Mauprat | Page 4

free from hysteria. On

marriage--the one subject which drove her to a certain though always
disciplined violence--she clearly felt more for others than they felt for
themselves; and in observing certain households and life partnerships,
she may have been afflicted with a dismay which the unreflecting
sufferers did not share. No writer who was carried away by egoistic
anger or disappointment could have told these stories of unhappiness,
infidelity, and luckless love with such dispassionate lucidity.
With the artist's dislike of all that is positive and arbitrary, she was,
nevertheless, subject rather to her intellect than her emotions. An insult
to her intelligence was the one thing she found it hard to pardon, and
she allowed no external interference to disturb her relations with her
own reasoning faculty. She followed caprices, no doubt, but she was
never under any apprehension with regard to their true nature,
displaying in this respect a detachment which is usually considered
exclusively virile. /Elle et Lui/, which, perhaps because it is short and
associated with actual facts, is the most frequently discussed in general
conversation on her work, remains probably the sanest account of a
sentimental experiment which was ever written. How far it may have
seemed accurate to De Musset is not to the point. Her version of her
grievance is at least convincing. Without fear and without hope, she
makes her statement, and it stands, therefore, unique of its kind among
indictments. It has been said that her fault was an excess of
emotionalism; that is to say, she attached too much importance to mere
feeling and described it, in French of marvellous ease and beauty, with
a good deal of something else which one can almost condemn as the
high-flown. Not that the high-flown is of necessity unnatural, but it is
misleading; it places the passing mood, the lyrical note, dependent on
so many accidents, above the essential temperament and the dominant
chord which depend on life only. Where she falls short of the very
greatest masters is in this all but deliberate confusion of things which
must change or can be changed with things which are unchangeable,
incurable, and permanent. Shakespeare, it is true, makes all his villains
talk poetry, but it is the poetry which a villain, were he a poet, would
inevitably write. George Sand glorifies every mind with her own
peculiar fire and tears. The fire is, fortunately, so much stronger than
the tears that her passion never degenerates into the maudlin. All the

same, she makes too universal a use of her own strongest gifts, and this
is why she cannot be said to excel as a portrait painter. One merit,
however, is certain: if her earliest writings were dangerous, it was
because of her wonderful power of idealization, not because she filled
her pages with the revolting and epicene sensuality of the new Italian,
French, and English schools. Intellectual viciousness was not her
failing, and she never made the modern mistake of confusing indecency
with vigour. She loved nature, air, and light too well and too truly to go
very far wrong in her imaginations. It may indeed be impossible for
many of us to accept all her social and political views; they have no
bearing, fortunately, on the quality of her literary art; they have to be
considered under a different aspect. In politics, her judgment, as
displayed in the letters to Mazzini, was profound. Her correspondence
with Flaubert shows us a capacity for stanch, unblemished friendship
unequalled, probably, in the biographies, whether published or
unpublished, of the remarkable.
With regard to her impiety--for such it should be called--it did not arise
from arrogance, nor was it based in any way upon the higher learning
of her period. Simply she did not possess the religious instinct. She
understood it sympathetically--in /Spiridion/, for instance, she
describes an ascetic nature as it has never been done in any other work
of fiction. Newman himself has not written passages of deeper or purer
mysticism, of more sincere spirituality. Balzac, in /Seraphita/,
attempted something of the kind, but the result was never more than a
/tour de force/. He could invent, he could describe, but George Sand
felt; and as she felt, she composed, living with and loving with an
understanding love all her creations. But it has to be remembered
always that she repudiated all religious restraint, that she believed in
the human heart, that she acknowledged no higher law than its own
impulses, that she saw love where others see only a cruel struggle for
existence, that she found beauty where ordinary visions can detect little
besides a selfishness worse than brutal and a squalor more pitiful than
death. Everywhere she insists upon the purifying influence of affection,
no matter how degraded in its circumstances or how illegal in