She became Republican, almost Communistic in her views, founded a paper, the Cause du Peuple, and contributed to another, the Commune de Paris.
“It seems to me,” she writes to her son, “that the earth belongs to God, who made it and has given it to man as a haven of refuge. It cannot therefore be His intention that some should suffer from repletion, while others die of hunger. All that any one can say on the subject will not prevent me from feeling miserable and angry when I see a beggar man moaning at a rich man’s door.
“If I say all this to you, however, you must not repeat it or show my letter. You know your father’s opinions are different. You must listen to him with respect, but your conscience is free, and you can choose between his ideas and mine. I will teach you many things if you and I ever live together. If we are not fated to enjoy this happiness (the greatest I can imagine, and the only thing that would make me wish to stop on earth), you will pray God for me, and from the bosom of death, if anything remains of me in the Universe, my spirit will watch over you.”
After the June massacres, she retired, sad and disappointed, to Nohant, where, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she reigned as père et mère de famille, respected and loved by all. The eccentricities of her youth were forgiven for the sake of her genius and generosity of heart. She was hospitable and simple, allowing her son and his wife to manage the household and property, making her guests, however, feel that she was the controlling spirit of the house. Here—all the struggles of life over—she devoted herself to literature, and produced the best works of her life: “La Petite Fadette,” “La Mare au Diable,” and “François le Chiampi.” George Sand had none of the brilliancy and repartee in general conversation one would have expected, and as the years went on she became more silent and reserved.
Her greatest happiness was to sit in her arm-chair smoking cigarettes. Often, when her friends thought she was absorbed in her own meditations, she would put in a word that proved she had been listening to everything. The word spoken, she would relapse again into silence. It was only when she sat down to her desk that she became eloquent, and the expressions that halted on her lips rushed abundantly from her pen. Her characters grew beneath her hand, and she went on writing, with that perfect style which is like the rhythmic cadence of a great river—“Large, calm, and regular.” George Sand worked all night long after all her guests were in bed, sometimes remaining up until five o’clock in the morning. She generally sat down to the old bureau in the hall at Nohant, with pen, ink, and foolscap paper sewn together, and began, without notes or a settled scheme of any kind.
“You wish to write,” she says to her lovely young friend, the Comtesse d’Agoult. “Then do so by all means. You are young, in the full force of your intelligence and powers. Write quickly and don’t think too much. If you reflect, you will cease to have any particular bent, and will write from habit. Work while you have genius, while the gods dictate to you. I think you will have a great success, and may you be spared the thorns which surround the blessed flowers of the crown of glory. Why should the thorns pierce your flesh? You have not wandered through the desert.”
When death came, she met it simply and bravely, like the great soul that she was. “Laissez la verdure” were the last words she spoke. No one at first understood what she meant, and thought she was delirious, but afterwards they remembered that she had always expressed a dislike to slabs and crosses on the graves of those she loved, so they left a mound of grass to mark her resting-place.
As we read the works of the two great female novelists of the century, George Eliot and George Sand, a comparison inevitably suggests itself to our minds. They both had the same passionate sympathy with the trials and sufferings of humanity, the same love and reverence for all that was weak and lowly. No intellectual aristocracy existed for them; they loved the crowd, and tried to influence the crowd. It is curious they should both have made the same observation, the one on hearing Liszt, the other on hearing Mendelssohn play: “Had I any genius, that is the form I should have wished to take, for then I could have spoken to all my fellow-men.” George Sand was ever seeking ideal perfection, and in that search often lost the right road and “wandered in the desert.” George Eliot accepted life with that calm resignation that was part of her nature; she was more restrained and less passionate than her French sister. The one, while at school, reproaches herself for her coldness and inability to feel any enthusiasm about the prayer-meetings in vogue among her companions. The other cast herself on her knees one day in a fit of devotion, and for weeks declared that she would become a nun.
There is as much divergence in the artistic work they produced as in their characters. George Sand, without having the perfection of construction and finish that distinguish George Eliot, far surpasses her in the delineation of her female characters. George Eliot never described a woman of genius, while George Sand has written Consuelo and the Comtesse Rudolstadt, both of them types of the femme artiste, with all her weakness and all her greatness.
In the painting of human love, also, the French novelist is infinitely stronger than the English one. We linger with absorbing interest over the suffering and passion of Indiana and Valentine, while we yawn over the conversations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, or Deronda and Myra. George Eliot herself has said, “That for eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand.”
We have seen a photograph done of George Sand shortly before she died. The face is massive, but lit up by the wonderful eyes through which the soul still shines. An expression of tenderness and gentle philosophy hovers round the lips, and we feel almost as though they would break into a smile as we gaze. She became latterly like one of those grand old trees of her own “Vallée Noire,” lopped and maimed by the storms and struggles of life, but ever to the last putting forth tender shoots and expanding into fresh foliage, through which the soft winds of heaven whisper, making music in the ears of those weary wayfarers who pause to rest beneath their shade.—Temple Bar.