Home Life of Great Authors Part 12

Madame Hugo died in 1868, and it was always a great grief to her husband that she could not have lived to share his return to his native land, which took place after the downfall of Louis Napoleon in 1870. After nineteen years of exile, he returned to his country only to find it in the hands of the Prussians first, and of the Commune afterward. One of his companions on that eventful journey thus describes the feelings of the returned exile:--

"Making good their retreat from Mezieres, on their way to Paris, the remnant of Vinoy's corps, poor, hara.s.sed creatures, covered with dust and discolored with powder, pale with exertion and discouragement, were lying all along the road. Close behind them were the Uhlans. There was no alternative for them but flight, if they would escape the disaster that had befallen the army at Sedan.

Defeat was written in their faces, demoralization was evident in their att.i.tude, they were dejected and dirty, they were like pebbles driven along by a hurricane. But what of that? Anyhow, they were soldiers of France; their uniform proclaimed their nationality: they wore the blue tunic and the red trousers,--but what was of infinitely more consequence, they were carrying their colors back with them. Their defeat did not prevent them bringing back the tri-color safe and sound.

"Great tears rolled from Victor Hugo's eyes. He leaned from the carriage-window, and with a voice thrilling in its earnestness, he kept shouting: 'Vive la France, vive l'armee, vive la patrie!'

Exhausted as they were with hunger and fatigue, the bewildered soldiers looked up. They scarcely comprehended what he said, but he continued his shouting, and it was almost like an order of quick march to them all, when they made out that they were being a.s.sured that they had done their duty, and that it was by no fault of theirs that they had sustained defeat.

"And so the train went on. The tears still lost themselves in Victor Hugo's snowy beard. He had lived in the proud illusion that France was invincible; he was a soldier's son, and could not conceive that the soldiers of his country were not pledged to glory."

It was ten o'clock when the train reached Paris, but a great crowd which had been gathering for hours was there to receive him. With continued acclamations they bore him to the house of his friend Paul Meurice, where he was to stay, and called upon him continually for a speech. He said a few words to the crowd, at the station and at the house, but gladly sought the seclusion of his new home, being completely overcome with emotion. This was at the beginning of the investment of the city by the Prussian troops, and he witnessed the whole of the siege of Paris, and endured its privations with the people. He also witnessed the terrible deeds of the Communists, but--sympathizing, as he always had done, with the poor and the downtrodden--only to condemn them with the utmost vehemence of his nature. Still, he desired their pardon when all was over, feeling for the ignorance which had caused their misguided zeal. About this time his son Charles died very suddenly, which was a great blow to him, and he began to feel that all things were falling away from him.

The death of his youngest son, Francois, in 1873, removed the last prop of his age, and only two young grandchildren remained of all who had composed his beloved family. The mother of these children, and her second husband, however, were very much loved by the old poet, and watched very tenderly over his declining years. The children were a source of constant interest and pleasure to him, and have become well known to the world through his work upon "The Art of being a Grandfather." Of the honors which were showered upon him from every side in his closing years, it is useless to write. All are familiar with them, as with the magnificent demonstrations after his death. It is safe to say that few men have been so honored while living, or held in such sacred remembrance after death.

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GEORGE SAND.

Upon no woman of the century has the public fixed its eye with a more eager interest and curiosity than upon Aurore Dudevant, known to the world as George Sand.

The utmost heights of panegyric and adulation have been scaled in describing her and her work; also the lowest depths of denunciation and of calumny. Her admirers describe her as being not only the greatest genius of her time, which perhaps few will dispute, but as being the most magnificent and adorable of women as well; while her detractors can find no language in which to express the depths of their loathing both for her life and some of her works. As usual, a just estimate of such a character as this will be found between the two extremes. She was neither a monster nor a saint, but a woman of magnificent qualities and of defects upon a corresponding scale. As with her life, so with her works. Some are undoubtedly pernicious to an alarming degree, while the influence of others cannot by any stretch of imagination be called bad.

The two kinds may perhaps be divided under the head of earlier and later works. When the tumultuous feelings and wild visions of youth were calmed by age, a new kind of literary product came forth. And her life in its latter years was as quiet as her books, and ran as little against the traditions and usages of mankind.

George Sand was born in 1804, and descended from Marshal Saxe, the natural son of the King of Poland. This Marshal Saxe was one of the bravest but most licentious men of his time,--a time not noted for its domestic virtues. She was brought up in the country until fifteen years of age, in the midst of the elegancies of an aristocratic home. But her unbounded vitality called loudly for an out-of-door life, and she lived the life of a boy, never wearying of its rude sports, and enjoying its sometimes dangerous excitements. At the close of her fifteenth year she was taken to the Augustine Convent in Paris, where she remained for three years, and where she pa.s.sed through a very intense religious experience and came near becoming a nun. It is a curious piece of speculation to try to imagine what her life as a nun would have been, had this design been carried out. Would the prayers and litanies, the penances and the fasts, have tamed her wild blood? Would her nature have still a.s.serted itself under the cap of the sister? would she have led a revolt against authority within the church as she did without? Are there any such fierce, tumultuous natures as hers to-day kneeling on stony cloister floors? Can matins and vespers, the odors of incense, and the sacred ceremonial of the church fill up for an ardent nature all that the service of the world supplies? We shall never know; for the real history of a faithful daughter of the church will never be written. The story of the three years of George Sand's convent life is very charming, full of variety and sincerity, and matchless in point of style; but it is a fragment.

She came out of the convent a young woman knowing absolutely nothing of real life. The object of all who have charge of young girls in France is to keep them in perfect ignorance of the world. The safety that lies in knowledge is utterly forbidden to them. They are supposed to be children, and are watched over as such until a marriage can be arranged.

And this marriage, whatever it may be, is usually accepted by the girl as an escape from a sort of slavery. She is always told that she may only do the things she desires to do after marriage. And it is very unusual for any girl to object to the wishes of her friends in this matter. The whole system of marriage in France is so utterly abominable that no other civilized land would tolerate it; and this sacrifice of the young and ignorant is only one of its diabolical features. Aurore Dudevant did not seem to object more than the rest. She was married, and lived for eight years with her husband, becoming the mother of two children.

She then left him and her estate of Nohant, and went up to Paris, taking her two children with her. She sacrificed her personal fortune--which was considerable--in doing so, and was obliged to earn her own living.

She tried various things in the artistic line before she essayed the writing of books. At last with one grand bound she leaped before the world in "Indiana." Of course she had written some things of small value before this, but that wonderful book was really her introduction to the world. And it brought the whole literary world to her feet. Thereafter her friends were the first men of France. De Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, Michel, Alfred de Musset, Chopin, Liszt, Delacroix, Beranger, Sainte-Beuve, Gustave Planche, Mazzini, were her friends, her intimates, or her lovers.

Alfred de Musset was the first who found favor with her heart, it appears; and they were inseparably a.s.sociated for about three years.

This brilliant young poet, so sceptical, so sad, so audacious, so dissolute, was the first of this famous coterie of men to become madly infatuated with George Sand,--but far from the last. It is a.s.serted that each in turn, and many more besides, were the victims of her luring wiles. For many years the wildest stories were afloat concerning her and her enchantments. And the fact that two or three of her most ardent wors.h.i.+ppers ended their lives for her sake only added to the interest and the horror with which the world of respectability and morality looked upon this strange woman. She had broken once for all with the world of conventionality, and was free to follow whatever inclination seized upon her, unrestrained by aught but conscience,--for we are far from thinking that she ever parted permanently with that disagreeable but useful monitor.

So she lived out her brief romance with De Musset, and, apparently unmindful of his tragic end, entered upon a new epoch of her life with that most remarkable modern musical genius, Chopin.

Poor Alfred de Musset has had the sympathy of all cla.s.ses and conditions of men, apparently, from that day to this. She tried to vindicate herself in the affair by publis.h.i.+ng a book ent.i.tled "Elle et Lui,"

"wherein she depicted the sufferings of an angelic woman, all tenderness, love, and patience, whose fate was joined to that of a man all egotism, selfishness, sensuousness, and eccentricity." How grandly the woman suffered, and how wantonly the man flung happiness away, is told with all the impa.s.sioned fervor of George Sand in her early writings. The taste of the whole proceeding was revoltingly low, and no more than matched by that of the rejoinder, which was made in a book called "Lui et Elle," written by Paul de Musset after his brother's death. In this book the picture is reversed: "a hideous woman is portrayed, utterly selfish, dissolute, heartless; and her lover, who is easily recognized as Musset himself, is described as having almost all of the heroic virtues." Both books were thoroughly French,--thoroughly execrable.

Chopin at first feared Madame Sand very much, and refused to be presented to her; but as she persisted in her desire to make the acquaintance of so fine and delicate a genius, they at last met, and the fate of poor Chopin was at once sealed. He was consumed from the very first by an absorbing pa.s.sion, to which no other name but morbid infatuation could be applied. Madame Sand herself describes it in "Lucrezia Floriani" thus:--

"For it seemed as if this fragile being was absorbed and consumed by his affection. . . . Others seek happiness in their attachments; when they no longer find it, the attachment gently vanishes. But he loved for the sake of loving. No amount of suffering was sufficient to discourage him. He could enter upon a new phase, that of woe; but the phase of coldness he could never arrive at. It would have been indeed a phase of physical agony,--for his love was his life, and, delicious or bitter, he had not the power of withdrawing himself a single moment from its domination."

Chopin, suffering from severe sickness, was ordered to a warmer climate; and in the fall of 1837 Madame Sand accompanied him to the Island of Majorca, where she nursed him back to life, although his friends at the time of his departure never thought to see him again, and although he was dangerously ill for a long time after their arrival. This solitude, surrounded by the blue waves of the Mediterranean, and shaded by groves of orange, seemed fitted by its exceeding loveliness for the ardent vows of youthful lovers, still believing in their nave and sweet illusions, sighing for happiness in some desert isle. In this case it was the refuge of those who had grown weary and disenchanted with life, but who hoped in deep devotion to each other to find some solace for their sadness. The memory of those days, like the remembrance of an entrancing ecstasy which Fate grants but once in a lifetime to her most favored children, always remained dear to the heart of Chopin. When he was restored to health they returned to Paris, where their friends.h.i.+p was continued for about eight years. She then severed her connection with him. Liszt asks in regard to this, in his life of Chopin:--

"Has genius ever attained that utter self-abnegation, that sublime humility of heart which gives the power to make those strange sacrifices of the entire Past, of the whole Future; those immolations as courageous as mysterious; those mystic and utter holocausts of self, not temporary and changing, but monotonous and constant,--through whose might alone tenderness may justly claim the higher word devotion? Has not the force of genius its own exclusive and legitimate exactions, and does not the force of woman consist in the abdication of all exactions? Can the purple and burning flames of genius ever float over the immaculate azure of a woman's destiny?"

Liszt also tells us that--

"Chopin spoke frequently and almost by preference of Madame Sand, without bitterness or recrimination. Tears always filled his eyes when he named her; but with a kind of bitter sweetness he gave himself up to the memories of past days, alas, now stripped of their manifold significance. . . . All attempts to fix his attention upon other objects were made in vain; he refused to be comforted, and would constantly speak of the one engrossing subject. . . . He was another great and ill.u.s.trious victim to the transitory attachments occurring between persons of different character, who, experiencing a surprise full of delight in their first sudden meeting, mistake it for a durable feeling, and build hopes and illusions upon it which can never be realized. It is always the nature the most deeply moved, the most absolute in its hopes and attachments, for which all transplantation is impossible, which is destroyed and ruined in the painful awakening from the absorbing dream. . . . Chopin felt, and often repeated, that the sundering of this long friends.h.i.+p, the rupture of this strong tie, broke all the cords which bound him to life."

Her friends say, upon her part, that he was a morbid, dreary invalid, jealous beyond endurance, and that she suffered much at his hands, and separated from him only when she could endure his exactions no longer.

He did not long survive the sundering of their relations, and died in Paris in 1849, very deeply deplored by all admirers of his genius.

Chopin was a wonderfully gifted and very remarkable man, exceedingly reserved, and with little of the egotism of genius. His eyes were blue and dreamy, his smile very sweet, his complexion very fair and delicate, his hair light in color, soft and silky, his nose slightly aquiline. His bearing was so distinguished, and his manners stamped with so much high breeding, that involuntarily he was always treated _en prince_. His gestures were many and graceful, yet he was on the whole serene in his bearing, and generally gay in company, though subject to moods of deep melancholy. He was pa.s.sionately devoted to Poland all his life, and when he was dying requested the Countess Potocka to sing to him the melodies of his country. He was deeply religious in nature, a devout Catholic.

It was during the years of which we have been speaking that George Sand produced her most famous works. "Indiana" was followed by "Valentine,"

"Lelia," and "Lettres d'un Voyageur." Others followed in quick succession, many of them dealing with the subject of marriage in such a manner as to raise a most violent storm about her head. People who had never read these books described them as being of revolting indecency; and that impression prevails in many quarters even yet. In point of fact, she is no more open to the charge of indelicacy than any prominent English novelist of the day. The opinions are bad enough many times, but the style is always pure and perfect. This is the answer she herself made to her critics:--

"I was astounded when a few Saint Simonians, conscientious and sincere philanthropists, estimable and sincere seekers of truth, asked me what I would put in the place of husbands. I answered them navely that it was marriage; in the same way as in the place of priests who have so much compromised religion, I believe it is religion which ought to be put. . . . That _love_ which I erect and crown over the ruins of the infamous, is my Utopia, my dream, my poetry. That love is grand, n.o.ble, beautiful, voluntary, eternal; but that love is marriage such as Jesus made it, such as Saint Paul explained it. This I ask of society as an innovation, as an inst.i.tution lost in the night of ages, which it would be opportune to revive, to draw from the dust of aeons, and the shrine of habits, if it wishes to see real conjugal fidelity, real repose, and the real sanct.i.ty of the family, replace the species of shameful contract and stupid despotism bred by the infamous decrepitude of the world."

It must always be remembered that she wrote of French marriages, in which there is no pretence of having love to start with; and if we remember this, her language can scarcely be considered too strong. The system is utterly vile, and her hatred of it an honor to her in every sense. Had she done nothing worse than to protest against this form of marriage few would condemn her; her condemnation comes rather from the life she felt it consistent with her theories to live for many years.

What the world said was: "The welfare of the human family demands that a marriage legally made shall never be questioned or undone. Marriage is not a union depending on love, or congeniality, or any such condition.

It is just as sacred when made for money, or for ambition, or for l.u.s.t of the flesh, or for any other purpose, however ign.o.ble or base, as when contracted in the spirit of the purest mutual love." Against all this, George Sand, both with pen and life, protested. She contended that it was love alone which made marriage anything but a disgusting sin. We have heard much of this in these latter days, even in our own country, but it was George Sand who first struck the keynote; the doctrine is essentially hers in all its parts. That she denounced the whole system of marriages of convenience, is an honor to her; that she proclaimed love as the only true foundation for marriage, is equally an honor; but that she a.s.sailed the inst.i.tution of legal marriage as a whole, and overleaped its bounds and became a law to herself in the matter, is her weakness and her shame. It is frequently denied that she did this. It is said that she did not a.s.sail the inst.i.tution of marriage, but only the things that are perpetrated in its name.

"But all the same [as another has well said], her eloquent expositions of ill-a.s.sorted unions, her daring appeals from the obligations they impose to the affections they outrage, her a.s.sertion of the rights of nature over the conventions of society, have the final effect of justifying the violation of duty on the precarious ground of pa.s.sion and inclination.

"n.o.body who knows what the actual life of George Sand has been can doubt for a moment the true nature of her opinions on the subject of marriage. It is not a pleasant subject to touch, and we should shrink from it if it were not as notorious as everything else by which she has become famous in her time. It forms in reality as much a part of the philosophy she desires to impress upon the world as the books through which she has expanded her theory. It is neither more nor less than her theory of freedom and independence in the matter of pa.s.sion (we dare not dignify it by any higher name) put into action,--rather vagrant action, we fear, but on that account all the more decisive."

Society and she were naturally at war from the beginning of her career; and she suffered from it, though she dealt many bitter blows at it even while she suffered. "What has it done," she says in one place,--

"what has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for our children, this society s.h.i.+elded with such care? Nothing. Those whom it calls vain complainers, and rebels, and madmen, may reply: Suffer us to bewail our martyrs, poets without a country that we are, forlorn singers well versed in the causes of their misery and of our own. You do not comprehend the malady which killed them; they themselves did not comprehend it. If one or two of us at the present day open our eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange and unaccountable good Providence? and have we not to seek our grain of faith in storm and darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the absence of all sympathy, all example, all brotherly aid, all protection and countenance in high places? Try yourselves to speak to your brethren heart to heart, conscience to conscience! Try it!

but you cannot, busied as you are with watching and patching up in all directions your d.y.k.es which the flood is invading: the material existence of this society of yours absorbs all your cares, and requires more than all your efforts. Meanwhile the powers of human thought are growing into strength and rise on all sides around you.

Among these threatening apparitions there are some which fade away and re-enter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no longer with the horrors of the present chaos; but there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and alive, to say, 'You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we, we do not mean to die.'"

But she rises after a while out of her depths of pa.s.sionate contention with a world out of joint, with the reign of stupidity and the tyranny of convention, into serener heights; and in her later books she gives us exquisite pictures of nature, with which she has the closest sympathy; lovely stories of rural life and gentle tales of perfectly pure love.

Her pa.s.sionate resentment against the world has worn itself out, and she is calmer, wiser now. Her daughter, too, Solange, has grown to be a woman and has a lover of her own, and the household thoughts and cares, and the tenderness of a serious and unselfish cast which creep into a mother's heart upon such occasions, shed their sweetness upon this wayward soul, and inspire it with congenial utterances. Now she looks back and says:--

"My poor children, my own flesh and blood, will perhaps turn upon me and say: 'You are leading us wrong; you mean to ruin us as well as yourself. Are you not unhappy, reprobated, evil spoken of? What have you gained by these unequal struggles, by these much-trumpeted duels of yours with Custom and Belief? Let us do as others do; let us get what is to be got from this easy and tolerant world.' This is what they will say to me. Or at best, if, out of tenderness for me, or from their own natural disposition, they give ear to my words and believe me, whither should I guide them? Into what abysses shall we go and plunge ourselves, we three? for we shall be our own three upon earth, and not one soul with us. What shall I reply to them, if they come and say to me: 'Yes, life is unbearable in a world like this. Let us die together. Show us the path of Bernica, or the Lake of Stenio, or the glaciers of Jacques'?"

Again, in the later times, she said:--

"Let us all try to be saints, and if we succeed we will know all the more how difficult a thing it is, and what indulgence is owed to those who are not yet saints. Then we shall acknowledge that there is something to be modified, either in law or opinion; for the aim of society should be to render perfection accessible to all, and man is very feeble when he struggles alone against the mad torrent of custom and of ideas."

A very wise, saying truly, written out of her own experience. Sad, too, as is much of her later writing, though there is not in it the pa.s.sionate despair of her earlier work.

She lived to be seventy-two years old, and had known and experienced many phases of life,--the tumultuous pa.s.sions and the wild revolt of youth, the cooler and more self-contained life of middle age, and the sombre color of a rather hopeless old age. Even in age she had her pleasures, however. She delighted in her grandchildren, in books, in pictures, in nature, and in work. Her unwearied pen moved until the last, and did not lose its cunning. There was much of the old strength and power to the last. But she had ceased to desire to destroy; she sought at last to build up.

Here are two descriptions of her as she appeared to different observers, in youth and in later life. Heine, who saw with the eye of an artist and wrote with the pen of a critic, described her in youth:--

"George Sand, the greatest of French writers, is a woman of remarkable beauty. Like the genius revealed in her writings, her countenance may rather be called beautiful than fascinating. The face of George Sand has precisely the character of Grecian regularity. The cut of her features has not exactly the severity of antique models; her face is softened by modern sentiment, which veils it with sadness. Her forehead is not high, and her rich and luxuriant brown hair falls from either side of her head upon her shoulders. Her eyes are not brilliant; has their fire gone out under frequent tears, or only in her writings? George Sand's eyes are soft and tranquil. Her nose is neither aquiline, nor spiritual, nor pugged; it is a straight and ordinary nose. Around her mouth habitually plays a smile of kindness and benevolence, but not very bewitching: her inferior lip protrudes a little, and seems to reveal a fatigue of the senses. Her chin is finely formed. Her shoulders are magnificent; also her hands, her arms, her feet, which are very small. George Sand is beautiful like the Venus of Milo."

Now hear one who described her in old age:--