In all this we are passing from the second element in George Sand to the third, — her aspiration for a social new-birth, a renaissance sociale. It is eminently the ideal of France; it was hers. Her religion connected itself with this ideal. In the convent where she was brought up, she had in youth had an awakening of fervent mystical piety in the Catholic form. That form she could not keep. Popular religion of all kinds, with its deep internal impossibilities, its “heaven and hell serving to cover the illogical manifestations of the Divinity’s apparent designs respecting us,” its “God made in our image, silly and malicious, vain and puerile, irritable or tender, after our fashion,” lost all sort of hold upon her: —
“Communion with such a God is impossible to me, I confess it. He is wiped out from my memory: there is no corner where I can find him any more. Nor do I find such a God out of doors either; he is not in the fields and waters, he is not in the starry sky. No, nor yet in the churches where men bow themselves; it is an extinct message, a dead letter, a thought that has done its day. Nothing of this belief, nothing of this God, subsists in me any longer.”
She refused to lament over the loss, to esteem it other than a benefit: —
“It is an addition to our stock of light, this detachment from the idolatrous conception of religion. It is no loss of the religious sense, as the persisters in idolatry maintain. It is quite the contrary, it is a restitution of allegiance to the true Divinity. It is a step made in the direction of this Divinity, it is an abjuration of the dogmas which did him dishonor.”
She does not attempt to give of this Divinity an account much more precise than that which we have in Wordsworth,— “a presence that disturbs me with the joy of animating thoughts.”
“Everything is divine (she says), even matter; everything is superhuman, even man. God is everywhere; he is in me in a measure proportioned to the little that I am. My present life separates me from him just in the degree determined by the actual state of childhood of our race. Let me content myself, in all my seeking, to feel after him, and to possess of him as much as this imperfect soul can take in with the intellectual sense I have.”
And she concludes: —
“The day will come when we shall no longer talk about God idly, nay, when we shall talk about him as little as possible. We shall cease to set him forth dogmatically, to dispute about his nature. We shall put compulsion on no one to pray to him, we shall leave the whole business of worship within the sanctuary of each man’s conscience. And this will happen when we are really religious.”
Meanwhile the sense of this spirit or presence which animates us, the sense of the divine, is our stronghold and our consolation. A man may say of it: “It comes not by my desert, but the atom of divine sense given to me nothing can rob me of.” Divine sense, — the phrase is a vague one; but it stands to Madame Sand for that to which are to be referred “all the best thoughts and the best actions of life, suffering endured, duty achieved, whatever purifies our existence, whatever vivifies our love.”
Madame Sand is a Frenchwoman, and her religion is therefore, as we might expect, with peculiar fervency social. Always she has before her mind “the natural law which will have it (the italics are her own) that the species man cannot subsist and prosper but by association.” Whatever else we may be in creation, we are, first and foremost, “at the head of the species which are called by instinct, and led by necessity, to the life of association.” The word love — the great word, as she justly says, of the New Testament — acquires from her social enthusiasm a peculiar significance to her: —
“The word is a great one, because it involves infinite consequences. To love means to help one another, to have joint aspirations, to act in concert, to labor for the same end, to develop to its ideal consummation the fraternal instinct, thanks to which mankind have brought the earth under their dominion. Every time that he has been false to this instinct which is his law of life, his natural destiny, man has seen his temples crumble, his societies dissolve, his intellectual sense go wrong, his moral sense die out. The future is founded on love.”
So long as love is thus spoken of in the general, the ordinary serious Englishman will have no difficulty in inclining himself with respect while Madame Sand speaks of it. But when he finds that love implies, with her, social equality, he will begin to be staggered. And in truth for almost every Englishman Madame Sand’s strong language about equality, and about France as the chosen vessel for exhibiting it, will sound exaggerated. “The human ideal,” she says, “as well as the social ideal, is to achieve equality.” France, which has made equality its rallying cry, is therefore “the nation which loves and is loved,” la nation qui aime et qu’on aime. The republic of equality is in her eyes “an ideal, a philosophy, a religion.” She invokes the “holy doctrine of social liberty and fraternal equality, ever reappearing as a ray of love and truth amidst the storm.” She calls it “the goal of man and the law of the future.” She thinks it the secret of the civilization of France, the most civilized of nations. Amid the disasters of the late war she cannot forbear a cry of astonishment at the neutral nations, insensibles à l’égorgement d’une civilisation comme la nôtre, “looking on with insensibility while a civilization such as ours has its throat cut.” Germany, with its stupid ideal of corporalism and Kruppism, is contrasted with France, full of social dreams, too civilized for war, incapable of planning and preparing war for twenty years, she is so incapable of hatred; — nous sommes si incapables de haïr! We seem to be listening, not to George Sand, but to M. Victor Hugo, half genius, half charlatan; to M. Victor Hugo, or even to one of those French declaimers in whom we come down to no genius and all charlatan.
The form of such outbursts as we have quoted will always be distasteful to an Englishman. It is to be remembered that they came from Madame Sand under the pressure and anguish of the terrible calamities of 1870. But what we are most concerned with, and what Englishmen in general regard too little, is the degree of truth contained in these allegations that France is the most civilized of nations, and that she is so, above all, by her “holy doctrine of equality.” How comes the idea to be so current; and to be passionately believed in, as we have seen, by such a woman as George Sand? It was so passionately believed in by her, that when one seeks, as I am now seeking, to recall her image, the image is incomplete if the passionate belief is kept from appearing.
I will not, with my scanty space, now discuss the belief; but I will seek to indicate how it must have commended itself, I think, to George Sand. I have somewhere called France “the country of Europe where the people is most alive.” The people is what interested George Sand. And in France the people is, above all, the peasant. The workman in Paris or in other great towns of France may afford material for such pictures as those which M. Zola has lately given us in L’Assommoir — pictures of a kind long ago labelled by Madame Sand as “the literature of mysteries of iniquity, which men of talent and imagination try to bring into fashion.” But the real people in France, the foundation of things there, both in George Sand’s eyes and in reality, is the peasant. The peasant was the object of Madame Sand’s fondest predilections in the present, and happiest hopes in the future. The Revolution and its doctrine of equality had made the French peasant. What wonder, then, if she saluted the doctrine as a holy and paramount one?
And the French peasant is really, so far as I can see, the largest and strongest element of soundness which the body social of any European nation possesses. To him is due that astonishing recovery which France has made since her defeat, and which George Sand predicted in the very hour of ruin. Yes, in 1870 she predicted ce reveil général qui va suivre, à la grande surprise des autres nations, l’espèce d’agonie où elles nous voient tombés, “the general re-arising which, to the astonishment of other nations, is about to follow the sort of agony in which they now see us lying.” To the condition, character, and qualities of the French peasant this recovery is in the main due. His material well-being is known to all of us.
M. de Laveleye, the well-known economist, a Belgian and a Protestant, says that France, being the country of Europe where the soil is more divided than anywhere except in Switzerland and Norway, is at the same time the country where well-being is most widely spread, where wealth has of late years increased most, and where population is least outrunning the limits which, for the comfort and progress of the working classes themselves, seem necessary. George Sand could see, of course, the well-being of the French peasant, for we can all see it.
But there is more. George Sand was a woman, with a woman’s ideal of gentleness, of “the charm of good manners,” as essential to civilization. She has somewhere spoken admirably of the variety and balance of forces which go to make up true civilization; “certain forces of weakness, docility, attractiveness, suavity, are here just as real forces as forces of vigor, encroachment, violence, or brutality.” Yes, as real forces, although Prince Bismarck cannot see it; because human nature requires them, and, often as they may be baffled, and slow as may be the process of their asserting themselves, mankind is not satisfied with its own civilization, and keeps fidgeting at it and altering it again and again, until room is made for them. George Sand thought the French people, — meaning principally, again, by the French people the people properly so called, the peasant, — she thought it “the most kindly, the most amiable, of all peoples.” Nothing is more touching than to read in her Journal, written in 1870, while she was witnessing what seemed to be “the agony of the Latin races,” and undergoing what seemed to be the process of “dying in a general death of one’s family, one’s country, and one’s nation,” how constant is her defence of the people, the peasant, against her Republican friends. Her Republican friends were furious with the peasant; accused him of stolidity, cowardice, want of patriotism; accused him of having given them the Empire, with all its vileness; wanted to take away from him the suffrage. Again and again does George Sand take up his defence, and warn her friends of the folly and danger of their false estimate of him. “The contempt of the masses, there,” she cries, “is the misfortune and crime of the present moment!” “To execrate the people,” she exclaims again, “is real blasphemy; the people is worth more than we are.”
If the peasant gave us the Empire, says Madame Sand, it was because he saw the parties of liberals disputing, gesticulating, and threatening to tear one another asunder and France too; he was told the Empire is peace, and he accepted the Empire. The peasant was deceived, he is uninstructed, he moves slowly; but he moves, he has admirable virtues, and in him, says George Sand, is our life: —
“Poor Jacques Bonhomme! accuse thee and despise thee who will; for my part I pity thee, and in spite of thy faults I shall always love thee. Never will I forget how, a child, I was carried asleep on thy shoulders, how I was given over to thy care and followed thee everywhere, to the field, the stall, the cottage. They are all dead, those good old people who have borne me in their arms; but I remember them well, and I appreciate at this hour, to the minutest detail, the pureness, the kindness, the patience, the good humor, the poetry, which presided over that rustic education amidst disasters of like kind with those which we are undergoing now. Why should I quarrel with the peasant because on certain points he feels and thinks differently from what I do? There are other essential points on which we may feel eternally at one with him, — probity and charity.”
Another generation of peasants had grown up since that first revolutionary generation of her youth, and equality, as its reign proceeded, had not deteriorated but improved them.
“They have advanced greatly in self-respect and well-being, these peasants from twenty years old to forty: they never ask for anything. When one meets them they no longer take off their hat. If they know you they come up to you and hold out their hand. All foreigners who stay with us are struck with their good bearing, with their amenity, and the simple, friendly, and polite ease of their behavior. In presence of people whom they esteem they are, like their fathers, models of tact and politeness; but they have more than that mere sentiment of equality which was all that their fathers had, — they have the idea of equality, and the determination to maintain it. This step upwards they owe to their having the franchise. Those who would fain treat them as creatures of a lower order dare not now show this disposition to their face; it would not be pleasant.”
Mr. Hamerton’s interesting book about French life has much, I think, to confirm this account of the French peasant. What I have seen of France myself (and I have seen something) is fully in agreement with it. Of a civilization and an equality which makes the peasant thus human, gives to the bulk of the people well-being, probity, charity, self-respect, tact, and good manners, let us pardon Madame Sand if she feels and speaks enthusiastically. Some little variation on our own eternal trio of Barbarians, Philistines, Populace, or on the eternal solo of Philistinism among our brethren of the United States and the Colonies, is surely permissible.
Where one is more inclined to differ from Madame Sand is in her estimate of her Republican friends of the educated classes. They may stand, she says, for the genius and the soul of France; they represent its “exalted imagination and profound sensibility,” while the peasant represents its humble, sound, indispensable body. Her protégé, the peasant, is much ruder with those eloquent gentlemen, and has his own name for one and all of them, l’avocat, by which he means to convey his belief that words are more to be looked for from that quarter than seriousness and profit. It seems to me by no means certain but that the peasant is in the right.
George Sand herself has said admirable things of these friends of hers; of their want of patience, temper, wisdom; of their “vague and violent way of talking”; of their interminable flow of “stimulating phrases, cold as death.” Her own place is of course with the party and propaganda of organic change. But George Sand felt the poetry of the past; she had no hatreds; the furies, the follies, the self-deceptions of secularist and revolutionist fanatics filled her with dismay. They are, indeed, the great danger of France, and it is amongst the educated and articulate classes of France that they prevail. If the educated and articulate classes in France were as sound in their way as the inarticulate peasant is in his, France would present a different spectacle. Not “imagination and sensibility” are so much required from the educated classes of France, as simpler, more serious views of life; a knowledge how great a part conduct (if M. Challemel-Lacour will allow me to say so) fills in it; a better example. The few who see this, such as Madame Sand among the dead, and M. Renan among the living, perhaps awaken on that account, amongst quiet observers at a distance, all the more sympathy; but in France they are isolated.
All the later work of George Sand, however, all her hope of genuine social renovation, take the simple and serious ground so necessary. “The cure for us is far more simple than we will believe. All the better natures amongst us see it and feel it. It is a good direction given by ourselves to our hearts and consciences; — une bonne direction donnée par nous-mêmes à nos coeurs et à nos consciences.” These are among the last words of her Journal of 1870.
* * * * *
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 left them behind her, and men’s memory of her will leave them behind also. There will remain of her to mankind the sense of benefit and stimulus from the passage upon earth of that large and frank nature, of that large and pure utterance, — the the large utterance of the early gods. There will remain an admiring and ever widening report of that great and ingenuous soul, simple, affectionate, without vanity, without pedantry, human,
equitable, patient, kind. She believed herself, she said, “to be in sympathy, across time and space, with a multitude of honest wills which interrogate their conscience and try to put themselves in accord with it.” This chain of sympathy will extend more and more.
It is silent, that eloquent voice! it is sunk, that noble, that speaking head! we sum up, as we best can, what she said to us, and we bid her adieu. From many hearts in many lands a troop of tender and grateful regrets converge towards her humble churchyard in Berry. Let them be joined by these words of sad homage from one of a nation which she esteemed, and which knew her very little and very ill. Her guiding thought, the guiding thought which she did her best to make ours too, “the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man’s normal life as we shall one day know it,” is in harmony with words and promises familiar to that sacred place where she lies. Exspectat resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi sæculi.
WORDSWORTH
I remember hearing Lord Macaulay say, after Wordsworth’s death, when subscriptions were being collected to found a memorial of him, that ten years earlier more money could have been raised in Cambridge alone, to do honor to Wordsworth, than was now raised all through the country. Lord Macaulay had, as we know, his own heightened and telling way of putting things, and we must always make allowance for it. But probably it is true that Wordsworth has never, either before or since, been so accepted and popular, so established in possession of the minds of all who profess to care for poetry, as he was between the years 1830 and 1840, and at Cambridge. From the very first, no doubt, he had his believers and witnesses. But I have myself heard him declare that, for he knew not how many years, his poetry had never brought him in enough to buy his shoe-strings. The poetry-reading public was very slow to recognize him, and was very easily drawn away from him. Scott effaced him with this public. Byron effaced him.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 82
