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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Sand, by Justin M'Carthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: George Sand
+
+Author: Justin M'Carthy
+
+Release Date: May 5, 2011 [EBook #36040]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE SAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Delphine Lettau, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE SAND.
+
+BY JUSTIN M'CARTHY.
+
+_Reprinted from "The Galaxy" for May, 1870._
+
+
+We are all of us probably inclined, now and then, to waste a little time
+in vaguely speculating on what might have happened if this or that
+particular event had not given a special direction to the career of some
+great man or woman. If there had been an inch of difference in the size
+of Cleopatra's nose; if Hannibal had not lingered at Capua; if Cromwell
+had carried out his idea of emigration; if Napoleon Bonaparte had taken
+service under the Turk,--and so on through all the old familiar
+illustrations dear to the minor essayist and the debating society. I
+have sometimes felt tempted thus to lose myself in speculating on what
+might have happened if the woman whom all the world knows as George Sand
+had been happily married in her youth to the husband of her choice.
+Would she ever have taken to literature at all? Would she, loving as she
+does, and as Frenchwomen so rarely do, the changing face of inanimate
+nature,--the fields, the flowers and the brooks,--have lived a peaceful
+and obscure life in some happy country place, and been content with
+home, and family, and love, and never thought of fame? Or if, thus
+happily married, she still had allowed her genius to find an expression
+in literature, would she have written books with no passionate purpose
+in them,--books which might have seemed like those of a good Miss Mulock
+made perfect,--books which Podsnap might have read with approval, and
+put without a scruple into the hands of that modest young person, his
+daughter? Certainly one cannot but think that a different kind of early
+life would have given a quite different complexion to the literary
+individuality of George Sand.
+
+Bulwer Lytton, in one of his novels, insists that true genius is always
+quite independent of the individual sufferings or joys of its possessor,
+and describes some inspired youth in the novel as sitting down, while
+sorrow is in his heart, and hunger gnawing at his vitals, to throw off a
+sparkling and gladsome little fairy tale. Now this is undoubtedly true,
+in general, of any high order of genius; but there are at least some
+great and striking exceptions. Rousseau and Byron are, in modern days,
+remarkable illustrations of genius, admittedly of a very high rank,
+governed and guided almost wholly by the individual fortunes of the men
+themselves. So, too, must we speak of the genius of George Sand. Not
+Rousseau, not even Byron, was in this sense more egotistic than the
+woman who broke the chains of her ill-assorted marriage with a crash
+that made its echoes heard at last in every civilized country in the
+world. Just as people are constantly quoting _nous avons changé tout
+cela_ who never read a page of Molière, or _pour encourager les autres_
+without even being aware that there is a story of Voltaire's called
+"Candide," so there have been thousands of passionate protests uttered
+in America and Europe, for the last twenty years, by people who never
+saw a volume of George Sand, and yet are only echoing her sentiments and
+even repeating her words.
+
+In a former number of _The Galaxy_, I expressed casually the opinion
+that George Sand is probably the most influential writer of our day. I
+am still, and deliberately, of the same opinion. It must be remembered
+that very few English or American authors have any wide or deep
+influence over peoples who do not speak English. Even of the very
+greatest authors this is true. Compare, for example, the literary
+dominion of Shakespeare with that of Cervantes. All nations who read
+Shakespeare read Cervantes: in Stratford-upon-Avon itself Don Quixote is
+probably as familiar a figure in people's minds as Falstaff; but
+Shakespeare is little known indeed to the vast majority of readers in
+the country of Cervantes, in the land of Dante, or in that of Racine and
+Victor Hugo. In something of the same way we may compare the influence
+of George Sand with that of even the greatest living authors of England
+and America. What influence has Charles Dickens or George Eliot outside
+the range of the English tongue? But George Sand's genius has been felt
+as a power in every country of the world where people read any manner of
+books. It has been felt almost as Rousseau's once was felt; it has
+aroused anger, terror, pity, or wild and rapturous excitement and
+admiration; it has rallied around it every instinct in man or woman
+which is revolutionary; it has ranged against it all that is
+conservative. It is not so much a literary influence as a great
+disorganizing force, riving the rocks of custom, resolving into their
+original elements the social combination which tradition and convention
+would declare to be indissoluble. I am not now speaking merely of the
+sentiments which George Sand does or did entertain on the subject of
+marriage. Divested of all startling effects and thrilling dramatic
+illustrations, these sentiments probably amounted to nothing more
+dreadful than the belief that an unwedded union between two people who
+love and are true to each other is less immoral than the legal marriage
+of two uncongenial creatures who do not love and probably are not true
+to each other. But the grand, revolutionary idea which George Sand
+announced was that of the social independence and equality of
+woman,--the principle that woman is not made for man in any other sense
+than as man is made for woman. For the first time in the history of the
+world woman spoke out for herself with a voice as powerful as that of
+man. For the first time in the history of the world woman spoke out as
+woman, not as the servant, the satellite, the pupil, the plaything, or
+the goddess of man.
+
+Now, I intend at present to write of George Sand rather as an
+individual, or an influence, than as the author of certain works of
+fiction. Criticism would now be superfluously bestowed on the literary
+merits and peculiarities of the great woman whose astonishing
+intellectual activity has never ceased to produce, during the last
+thirty years, works which take already a classical place in French
+literature. If any reputation of our day may be looked upon as
+established, we may thus regard the reputation of George Sand. She is,
+beyond comparison, the greatest living novelist of France. She has won
+this position by the most legitimate application of the gifts of an
+artist. With all her marvellous fecundity, she has hardly ever given to
+the world any work which does not seem, at least, to have been the
+subject of the most elaborate and patient care. The greatest temptation
+which tries a story-teller is perhaps the temptation to rely on the
+attractiveness of story-telling, and to pay little or no attention to
+style. Walter Scott's prose, for example, if regarded as mere prose, is
+rambling, irregular, and almost worthless. Dickens's prose is as bad a
+model for imitation as a musical performance which is out of tune. Of
+course, I need hardly say that attention to style is almost as
+characteristic of French authors in general, as the lack of it is
+characteristic of English authors; but, even in France, the prose of
+George Sand stands out conspicuous for its wonderful expressiveness and
+force, its almost perfect beauty. Then, of all modern French authors,--I
+might, perhaps, say of all modern novelists of any country,--George Sand
+has added to fiction, has annexed from the worlds of reality and of
+imagination the greatest number of original characters,--of what Emerson
+calls new organic creations. Moreover, George Sand is, after Rousseau,
+the one only great French author who has looked directly and lovingly
+into the face of Nature, and learned the secrets which skies and waters,
+fields and lanes, can teach to the heart that loves them. Gifts such as
+these have won her the almost unrivalled place which she holds in living
+literature; and she has conquered at last even the public opinion which
+once detested and proscribed her. I could therefore hope to add nothing
+to what has been already said by criticism in regard to her merits as a
+novelist. Indeed, I think it probable that the majority of readers in
+this country know more of George Sand through the interpretation of the
+critics than through the pages of her books. And in her case criticism
+is so nearly unanimous as to her literary merits, that I may safely
+assume the public in general to have in their minds a just recognition
+of her position as a novelist. My object is rather to say something
+about the place which George Sand has taken as a social revolutionist,
+about the influence she has so long exercised over the world, and about
+the woman herself. For she is assuredly the greatest champion of woman's
+rights, in one sense, that the world has ever seen; and she is, on the
+other hand, the one woman out of all the world who has been most
+commonly pointed to as the appalling example to scare doubtful and
+fluttering womanhood back into its sheepfold of submissiveness and
+conventionality. There is hardly a woman's heart anywhere in the
+civilized world which has not felt the vibration of George Sand's
+thrilling voice. Women who never saw one of her books,--nay, who never
+heard even her _nom de plume_, have been stirred by emotions of doubt or
+fear, or repining or ambition, which they never would have known but for
+George Sand, and perhaps but for George Sand's uncongenial marriage.
+For, indeed, there is not now, and has not been for twenty years, I
+venture to think, a single "revolutionary" idea, as slow and
+steady-going people would call it, afloat anywhere in Europe or America,
+on the subject of woman's relations to man, society, and destiny, which
+is not due immediately to the influence of George Sand, and to the
+influence of George Sand's unhappy marriage upon George Sand herself.
+
+The world has of late years grown used to this extraordinary woman, and
+has lost much of the wonder and terror with which it once regarded her.
+I can quite remember,--younger people than I can remember,--the time
+when all good and proper personages in England regarded the authoress of
+"Indiana" as a sort of feminine fiend, endowed with a hideous power for
+the destruction of souls, and an inextinguishable thirst for the
+slaughter of virtuous beliefs. I fancy a good deal of this sentiment was
+due to the fearful reports wafted across the seas, that this terrible
+woman had not merely repudiated the marriage bond, but had actually put
+off the garments sacred to womanhood. That George Sand appeared in men's
+clothes was an outrage upon consecrated proprieties far more astonishing
+than any theoretical onslaught upon old opinions could be. Reformers,
+indeed, should always, if they are wise in their generation, have a care
+of the proprieties. Many worthy people can listen with comparative
+fortitude when sacred and eternal truths are assailed, who are stricken
+with horror when the ark of propriety is never so lightly touched.
+George Sand's pantaloons were, therefore, regarded as the most appalling
+illustration of George Sand's wickedness. I well remember what
+excitement, scandal, and horror were created in the provincial town
+where I lived, some twenty years ago, when the editor of a local
+Panjandrum (to borrow Mr. Trollope's word) insulted the feelings and the
+morals of his constituents and subscribers by polluting his pages with a
+translation from one of George Sand's shorter novels. Ah me! the little
+novel might, so far as morality was concerned, have been written every
+word by Miss Phelps, or the authoress of the "Heir of Redcliff"; it had
+not a word, from beginning to end, which might not have been read out to
+a Sunday-school of girls; the translation was made by a woman of the
+purest soul, and, in her own locality, of the highest name; and yet how
+virtue did shriek out against the publication! The editor persevered in
+the publishing of the novel, spurred on to boldness by some of his very
+young and therefore fearless coadjutors, who thought it delightful to
+confront public opinion, and liked the notion of the stars in their
+courses fighting against Sisera, and Sisera not being dismayed. That
+charming, tender, touching little story! I would submit it to-day
+cheerfully to the verdict of a jury of matrons, confident that it would
+be declared a fit and proper publication. But at that time it was enough
+that the story bore the odious name of George Sand; public opinion
+condemned it, and sent the magazine which ventured to translate it to an
+early and dishonored grave. I remember reading, about that time, a short
+notice of George Sand by an English authoress of some talent and
+culture, in which the Frenchwoman's novels were described as so
+abominably filthy that even the denizens of the Paris brothels were
+ashamed to be caught reading them. Now, this declaration was made all in
+good faith, in the simple good faith of that class of persons who will
+pass wholesale and emphatic judgment upon works of which they have never
+read a single page. For I need hardly tell any intelligent person of
+to-day that, whatever may be said of George Sand's doctrines, she is no
+more open to the charge of indelicacy than the authoress of "Romola." I
+cannot, myself, remember any passage in George Sand's novels which can
+be called indelicate; and, indeed, her severest and most hostile critics
+are fond of saying, not without a certain justice, that one of the worst
+characteristics of her works is the delicacy and beauty of her style,
+which thus commends to pure and innocent minds certain doctrines that,
+broadly stated, would repel and shock them. Were I one of George Sand's
+inveterate opponents, this, or something like it, is the ground I would
+take up. I would say: "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 and base, as when
+contracted in the spirit of the purest mutual love. Here is a woman of
+great power and daring genius, who says that the essential condition of
+marriage is love and natural fitness; that a legal union of man and
+woman without this is no marriage at all, but a detestable and
+disgusting sin. Now, the more delicately, modestly, plausibly she can
+put this revolutionary and pernicious doctrine, the more dangerous she
+becomes, and the more earnestly we ought to denounce her." This was, in
+fact, what a great many persons did say; and the protest was at least
+consistent and logical.
+
+But horror is an emotion which cannot long live on the old fuel, and
+even the world of English Philistinism soon ceased to regard George Sand
+as a mere monster. Any one now taking up "Indiana," for example, would
+perhaps find it not quite easy to understand how the book produced such
+an effect. Our novel-writing women of to-day commonly feed us on more
+fiery stuff than this. Not to speak of such accomplished artists in
+impurity as the lady who calls herself Ouida, and one or two others of
+the same school, we have young women, only just promoted from
+pantalettes, who can throw you off such glowing chapters of passion and
+young desire as would make the rhapsodies of "Indiana" seem very feeble
+milk-and-water brewage by comparison. Indeed, except for some of the
+descriptions in the opening chapters, I fail to see any extraordinary
+merit in "Indiana"; and toward the end it seems to me to grow verbose,
+weak, and tiresome. "Leone Leoni" opens with one of the finest dramatic
+outbursts of emotion known to the literature of modern fiction; but it
+soon wanders away into discursive weakness, and only just toward the
+close brightens up into a burst of lurid splendor. It is not those which
+I may call the questionable novels of George Sand,--the novels which
+were believed to illustrate in naked and appalling simplicity her
+doctrines and her life,--that will bear up her fame through succeeding
+generations. If every one of the novels which thus in their time drew
+down the thunders of Society's denunciation were to be swept into the
+wallet wherein Time, according to Shakespeare, carries scraps for
+oblivion, George Sand would still remain where she now is,--at the head
+of the French fiction of her day. It is true, as Goethe says, that
+"miracle-working pictures are rarely works of art." The books which make
+the hair of the respectable public stand on end are not often the works
+by which the fame of the author is preserved for posterity.
+
+It is a curious fact that, at the early time to which I have been
+alluding, little or nothing was known in England (or, I presume, in
+America) of the real life of Aurora Amandine Dupin, who had been pleased
+to call herself George Sand. People knew, or had heard, that she had
+separated from her husband, that she had written novels which
+depreciated the sanctity of legal marriage, and that she sometimes wore
+male costume in the streets. This was enough. In England, at least, we
+were ready to infer any enormity regarding a woman who was unsound on
+the legal marriage question, and who did not wear petticoats. What
+would have been said had people then commonly known half the stories
+which were circulated in Paris,--half the extravagances into which a
+passionate soul, and the stimulus of sudden emancipation from restraint,
+had hurried the authoress of "Indiana" and "Lucrezia Floriani"? For it
+must be owned that the life of that woman was, in its earlier years, a
+strange and wild phenomenon, hardly to be comprehended, perhaps, by
+American or English natures. I have heard George Sand bitterly arraigned
+even by persons who protested that they were at one with her as regards
+the early sentiments which used to excite such odium. I have heard her
+described by such as a sort of Lamia of literature and passion,--a
+creature who could seize some noble, generous, youthful heart, drain it
+of its love, its aspirations, its profoundest emotions, and then fling
+it, squeezed and lifeless, away. I have heard it declared that George
+Sand made "copy" of the fierce and passionate loves which she knew so
+well how to awaken and to foster; that she distilled the life-blood of
+youth to obtain the mixture out of which she derived her inspiration.
+The charge so commonly (I think unjustly) made against Goethe, that he
+played with the girlish love of Bettina and of others in order to obtain
+a subject for literary dissection, is vehemently and deliberately urged
+in an aggravated form,--in many aggravated forms,--against George Sand.
+Where, such accusers ask, is that young poet, endowed with a lyrical
+genius rare indeed in the France of later days,--that young poet whose
+imagination was at once so daring and so subtle,--who might have been
+Béranger and Heine in one, and have risen to an atmosphere in which
+neither Béranger nor Heine ever floated? Where is he, and what evil
+influence was it which sapped the strength of his nature, corrupted his
+genius, and prepared for him a premature and shameful grave? Where is
+that young musician, whose pure, tender, and lofty strains sound sweetly
+and sadly in the ears, as the very hymn and music of the
+Might-Have-Been,--where is he now, and what was the seductive power
+which made a plaything of him and then flung him away? Here and there
+some man of stronger mould is pointed out as one who was at the first
+conquered, and then deceived and trifled with, but who ordered his stout
+heart to bear, and rose superior to the hour, and lived to retrieve his
+nature and make himself a name of respect; but the others, of more
+sensitive and perhaps finer organizations, are only the more to be
+pitied because they were so terribly in earnest. Seldom, even in the
+literary history of modern France, has there been a more strange and
+shocking episode than the publication by George Sand of the little book
+called "Elle et Lui," and the rejoinder to it by Paul de Musset, called
+"Lui et Elle." I can hardly be accused of straying into the regions of
+private scandal when I speak of two books which had a wide circulation,
+are still being read, and may be had, I presume, in any New York
+book-store where French literature is sold. The former of the two books,
+"She and He," was a story, or something which purported to be a story,
+by George Sand, telling of two ill-assorted beings whom fate had thrown
+together for awhile, and of whom the woman was all tenderness, love,
+patience, the man all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and
+eccentricity. The point of the whole business was to show how sublimely
+the woman suffered, and how wantonly the man flung happiness away. Had
+it been merely a piece of fiction, it must have been regarded by any
+healthy mind as a morbid, unwholesome, disagreeable production,--a sin
+of the highest æsthetic kind against true art, which must always, even
+in its pathos and its tragedy, leave on the mind exalted and delightful
+impressions. But every one in Paris at once hailed the story as a
+chapter of autobiography, as the author's vindication of one episode in
+her own career,--a vindication at the expense of a man who had gone
+down, ruined and lost, to an early grave. Therefore the brother of the
+dead man flung into literature a little book called "He and She," in
+which a story, substantially the same in its outlines, is so told as
+exactly to reverse the conditions under which the verdict of public
+opinion was sought. Very curious indeed was the manner in which the same
+substance of facts was made to present the two principal figures with
+complexions and characters so strangely altered. In the woman's book the
+woman was made the patient, loving, suffering victim; in the man's reply
+this same woman was depicted as the most utterly selfish and depraved
+creature the human imagination could conceive. Even if one had no other
+means whatever of forming an estimate of the character of George Sand,
+it would be hardly possible to accept as her likeness the hideous
+picture sketched by Paul de Musset. No woman, I am glad to believe, ever
+existed in real life so utterly selfish, base, and wicked as his bitter
+pen has drawn. I must say that the thing is very cleverly done. The
+picture is at least consistent with itself. As a character in romance it
+might be pronounced original, bold, brilliant, and, in an artistic
+sense, quite natural. There is something thoroughly French in the easy
+and delicate force of the final touch with which de Musset dismisses his
+hideous subject. Having sketched this woman in tints that seem to flame
+across the eyes of the reader,--having described with wonderful realism
+and power her affectation, her deceit, her reckless caprices, her base
+and cruel coquetries, her devouring wantonness, her soul-destroying
+arts, her unutterable selfishness and egotism,--having, to use a vulgar
+phrase, "turned her inside out," and told her story backwards,--the
+author calmly explains that the hero of the narrative in his dying hour
+called his brother to his bedside, and enjoined him, if occasion should
+ever arise, if the partner of his sin should ever calumniate him in his
+grave, to vindicate his memory, and avenge the treason practised upon
+him. "Of course," adds the narrator, "the brother made the promise,--and
+I have since heard that he has kept his word." I can hardly hope to
+convey to the reader any adequate idea of the effect produced on the
+mind by these few simple words of compressed, whispered hatred and
+triumph, closing a philippic, or a revelation, or a libel of such
+extraordinary bitterness and ferocity. The whole episode is, I believe
+and earnestly hope, without precedent or imitation in literary
+controversy. Never, that I know of, has a living woman been publicly
+exhibited to the world in a portraiture so hideous as that which Paul de
+Musset drew of George Sand. Never, that I know of, has any woman gone so
+near to deserving and justifying such a measure of retaliation.
+
+For if it be assumed,--and I suppose it never has been disputed,--that
+in writing "Elle et Lui" George Sand meant to describe herself and
+Alfred de Musset, it is hard to conceive of any sin against taste and
+feeling,--against art and morals,--more flagrant than such a
+publication. The practice, to which French writers are so much addicted,
+of making "copy" of the private lives, characters, and relationships of
+themselves and their friends, seems to me in all cases utterly
+detestable. Lamartine's sins of this kind were grievous and glaring; but
+were they red as scarlet, they would seem whiter than snow when compared
+with the lurid monstrosity of George Sand's assault on the memory of the
+dead poet who was once her favorite. The whole affair, indeed, is so
+unlike anything which could occur in America or in England, that we can
+hardly find any canons by which to try it, or any standard of punishment
+by which to regulate its censure. I allude to it now because it is the
+only substantial evidence I know of which does fairly seem to justify
+the worst of the accusations brought against George Sand; and I do not
+think it right, when writing for grown men and women, who are supposed
+to have sense and judgment, to affect not to know that such accusations
+are made, or to pretend to think that it would be proper not to allude
+to them. They have been put forward, replied to, urged again, made the
+theme of all manner of controversy in scores of French and in some
+English publications. Pray let it be distinctly understood that I am not
+entering into any criticism of the morality of any part of George Sand's
+private life. With that we have nothing here to do. I am now dealing
+with the question, fairly belonging to public controversy, whether the
+great artist did not deliberately deal with human hearts as the painter
+of old is said to have done with a purchased slave,--inflicting torture
+in order the better to learn how to depict the struggles and contortions
+of mortal agony. In answer to such a question I can only point to
+"Lucrezia Floriani" and to "Elle et Lui," and say that unless the
+universal opinion of qualified critics be wrong, these books, and others
+too, owe their piquancy and their dramatic force to the anatomization
+of dead passions and discarded lovers. We have all laughed over the
+pedantic surgeon in Molière's "Malade Imaginaire", who invites his
+_fiancée_, as a delightful treat, to see him dissect the body of a
+woman. I am afraid that George Sand did sometimes invite an admiring
+public to an exhibition yet more ghastly and revolting,--the dissection
+of the heart of a dead lover.
+
+But, in truth, we shall never judge George Sand and her writings at all,
+if we insist on criticising them from any point of view set up by the
+proprieties or even the moralities of Old England or New England. When
+the passionate young woman,--in whose veins ran the wild blood of
+Marshal Saxe,--found herself surrendered by legality and prescription to
+a marriage bond against which her soul revolted, society seemed for her
+to have resolved itself into its original elements. Its
+conventionalities and traditions contained nothing which she held
+herself bound to respect. The world was not her friend, nor the world's
+law. By one great decisive step she sundered herself forever from the
+bonds of what we call "society". She had shaken the dust of convention
+from her feet; the world was all before her where to choose. No creature
+on earth is so absolutely free as the Frenchwoman who has broken with
+society: There, then, stood this daring young woman, on the threshold of
+a new, fresh, and illimitable world; a young woman gifted with genius
+such as our later years have rarely seen, and blessed or cursed with a
+nature so strangely uniting the most characteristic qualities of man and
+woman, as to be in itself quite unparalleled and unique. Just think of
+it,--try to think of it! Society and the world had no longer any laws
+which she recognized. Nothing was sacred; nothing was settled. She had
+to evolve from her own heart and brain her own law of life. What wonder
+if she made some sad mistakes? Nay, is it not rather a theme for wonder
+and admiration that she did somehow come right at last? I know of no one
+who seems to me to have been open at once to the temptations of woman's
+nature and man's nature, except this George Sand. Her soul,--her
+brain,--her style may be described, from one point of view, as
+exuberantly and splendidly feminine; yet no other woman has ever shown
+the same power of understanding, and entering into the nature of a man.
+If Balzac is the only man who has ever thoroughly mastered the mysteries
+of a woman's heart, George Sand is the only woman, so far as I know, who
+has ever shown that she could feel as a man can feel. I have read stray
+passages in her novels which I would confidently submit to the criticism
+of any intelligent men unacquainted with the text, convinced that they
+would declare that only a man could have thus analyzed the emotions of
+manhood. I have in my mind, just now especially, a passage in the novel
+"Piccinino" which, were the authorship unknown, would, I am satisfied,
+secure the decision of a jury of literary experts that the author must
+be a man. Now this gift of entire appreciation of the feelings of a
+different sex or race is, I take it, one of the rarest and highest
+dramatic qualities. Especially is it difficult for a woman, as our
+social life goes, to enter into the feelings of a man. While men and
+women alike admit the accuracy of certain pictures of women drawn by
+such artists as Cervantes, Molière, Balzac, and Thackeray, there are few
+women,--indeed, perhaps there are no women but one,--by whom a man has
+been so painted as to challenge and compel the recognition and
+acknowledgment of men. In "The Galaxy", some months ago, I wrote of a
+great Englishwoman, the authoress of "Romola", and I expressed my
+conviction that on the whole she is entitled to higher rank, as a
+novelist, than even the authoress of "Consuelo". Many, very many men and
+women, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, differed from me
+in this opinion. I still hold it, nevertheless; but I freely admit that
+George Eliot has nothing like the dramatic insight which enables George
+Sand to enter into the feelings and experiences of a man. I go so far as
+to say that, having some knowledge of the literature of fiction in most
+countries, I am not aware of the existence of any woman but this one,
+who could draw a real, living, straggling, passion-tortured man. All
+other novelists of George Sand's sex,--even including Charlotte
+Brontë,--draw only what I may call "women's men". If ever the two
+natures could be united in one form,--if ever a single human being could
+have the soul of man and the soul of woman at once,--George Sand might
+be described as that physical and psychological phenomenon. Now the
+point to which I wish to direct attention, is the peculiarity of the
+temptation to which a nature such as this was necessarily exposed at
+every turn when, free of all restraint and a rebel against all
+conventionality, it confronted the world and the world's law, and stood
+up, itself alone, against the domination of custom and the majesty of
+tradition. I claim, then, that when we have taken all these
+considerations into account, we are bound to admit that Aurora Dudevant
+deserves the generous recognition of the world for the use which she
+made of her splendid gifts. Her influence on French literature has been,
+on the whole, a purifying and strengthening power. The cynicism, the
+recklessness, the wanton, licentious disregard of any manner of
+principle, the debasing parade of disbelief in any higher purpose or
+nobler restraint, which are the shame and curse of modern French
+fiction, find no sanction in the pages of George Sand. I remember no
+passage in her works which gives the slightest encouragement to the
+"nothing new, and nothing true, and it don't signify" code of ethics
+which has been so much in fashion of late years. I find nothing in
+George Sand which does not do homage to the existence of a principle and
+a law in everything. This daring woman, who broke with society so early
+and so conspicuously, has always insisted, through every illustration,
+character, and catastrophe in her books, that the one only reality, the
+one only thing that can endure, is the rule of right and of virtue. Nor
+has she ever, that I can recollect, fallen into the enfeebling and
+sentimental theory so commonly expressed in the works of Victor Hugo,
+that the vague abstraction society is always to bear the blame of the
+faults committed by the individual man or woman. Of all persons in the
+world, Aurora Dudevant might be supposed most likely to adopt this easy
+and complacent theory as her guiding principle. She had every excuse,
+every reason for endeavoring to preach up the doctrine that our errors
+are society's and our virtues our own. But I am not aware that she ever
+taught any lesson save the lesson that men and women must endeavor to be
+heroes and heroines for themselves, heroes and heroines though all the
+world else were craven, and weak, and selfish, and unprincipled. Even
+that wretched and lamentable "Elle et Lui" affair, utterly inexcusable
+as it is when we read between the lines its secret history, has, at
+least, the merit of being an earnest and powerful protest against the
+egotistical and debasing indulgence of moral weaknesses and
+eccentricities which mean and vulgar minds are apt to regard as the
+privilege of genius. "Stand upon your own ground; be your own ruler;
+look to yourself, not to your stars, for your failure or success; always
+make your standard a lofty ideal, and try persistently to reach it,
+though all the temptations of earth, and all the power of darkness
+strive against you"--this, and nothing else, if I have read her books
+rightly, is the moral taught by George Sand. She may be wrong in her
+principle sometimes, but, at least, she always has a principle. She has
+a profound and generous faith in the possibilities of human nature; in
+the capacity of man's heart for purity, self-sacrifice, and
+self-redemption. Indeed, so far is she from holding counsel with wilful
+weakness or sin, that I think she sometimes falls into the noble error
+of painting her heroes as too glorious in their triumph over temptation,
+in their subjugation of every passion and interest to the dictates of
+duty and of honor. Take, for instance, that extraordinary book which has
+just been given to the American public in Miss Virginia Vaughan's
+excellent translation, "Mauprat". If I understand that magnificent
+romance at all, its purport is to prove that no human nature is ever
+plunged into temptation beyond its own strength to resist, provided that
+it really wills resistance; that no character is irretrievable, no error
+inexpiable, where there is sincere resolve to expiate, and longing
+desire to retrieve. Take, again, that exquisite little story, "La
+Dernière Aldini"; I do not know where one could find a finer
+illustration of the entire sacrifice of man's natural impulse, passion,
+interest, to what might almost be called an abstract idea of honor and
+principle. I have never read this little story without wondering how
+many men one ever has known who, placed in the same situation as that of
+Nello, the hero, would have done the same thing; and yet so simply and
+naturally are the characters wrought out, and the incidents described,
+that the idea of pompous, dramatic self-sacrifice never enters the mind
+of the reader, and it seems to him that Nello could not do otherwise
+than as he is doing. I speak of these two stories particularly, because
+in both of them there is a good deal of the world and the flesh; that
+is, both are stories of strong human passion and temptation. Many of
+George Sand's novels, the shorter ones especially, are as absolutely
+pure in moral tone, as entirely free from even a taint or suggestion of
+impurity, as they are perfect in style. Now, if we cannot help knowing
+that much of this great woman's life was far from being irreproachable,
+are we not bound to give her all the fuller credit, because her genius,
+at least, kept so far the whiteness of its soul? Revolutions are not to
+be made with rose-water; you cannot have omelettes without breaking of
+eggs. I am afraid that great social revolutionists are not often
+creatures of the most pure and perfect nature. It is not to patient
+Griselda you must look for any protest against even the uttermost
+tyranny of social conventions. One thing I think may, at least, be
+admitted as part of George Sand's vindication,--that the marriage system
+in France is the most debased and debasing institution existing in
+civilized society, now that the buying and selling of slaves has ceased
+to be a tolerated system. I hold that the most ardent advocates of the
+irrevocable endurance of the marriage bond are bound, by their very
+principles, to admit that, in protesting against the so-called marriage
+system of France, George Sand stood on the side of purity and right.
+Assuredly, she often went into extravagances in the other direction. It
+seems to be the fate of all French reformers to rush suddenly to
+extremes; and we must remember that George Sand was not a Bristol
+Quakeress, or a Boston transcendentalist, but a passionate Frenchwoman,
+the descendant of one of the maddest votaries of love and war who ever
+stormed across the stage of European history.
+
+Regarding George Sand, then, as an influence in literature, and on
+society, I claim for her at least four great and special merits: First,
+she insisted on calling public attention to the true principle of
+marriage; that is to say, she put the question as it had not been put
+before. Of course, the fundamental principle she would have enforced is
+always being urged more or less feebly, more or less sincerely; but she
+made it her own question, and illuminated it by the fervid, fierce rays
+of her genius and her passion. Secondly, her works are an exposition of
+the tremendous reality of the feelings which people who call themselves
+practical are apt to regard with indifference or contempt as mere
+sentiments. In the long run, the passions decide the life-question one
+way or the other. They are the tide which, as you know or do not know
+how to use it, will either turn your mill and float your boat, or drown
+your fields and sweep away your dwellings. Life and society receive no
+impulse and no direction from the influences out of which the novels of
+Dickens, or even of Thackeray, are made up. These are but pleasant or
+tender toying with the playthings and puppets of existence. George Sand
+constrains us to look at the realities through the medium of her
+fiction. Thirdly, she insists that man can and shall make his own
+career; not whine to the stars, and rail out against the powers above,
+when he has weakly or wantonly marred his own destiny. Fourthly,--and
+this ought not to be considered her least service to the literature of
+her country,--she has tried to teach people to look at Nature with
+their own eyes, and to invite the true love of her to flow into their
+hearts. The great service which Ruskin, with all his eccentricities and
+extravagances, has rendered to English-speaking peoples by teaching them
+to use their own eyes when they look at clouds, and waters, and grasses,
+and hills, George Sand has rendered to France.
+
+I hold that these are virtues and services which ought to outweigh even
+very grave personal and artistic errors. We often hear that this or that
+great poet or romancist has painted men as they are; this other as they
+ought to be. I think George Sand paints men as they are, and also not
+merely as they ought to be, but as they can be. The sum of the lesson
+taught by her books is one of confidence in man's possibilities, and
+hope in his steady progress. At the same time she is entirely practical
+in her faith and her aspirations. She never expects that the trees are
+to grow up into the heavens, that men and women are to be other than men
+and women. She does not want them to be other; she finds the springs and
+sources of their social regeneration in the fact that they are just what
+they are, to begin with. I am afraid some of the ladies who seem to base
+their scheme of woman's emancipation and equality on the assumption
+that, by some development of time or process of schooling, a condition
+of things is to be brought about where difference of sex is no longer to
+be a disturbing power, will find small comfort or encouragement in the
+writings of George Sand. She deals in realities altogether; the
+realities of life, even when they are such as to shallow minds may seem
+mere sentiments and ecstacies; the realities of society, of suffering,
+of passion, of inanimate nature. There is in her nothing unmeaning,
+nothing untrue; there is in her much error, doubtless, but no sham.
+
+I believe George Sand is growing into a quiet and beautiful old age.
+After a life of storm and stress, a life which, metaphorically at least,
+was "worn by war and passion", her closing years seem likely to be
+gilded with the calm glory of an autumnal sunset. One is glad to think
+of her thus happy and peaceful, accepting so tranquilly the reality of
+old age, still laboring with her unwearied pen, still delighting in
+books, and landscapes, and friends, and work. The world can well afford
+to forget as soon as possible her literary and other errors. Of the vast
+mass of romances, stories, plays, sketches, criticisms, pamphlets,
+political articles, even, it is said, ministerial manifestoes of
+republican days, which she poured out, only a few comparatively will
+perhaps be always treasured by posterity; but these will be enough to
+secure her a classic place. And she will not be remembered by her
+writings alone. Hers is probably the most powerful individuality
+displayed by any modern Frenchwoman. The influence of Madame Roland was
+but a glittering unreality, that of Madame de Staël only a boudoir and
+coterie success, when compared with the power exercised over literature,
+human feeling, and social law, by the energy, the courage, the genius,
+even the very errors and extravagances of George Sand.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of George Sand, by Justin M'Carthy
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Sand, by Justin M'Carthy
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+Title: George Sand
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+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1><span>GEORGE SAND.</span> <span id="id1">By</span><span>JUSTIN M'CARTHY.</span></h1>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p class="center"><i>Reprinted from "The Galaxy" for May, 1870.</i></p>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<p>We are all of us probably inclined, now and then, to waste a little time
+in vaguely speculating on what might have happened if this or that
+particular event had not given a special direction to the career of some
+great man or woman. If there had been an inch of difference in the size
+of Cleopatra's nose; if Hannibal had not lingered at Capua; if Cromwell
+had carried out his idea of emigration; if Napoleon Bonaparte had taken
+service under the Turk,&mdash;and so on through all the old familiar
+illustrations dear to the minor essayist and the debating society. I
+have sometimes felt tempted thus to lose myself in speculating on what
+might have happened if the woman whom all the world knows as George Sand
+had been happily married in her youth to the husband of her choice.
+Would she ever have taken to literature at all? Would she, loving as she
+does, and as Frenchwomen so rarely do, the changing face of inanimate
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>nature,&mdash;the fields, the flowers and the brooks,&mdash;have lived a peaceful
+and obscure life in some happy country place, and been content with
+home, and family, and love, and never thought of fame? Or if, thus
+happily married, she still had allowed her genius to find an expression
+in literature, would she have written books with no passionate purpose
+in them,&mdash;books which might have seemed like those of a good Miss Mulock
+made perfect,&mdash;books which Podsnap might have read with approval, and
+put without a scruple into the hands of that modest young person, his
+daughter? Certainly one cannot but think that a different kind of early
+life would have given a quite different complexion to the literary
+individuality of George Sand.</p>
+
+<p>Bulwer Lytton, in one of his novels, insists that true genius is always
+quite independent of the individual sufferings or joys of its possessor,
+and describes some inspired youth in the novel as sitting down, while
+sorrow is in his heart, and hunger gnawing at his vitals, to throw off a
+sparkling and gladsome little fairy tale. Now this is undoubtedly true,
+in general, of any high order of genius; but there are at least some
+great and striking exceptions. Rousseau and Byron are, in modern days,
+remarkable illustrations of genius, admittedly of a very high rank,
+governed and guided almost wholly by the individual fortunes of the men
+themselves. So, too, must we speak of the genius of George Sand. Not
+Rousseau, not even Byron, was in this sense more egotistic than the
+woman who broke the chains of her ill-assorted marriage with a crash
+that made its echoes heard at last in every civilized country in the
+world. Just as people are constantly quoting <i>nous avons chang&eacute; tout
+cela</i> who never read a page of Moli&egrave;re, or <i>pour encourager les autres</i>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>without even being aware that there is a story of Voltaire's called
+"Candide," so there have been thousands of passionate protests uttered
+in America and Europe, for the last twenty years, by people who never
+saw a volume of George Sand, and yet are only echoing her sentiments and
+even repeating her words.</p>
+
+<p>In a former number of <i>The Galaxy</i>, I expressed casually the opinion
+that George Sand is probably the most influential writer of our day. I
+am still, and deliberately, of the same opinion. It must be remembered
+that very few English or American authors have any wide or deep
+influence over peoples who do not speak English. Even of the very
+greatest authors this is true. Compare, for example, the literary
+dominion of Shakespeare with that of Cervantes. All nations who read
+Shakespeare read Cervantes: in Stratford-upon-Avon itself Don Quixote is
+probably as familiar a figure in people's minds as Falstaff; but
+Shakespeare is little known indeed to the vast majority of readers in
+the country of Cervantes, in the land of Dante, or in that of Racine and
+Victor Hugo. In something of the same way we may compare the influence
+of George Sand with that of even the greatest living authors of England
+and America. What influence has Charles Dickens or George Eliot outside
+the range of the English tongue? But George Sand's genius has been felt
+as a power in every country of the world where people read any manner of
+books. It has been felt almost as Rousseau's once was felt; it has
+aroused anger, terror, pity, or wild and rapturous excitement and
+admiration; it has rallied around it every instinct in man or woman
+which is revolutionary; it has ranged against it all that is
+conservative. It is not so much a literary influence as a great
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>disorganizing force, riving the rocks of custom, resolving into their
+original elements the social combination which tradition and convention
+would declare to be indissoluble. I am not now speaking merely of the
+sentiments which George Sand does or did entertain on the subject of
+marriage. Divested of all startling effects and thrilling dramatic
+illustrations, these sentiments probably amounted to nothing more
+dreadful than the belief that an unwedded union between two people who
+love and are true to each other is less immoral than the legal marriage
+of two uncongenial creatures who do not love and probably are not true
+to each other. But the grand, revolutionary idea which George Sand
+announced was that of the social independence and equality of
+woman,&mdash;the principle that woman is not made for man in any other sense
+than as man is made for woman. For the first time in the history of the
+world woman spoke out for herself with a voice as powerful as that of
+man. For the first time in the history of the world woman spoke out as
+woman, not as the servant, the satellite, the pupil, the plaything, or
+the goddess of man.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I intend at present to write of George Sand rather as an
+individual, or an influence, than as the author of certain works of
+fiction. Criticism would now be superfluously bestowed on the literary
+merits and peculiarities of the great woman whose astonishing
+intellectual activity has never ceased to produce, during the last
+thirty years, works which take already a classical place in French
+literature. If any reputation of our day may be looked upon as
+established, we may thus regard the reputation of George Sand. She is,
+beyond comparison, the greatest living novelist of France. She has won
+this position by the most legitimate application of the gifts of an
+artist. With all her marvellous fecundity,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> she has hardly ever given to
+the world any work which does not seem, at least, to have been the
+subject of the most elaborate and patient care. The greatest temptation
+which tries a story-teller is perhaps the temptation to rely on the
+attractiveness of story-telling, and to pay little or no attention to
+style. Walter Scott's prose, for example, if regarded as mere prose, is
+rambling, irregular, and almost worthless. Dickens's prose is as bad a
+model for imitation as a musical performance which is out of tune. Of
+course, I need hardly say that attention to style is almost as
+characteristic of French authors in general, as the lack of it is
+characteristic of English authors; but, even in France, the prose of
+George Sand stands out conspicuous for its wonderful expressiveness and
+force, its almost perfect beauty. Then, of all modern French authors,&mdash;I
+might, perhaps, say of all modern novelists of any country,&mdash;George Sand
+has added to fiction, has annexed from the worlds of reality and of
+imagination the greatest number of original characters,&mdash;of what Emerson
+calls new organic creations. Moreover, George Sand is, after Rousseau,
+the one only great French author who has looked directly and lovingly
+into the face of Nature, and learned the secrets which skies and waters,
+fields and lanes, can teach to the heart that loves them. Gifts such as
+these have won her the almost unrivalled place which she holds in living
+literature; and she has conquered at last even the public opinion which
+once detested and proscribed her. I could therefore hope to add nothing
+to what has been already said by criticism in regard to her merits as a
+novelist. Indeed, I think it probable that the majority of readers in
+this country know more of George Sand through the interpretation of the
+critics than through the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> pages of her books. And in her case criticism
+is so nearly unanimous as to her literary merits, that I may safely
+assume the public in general to have in their minds a just recognition
+of her position as a novelist. My object is rather to say something
+about the place which George Sand has taken as a social revolutionist,
+about the influence she has so long exercised over the world, and about
+the woman herself. For she is assuredly the greatest champion of woman's
+rights, in one sense, that the world has ever seen; and she is, on the
+other hand, the one woman out of all the world who has been most
+commonly pointed to as the appalling example to scare doubtful and
+fluttering womanhood back into its sheepfold of submissiveness and
+conventionality. There is hardly a woman's heart anywhere in the
+civilized world which has not felt the vibration of George Sand's
+thrilling voice. Women who never saw one of her books,&mdash;nay, who never
+heard even her <i>nom de plume</i>, have been stirred by emotions of doubt or
+fear, or repining or ambition, which they never would have known but for
+George Sand, and perhaps but for George Sand's uncongenial marriage.
+For, indeed, there is not now, and has not been for twenty years, I
+venture to think, a single "revolutionary" idea, as slow and
+steady-going people would call it, afloat anywhere in Europe or America,
+on the subject of woman's relations to man, society, and destiny, which
+is not due immediately to the influence of George Sand, and to the
+influence of George Sand's unhappy marriage upon George Sand herself.</p>
+
+<p>The world has of late years grown used to this extraordinary woman, and
+has lost much of the wonder and terror with which it once regarded her.
+I can quite remember,&mdash;younger people than I can remember,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>&mdash;the time
+when all good and proper personages in England regarded the authoress of
+"Indiana" as a sort of feminine fiend, endowed with a hideous power for
+the destruction of souls, and an inextinguishable thirst for the
+slaughter of virtuous beliefs. I fancy a good deal of this sentiment was
+due to the fearful reports wafted across the seas, that this terrible
+woman had not merely repudiated the marriage bond, but had actually put
+off the garments sacred to womanhood. That George Sand appeared in men's
+clothes was an outrage upon consecrated proprieties far more astonishing
+than any theoretical onslaught upon old opinions could be. Reformers,
+indeed, should always, if they are wise in their generation, have a care
+of the proprieties. Many worthy people can listen with comparative
+fortitude when sacred and eternal truths are assailed, who are stricken
+with horror when the ark of propriety is never so lightly touched.
+George Sand's pantaloons were, therefore, regarded as the most appalling
+illustration of George Sand's wickedness. I well remember what
+excitement, scandal, and horror were created in the provincial town
+where I lived, some twenty years ago, when the editor of a local
+Panjandrum (to borrow Mr. Trollope's word) insulted the feelings and the
+morals of his constituents and subscribers by polluting his pages with a
+translation from one of George Sand's shorter novels. Ah me! the little
+novel might, so far as morality was concerned, have been written every
+word by Miss Phelps, or the authoress of the "Heir of Redcliff"; it had
+not a word, from beginning to end, which might not have been read out to
+a Sunday-school of girls; the translation was made by a woman of the
+purest soul, and, in her own locality, of the highest name; and yet how
+virtue did<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> shriek out against the publication! The editor persevered in
+the publishing of the novel, spurred on to boldness by some of his very
+young and therefore fearless coadjutors, who thought it delightful to
+confront public opinion, and liked the notion of the stars in their
+courses fighting against Sisera, and Sisera not being dismayed. That
+charming, tender, touching little story! I would submit it to-day
+cheerfully to the verdict of a jury of matrons, confident that it would
+be declared a fit and proper publication. But at that time it was enough
+that the story bore the odious name of George Sand; public opinion
+condemned it, and sent the magazine which ventured to translate it to an
+early and dishonored grave. I remember reading, about that time, a short
+notice of George Sand by an English authoress of some talent and
+culture, in which the Frenchwoman's novels were described as so
+abominably filthy that even the denizens of the Paris brothels were
+ashamed to be caught reading them. Now, this declaration was made all in
+good faith, in the simple good faith of that class of persons who will
+pass wholesale and emphatic judgment upon works of which they have never
+read a single page. For I need hardly tell any intelligent person of
+to-day that, whatever may be said of George Sand's doctrines, she is no
+more open to the charge of indelicacy than the authoress of "Romola." I
+cannot, myself, remember any passage in George Sand's novels which can
+be called indelicate; and, indeed, her severest and most hostile critics
+are fond of saying, not without a certain justice, that one of the worst
+characteristics of her works is the delicacy and beauty of her style,
+which thus commends to pure and innocent minds certain doctrines that,
+broadly stated, would repel and shock them. Were I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> one of George Sand's
+inveterate opponents, this, or something like it, is the ground I would
+take up. I would say: "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 and base, as when
+contracted in the spirit of the purest mutual love. Here is a woman of
+great power and daring genius, who says that the essential condition of
+marriage is love and natural fitness; that a legal union of man and
+woman without this is no marriage at all, but a detestable and
+disgusting sin. Now, the more delicately, modestly, plausibly she can
+put this revolutionary and pernicious doctrine, the more dangerous she
+becomes, and the more earnestly we ought to denounce her." This was, in
+fact, what a great many persons did say; and the protest was at least
+consistent and logical.</p>
+
+<p>But horror is an emotion which cannot long live on the old fuel, and
+even the world of English Philistinism soon ceased to regard George Sand
+as a mere monster. Any one now taking up "Indiana," for example, would
+perhaps find it not quite easy to understand how the book produced such
+an effect. Our novel-writing women of to-day commonly feed us on more
+fiery stuff than this. Not to speak of such accomplished artists in
+impurity as the lady who calls herself Ouida, and one or two others of
+the same school, we have young women, only just promoted from
+pantalettes, who can throw you off such glowing chapters of passion and
+young desire as would make the rhapsodies of "Indiana" seem very feeble
+milk-and-water brewage by comparison. Indeed, except for some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> of the
+descriptions in the opening chapters, I fail to see any extraordinary
+merit in "Indiana"; and toward the end it seems to me to grow verbose,
+weak, and tiresome. "Leone Leoni" opens with one of the finest dramatic
+outbursts of emotion known to the literature of modern fiction; but it
+soon wanders away into discursive weakness, and only just toward the
+close brightens up into a burst of lurid splendor. It is not those which
+I may call the questionable novels of George Sand,&mdash;the novels which
+were believed to illustrate in naked and appalling simplicity her
+doctrines and her life,&mdash;that will bear up her fame through succeeding
+generations. If every one of the novels which thus in their time drew
+down the thunders of Society's denunciation were to be swept into the
+wallet wherein Time, according to Shakespeare, carries scraps for
+oblivion, George Sand would still remain where she now is,&mdash;at the head
+of the French fiction of her day. It is true, as Goethe says, that
+"miracle-working pictures are rarely works of art." The books which make
+the hair of the respectable public stand on end are not often the works
+by which the fame of the author is preserved for posterity.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious fact that, at the early time to which I have been
+alluding, little or nothing was known in England (or, I presume, in
+America) of the real life of Aurora Amandine Dupin, who had been pleased
+to call herself George Sand. People knew, or had heard, that she had
+separated from her husband, that she had written novels which
+depreciated the sanctity of legal marriage, and that she sometimes wore
+male costume in the streets. This was enough. In England, at least, we
+were ready to infer any enormity regarding a woman who was unsound on
+the legal marriage question, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> who did not wear petticoats. What
+would have been said had people then commonly known half the stories
+which were circulated in Paris,&mdash;half the extravagances into which a
+passionate soul, and the stimulus of sudden emancipation from restraint,
+had hurried the authoress of "Indiana" and "Lucrezia Floriani"? For it
+must be owned that the life of that woman was, in its earlier years, a
+strange and wild phenomenon, hardly to be comprehended, perhaps, by
+American or English natures. I have heard George Sand bitterly arraigned
+even by persons who protested that they were at one with her as regards
+the early sentiments which used to excite such odium. I have heard her
+described by such as a sort of Lamia of literature and passion,&mdash;a
+creature who could seize some noble, generous, youthful heart, drain it
+of its love, its aspirations, its profoundest emotions, and then fling
+it, squeezed and lifeless, away. I have heard it declared that George
+Sand made "copy" of the fierce and passionate loves which she knew so
+well how to awaken and to foster; that she distilled the life-blood of
+youth to obtain the mixture out of which she derived her inspiration.
+The charge so commonly (I think unjustly) made against Goethe, that he
+played with the girlish love of Bettina and of others in order to obtain
+a subject for literary dissection, is vehemently and deliberately urged
+in an aggravated form,&mdash;in many aggravated forms,&mdash;against George Sand.
+Where, such accusers ask, is that young poet, endowed with a lyrical
+genius rare indeed in the France of later days,&mdash;that young poet whose
+imagination was at once so daring and so subtle,&mdash;who might have been
+B&eacute;ranger and Heine in one, and have risen to an atmosphere in which
+neither B&eacute;ranger nor Heine ever floated? Where is he, and what evil
+influence was it which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> sapped the strength of his nature, corrupted his
+genius, and prepared for him a premature and shameful grave? Where is
+that young musician, whose pure, tender, and lofty strains sound sweetly
+and sadly in the ears, as the very hymn and music of the
+Might-Have-Been,&mdash;where is he now, and what was the seductive power
+which made a plaything of him and then flung him away? Here and there
+some man of stronger mould is pointed out as one who was at the first
+conquered, and then deceived and trifled with, but who ordered his stout
+heart to bear, and rose superior to the hour, and lived to retrieve his
+nature and make himself a name of respect; but the others, of more
+sensitive and perhaps finer organizations, are only the more to be
+pitied because they were so terribly in earnest. Seldom, even in the
+literary history of modern France, has there been a more strange and
+shocking episode than the publication by George Sand of the little book
+called "Elle et Lui," and the rejoinder to it by Paul de Musset, called
+"Lui et Elle." I can hardly be accused of straying into the regions of
+private scandal when I speak of two books which had a wide circulation,
+are still being read, and may be had, I presume, in any New York
+book-store where French literature is sold. The former of the two books,
+"She and He," was a story, or something which purported to be a story,
+by George Sand, telling of two ill-assorted beings whom fate had thrown
+together for awhile, and of whom the woman was all tenderness, love,
+patience, the man all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and
+eccentricity. The point of the whole business was to show how sublimely
+the woman suffered, and how wantonly the man flung happiness away. Had
+it been merely a piece of fiction, it must have been regarded by any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+healthy mind as a morbid, unwholesome, disagreeable production,&mdash;a sin
+of the highest &aelig;sthetic kind against true art, which must always, even
+in its pathos and its tragedy, leave on the mind exalted and delightful
+impressions. But every one in Paris at once hailed the story as a
+chapter of autobiography, as the author's vindication of one episode in
+her own career,&mdash;a vindication at the expense of a man who had gone
+down, ruined and lost, to an early grave. Therefore the brother of the
+dead man flung into literature a little book called "He and She," in
+which a story, substantially the same in its outlines, is so told as
+exactly to reverse the conditions under which the verdict of public
+opinion was sought. Very curious indeed was the manner in which the same
+substance of facts was made to present the two principal figures with
+complexions and characters so strangely altered. In the woman's book the
+woman was made the patient, loving, suffering victim; in the man's reply
+this same woman was depicted as the most utterly selfish and depraved
+creature the human imagination could conceive. Even if one had no other
+means whatever of forming an estimate of the character of George Sand,
+it would be hardly possible to accept as her likeness the hideous
+picture sketched by Paul de Musset. No woman, I am glad to believe, ever
+existed in real life so utterly selfish, base, and wicked as his bitter
+pen has drawn. I must say that the thing is very cleverly done. The
+picture is at least consistent with itself. As a character in romance it
+might be pronounced original, bold, brilliant, and, in an artistic
+sense, quite natural. There is something thoroughly French in the easy
+and delicate force of the final touch with which de Musset dismisses his
+hideous subject. Having sketched this woman in tints that seem to flame<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+across the eyes of the reader,&mdash;having described with wonderful realism
+and power her affectation, her deceit, her reckless caprices, her base
+and cruel coquetries, her devouring wantonness, her soul-destroying
+arts, her unutterable selfishness and egotism,&mdash;having, to use a vulgar
+phrase, "turned her inside out," and told her story backwards,&mdash;the
+author calmly explains that the hero of the narrative in his dying hour
+called his brother to his bedside, and enjoined him, if occasion should
+ever arise, if the partner of his sin should ever calumniate him in his
+grave, to vindicate his memory, and avenge the treason practised upon
+him. "Of course," adds the narrator, "the brother made the promise,&mdash;and
+I have since heard that he has kept his word." I can hardly hope to
+convey to the reader any adequate idea of the effect produced on the
+mind by these few simple words of compressed, whispered hatred and
+triumph, closing a philippic, or a revelation, or a libel of such
+extraordinary bitterness and ferocity. The whole episode is, I believe
+and earnestly hope, without precedent or imitation in literary
+controversy. Never, that I know of, has a living woman been publicly
+exhibited to the world in a portraiture so hideous as that which Paul de
+Musset drew of George Sand. Never, that I know of, has any woman gone so
+near to deserving and justifying such a measure of retaliation.</p>
+
+<p>For if it be assumed,&mdash;and I suppose it never has been disputed,&mdash;that
+in writing "Elle et Lui" George Sand meant to describe herself and
+Alfred de Musset, it is hard to conceive of any sin against taste and
+feeling,&mdash;against art and morals,&mdash;more flagrant than such a
+publication. The practice, to which French writers are so much addicted,
+of making "copy" of the private lives, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>characters, and relationships of
+themselves and their friends, seems to me in all cases utterly
+detestable. Lamartine's sins of this kind were grievous and glaring; but
+were they red as scarlet, they would seem whiter than snow when compared
+with the lurid monstrosity of George Sand's assault on the memory of the
+dead poet who was once her favorite. The whole affair, indeed, is so
+unlike anything which could occur in America or in England, that we can
+hardly find any canons by which to try it, or any standard of punishment
+by which to regulate its censure. I allude to it now because it is the
+only substantial evidence I know of which does fairly seem to justify
+the worst of the accusations brought against George Sand; and I do not
+think it right, when writing for grown men and women, who are supposed
+to have sense and judgment, to affect not to know that such accusations
+are made, or to pretend to think that it would be proper not to allude
+to them. They have been put forward, replied to, urged again, made the
+theme of all manner of controversy in scores of French and in some
+English publications. Pray let it be distinctly understood that I am not
+entering into any criticism of the morality of any part of George Sand's
+private life. With that we have nothing here to do. I am now dealing
+with the question, fairly belonging to public controversy, whether the
+great artist did not deliberately deal with human hearts as the painter
+of old is said to have done with a purchased slave,&mdash;inflicting torture
+in order the better to learn how to depict the struggles and contortions
+of mortal agony. In answer to such a question I can only point to
+"Lucrezia Floriani" and to "Elle et Lui," and say that unless the
+universal opinion of qualified critics be wrong, these books, and others
+too, owe their piquancy and their dramatic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> force to the anatomization
+of dead passions and discarded lovers. We have all laughed over the
+pedantic surgeon in Moli&egrave;re's "Malade Imaginaire", who invites his
+<i>fianc&eacute;e</i>, as a delightful treat, to see him dissect the body of a
+woman. I am afraid that George Sand did sometimes invite an admiring
+public to an exhibition yet more ghastly and revolting,&mdash;the dissection
+of the heart of a dead lover.</p>
+
+<p>But, in truth, we shall never judge George Sand and her writings at all,
+if we insist on criticising them from any point of view set up by the
+proprieties or even the moralities of Old England or New England. When
+the passionate young woman,&mdash;in whose veins ran the wild blood of
+Marshal Saxe,&mdash;found herself surrendered by legality and prescription to
+a marriage bond against which her soul revolted, society seemed for her
+to have resolved itself into its original elements. Its
+conventionalities and traditions contained nothing which she held
+herself bound to respect. The world was not her friend, nor the world's
+law. By one great decisive step she sundered herself forever from the
+bonds of what we call "society". She had shaken the dust of convention
+from her feet; the world was all before her where to choose. No creature
+on earth is so absolutely free as the Frenchwoman who has broken with
+society: There, then, stood this daring young woman, on the threshold of
+a new, fresh, and illimitable world; a young woman gifted with genius
+such as our later years have rarely seen, and blessed or cursed with a
+nature so strangely uniting the most characteristic qualities of man and
+woman, as to be in itself quite unparalleled and unique. Just think of
+it,&mdash;try to think of it! Society and the world had no longer any laws
+which she recognized. Nothing was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> sacred; nothing was settled. She had
+to evolve from her own heart and brain her own law of life. What wonder
+if she made some sad mistakes? Nay, is it not rather a theme for wonder
+and admiration that she did somehow come right at last? I know of no one
+who seems to me to have been open at once to the temptations of woman's
+nature and man's nature, except this George Sand. Her soul,&mdash;her
+brain,&mdash;her style may be described, from one point of view, as
+exuberantly and splendidly feminine; yet no other woman has ever shown
+the same power of understanding, and entering into the nature of a man.
+If Balzac is the only man who has ever thoroughly mastered the mysteries
+of a woman's heart, George Sand is the only woman, so far as I know, who
+has ever shown that she could feel as a man can feel. I have read stray
+passages in her novels which I would confidently submit to the criticism
+of any intelligent men unacquainted with the text, convinced that they
+would declare that only a man could have thus analyzed the emotions of
+manhood. I have in my mind, just now especially, a passage in the novel
+"Piccinino" which, were the authorship unknown, would, I am satisfied,
+secure the decision of a jury of literary experts that the author must
+be a man. Now this gift of entire appreciation of the feelings of a
+different sex or race is, I take it, one of the rarest and highest
+dramatic qualities. Especially is it difficult for a woman, as our
+social life goes, to enter into the feelings of a man. While men and
+women alike admit the accuracy of certain pictures of women drawn by
+such artists as Cervantes, Moli&egrave;re, Balzac, and Thackeray, there are few
+women,&mdash;indeed, perhaps there are no women but one,&mdash;by whom a man has
+been so painted as to challenge and compel the recognition and
+acknowledgment of men. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> "The Galaxy", some months ago, I wrote of a
+great Englishwoman, the authoress of "Romola", and I expressed my
+conviction that on the whole she is entitled to higher rank, as a
+novelist, than even the authoress of "Consuelo". Many, very many men and
+women, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, differed from me
+in this opinion. I still hold it, nevertheless; but I freely admit that
+George Eliot has nothing like the dramatic insight which enables George
+Sand to enter into the feelings and experiences of a man. I go so far as
+to say that, having some knowledge of the literature of fiction in most
+countries, I am not aware of the existence of any woman but this one,
+who could draw a real, living, straggling, passion-tortured man. All
+other novelists of George Sand's sex,&mdash;even including Charlotte
+Bront&euml;,&mdash;draw only what I may call "women's men". If ever the two
+natures could be united in one form,&mdash;if ever a single human being could
+have the soul of man and the soul of woman at once,&mdash;George Sand might
+be described as that physical and psychological phenomenon. Now the
+point to which I wish to direct attention, is the peculiarity of the
+temptation to which a nature such as this was necessarily exposed at
+every turn when, free of all restraint and a rebel against all
+conventionality, it confronted the world and the world's law, and stood
+up, itself alone, against the domination of custom and the majesty of
+tradition. I claim, then, that when we have taken all these
+considerations into account, we are bound to admit that Aurora Dudevant
+deserves the generous recognition of the world for the use which she
+made of her splendid gifts. Her influence on French literature has been,
+on the whole, a purifying and strengthening power. The cynicism, the
+recklessness, the wanton, licentious <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>disregard of any manner of
+principle, the debasing parade of disbelief in any higher purpose or
+nobler restraint, which are the shame and curse of modern French
+fiction, find no sanction in the pages of George Sand. I remember no
+passage in her works which gives the slightest encouragement to the
+"nothing new, and nothing true, and it don't signify" code of ethics
+which has been so much in fashion of late years. I find nothing in
+George Sand which does not do homage to the existence of a principle and
+a law in everything. This daring woman, who broke with society so early
+and so conspicuously, has always insisted, through every illustration,
+character, and catastrophe in her books, that the one only reality, the
+one only thing that can endure, is the rule of right and of virtue. Nor
+has she ever, that I can recollect, fallen into the enfeebling and
+sentimental theory so commonly expressed in the works of Victor Hugo,
+that the vague abstraction society is always to bear the blame of the
+faults committed by the individual man or woman. Of all persons in the
+world, Aurora Dudevant might be supposed most likely to adopt this easy
+and complacent theory as her guiding principle. She had every excuse,
+every reason for endeavoring to preach up the doctrine that our errors
+are society's and our virtues our own. But I am not aware that she ever
+taught any lesson save the lesson that men and women must endeavor to be
+heroes and heroines for themselves, heroes and heroines though all the
+world else were craven, and weak, and selfish, and unprincipled. Even
+that wretched and lamentable "Elle et Lui" affair, utterly inexcusable
+as it is when we read between the lines its secret history, has, at
+least, the merit of being an earnest and powerful protest against the
+egotistical and debasing indulgence of moral weaknesses and
+eccentricities<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> which mean and vulgar minds are apt to regard as the
+privilege of genius. "Stand upon your own ground; be your own ruler;
+look to yourself, not to your stars, for your failure or success; always
+make your standard a lofty ideal, and try persistently to reach it,
+though all the temptations of earth, and all the power of darkness
+strive against you"&mdash;this, and nothing else, if I have read her books
+rightly, is the moral taught by George Sand. She may be wrong in her
+principle sometimes, but, at least, she always has a principle. She has
+a profound and generous faith in the possibilities of human nature; in
+the capacity of man's heart for purity, self-sacrifice, and
+self-redemption. Indeed, so far is she from holding counsel with wilful
+weakness or sin, that I think she sometimes falls into the noble error
+of painting her heroes as too glorious in their triumph over temptation,
+in their subjugation of every passion and interest to the dictates of
+duty and of honor. Take, for instance, that extraordinary book which has
+just been given to the American public in Miss Virginia Vaughan's
+excellent translation, "Mauprat". If I understand that magnificent
+romance at all, its purport is to prove that no human nature is ever
+plunged into temptation beyond its own strength to resist, provided that
+it really wills resistance; that no character is irretrievable, no error
+inexpiable, where there is sincere resolve to expiate, and longing
+desire to retrieve. Take, again, that exquisite little story, "La
+Derni&egrave;re Aldini"; I do not know where one could find a finer
+illustration of the entire sacrifice of man's natural impulse, passion,
+interest, to what might almost be called an abstract idea of honor and
+principle. I have never read this little story without wondering how
+many men one ever has known who, placed in the same situation as that of
+Nello, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> hero, would have done the same thing; and yet so simply and
+naturally are the characters wrought out, and the incidents described,
+that the idea of pompous, dramatic self-sacrifice never enters the mind
+of the reader, and it seems to him that Nello could not do otherwise
+than as he is doing. I speak of these two stories particularly, because
+in both of them there is a good deal of the world and the flesh; that
+is, both are stories of strong human passion and temptation. Many of
+George Sand's novels, the shorter ones especially, are as absolutely
+pure in moral tone, as entirely free from even a taint or suggestion of
+impurity, as they are perfect in style. Now, if we cannot help knowing
+that much of this great woman's life was far from being irreproachable,
+are we not bound to give her all the fuller credit, because her genius,
+at least, kept so far the whiteness of its soul? Revolutions are not to
+be made with rose-water; you cannot have omelettes without breaking of
+eggs. I am afraid that great social revolutionists are not often
+creatures of the most pure and perfect nature. It is not to patient
+Griselda you must look for any protest against even the uttermost
+tyranny of social conventions. One thing I think may, at least, be
+admitted as part of George Sand's vindication,&mdash;that the marriage system
+in France is the most debased and debasing institution existing in
+civilized society, now that the buying and selling of slaves has ceased
+to be a tolerated system. I hold that the most ardent advocates of the
+irrevocable endurance of the marriage bond are bound, by their very
+principles, to admit that, in protesting against the so-called marriage
+system of France, George Sand stood on the side of purity and right.
+Assuredly, she often went into extravagances in the other direction. It
+seems to be the fate of all French reformers to rush <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>suddenly to
+extremes; and we must remember that George Sand was not a Bristol
+Quakeress, or a Boston transcendentalist, but a passionate Frenchwoman,
+the descendant of one of the maddest votaries of love and war who ever
+stormed across the stage of European history.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding George Sand, then, as an influence in literature, and on
+society, I claim for her at least four great and special merits: First,
+she insisted on calling public attention to the true principle of
+marriage; that is to say, she put the question as it had not been put
+before. Of course, the fundamental principle she would have enforced is
+always being urged more or less feebly, more or less sincerely; but she
+made it her own question, and illuminated it by the fervid, fierce rays
+of her genius and her passion. Secondly, her works are an exposition of
+the tremendous reality of the feelings which people who call themselves
+practical are apt to regard with indifference or contempt as mere
+sentiments. In the long run, the passions decide the life-question one
+way or the other. They are the tide which, as you know or do not know
+how to use it, will either turn your mill and float your boat, or drown
+your fields and sweep away your dwellings. Life and society receive no
+impulse and no direction from the influences out of which the novels of
+Dickens, or even of Thackeray, are made up. These are but pleasant or
+tender toying with the playthings and puppets of existence. George Sand
+constrains us to look at the realities through the medium of her
+fiction. Thirdly, she insists that man can and shall make his own
+career; not whine to the stars, and rail out against the powers above,
+when he has weakly or wantonly marred his own destiny. Fourthly,&mdash;and
+this ought not to be considered her least service to the literature of
+her country,&mdash;she has tried to teach<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> people to look at Nature with
+their own eyes, and to invite the true love of her to flow into their
+hearts. The great service which Ruskin, with all his eccentricities and
+extravagances, has rendered to English-speaking peoples by teaching them
+to use their own eyes when they look at clouds, and waters, and grasses,
+and hills, George Sand has rendered to France.</p>
+
+<p>I hold that these are virtues and services which ought to outweigh even
+very grave personal and artistic errors. We often hear that this or that
+great poet or romancist has painted men as they are; this other as they
+ought to be. I think George Sand paints men as they are, and also not
+merely as they ought to be, but as they can be. The sum of the lesson
+taught by her books is one of confidence in man's possibilities, and
+hope in his steady progress. At the same time she is entirely practical
+in her faith and her aspirations. She never expects that the trees are
+to grow up into the heavens, that men and women are to be other than men
+and women. She does not want them to be other; she finds the springs and
+sources of their social regeneration in the fact that they are just what
+they are, to begin with. I am afraid some of the ladies who seem to base
+their scheme of woman's emancipation and equality on the assumption
+that, by some development of time or process of schooling, a condition
+of things is to be brought about where difference of sex is no longer to
+be a disturbing power, will find small comfort or encouragement in the
+writings of George Sand. She deals in realities altogether; the
+realities of life, even when they are such as to shallow minds may seem
+mere sentiments and ecstacies; the realities of society, of suffering,
+of passion, of inanimate nature. There is in her nothing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> unmeaning,
+nothing untrue; there is in her much error, doubtless, but no sham.</p>
+
+<p>I believe George Sand is growing into a quiet and beautiful old age.
+After a life of storm and stress, a life which, metaphorically at least,
+was "worn by war and passion", her closing years seem likely to be
+gilded with the calm glory of an autumnal sunset. One is glad to think
+of her thus happy and peaceful, accepting so tranquilly the reality of
+old age, still laboring with her unwearied pen, still delighting in
+books, and landscapes, and friends, and work. The world can well afford
+to forget as soon as possible her literary and other errors. Of the vast
+mass of romances, stories, plays, sketches, criticisms, pamphlets,
+political articles, even, it is said, ministerial manifestoes of
+republican days, which she poured out, only a few comparatively will
+perhaps be always treasured by posterity; but these will be enough to
+secure her a classic place. And she will not be remembered by her
+writings alone. Hers is probably the most powerful individuality
+displayed by any modern Frenchwoman. The influence of Madame Roland was
+but a glittering unreality, that of Madame de Sta&euml;l only a boudoir and
+coterie success, when compared with the power exercised over literature,
+human feeling, and social law, by the energy, the courage, the genius,
+even the very errors and extravagances of George Sand.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of George Sand, by Justin M'Carthy
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of George Sand, by Justin M'Carthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: George Sand
+
+Author: Justin M'Carthy
+
+Release Date: May 5, 2011 [EBook #36040]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE SAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Delphine Lettau, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE SAND.
+
+BY JUSTIN M'CARTHY.
+
+_Reprinted from "The Galaxy" for May, 1870._
+
+
+We are all of us probably inclined, now and then, to waste a little time
+in vaguely speculating on what might have happened if this or that
+particular event had not given a special direction to the career of some
+great man or woman. If there had been an inch of difference in the size
+of Cleopatra's nose; if Hannibal had not lingered at Capua; if Cromwell
+had carried out his idea of emigration; if Napoleon Bonaparte had taken
+service under the Turk,--and so on through all the old familiar
+illustrations dear to the minor essayist and the debating society. I
+have sometimes felt tempted thus to lose myself in speculating on what
+might have happened if the woman whom all the world knows as George Sand
+had been happily married in her youth to the husband of her choice.
+Would she ever have taken to literature at all? Would she, loving as she
+does, and as Frenchwomen so rarely do, the changing face of inanimate
+nature,--the fields, the flowers and the brooks,--have lived a peaceful
+and obscure life in some happy country place, and been content with
+home, and family, and love, and never thought of fame? Or if, thus
+happily married, she still had allowed her genius to find an expression
+in literature, would she have written books with no passionate purpose
+in them,--books which might have seemed like those of a good Miss Mulock
+made perfect,--books which Podsnap might have read with approval, and
+put without a scruple into the hands of that modest young person, his
+daughter? Certainly one cannot but think that a different kind of early
+life would have given a quite different complexion to the literary
+individuality of George Sand.
+
+Bulwer Lytton, in one of his novels, insists that true genius is always
+quite independent of the individual sufferings or joys of its possessor,
+and describes some inspired youth in the novel as sitting down, while
+sorrow is in his heart, and hunger gnawing at his vitals, to throw off a
+sparkling and gladsome little fairy tale. Now this is undoubtedly true,
+in general, of any high order of genius; but there are at least some
+great and striking exceptions. Rousseau and Byron are, in modern days,
+remarkable illustrations of genius, admittedly of a very high rank,
+governed and guided almost wholly by the individual fortunes of the men
+themselves. So, too, must we speak of the genius of George Sand. Not
+Rousseau, not even Byron, was in this sense more egotistic than the
+woman who broke the chains of her ill-assorted marriage with a crash
+that made its echoes heard at last in every civilized country in the
+world. Just as people are constantly quoting _nous avons change tout
+cela_ who never read a page of Moliere, or _pour encourager les autres_
+without even being aware that there is a story of Voltaire's called
+"Candide," so there have been thousands of passionate protests uttered
+in America and Europe, for the last twenty years, by people who never
+saw a volume of George Sand, and yet are only echoing her sentiments and
+even repeating her words.
+
+In a former number of _The Galaxy_, I expressed casually the opinion
+that George Sand is probably the most influential writer of our day. I
+am still, and deliberately, of the same opinion. It must be remembered
+that very few English or American authors have any wide or deep
+influence over peoples who do not speak English. Even of the very
+greatest authors this is true. Compare, for example, the literary
+dominion of Shakespeare with that of Cervantes. All nations who read
+Shakespeare read Cervantes: in Stratford-upon-Avon itself Don Quixote is
+probably as familiar a figure in people's minds as Falstaff; but
+Shakespeare is little known indeed to the vast majority of readers in
+the country of Cervantes, in the land of Dante, or in that of Racine and
+Victor Hugo. In something of the same way we may compare the influence
+of George Sand with that of even the greatest living authors of England
+and America. What influence has Charles Dickens or George Eliot outside
+the range of the English tongue? But George Sand's genius has been felt
+as a power in every country of the world where people read any manner of
+books. It has been felt almost as Rousseau's once was felt; it has
+aroused anger, terror, pity, or wild and rapturous excitement and
+admiration; it has rallied around it every instinct in man or woman
+which is revolutionary; it has ranged against it all that is
+conservative. It is not so much a literary influence as a great
+disorganizing force, riving the rocks of custom, resolving into their
+original elements the social combination which tradition and convention
+would declare to be indissoluble. I am not now speaking merely of the
+sentiments which George Sand does or did entertain on the subject of
+marriage. Divested of all startling effects and thrilling dramatic
+illustrations, these sentiments probably amounted to nothing more
+dreadful than the belief that an unwedded union between two people who
+love and are true to each other is less immoral than the legal marriage
+of two uncongenial creatures who do not love and probably are not true
+to each other. But the grand, revolutionary idea which George Sand
+announced was that of the social independence and equality of
+woman,--the principle that woman is not made for man in any other sense
+than as man is made for woman. For the first time in the history of the
+world woman spoke out for herself with a voice as powerful as that of
+man. For the first time in the history of the world woman spoke out as
+woman, not as the servant, the satellite, the pupil, the plaything, or
+the goddess of man.
+
+Now, I intend at present to write of George Sand rather as an
+individual, or an influence, than as the author of certain works of
+fiction. Criticism would now be superfluously bestowed on the literary
+merits and peculiarities of the great woman whose astonishing
+intellectual activity has never ceased to produce, during the last
+thirty years, works which take already a classical place in French
+literature. If any reputation of our day may be looked upon as
+established, we may thus regard the reputation of George Sand. She is,
+beyond comparison, the greatest living novelist of France. She has won
+this position by the most legitimate application of the gifts of an
+artist. With all her marvellous fecundity, she has hardly ever given to
+the world any work which does not seem, at least, to have been the
+subject of the most elaborate and patient care. The greatest temptation
+which tries a story-teller is perhaps the temptation to rely on the
+attractiveness of story-telling, and to pay little or no attention to
+style. Walter Scott's prose, for example, if regarded as mere prose, is
+rambling, irregular, and almost worthless. Dickens's prose is as bad a
+model for imitation as a musical performance which is out of tune. Of
+course, I need hardly say that attention to style is almost as
+characteristic of French authors in general, as the lack of it is
+characteristic of English authors; but, even in France, the prose of
+George Sand stands out conspicuous for its wonderful expressiveness and
+force, its almost perfect beauty. Then, of all modern French authors,--I
+might, perhaps, say of all modern novelists of any country,--George Sand
+has added to fiction, has annexed from the worlds of reality and of
+imagination the greatest number of original characters,--of what Emerson
+calls new organic creations. Moreover, George Sand is, after Rousseau,
+the one only great French author who has looked directly and lovingly
+into the face of Nature, and learned the secrets which skies and waters,
+fields and lanes, can teach to the heart that loves them. Gifts such as
+these have won her the almost unrivalled place which she holds in living
+literature; and she has conquered at last even the public opinion which
+once detested and proscribed her. I could therefore hope to add nothing
+to what has been already said by criticism in regard to her merits as a
+novelist. Indeed, I think it probable that the majority of readers in
+this country know more of George Sand through the interpretation of the
+critics than through the pages of her books. And in her case criticism
+is so nearly unanimous as to her literary merits, that I may safely
+assume the public in general to have in their minds a just recognition
+of her position as a novelist. My object is rather to say something
+about the place which George Sand has taken as a social revolutionist,
+about the influence she has so long exercised over the world, and about
+the woman herself. For she is assuredly the greatest champion of woman's
+rights, in one sense, that the world has ever seen; and she is, on the
+other hand, the one woman out of all the world who has been most
+commonly pointed to as the appalling example to scare doubtful and
+fluttering womanhood back into its sheepfold of submissiveness and
+conventionality. There is hardly a woman's heart anywhere in the
+civilized world which has not felt the vibration of George Sand's
+thrilling voice. Women who never saw one of her books,--nay, who never
+heard even her _nom de plume_, have been stirred by emotions of doubt or
+fear, or repining or ambition, which they never would have known but for
+George Sand, and perhaps but for George Sand's uncongenial marriage.
+For, indeed, there is not now, and has not been for twenty years, I
+venture to think, a single "revolutionary" idea, as slow and
+steady-going people would call it, afloat anywhere in Europe or America,
+on the subject of woman's relations to man, society, and destiny, which
+is not due immediately to the influence of George Sand, and to the
+influence of George Sand's unhappy marriage upon George Sand herself.
+
+The world has of late years grown used to this extraordinary woman, and
+has lost much of the wonder and terror with which it once regarded her.
+I can quite remember,--younger people than I can remember,--the time
+when all good and proper personages in England regarded the authoress of
+"Indiana" as a sort of feminine fiend, endowed with a hideous power for
+the destruction of souls, and an inextinguishable thirst for the
+slaughter of virtuous beliefs. I fancy a good deal of this sentiment was
+due to the fearful reports wafted across the seas, that this terrible
+woman had not merely repudiated the marriage bond, but had actually put
+off the garments sacred to womanhood. That George Sand appeared in men's
+clothes was an outrage upon consecrated proprieties far more astonishing
+than any theoretical onslaught upon old opinions could be. Reformers,
+indeed, should always, if they are wise in their generation, have a care
+of the proprieties. Many worthy people can listen with comparative
+fortitude when sacred and eternal truths are assailed, who are stricken
+with horror when the ark of propriety is never so lightly touched.
+George Sand's pantaloons were, therefore, regarded as the most appalling
+illustration of George Sand's wickedness. I well remember what
+excitement, scandal, and horror were created in the provincial town
+where I lived, some twenty years ago, when the editor of a local
+Panjandrum (to borrow Mr. Trollope's word) insulted the feelings and the
+morals of his constituents and subscribers by polluting his pages with a
+translation from one of George Sand's shorter novels. Ah me! the little
+novel might, so far as morality was concerned, have been written every
+word by Miss Phelps, or the authoress of the "Heir of Redcliff"; it had
+not a word, from beginning to end, which might not have been read out to
+a Sunday-school of girls; the translation was made by a woman of the
+purest soul, and, in her own locality, of the highest name; and yet how
+virtue did shriek out against the publication! The editor persevered in
+the publishing of the novel, spurred on to boldness by some of his very
+young and therefore fearless coadjutors, who thought it delightful to
+confront public opinion, and liked the notion of the stars in their
+courses fighting against Sisera, and Sisera not being dismayed. That
+charming, tender, touching little story! I would submit it to-day
+cheerfully to the verdict of a jury of matrons, confident that it would
+be declared a fit and proper publication. But at that time it was enough
+that the story bore the odious name of George Sand; public opinion
+condemned it, and sent the magazine which ventured to translate it to an
+early and dishonored grave. I remember reading, about that time, a short
+notice of George Sand by an English authoress of some talent and
+culture, in which the Frenchwoman's novels were described as so
+abominably filthy that even the denizens of the Paris brothels were
+ashamed to be caught reading them. Now, this declaration was made all in
+good faith, in the simple good faith of that class of persons who will
+pass wholesale and emphatic judgment upon works of which they have never
+read a single page. For I need hardly tell any intelligent person of
+to-day that, whatever may be said of George Sand's doctrines, she is no
+more open to the charge of indelicacy than the authoress of "Romola." I
+cannot, myself, remember any passage in George Sand's novels which can
+be called indelicate; and, indeed, her severest and most hostile critics
+are fond of saying, not without a certain justice, that one of the worst
+characteristics of her works is the delicacy and beauty of her style,
+which thus commends to pure and innocent minds certain doctrines that,
+broadly stated, would repel and shock them. Were I one of George Sand's
+inveterate opponents, this, or something like it, is the ground I would
+take up. I would say: "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 and base, as when
+contracted in the spirit of the purest mutual love. Here is a woman of
+great power and daring genius, who says that the essential condition of
+marriage is love and natural fitness; that a legal union of man and
+woman without this is no marriage at all, but a detestable and
+disgusting sin. Now, the more delicately, modestly, plausibly she can
+put this revolutionary and pernicious doctrine, the more dangerous she
+becomes, and the more earnestly we ought to denounce her." This was, in
+fact, what a great many persons did say; and the protest was at least
+consistent and logical.
+
+But horror is an emotion which cannot long live on the old fuel, and
+even the world of English Philistinism soon ceased to regard George Sand
+as a mere monster. Any one now taking up "Indiana," for example, would
+perhaps find it not quite easy to understand how the book produced such
+an effect. Our novel-writing women of to-day commonly feed us on more
+fiery stuff than this. Not to speak of such accomplished artists in
+impurity as the lady who calls herself Ouida, and one or two others of
+the same school, we have young women, only just promoted from
+pantalettes, who can throw you off such glowing chapters of passion and
+young desire as would make the rhapsodies of "Indiana" seem very feeble
+milk-and-water brewage by comparison. Indeed, except for some of the
+descriptions in the opening chapters, I fail to see any extraordinary
+merit in "Indiana"; and toward the end it seems to me to grow verbose,
+weak, and tiresome. "Leone Leoni" opens with one of the finest dramatic
+outbursts of emotion known to the literature of modern fiction; but it
+soon wanders away into discursive weakness, and only just toward the
+close brightens up into a burst of lurid splendor. It is not those which
+I may call the questionable novels of George Sand,--the novels which
+were believed to illustrate in naked and appalling simplicity her
+doctrines and her life,--that will bear up her fame through succeeding
+generations. If every one of the novels which thus in their time drew
+down the thunders of Society's denunciation were to be swept into the
+wallet wherein Time, according to Shakespeare, carries scraps for
+oblivion, George Sand would still remain where she now is,--at the head
+of the French fiction of her day. It is true, as Goethe says, that
+"miracle-working pictures are rarely works of art." The books which make
+the hair of the respectable public stand on end are not often the works
+by which the fame of the author is preserved for posterity.
+
+It is a curious fact that, at the early time to which I have been
+alluding, little or nothing was known in England (or, I presume, in
+America) of the real life of Aurora Amandine Dupin, who had been pleased
+to call herself George Sand. People knew, or had heard, that she had
+separated from her husband, that she had written novels which
+depreciated the sanctity of legal marriage, and that she sometimes wore
+male costume in the streets. This was enough. In England, at least, we
+were ready to infer any enormity regarding a woman who was unsound on
+the legal marriage question, and who did not wear petticoats. What
+would have been said had people then commonly known half the stories
+which were circulated in Paris,--half the extravagances into which a
+passionate soul, and the stimulus of sudden emancipation from restraint,
+had hurried the authoress of "Indiana" and "Lucrezia Floriani"? For it
+must be owned that the life of that woman was, in its earlier years, a
+strange and wild phenomenon, hardly to be comprehended, perhaps, by
+American or English natures. I have heard George Sand bitterly arraigned
+even by persons who protested that they were at one with her as regards
+the early sentiments which used to excite such odium. I have heard her
+described by such as a sort of Lamia of literature and passion,--a
+creature who could seize some noble, generous, youthful heart, drain it
+of its love, its aspirations, its profoundest emotions, and then fling
+it, squeezed and lifeless, away. I have heard it declared that George
+Sand made "copy" of the fierce and passionate loves which she knew so
+well how to awaken and to foster; that she distilled the life-blood of
+youth to obtain the mixture out of which she derived her inspiration.
+The charge so commonly (I think unjustly) made against Goethe, that he
+played with the girlish love of Bettina and of others in order to obtain
+a subject for literary dissection, is vehemently and deliberately urged
+in an aggravated form,--in many aggravated forms,--against George Sand.
+Where, such accusers ask, is that young poet, endowed with a lyrical
+genius rare indeed in the France of later days,--that young poet whose
+imagination was at once so daring and so subtle,--who might have been
+Beranger and Heine in one, and have risen to an atmosphere in which
+neither Beranger nor Heine ever floated? Where is he, and what evil
+influence was it which sapped the strength of his nature, corrupted his
+genius, and prepared for him a premature and shameful grave? Where is
+that young musician, whose pure, tender, and lofty strains sound sweetly
+and sadly in the ears, as the very hymn and music of the
+Might-Have-Been,--where is he now, and what was the seductive power
+which made a plaything of him and then flung him away? Here and there
+some man of stronger mould is pointed out as one who was at the first
+conquered, and then deceived and trifled with, but who ordered his stout
+heart to bear, and rose superior to the hour, and lived to retrieve his
+nature and make himself a name of respect; but the others, of more
+sensitive and perhaps finer organizations, are only the more to be
+pitied because they were so terribly in earnest. Seldom, even in the
+literary history of modern France, has there been a more strange and
+shocking episode than the publication by George Sand of the little book
+called "Elle et Lui," and the rejoinder to it by Paul de Musset, called
+"Lui et Elle." I can hardly be accused of straying into the regions of
+private scandal when I speak of two books which had a wide circulation,
+are still being read, and may be had, I presume, in any New York
+book-store where French literature is sold. The former of the two books,
+"She and He," was a story, or something which purported to be a story,
+by George Sand, telling of two ill-assorted beings whom fate had thrown
+together for awhile, and of whom the woman was all tenderness, love,
+patience, the man all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and
+eccentricity. The point of the whole business was to show how sublimely
+the woman suffered, and how wantonly the man flung happiness away. Had
+it been merely a piece of fiction, it must have been regarded by any
+healthy mind as a morbid, unwholesome, disagreeable production,--a sin
+of the highest aesthetic kind against true art, which must always, even
+in its pathos and its tragedy, leave on the mind exalted and delightful
+impressions. But every one in Paris at once hailed the story as a
+chapter of autobiography, as the author's vindication of one episode in
+her own career,--a vindication at the expense of a man who had gone
+down, ruined and lost, to an early grave. Therefore the brother of the
+dead man flung into literature a little book called "He and She," in
+which a story, substantially the same in its outlines, is so told as
+exactly to reverse the conditions under which the verdict of public
+opinion was sought. Very curious indeed was the manner in which the same
+substance of facts was made to present the two principal figures with
+complexions and characters so strangely altered. In the woman's book the
+woman was made the patient, loving, suffering victim; in the man's reply
+this same woman was depicted as the most utterly selfish and depraved
+creature the human imagination could conceive. Even if one had no other
+means whatever of forming an estimate of the character of George Sand,
+it would be hardly possible to accept as her likeness the hideous
+picture sketched by Paul de Musset. No woman, I am glad to believe, ever
+existed in real life so utterly selfish, base, and wicked as his bitter
+pen has drawn. I must say that the thing is very cleverly done. The
+picture is at least consistent with itself. As a character in romance it
+might be pronounced original, bold, brilliant, and, in an artistic
+sense, quite natural. There is something thoroughly French in the easy
+and delicate force of the final touch with which de Musset dismisses his
+hideous subject. Having sketched this woman in tints that seem to flame
+across the eyes of the reader,--having described with wonderful realism
+and power her affectation, her deceit, her reckless caprices, her base
+and cruel coquetries, her devouring wantonness, her soul-destroying
+arts, her unutterable selfishness and egotism,--having, to use a vulgar
+phrase, "turned her inside out," and told her story backwards,--the
+author calmly explains that the hero of the narrative in his dying hour
+called his brother to his bedside, and enjoined him, if occasion should
+ever arise, if the partner of his sin should ever calumniate him in his
+grave, to vindicate his memory, and avenge the treason practised upon
+him. "Of course," adds the narrator, "the brother made the promise,--and
+I have since heard that he has kept his word." I can hardly hope to
+convey to the reader any adequate idea of the effect produced on the
+mind by these few simple words of compressed, whispered hatred and
+triumph, closing a philippic, or a revelation, or a libel of such
+extraordinary bitterness and ferocity. The whole episode is, I believe
+and earnestly hope, without precedent or imitation in literary
+controversy. Never, that I know of, has a living woman been publicly
+exhibited to the world in a portraiture so hideous as that which Paul de
+Musset drew of George Sand. Never, that I know of, has any woman gone so
+near to deserving and justifying such a measure of retaliation.
+
+For if it be assumed,--and I suppose it never has been disputed,--that
+in writing "Elle et Lui" George Sand meant to describe herself and
+Alfred de Musset, it is hard to conceive of any sin against taste and
+feeling,--against art and morals,--more flagrant than such a
+publication. The practice, to which French writers are so much addicted,
+of making "copy" of the private lives, characters, and relationships of
+themselves and their friends, seems to me in all cases utterly
+detestable. Lamartine's sins of this kind were grievous and glaring; but
+were they red as scarlet, they would seem whiter than snow when compared
+with the lurid monstrosity of George Sand's assault on the memory of the
+dead poet who was once her favorite. The whole affair, indeed, is so
+unlike anything which could occur in America or in England, that we can
+hardly find any canons by which to try it, or any standard of punishment
+by which to regulate its censure. I allude to it now because it is the
+only substantial evidence I know of which does fairly seem to justify
+the worst of the accusations brought against George Sand; and I do not
+think it right, when writing for grown men and women, who are supposed
+to have sense and judgment, to affect not to know that such accusations
+are made, or to pretend to think that it would be proper not to allude
+to them. They have been put forward, replied to, urged again, made the
+theme of all manner of controversy in scores of French and in some
+English publications. Pray let it be distinctly understood that I am not
+entering into any criticism of the morality of any part of George Sand's
+private life. With that we have nothing here to do. I am now dealing
+with the question, fairly belonging to public controversy, whether the
+great artist did not deliberately deal with human hearts as the painter
+of old is said to have done with a purchased slave,--inflicting torture
+in order the better to learn how to depict the struggles and contortions
+of mortal agony. In answer to such a question I can only point to
+"Lucrezia Floriani" and to "Elle et Lui," and say that unless the
+universal opinion of qualified critics be wrong, these books, and others
+too, owe their piquancy and their dramatic force to the anatomization
+of dead passions and discarded lovers. We have all laughed over the
+pedantic surgeon in Moliere's "Malade Imaginaire", who invites his
+_fiancee_, as a delightful treat, to see him dissect the body of a
+woman. I am afraid that George Sand did sometimes invite an admiring
+public to an exhibition yet more ghastly and revolting,--the dissection
+of the heart of a dead lover.
+
+But, in truth, we shall never judge George Sand and her writings at all,
+if we insist on criticising them from any point of view set up by the
+proprieties or even the moralities of Old England or New England. When
+the passionate young woman,--in whose veins ran the wild blood of
+Marshal Saxe,--found herself surrendered by legality and prescription to
+a marriage bond against which her soul revolted, society seemed for her
+to have resolved itself into its original elements. Its
+conventionalities and traditions contained nothing which she held
+herself bound to respect. The world was not her friend, nor the world's
+law. By one great decisive step she sundered herself forever from the
+bonds of what we call "society". She had shaken the dust of convention
+from her feet; the world was all before her where to choose. No creature
+on earth is so absolutely free as the Frenchwoman who has broken with
+society: There, then, stood this daring young woman, on the threshold of
+a new, fresh, and illimitable world; a young woman gifted with genius
+such as our later years have rarely seen, and blessed or cursed with a
+nature so strangely uniting the most characteristic qualities of man and
+woman, as to be in itself quite unparalleled and unique. Just think of
+it,--try to think of it! Society and the world had no longer any laws
+which she recognized. Nothing was sacred; nothing was settled. She had
+to evolve from her own heart and brain her own law of life. What wonder
+if she made some sad mistakes? Nay, is it not rather a theme for wonder
+and admiration that she did somehow come right at last? I know of no one
+who seems to me to have been open at once to the temptations of woman's
+nature and man's nature, except this George Sand. Her soul,--her
+brain,--her style may be described, from one point of view, as
+exuberantly and splendidly feminine; yet no other woman has ever shown
+the same power of understanding, and entering into the nature of a man.
+If Balzac is the only man who has ever thoroughly mastered the mysteries
+of a woman's heart, George Sand is the only woman, so far as I know, who
+has ever shown that she could feel as a man can feel. I have read stray
+passages in her novels which I would confidently submit to the criticism
+of any intelligent men unacquainted with the text, convinced that they
+would declare that only a man could have thus analyzed the emotions of
+manhood. I have in my mind, just now especially, a passage in the novel
+"Piccinino" which, were the authorship unknown, would, I am satisfied,
+secure the decision of a jury of literary experts that the author must
+be a man. Now this gift of entire appreciation of the feelings of a
+different sex or race is, I take it, one of the rarest and highest
+dramatic qualities. Especially is it difficult for a woman, as our
+social life goes, to enter into the feelings of a man. While men and
+women alike admit the accuracy of certain pictures of women drawn by
+such artists as Cervantes, Moliere, Balzac, and Thackeray, there are few
+women,--indeed, perhaps there are no women but one,--by whom a man has
+been so painted as to challenge and compel the recognition and
+acknowledgment of men. In "The Galaxy", some months ago, I wrote of a
+great Englishwoman, the authoress of "Romola", and I expressed my
+conviction that on the whole she is entitled to higher rank, as a
+novelist, than even the authoress of "Consuelo". Many, very many men and
+women, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, differed from me
+in this opinion. I still hold it, nevertheless; but I freely admit that
+George Eliot has nothing like the dramatic insight which enables George
+Sand to enter into the feelings and experiences of a man. I go so far as
+to say that, having some knowledge of the literature of fiction in most
+countries, I am not aware of the existence of any woman but this one,
+who could draw a real, living, straggling, passion-tortured man. All
+other novelists of George Sand's sex,--even including Charlotte
+Bronte,--draw only what I may call "women's men". If ever the two
+natures could be united in one form,--if ever a single human being could
+have the soul of man and the soul of woman at once,--George Sand might
+be described as that physical and psychological phenomenon. Now the
+point to which I wish to direct attention, is the peculiarity of the
+temptation to which a nature such as this was necessarily exposed at
+every turn when, free of all restraint and a rebel against all
+conventionality, it confronted the world and the world's law, and stood
+up, itself alone, against the domination of custom and the majesty of
+tradition. I claim, then, that when we have taken all these
+considerations into account, we are bound to admit that Aurora Dudevant
+deserves the generous recognition of the world for the use which she
+made of her splendid gifts. Her influence on French literature has been,
+on the whole, a purifying and strengthening power. The cynicism, the
+recklessness, the wanton, licentious disregard of any manner of
+principle, the debasing parade of disbelief in any higher purpose or
+nobler restraint, which are the shame and curse of modern French
+fiction, find no sanction in the pages of George Sand. I remember no
+passage in her works which gives the slightest encouragement to the
+"nothing new, and nothing true, and it don't signify" code of ethics
+which has been so much in fashion of late years. I find nothing in
+George Sand which does not do homage to the existence of a principle and
+a law in everything. This daring woman, who broke with society so early
+and so conspicuously, has always insisted, through every illustration,
+character, and catastrophe in her books, that the one only reality, the
+one only thing that can endure, is the rule of right and of virtue. Nor
+has she ever, that I can recollect, fallen into the enfeebling and
+sentimental theory so commonly expressed in the works of Victor Hugo,
+that the vague abstraction society is always to bear the blame of the
+faults committed by the individual man or woman. Of all persons in the
+world, Aurora Dudevant might be supposed most likely to adopt this easy
+and complacent theory as her guiding principle. She had every excuse,
+every reason for endeavoring to preach up the doctrine that our errors
+are society's and our virtues our own. But I am not aware that she ever
+taught any lesson save the lesson that men and women must endeavor to be
+heroes and heroines for themselves, heroes and heroines though all the
+world else were craven, and weak, and selfish, and unprincipled. Even
+that wretched and lamentable "Elle et Lui" affair, utterly inexcusable
+as it is when we read between the lines its secret history, has, at
+least, the merit of being an earnest and powerful protest against the
+egotistical and debasing indulgence of moral weaknesses and
+eccentricities which mean and vulgar minds are apt to regard as the
+privilege of genius. "Stand upon your own ground; be your own ruler;
+look to yourself, not to your stars, for your failure or success; always
+make your standard a lofty ideal, and try persistently to reach it,
+though all the temptations of earth, and all the power of darkness
+strive against you"--this, and nothing else, if I have read her books
+rightly, is the moral taught by George Sand. She may be wrong in her
+principle sometimes, but, at least, she always has a principle. She has
+a profound and generous faith in the possibilities of human nature; in
+the capacity of man's heart for purity, self-sacrifice, and
+self-redemption. Indeed, so far is she from holding counsel with wilful
+weakness or sin, that I think she sometimes falls into the noble error
+of painting her heroes as too glorious in their triumph over temptation,
+in their subjugation of every passion and interest to the dictates of
+duty and of honor. Take, for instance, that extraordinary book which has
+just been given to the American public in Miss Virginia Vaughan's
+excellent translation, "Mauprat". If I understand that magnificent
+romance at all, its purport is to prove that no human nature is ever
+plunged into temptation beyond its own strength to resist, provided that
+it really wills resistance; that no character is irretrievable, no error
+inexpiable, where there is sincere resolve to expiate, and longing
+desire to retrieve. Take, again, that exquisite little story, "La
+Derniere Aldini"; I do not know where one could find a finer
+illustration of the entire sacrifice of man's natural impulse, passion,
+interest, to what might almost be called an abstract idea of honor and
+principle. I have never read this little story without wondering how
+many men one ever has known who, placed in the same situation as that of
+Nello, the hero, would have done the same thing; and yet so simply and
+naturally are the characters wrought out, and the incidents described,
+that the idea of pompous, dramatic self-sacrifice never enters the mind
+of the reader, and it seems to him that Nello could not do otherwise
+than as he is doing. I speak of these two stories particularly, because
+in both of them there is a good deal of the world and the flesh; that
+is, both are stories of strong human passion and temptation. Many of
+George Sand's novels, the shorter ones especially, are as absolutely
+pure in moral tone, as entirely free from even a taint or suggestion of
+impurity, as they are perfect in style. Now, if we cannot help knowing
+that much of this great woman's life was far from being irreproachable,
+are we not bound to give her all the fuller credit, because her genius,
+at least, kept so far the whiteness of its soul? Revolutions are not to
+be made with rose-water; you cannot have omelettes without breaking of
+eggs. I am afraid that great social revolutionists are not often
+creatures of the most pure and perfect nature. It is not to patient
+Griselda you must look for any protest against even the uttermost
+tyranny of social conventions. One thing I think may, at least, be
+admitted as part of George Sand's vindication,--that the marriage system
+in France is the most debased and debasing institution existing in
+civilized society, now that the buying and selling of slaves has ceased
+to be a tolerated system. I hold that the most ardent advocates of the
+irrevocable endurance of the marriage bond are bound, by their very
+principles, to admit that, in protesting against the so-called marriage
+system of France, George Sand stood on the side of purity and right.
+Assuredly, she often went into extravagances in the other direction. It
+seems to be the fate of all French reformers to rush suddenly to
+extremes; and we must remember that George Sand was not a Bristol
+Quakeress, or a Boston transcendentalist, but a passionate Frenchwoman,
+the descendant of one of the maddest votaries of love and war who ever
+stormed across the stage of European history.
+
+Regarding George Sand, then, as an influence in literature, and on
+society, I claim for her at least four great and special merits: First,
+she insisted on calling public attention to the true principle of
+marriage; that is to say, she put the question as it had not been put
+before. Of course, the fundamental principle she would have enforced is
+always being urged more or less feebly, more or less sincerely; but she
+made it her own question, and illuminated it by the fervid, fierce rays
+of her genius and her passion. Secondly, her works are an exposition of
+the tremendous reality of the feelings which people who call themselves
+practical are apt to regard with indifference or contempt as mere
+sentiments. In the long run, the passions decide the life-question one
+way or the other. They are the tide which, as you know or do not know
+how to use it, will either turn your mill and float your boat, or drown
+your fields and sweep away your dwellings. Life and society receive no
+impulse and no direction from the influences out of which the novels of
+Dickens, or even of Thackeray, are made up. These are but pleasant or
+tender toying with the playthings and puppets of existence. George Sand
+constrains us to look at the realities through the medium of her
+fiction. Thirdly, she insists that man can and shall make his own
+career; not whine to the stars, and rail out against the powers above,
+when he has weakly or wantonly marred his own destiny. Fourthly,--and
+this ought not to be considered her least service to the literature of
+her country,--she has tried to teach people to look at Nature with
+their own eyes, and to invite the true love of her to flow into their
+hearts. The great service which Ruskin, with all his eccentricities and
+extravagances, has rendered to English-speaking peoples by teaching them
+to use their own eyes when they look at clouds, and waters, and grasses,
+and hills, George Sand has rendered to France.
+
+I hold that these are virtues and services which ought to outweigh even
+very grave personal and artistic errors. We often hear that this or that
+great poet or romancist has painted men as they are; this other as they
+ought to be. I think George Sand paints men as they are, and also not
+merely as they ought to be, but as they can be. The sum of the lesson
+taught by her books is one of confidence in man's possibilities, and
+hope in his steady progress. At the same time she is entirely practical
+in her faith and her aspirations. She never expects that the trees are
+to grow up into the heavens, that men and women are to be other than men
+and women. She does not want them to be other; she finds the springs and
+sources of their social regeneration in the fact that they are just what
+they are, to begin with. I am afraid some of the ladies who seem to base
+their scheme of woman's emancipation and equality on the assumption
+that, by some development of time or process of schooling, a condition
+of things is to be brought about where difference of sex is no longer to
+be a disturbing power, will find small comfort or encouragement in the
+writings of George Sand. She deals in realities altogether; the
+realities of life, even when they are such as to shallow minds may seem
+mere sentiments and ecstacies; the realities of society, of suffering,
+of passion, of inanimate nature. There is in her nothing unmeaning,
+nothing untrue; there is in her much error, doubtless, but no sham.
+
+I believe George Sand is growing into a quiet and beautiful old age.
+After a life of storm and stress, a life which, metaphorically at least,
+was "worn by war and passion", her closing years seem likely to be
+gilded with the calm glory of an autumnal sunset. One is glad to think
+of her thus happy and peaceful, accepting so tranquilly the reality of
+old age, still laboring with her unwearied pen, still delighting in
+books, and landscapes, and friends, and work. The world can well afford
+to forget as soon as possible her literary and other errors. Of the vast
+mass of romances, stories, plays, sketches, criticisms, pamphlets,
+political articles, even, it is said, ministerial manifestoes of
+republican days, which she poured out, only a few comparatively will
+perhaps be always treasured by posterity; but these will be enough to
+secure her a classic place. And she will not be remembered by her
+writings alone. Hers is probably the most powerful individuality
+displayed by any modern Frenchwoman. The influence of Madame Roland was
+but a glittering unreality, that of Madame de Stael only a boudoir and
+coterie success, when compared with the power exercised over literature,
+human feeling, and social law, by the energy, the courage, the genius,
+even the very errors and extravagances of George Sand.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of George Sand, by Justin M'Carthy
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