critic the pitch of the great fact about her—the formation apparently at a given moment, yet in very truth, we may be sure, from far back, of the capacity and the determination to live with high consistency for herself. What she made of this resolve to allow her nature all its chances and how she carried on the process—these things are, thanks to the immense illustration her genius enabled her to lend them, the essence of her story; of which the full adumbration is in the detached pictorial way she causes her mother to live for us. Motherhood, daughterhood, childhood, embarrassed maturity, were phenomena she early encountered in her great adventure, and nothing is more typical of her energy and sincerity than the short work we can scarce help feeling she makes of them. It is not that she for a moment blinks or dodges them; she weaves them straight in—embarks with them indeed as her principal baggage. We know to-day from the pages before us everything we need to know about her marriage and the troubled years that followed; about M. Casimir Dudevant and his possible points of view, about her separation, her sharp secession, rather, as it first presents itself, and her discovery, at a turn of the road as it can only be called, of her genius.
She stumbled on this principle, we see, quite by accident and as a consequence of the attempt to do the very humblest labour, to support herself from day to day. It would be difficult to put one’s finger more exactly upon a case of genius unaided and unprompted. She embarked, as I have called it, on her great voyage with no grounds of confidence whatever; she had obscurely, unwittingly the spirit of Columbus, but not so much even as his exiguous outfit. She found her gift of improvisation, found her tropic wealth, by leaping—a surprised conquistador of “style”—straight upon the coral strand. No awakened instinct, probably, was ever such a blessing to a writer so much in need. This instinct was for a long time all her initiation, practically all her equipment. The curious thing is that she never really arrived at the fruit of it as the result of a process, but that she started with the whole thing as a Patti or a Mario starts with a voice which is a method, which is music, and that it was simply the train in which she travelled. It was to render her as great a service as any supreme faculty ever rendered its possessor, quite the same service as the strategic eye renders a commander in the field or instant courage the attacking soldier: it was to carry her through life still more inimitably than through the career of authorship. Her books are all rich and resonant with it, but they profit by it meagrely compared with her character. She walks from first to last in music, that is in literary harmonies, of her own making, and it is in truth sometimes only, with her present biographer to elbow us a little the way, that these triumphant sounds permit us a near enough approach to the procession to make out quite exactly its course.
No part of her career is to my sense so curious as this particular sudden bound into the arena. Nothing but the indescribable heredity I have spoken of appears traceably to have prepared it. We have on one side the mere poverty and provinciality of her marriage and her early contacts, the crudity of her youth and her ignorance (which included so small a view of herself that she had begun by looking for a future in the bedaubing, for fancy-shops, of little boxes and fans); and on the other, at a stride, the full-blown distinction of “Valentine” and “Jacques,” which had had nothing to lead up to it, we seem to make out, but the very rough sketch of a love-affair with M. Jules Sandeau. I spoke just now of the possible points of view of poor M. Dudevant; at which, had we space, it might be of no small amusement to glance—of an amusement indeed large and suggestive. We see him, surely, in the light of these records, as the most “sold” husband in literature, and not at all, one feels, by his wife’s assertion of her freedom, but simply by her assertion of her mind. He appears to have married her for a nobody approved and guaranteed, and he found her, on his hands, a sister, as we have seen, of Goethe—unless it be but a figure to say that he ever “found” her anything. He appears to have lived to an advanced age without having really—in spite of the lawsuits he lost—comprehended his case; not the least singular feature of which had in fact positively been the deceptive delay of his fate. It was not till after several years of false calm that it presented itself in its special form. We see him and his so ruthlessly superseded name, never to be gilded by the brilliant event, we see him reduced, like a leaf in a whirlwind, to a mere vanishing-point.
We deal here, I think, with something very different from the usual tittle-tattle about “private” relations, for the simple reason that we deal with relations foredoomed to publicity by the strange economy involved in the play of genius itself. Nothing was ever less wasted, from beginning to end, than all this amorous experience and all this luxury of woe. The parties to it were to make an inveterate use of it, the principal party most of all; and what therefore on that marked ground concerns the critic is to see what they were appreciably to get out of it. The principal party, the constant one through all mutations, was alone qualified to produce the extract that affects us as final. It was by the publication four years since of her letters to Alfred de Musset and to Sainte-Beuve, by the appearance also of Madame Arvède Barine’s clear compact biography of Musset, that we began to find her personal history brought nearer to us than her own communications had in her lifetime already brought it. The story of her relations with Musset is accordingly so known that I need only glance at the fact of her having—shortly after the highest degree of intimacy between them had, in the summer of 1833, established itself in Paris—travelled with him to Italy, settled with him briefly in Venice, and there passionately quarrelled and parted with him—only, however, several months later, on their return to France, to renew again, to quarrel and to part again, all more passionately, if possible, even than before. Madame Karénine, besides supplying us with all added light on this episode, keeps us abreast of others that were to follow, leaves us no more in the dark about Michel de Bourges, Félicien Mallefille and Chopin than we had already been left about their several predecessors. She is commendably lucid on the subject of Franz Liszt, impartially examines the case and authoritatively dismisses it. Her second volume brings her heroine to the eve of the historic departure with Chopin for Majorca. We have thus in a convenient form enough for one mouthful of entertainment, as well as for superabundant reflection.
We have indeed the whole essence of what most touches us, for this consists not at all of the quantity of the facts, nor even of their oddity: they are practically all there from the moment the heroine’s general attitude defines itself. That is the solid element—the details to-day are smoke. Yet I hasten to add that it was in particular by taking her place of an autumn evening in the southward-moving diligence with Alfred de Musset, it was on this special occasion that she gave most the measure of her choice of the consistent, even though it so little meant the consequent, life. She had reached toward such a life obviously in quitting the conjugal roof in 1831—had attacked the experiment clumsily, but according to her light, by throwing herself on such material support as faculties yet untested might furnish, and on such moral as several months of the intimité of Jules Sandeau and a briefer taste of that of Prosper Mérimée might further contribute. She had done, in other words, what she could; subsequent lights show it as not her fault that she had not done better. With Musset her future took a long stride; emotionally speaking it “looked up.” Nothing was wanting in this case—independently of what might then have appeared her friend’s equal genius—quite ideally to qualify it. He was several years her junior, and as she had her husband and her children, he had, in the high degree of most young Frenchmen of sensibility, his mother. It is recorded that with this lady on the eve of the celebrated step she quite had the situation, as the phrase is, out; which is a note the more in the general, the intellectual lucidity. The only other note in fact to be added is that of the absence of funds for the undertaking. Neither partner had a penny to spare; the plan was wholly to “make money,” on a scale, as they went. A great deal was in the event, exactly speaking, to be made—but the event was at the time far from clear to them. The enterprise was in consequence purely and simply, with a rounded perfection that gives it its value for the critic, an affair of the heart. That the heart, taking it as a fully representative organ, should fail of no good occasion completely and consistently to engage itself was the definite and, as appeared, the promising assumption on which everything rested. The heart was real life, frank, fearless, intelligent and even, so far as might be, intelligible life; everything else was stupid as well as poor, muddle as well as misery. The heart of course might be misery, for nothing was more possible than that life predominantly was; but it was at all events the misery that is least ignoble.