The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters | Page 4

better mankind,
do you see? You can, and therefore should. Oh, if poor I could do it! I
should lift my head again and my heart would no longer be broken; but
in vain I seek a religion: Shall it be God, shall it be love, friendship, the
public welfare? Alas, it seems to me that my soul is framed to receive

all these impressions, without one effacing another ... Who shall paint
justice as it should, as it may, be in our modern society?"
To Sainte-Beuve, himself an unscathed intellectual Odysseus, she
declares herself greatly indebted intellectually; but on the whole his
influence seems to have been tranquillizing. The material for the radical
program, economic, political, and religious, which, like a spiritual
ancestor of H. G. Wells, she eagerly sought to popularize by the novels
of her middle years, was supplied mainly by Saint-Simon, Lamennais,
and Leroux. Her new "religion of humanity," a kind of theosophical
socialism, is too fantastically garbed to charm the sober spirits of our
age. And yet from the ruins of that time and from the emotional
extravagance of books grown tedious, which she has left behind her,
George Sand emerges for us with one radiant perception which must be
included in whatever religion animates a democratic society: "Everyone
must be happy, so that the happiness of a few may not be criminal and
cursed by God."
One of George Sand's French critics, M. Caro, a member of the
Academy, who deals somewhat austerely with her religiose
enthusiasms and with her Utopian projects for social reformation,
remarks gravely and not without tenderness:
"The one thing needful to this soul, so strong, so rich in enthusiasm, is
a humble moral quality that she disdains, and when she has occasion to
speak of it, even slanders,--namely resignation. This is not, as she
seems to think, the sluggish virtue of base souls, who, in their
superstitious servitude to force, hasten to crouch beneath every yoke.
That is a false and degrading resignation; genuine resignation grows
out of the conception of the universal order, weighed against which
individual sufferings, without ceasing to be a ground of merit, cease to
constitute a right of revolt. ... Resignation, in the true, the philosophical,
the Christian sense, is a manly acceptance of moral law and also of the
laws essential to the social order; it is a free adherence to order, a
sacrifice approved by reason of a part of one's private good and of one's
personal freedom, not to might nor to the tyranny of a human caprice,
but to the exigencies of the common weal, which subsists only by the
concord of individual liberty with obedient passions."
Well, resigned in the sense of defeated, George Sand never became; nor
did she, perhaps, ever wholly acquiesce in that scheme of things which

M. Caro impressively designates as "the universal order." Yet with age,
the abandonment of many distractions, the retreat to Nohant, the
consolations of nature, and her occupation with tales of pastoral life,
beginning with La Mare au Diable, there develops within her, there
diffuses itself around her, there appears in her work a charm like that
which falls upon green fields from the level rays of the evening sun
after a day of storms. It is not the charm, precisely, of resignation; it is
the charm of serenity--the serenity of an old revolutionist who no
longer expects victory in the morning yet is secure in her confidence of
a final triumph, and still more secure in the goodness of her cause. "A
hundred times in life," she declares, "the good that one does seems to
serve no immediate purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another
the tradition of well wishing and well doing, without which all would
perish." At the outset of her career we compared her with Shelley. In
her last phase, she reminds us rather of the authors of Far from the
Madding Crowd and The Mill on the Floss, and of Wordsworth, once,
too, a torch of revolution, turning to his Michaels and his
leech-gatherers and his Peter Bells. Her exquisite pictures of pastoral
life are idealizations of it; her representations of the peasant are not
corroborated by Zola's; to the last she approaches the shield of human
nature from the golden side. But for herself at least she has found a real
secret of happiness in country life, tranquil work, and a right direction
given to her own heart and conscience.
It is at about this point in her spiritual development that she turns
towards Gustave Flaubert--perhaps a little suspiciously at first, yet
resolved from the first, according to her natural instinct and her now
fixed principles, to stimulate by believing in his admirable qualities.
Writing from Nohant in 1866 to him at Croisset, she