In contact with the finest minds of her times, George Sand was neither a moral monster nor yet the arrant Bohemian that legend has fashioned of her. She was a fond mother, and a delightful grandmother. She had the featherbed temperament, and soothed masculine nerves exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art. Jules Laforgue would have said of her: Stability, thy name is Woman! She died in the odour of domestic sanctity, mourned by her friends, and the idol of the literary world.
How account for her uprightness of character, her abundant virtues—save one? She was as true as the compass to her friends, to her family. Either she has been slandered or else she is an anomaly in the moral world. In either case we need a new transvaluation of morals. She was not made of the stuff of courtesans, she refused to go to the devil. Like Aspasia, she was an immoralist. As an artist she could have had social position. But she didn't crave it; she didn't crave notoriety; paradoxical as it may sound, notoriety was thrust upon her. At Nohant, her château in Berri, there was usually a conglomeration of queer people: Socialists, reformers, crazy dreamers, artists, and poets, occasionally working men in their blouses. Of that mystic crew Matthew Arnold could have repeated his famous "What a set!" which he despairingly uttered about the Shelley-Godwin gatherings.
II
George Sand was a normal woman. She preferred the society of men; with women she was always on her guard, a cat sleeping with one eye open. Her friendship with Mme. D'Agoult, the elective affinity of Liszt, soon ended. She never summered in soft Sapphic seas, nor hankered after poetic Leucadian promontories. She never did approvingly quote the verse of Baudelaire beginning: "Lo! the Lesbians their sterile sex advancing." She was a woman from top to toe. Nor did she indulge often in casual gallant adventures. Her affairs were romantic. With the author of Carmen her spiritual thermometer registered at its lowest. She endured him just eight days, and Mérimée is responsible for the tasteless anecdote which he tells as his reason for leaving her. He saw her of a cold morning making the fire, her head in curl-papers, and attired in an old dressing-gown. No passion could survive that shock, and selfish Prosper at once grew frigid.
A French expression may suit George: She always had her heart "en compote." And she was incorrigibly naïve—they called it "Idealism" in those days—witness her affair with Doctor Pagello in Venice. The first handsome Italian she met she fell in love with and allowed poor sick Alfred de Musset to return to Paris alone, although she had promised his mother to guard him carefully. He was suffering from an attack of delirium tremens in Venice. He had said of himself: "I am not tender, I am excessive." He was. His name, unlike Keats's, is writ in absinthe, not water. Nevertheless, you can reread him.
But the separation didn't kill him. He was twenty-two, George six years older. Their affair struggled along about six months. Alfred consoled himself with Rachel and many others. He was more poet than artist, more artist than man; and a pretty poor specimen of a man. He wrote the history of his love for George. She followed suit. This sphinx of the ink-well was a journalist born. She used her lovers for "copy"; and for that matter Byron and Goethe did the same. George always discoursed of her thirst for the "infinite." It was only a species of moral indigestion. Every romance ended in disillusionment. The one with Chopin lasted the longest, nearly ten years. She first met the Pole in 1836, not in 1837, as the Chopinists believe. Liszt introduced them. Later Chopin quarrelled with Liszt about her. Chopin did not like her at first; blue stockings were not to the taste of this conventional man of the world. Yet he succumbed. He died of the liaison itself, rather than from the separation in 1847. Sand divined the genius of Chopin before many of his critical contemporaries. She had the courage—and the wisdom—to write that one of his Tiny Preludes contained more genuine music than much of Meyerbeer's mighty Trumpetings. And Meyerbeer ruled the world of music when she said this.
The immediate cause of this separation I hinted at in my early study of Chopin. Solange Sand, the daughter of George, was a thoroughly perverse girl. She not only flirted with Chopin, seeking to lure him from her mother—truly a Gallic triangle—but she so contrived matters that her mother was forced to allow the intriguing girl to marry her lover, Clésinger, the sculptor. The knowledge of this Mme. Sand kept from Chopin for a while because she feared that he would side with Solange. He promptly did so, being furious at the deception. He it was who broke with George, possibly aided thereto by her nagging. He saw much of Solange, and pecuniarily helped her young and unhappy household. He announced by letter to George the news that she was a grandmother; they occasionally corresponded.
Clésinger did not get on with his mother-in-law. She once boxed his ears. He drank, gambled, and brutally treated Solange. George Sand suffered the agony of seeing in her daughter's life a duplicate of her own. Her husband, François-Casimir Dudevant, a debauched country squire, drank, was unfaithful, and beat her betimes. He treated his dogs better. No wonder she ran away to Paris, there to live with Jules Sandeau. (She had married in 1822, and brought her husband five hundred thousand francs.)
But, rain or shine, joy or sorrow, she did her daily stunt at her desk. She was a journalist and wrote by the sweat of her copious soul. She was the rare possessor of the Will-to-Sit-Still, as metaphysicians would say. She thought with her nerves and felt with her brain. She was, morally speaking, magnificently disorganised. She was a subtle mixer of praise and poison, and her autobiography is stuffed with falsehoods. She couldn't help falsifying facts, for she was an incurable sentimentalist. Heine has cruelly said that women writers write with one eye on the paper, the other on some man; all except the Countess Hahn-Hahn, who had one eye. George Sand wrote with both eyes fixed on a man, or men. Charity should cover a multitude of her missteps. In her case we don't know all. We know too much. Still, I believe she was more sinned against than sinning.