The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 49, November, 1861. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ solutions of the ills that are, and are permitted to be. She was never tempted to become an atheist, never lost sight of the Divine in life, yet the necessity of a terrible fatalism seemed to envelop her. With her numerous friends, she sought escape from the dilemma through various theories of social development; and they often sat or walked half through the night, discussing the fortunes of the race, and the intentions of God. With her most intimate set, this sometimes led to a jest, and "It is time to settle the social question" became the formula of announcing dinner. These considerations led the way to her adoption of socialistic theories in later years, of which she herself informs us, but hints at the same time at many important reservations in her acceptance of them.

      In process of time she visited Italy with Alfred de Musset. The fever seized on her at Genoa, and she saw the wonders of the fair land through half-shut eyes, alternately shivering and burning. In the languor of disease, she allowed the tossing of a coin to decide whether she should visit Rome or Venice. Venice came uppermost ten times, and she chose to consider it an affair of destiny. Her long stay in this city suggested the themes of several of her romances, and the "Lettres d'un Voyageur" might almost be pages from her own journal. Her companion was here seized with a terrible illness. She nursed him day and night through all its length, being so greatly fatigued at the time of his recovery that she saw every object double, through want of sleep. Yet De Musset went forth from his sick-room with a heart changed towards her. Hatred had taken the place of love. Some say that this cruel change was the punishment of as cruel a deception; others call it a mania of the fever, perpetuating itself thenceforth in a brain sound as to all else. The world does not know about this, and she herself tells us nothing. In the "Lettres d'un Voyageur," however, she gives us to understand that constancy is not her forte, and a sigh escapes with this confession, "Prie pour moi, ô Marguerite Le Conte!"

      George Sand was now launched,—with brilliant success, in the world of letters, unheeding the conventional restraints of domestic life. The choicest spirits of the day gathered round her. She was the luminous centre of a circle of light. She did not hold a salon, the mimic court of every Frenchwoman of distinction,—nor were the worldly wits of fashion her vain and supercilious satellites. But De Lamennais climbed to her mansarde, and unfolded therein his theories of saintly and visionary philosophy. Liszt and Chopin bound her in the enchantment of their wonderful melodies. De Balzac feasted her in his fantastic lodgings, and lighted her across the square with a silver-gilt flambeau, himself attired in a flounced satin dressing-gown, of which he was extremely proud. Pierre Leroux instructed her in the old and the new religions, and taught her the history of secret societies. Louis Blanc, Cavaignac, and Pauline Garcia were bound to her by ties of intimacy. She knew Lablache, Quinet, Miekiewiez, whom she calls the equal of Lord Byron. Her intimates in her own province were men of high character and intelligence, nor were friends wanting among her own sex. Good-will and sympathy, therefore, not ill-will and antipathy, inspired her best works. Her views of parties were charitable and conciliatory, and her revolutionism more reconstructive than destructive. Yet, with all this array of good company, we cannot accord her a miraculous immunity from the fatalities of her situation. Of the guilt we are not here called upon to judge; of the suffering many pages in this record of her life bear witness. Little as we know, however, of her own power of self-protection against the tyranny of the selfish and the sensual, we yet feel as if the really base could never have held her in other than the briefest thraldom, and as if her nobler nature must have continually asserted and reasserted itself, with a constant tendency towards that higher liberty which she had sought in the abandonment of outward restraints, but which can never be thus attained. Some great moral safeguards she had in her tireless industry, her love of art, her honesty and geniality of nature, and, above all, in her passionate love for her children. Happily, these deep and solid forces of Nature are calculated to outlast the heyday of the blood, and to redeem its errors.

      In connection with her domestic life, she gives some explanations which must not be overlooked. She did not at first quit her husband's roof with an intention of permanent absence, but with the intention of a periodical return thither. In time, however, her presence there became unwelcome, and she found those arrangements of which, as she says, she had no right to complain, but which she could not recognize. Friends intervened, advising an effectual reintegration of the broken marriage; but against this, she says, her conscience, no less than her heart, rebelled. There existed, indeed, no virtual bond between herself and her late husband. Whatever may have been the beginning of their estrangement, it seems certain that he acquiesced in her independence with easy satisfaction. He wrote to her,—"I shall not put up at your lodgings when I come to Paris, because I wish as little to be in your way as I wish to have you in mine." At the same time, by visiting her there, and appearing with her in public, he had given a certain recognition to her position. There was, therefore, no room for penitence on the one side, for forgiveness on the other, and, through these, for a renewable moral relation between the two. The law took cognizance of these facts, when, some years later, M. Dudevant brought an action for civil divorce, wishing to recover possession of his children. His complicity in what had taken place, and the amicable nature of the separation, were so fully established, that the court, recognizing in the parties neither husband nor wife, followed the pleadings of Nature, and bestowed the children where, in the present instance, they were likely to find the warmest cherishing. Under this decision, she gave up the estate of Nohant to M. Dudevant, who, becoming weary of its management, returned it to her, by a later compromise, in exchange for other property, and the home of her childhood now shelters her declining years.

      For the history draws near its close; more travels, more novels, more successes, more sorrows, much fond talk of her friends, many of whom death has endeared to her, a shadowy sketch of her seven years' intimacy with Chopin, a sob over the untimely grave of her married daughter, and the wonderful book is ended. Surely, it tells its own moral; and we, who have woven into short measure the tissue of its relations, need not appear either as the apologist of a very exceptional woman, or as the vindicator of laws inevitable and universal, the mischief of whose violation no human knowledge can justly fathom. The world knows that the life before us is no example for women to follow; but it also knows, we think, that she who led it was on the whole an earnest and sincere person, of ardent imagination and large heart, loving the good as well as the beautiful, even if often mistaken in both,—and above all, honest in her errors and their acknowledgment. Gross injustice has, no doubt, been done her. The creations of her powerful fancy have been taken for images of herself, and the popular mind, delighting to elevate all things beyond the bounds of Nature, has made her a monster. It is clear, we think, that those who have represented her as plunged headlong in a career of vice and dissipation, the companion of all that is low and trivial, have slandered alike her acts and her intentions. Like the rest of us, she is the child of her antecedents and surroundings. Her education was as exceptional as her character. Her marriage brought no moral influence to bear upon her. Her separation opened before her a new and strange way, never to be trodden by any with impunity. Yet we do not believe, that, in the most undesirable circumstances of her life, she ever long lost sight of its ideal object. We do not doubt that her zeal for human progress, her sympathy for the wrongs of the race, and her distrust of existing institutions were deep and sincere. We do not doubt that she was devoted in friendship, disinterested in love, ardent in philanthropy. She has seen the poverty and insincerity of society; she has quarrelled with what she calls the shams of sacred things, the merely conventional marriage, the God of bigotry and hypocrisy, the government of oppression and fraud; but she ends by recognizing and demanding the marriage of heart, the God of enlightened faith, the government of order and progress. Responding to the dominant chord of the nineteenth century, she strove to exalt individuality above sociality, and passion above decorum and usage. Nor would she allow any World's Congress of morals to settle the delicate limits between these opposing vital forces, between what we owe to ourselves and what we owe to others. If there be a divine of passion for which it is noble to suffer and sacrifice, there is also a deeper divine of duty, far transcending the other both in sacrifice and in reward. To this divine, too often obscured to all of us, her later life increasingly renders homage; and to its gentle redemption, our loving, pitying hearts—the more loving, the more pitying for her story—are glad to leave her.

      Ave, thou long laborious! Ave, thou worker of wonders, СКАЧАТЬ