The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters | Page 3

sentry-box coat made, of rough grey cloth,
with trousers and waist-coat to match. With a grey hat and a huge
cravat of woolen material, I looked exactly like a first-year student." In

the freedom of this rather unalluring garb she entered into relations
Platonic, fraternal, or tempestuously passionate with perhaps the most
distinguished series of friends and lovers that ever fluttered about one
flame. There was Aurelien de Seze; Jules Sandeau, her first
collaborator, who "reconciled her to life" and gave her a nom de guerre;
the inscrutable Merimee, who made no one happy; Musset--an
encounter from which both tiger-moths escaped with singed wings; the
odd transitional figure of Pagello; Michel Euraed; Liszt; Chopin, whom
she loved and nursed for eight years; her master Lamennais; her master
Pierre Leroux; her father-confessor Sainte-Beuve; and Gustave Flaubert,
the querulous friend of her last decade.
As we have compressed the long and complex story of her personal
relationships, so we must compress the intimately related history of her
works and her ideas. When under the inspiration of Rousseau, the
emancipated George Sand began to write, her purposes were but
vaguely defined. She conceived of life as primarily an opportunity for
unlimited self-expansion, and of literature as an opportunity for
unrestricted self-expression. "Nevertheless," she declares, "my instincts
have formed, without my privity, the theory I am about to set down,--a
theory which I have generally followed unconsciously. ... According to
this theory, the novel is as much a work of poetry as of analysis. It
demands true situations, and characters not only true but real, grouped
about a type intended to epitomize the sentiment or the main
conceptions of the book. This type generally represents the passion of
love, since almost all novels are love- stories. According to this theory
(and it is here that it begins) the writer must idealize this love, and
consequently this type,--and must not fear to attribute to it all the
powers to which he inwardly aspires, or all the sorrows whose pangs he
has observed or felt. This type must in no wise, however, become
degraded by the vicissitude of events; it must either die or triumph."
In 1831, when her pen began its fluent course through the lyrical works
of her first period--Indiana, Valentine, Lelia, Jacques, and the rest--we
conceive George Sand's culture, temper, and point of view to have been
fairly comparable with those of the young Shelley when, fifteen years
earlier, he with Mary Godwin joined Byron and Jane Clairmont in
Switzerland--young revoltes, all of them, nourished on eighteenth
century revolutionary philosophy and Gothic novels. Both these

eighteenth century currents meet in the work of the new romantic group
in England and in France. The innermost origin of the early long poems
of Shelley and the early works of George Sand is in personal passion,
in the commotion of a romantic spirit beating its wings against the cage
of custom and circumstance and institutions. The external form of the
plot, whatever is fantastic and wilful in its setting and its adventures, is
due to the school of Ann Radcliffe. But the quality in Shelley and in
George Sand which bewitched even the austere Matthew Arnold in his
green and salad days is the poetising of that liberative eighteenth
century philosophy into "beautiful idealisms" of a love emancipated
from human limitations, a love exalted to the height of its gamut by the
influences of nature, triumphantly seeking its own or shattered in
magnificent despair. In her novels of the first period, George Sand
takes her Byronic revenge upon M. Dudevant. In Indiana and its
immediate successors, consciously or unconsciously, she declares to
the world what a beautiful soul M. Dudevant condemned to sewing on
buttons; in Jacques she paints the man who might fitly have matched
her spirit; and by the entire series, which now impresses us as fantastic
in sentiment no less than in plot, she won her early reputation as the
apologist for free love, the adversary of marriage.
In her middle period--say from 1838 to 1848--of which The Miller of
Aginbault, Consuelo, and The Countess of Rudolstadt are
representative works, there is a marked subsidence of her personal
emotion, and, in compensation, a rising tide of humanitarian
enthusiasm. Gradually satiated with erotic passion, gradually convinced
that it is rather a mischief-maker than a reconstructive force in a
decrepit society, she is groping, indeed, between her successive liaisons
for an elusive felicity, for a larger mission than inspiring Musset's
Alexandrines or Chopin's nocturnes. It is somewhat amusing, and at the
same time indicative of her vague but deep-seated moral yearnings, to
find her writing rebukingly to Sainte-Beuve, as early as 1834, apropos
of his epicurean Volupte: "Let the rest do as they like; but you, dear
friend, you must produce a book which will change and