George Sand's Letters

“WHETHER or not the number of George Sand’s works — always fresh, always attractive, but poured out too lavishly and rapidly—is likely to prove a hindrance to her fame, I do not care to consider. Posterity, alarmed at the way in which its literary baggage grows upon it, always seeks to leave behind it as much as it can, as much as it dares, — everything but masterpieces. But the immense vibration of George Sand’s voice upon the ear of Europe will not soon die away. Her passions and her errors have been abundantly talked of. She has left them behind her, and men’s memory of her will leave them behind also. There will remain of her the sense of benefit and stimulus from the passage on earth of that large and frank nature, that large and pure utterance, — the large utterance of the early gods. There will remain an admiring and everwidening report of that great soul, simple, affectionate, without vanity, without pedantry, human, equitable, patient, kind.”

In the words here quoted, written at the time of her death, in 1876, Matthew Arnold admirably summed up the character and influence of George Sand. She was indeed a great soul, of whom there remains an admiring and everwidening report. But Mr. Arnold had known only the pacific and tender grandmother, the good lady of Nohant, la bonne dame, appeased and almost timid, who would have smiled sadly to read the letters that Lélia wrote in 1848, — lyric letters, overflowing now with enthusiasm, now with sadness; at one moment like cries of passionate joy, at another like wails of grief. In 1848 the good lady of Nohant was ready to fight in person, like the Grand Mademoiselle: “ I feel, just like a man, the emotion of the combat, the attraction of the gunshot. In my youth I should have followed the devil, if he had ordered, Fire ! ” This third volume of Georgo Sand’s Correspondence ¹ does indeed smell of powder. It contains one hundred and five letters, written between the years 1848 and 1853. It begins with the exuberant joy of the young republic, and ends with the proscriptions and chain-gangs of the Third Napoleon, the climax of enthusiasm and the depths of despair. In the present collection, as in the preceding volumes of George Sand’s letters, the curious will seek in vain for piquant personal details. Indeed, almost all the letters in this new installment relate to public affairs. In them we follow, day by day, the changing fortunes of the republic of 1848. We hear from George Sand herself the narrative of her relations with the provisional government, with Lamartine, with Armand Barbès, with Louis Napoleon. One might almost style these letters “ Memoirs to serve for the history of the republic of 1848.” March 9, 1848, George Sand writes, “Vive la République ! What a dream ! What enthusiasm, and, at the same time, what behavior, what order, at Paris! I have just come back from there. I hurried to the scene. I saw the last barricades open under my feet. I saw the people, grand, sublime, artless, generous, — the French people, the most admirable people in the universe ! I passed many nights without sleeping, many days without sitting down. People are wild, drunk with happiness, to think that they lay down to sleep in the mire, and woke up in heaven. Let all who are around you have courage and confidence ! The republic is conquered and assured, and we will perish in it rather than lose it. The government is composed for the most part of excellent men, all a little incomplete and insufficient for a task which demands the genius of a Napoleon and the heart of Jesus. But the union of all these men, who have soul, talent, or will, suffices for the situation. They desire the good, they seek it, they try. They are sincerely dominated by a principle superior to the individual capacity of each one : I mean the will of all, the right of the people. The people of Paris is so good, so indulgent, so confident in its cause, and so strong that it itself aids the government. The duration of such a disposition would be the social ideal.”

George Sand has her heart full and her head on fire. She returns to Paris to found a journal in the good cause. She forgets her troubles and her ailments ; she feels strong and active, as if she were only twenty years of age. She enters into relations with the provisional government, writes official circulars for the ministers, and compiles the weekly official journal, the Bulletin de la République. Paris is in a great state of excitement, and queer things are taking place. The provisional government, fearing lest Rothschild should take to his heels with his money, attaches a guard to him. Every day liberty trees are being planted. In the streets you meet bands of fifty or sixty workmen, stalwart, grave, their brows crowned with foliage, and the spade or the pick on their shoulders. “ It is magnificent!” cries George Sand.

After a few letters a different note is sounded. April 17th, George Sand writes, " I am afraid the republic has been killed in its principle and in its future, at least in its immediate future. To-day it has been defiled by cries of death. Liberty and equality have been trodden under foot with fraternity all this day.” The bourgeoisie have started the cry of “ Death to the Communists ; ” the bourgeoisie try to terrorize the work-

ingmen. The republic is the plaything of four conspiracies, headed by LedruRollin, Marrast, Blanqui, and Louis Blanc. The long letter in which George Sand explains the composition and object of these conspiracies is a very curious and important historical document. The results for the republic are disastrous, and George Sand laments the weakness of men. The ideas of all of them are good enough; the characters are inferior, and truth, she says, “has life only in an upright soul, and influence only in a pure mouth. Men are false, ambitious, vain, egoists, and the best of them is not worth much ; it is sad to see close. The two honestest men I have yet met are Barbès and Etienne Arago. . . . All the men of the first rank in the government live with this ideal: I, I, I.” Even Louis Blanc is at this time severely judged by George Sand. But why quote the hot words written in a moment of trial ? A year later, July, 1849, George Sand judges Louis Blanc more equitably and more calmly. Speaking of political writing, she says, —

“ I am not and shall not be a political writer, because, in order to be read in France at the present day, one must attack men, dabble in scandal, in hatred, in gossip even. If one confines one’s self to dissertation, preaching, and explanation, one becomes tiresome. It is better to hold one’s peace. Emile de Girardin has form when he likes ; he has not the true matter. Louis Blanc has both form and matter. People do not concern themselves about him. He is bound to go on writing, because he has a party, and he cannot abandon his party after having formed it. But, outside his party, he is without action. . . . In political life Louis Blanc is a sure man. What do I care if in private life he has as much pride as Ledru-Rollin has vanity, if in public life he knows how to sacrifice his pride or his vanity to his duty ? I count on him ; I know where he is going, and I know that nobody can make him deviate from his path. I have found in him asperity, never weakness ; secret sufferings, immediately conquered by a profound and tenacious sentiment of duty.”

At the end of 1849 the new republic seems in a bad way. The “ social ideal ” of March, 1848, has given place to treachery, party strife, ambition, egoism, and the rest. In her retirement at Nohant, she tries not to think, for fear of becoming the enemy, or at least the despiser, of the human race, which she has loved so much that she has forgotten to love herself. Still she resists. She refuses to lose faith ; she prays God to preserve her in her faith. She writes thus to Mazzini: “ But you are there in my heart, — you, Barbès, and two or three other, less illustrious, but holy too, and believers, and pure from all the wretchedness and all the wickedness of this age. Truth, then, is incarnate somewhere ; truth, therefore, is not out of the reach of man, and one good man proves more than a hundred thousand bad ones.”

Then, again, she writes to Barbès: " You and Mazzini are always in my thoughts as the heroic martyrs of these sad times. There is not a shadow of a reproach to be made against either of you. In neither of you is there a spot. I still believe, and I believe firmly, that revolutions will neither be profound nor durable until there be at the head of them men of boundless virtue and profound modesty of heart. The peoples are sick of men of talent, eloquence, and invention. They listen to them because they are amusing; the French people, particularly, eminently artistic as they are, become passionate about them without reflection. But this passion does not go even to devotion or self-sacrifice. Devotion alone commands devotion, and nowadays devotion is rarer amongst the party chiefs than amongst the people.”

In the letters of 1852, George Sand appears as a great and reasonable woman. The socialist dreams of 1848 have been rudely shattered ; the republic with Napoleon as Prince President is no republic ; George Sand’s friends, her brothers, her adopted children, are in prison or in exile; the rigor of Napoleon is throwing into chains all who accept the title of socialist republicans. Yet George Sand persists in seeing in Louis Napoleon a socialist genius ; she does not believe that he is acting in a selfish end ; she believes him to have had an ideal apparition of justice and of truth, and while disapproving the means he has adopted, she, as a socialist, accepts las accession to power “ with the submission we owe to the logic of Providence.” Taking advantage of former relations with Napoleon, and of the esteem in which she had reason to believe he held her, George Sand addressed to the Prince President several noble letters of advice, of warning, and of supplication, principally of supplication, in behalf of the political prisoners, her fellow citizens, her friends. The long letter to Napoleon, dated January 20,1852, is a magnificent piece of writing. The grandeur of the cause gives to the prayer a savor of what Matthew Arnold calls, in the words of Keats, “ the large utterance of the early gods.” Happily for his memory, Napoleon listened to George Sand’s appeals for her friends, and promised her soon a general amnesty. We know how he kept his promise. Still, George Sand at that moment could not allow the character of Napoleon to be calumniated before her. She had found him accessible and human ; she had talked with him sufficiently to have seen in him good instincts and certain tendencies towards an object which would have been the object of George Sand and her socialist friends, — tendencies soon to be effectually obstructed, if ever they existed, by the counselors with whom the Emperor was gradually becoming surrounded.

The last letter in the volume is one to Joseph Mazzini, whom, in spite of certain differences of opinion, discussed at length in previous letters, George Sand has not ceased to love and respect. Mazzini has written her a severe letter, reproaching her with her resignation. This is in December, 1853. Mazzini has also expressed surprise at finding no allusions in her recent works to current events. To these reproaches George Sand replies, with dignity and filial respect, that the censorship of Napoleon would not permit allusions : —

“ When liberty is limited, frank and courageous souls prefer silence to insinuation. Furthermore, were liberty reëstablished for us, it is not certain that I should now wish to touch questions which humanity is not yet worthy to resolve, and which have divided even unto hatred the greatest and the best minds of these times. You are astonished that I am able to do literary work. I thank God that he has preserved me this faculty, because an honest and pure conscience, as mine is, still finds, outside of all discussion, a work of moralization to be pursued. What should I do, then, if I were to abandon my humble task ? Conspire ? It is not my vocation. Write pamphlets ? I have neither the gall nor the wit. Theorize ? We have had too much theorizing, and we have fallen into disputation, which is the grave of all truth and of all power. I am, and always have been, an artist, above everything. I know that purely political men have a great contempt for the artist, because they judge him after the types of certain mountebanks, who dishonor art. But you, my friend, you know well that a veritable artist is as useful as the priest and the warrior ; and that, when he respects truth and virtue, he is in a way that God always blesses.”

George Sand is, indeed, above everything, an artist; and, in the midst of all the agitation of 1848, of all the ardor of her socialist propaganda, and of all the anguish and despair of the corruption and ruin of the young republic, she was writing that immortal idyl, La Mare au Diable, and Les Maîtres Sonneurs, a work of purely literary excellence.

After all, was not the revolution of 1848 a dream to George Sand, — a dream like the idyl of the Mare au Diable ? Artist, enthusiast, great-souled genius, as she was, was George Sand ever gifted with practical sense ? In the last letter to Mazzini, just quoted, she says, “ As regards material interests, I have remained in a state of absolute idiocy ; and so I have engaged a business man, who will take charge of the whole of the positive side of my life.” The business man in question was no other than Pierre Leroux, a man as innocent in all practical things as a new-born babe.

Once, and once only, this Pierre Leroux collaborated with George Sand in writing one of her novels, Spiridion, — which, by the way, is dedicated to that vague and cloudy philosopher. Spiridion was published in installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The reader may remember that this lugubrious and sepulchral narrative is the story of a monk, Pierre Hébronius, — in religion, Brother Spiridion, — who died in the odor of sanctity, and had buried with him a manuscript, the work of his life, which bore, like his tombstone, the inscription, Hic est veritas. The whole interest of the novel lies in the search for this manuscript by the monk Alexis, who digs and digs, and philosophizes, chapter after chapter, without finding the manuscript of Spiridion. The readers of the Revue became impatient, at last. When is Alexis going to find the manuscript of Spiridion ? asked the subscribers. The fact was that George Sand, ardent seeker after and believer in truth as she was, had invented Spiridion and his manuscript, Hic est veritas ; but what truth was, George Sand, when pushed to the wall, could not say. In her embarrassment, she asked Pierre Leroux to write what Spiridion could have written in his famous manuscript; and Leroux, without hesitation, finished the novel by a variation on his own doctrine of the triad : —

“ Religion has three epochs, like the reigns of the three persons of the Trinity. Christianity was destined to have three epochs, and the three epochs are accomplished. As the divine Trinity has three phases, the conception that the human mind has had of the Trinity in Christianity was destined to have three successive phases. The first, corresponding to Saint Peter, embraces the period of the creation and hierarchic and militant development of the church up to Hildebrand, the Saint Peter of the eleventh century; the second, corresponding to Saint John, embraces the period from Abelard to Luther ; the third, corresponding to Saint Paul, begins with Luther and ends with Bossuet. It is the reign of free examination, of knowledge, as the second period is the period of love and of sentiment, and as the first is the period of sensation and of activity. There Christianity ends, and there begins the era of a new religion.”

This new religion was of course the religion of Pierre Leroux, whom George Sand then styled her “ friend and brother in years, her father and master in virtue and knowledge.” And yet people continue to think that Pilate was “ jesting ” when he asked, “ What is truth ?”