Justin McCarthy

“ I believe George Sand is growing into a quiet and beautiful old age. After a life of storm and stress, a life which, metaphorically at least, was "worn by war and passion", her closing years seem likely to be gilded with the calm glory of an autumnal sunset. One is glad to think of her thus happy and peaceful, accepting so tranquilly the reality of old age, still laboring with her unwearied pen, still delighting in books, and landscapes, and friends, and work. The world can well afford to forget as soon as possible her literary and other errors. ”

“ Divested of all startling effects and thrilling dramatic illustrations, these sentiments probably amounted to nothing more dreadful than the belief that an unwedded union between two people who love and are true to each other is less immoral than the legal marriage of two uncongenial creatures who do not love and probably are not true to each other. But the grand, revolutionary idea which George Sand announced was that of the social independence and equality of woman,—the principle that woman is not made for man in any other sense than as man is made for woman. ”

“ There is hardly a woman's heart anywhere in the civilized world which has not felt the vibration of George Sand's thrilling voice. Women who never saw one of her books,—nay, who never heard even her nom de plume, have been stirred by emotions of doubt or fear, or repining or ambition, which they never would have known but for George Sand, and perhaps but for George Sand's uncongenial marriage. ”

“ I find nothing in George Sand which does not do homage to the existence of a principle and a law in everything. This daring woman, who broke with society so early and so conspicuously, has always insisted, through every illustration, character, and catastrophe in her books, that the one only reality, the one only thing that can endure, is the rule of right and of virtue. ”

“ She may be wrong in her principle sometimes, but, at least, she always has a principle. She has a profound and generous faith in the possibilities of human nature; in the capacity of man's heart for purity, self-sacrifice, and self-redemption. Indeed, so far is she from holding counsel with wilful weakness or sin, that I think she sometimes falls into the noble error of painting her heroes as too glorious in their triumph over temptation, in their subjugation of every passion and interest to the dictates of duty and of honor. ”

“ In something of the same way we may compare the influence of George Sand with that of even the greatest living authors of England and America. What influence has Charles Dickens or George Eliot outside the range of the English tongue? But George Sand's genius has been felt as a power in every country of the world where people read any manner of books. It has been felt almost as Rousseau's once was felt; it has aroused anger, terror, pity, or wild and rapturous excitement and admiration; it has rallied around it every instinct in man or woman which is revolutionary ”

“ I know of no one who seems to me to have been open at once to the temptations of woman's nature and man's nature, except this George Sand. Her soul,—her brain,—her style may be described, from one point of view, as exuberantly and splendidly feminine; yet no other woman has ever shown the same power of understanding, and entering into the nature of a man. ”

“ In the woman's book the woman was made the patient, loving, suffering victim; in the man's reply this same woman was depicted as the most utterly selfish and depraved creature the human imagination could conceive. Even if one had no other means whatever of forming an estimate of the character of George Sand, it would be hardly possible to accept as her likeness the hideous picture sketched by Paul de Musset. No woman, I am glad to believe, ever existed in real life so utterly selfish, base, and wicked as his bitter pen has drawn. ”

“ I go so far as to say that, having some knowledge of the literature of fiction in most countries, I am not aware of the existence of any woman but this one, who could draw a real, living, straggling, passion-tortured man. All other novelists of George Sand's sex,—even including Charlotte Brontë,—draw only what I may call "women's men". If ever the two natures could be united in one form,—if ever a single human being could have the soul of man and the soul of woman at once,—George Sand might be described as that physical and psychological phenomenon. ”

“ But, in truth, we shall never judge George Sand and her writings at all, if we insist on criticising them from any point of view set up by the proprieties or even the moralities of Old England or New England. When the passionate young woman,—in whose veins ran the wild blood of Marshal Saxe,—found herself surrendered by legality and prescription to a marriage bond against which her soul revolted, society seemed for her to have resolved itself into its original elements. ”

“ I am afraid some of the ladies who seem to base their scheme of woman's emancipation and equality on the assumption that, by some development of time or process of schooling, a condition of things is to be brought about where difference of sex is no longer to be a disturbing power, will find small comfort or encouragement in the writings of George Sand. She deals in realities altogether; the realities of life, even when they are such as to shallow minds may seem mere sentiments and ecstacies; the realities of society, of suffering, of passion, of inanimate nature. ”

“ For I need hardly tell any intelligent person of to-day that, whatever may be said of George Sand's doctrines, she is no more open to the charge of indelicacy than the authoress of "Romola." I cannot, myself, remember any passage in George Sand's novels which can be called indelicate; and, indeed, her severest and most hostile critics are fond of saying, not without a certain justice, that one of the worst characteristics of her works is the delicacy and beauty of her style, which thus commends to pure and innocent minds certain doctrines that, broadly stated, would repel and shock them. ”

“ Of course, the fundamental principle she would have enforced is always being urged more or less feebly, more or less sincerely; but she made it her own question, and illuminated it by the fervid, fierce rays of her genius and her passion. Secondly, her works are an exposition of the tremendous reality of the feelings which people who call themselves practical are apt to regard with indifference or contempt as mere sentiments. In the long run, the passions decide the life-question one way or the other. ”

“ Never, that I know of, has a living woman been publicly exhibited to the world in a portraiture so hideous as that which Paul de Musset drew of George Sand. Never, that I know of, has any woman gone so near to deserving and justifying such a measure of retaliation. ”

“ Then, of all modern French authors,—I might, perhaps, say of all modern novelists of any country,—George Sand has added to fiction, has annexed from the worlds of reality and of imagination the greatest number of original characters,—of what Emerson calls new organic creations. Moreover, George Sand is, after Rousseau, the one only great French author who has looked directly and lovingly into the face of Nature, and learned the secrets which skies and waters, fields and lanes, can teach to the heart that loves them. ”

“ Especially is it difficult for a woman, as our social life goes, to enter into the feelings of a man. While men and women alike admit the accuracy of certain pictures of women drawn by such artists as Cervantes, Molière, Balzac, and Thackeray, there are few women,—indeed, perhaps there are no women but one,—by whom a man has been so painted as to challenge and compel the recognition and acknowledgment of men. ”

“ Dickens's prose is as bad a model for imitation as a musical performance which is out of tune. Of course, I need hardly say that attention to style is almost as characteristic of French authors in general, as the lack of it is characteristic of English authors; but, even in France, the prose of George Sand stands out conspicuous for its wonderful expressiveness and force, its almost perfect beauty. ”

“ I am afraid that great social revolutionists are not often creatures of the most pure and perfect nature. It is not to patient Griselda you must look for any protest against even the uttermost tyranny of social conventions. One thing I think may, at least, be admitted as part of George Sand's vindication,—that the marriage system in France is the most debased and debasing institution existing in civilized society, now that the buying and selling of slaves has ceased to be a tolerated system. ”

“ Where is that young musician, whose pure, tender, and lofty strains sound sweetly and sadly in the ears, as the very hymn and music of the Might-Have-Been,—where is he now, and what was the seductive power which made a plaything of him and then flung him away? ”

“ For the first time in the history of the world woman spoke out as woman, not as the servant, the satellite, the pupil, the plaything, or the goddess of man.
Now, I intend at present to write of George Sand rather as an individual, or an influence, than as the author of certain works of fiction. Criticism would now be superfluously bestowed on the literary merits and peculiarities of the great woman whose astonishing intellectual activity has never ceased to produce, during the last thirty years, works which take already a classical place in French literature. ”

“ Many of George Sand's novels, the shorter ones especially, are as absolutely pure in moral tone, as entirely free from even a taint or suggestion of impurity, as they are perfect in style. Now, if we cannot help knowing that much of this great woman's life was far from being irreproachable, are we not bound to give her all the fuller credit, because her genius, at least, kept so far the whiteness of its soul? Revolutions are not to be made with rose-water ”

“ They are the tide which, as you know or do not know how to use it, will either turn your mill and float your boat, or drown your fields and sweep away your dwellings. Life and society receive no impulse and no direction from the influences out of which the novels of Dickens, or even of Thackeray, are made up. ”

“ If every one of the novels which thus in their time drew down the thunders of Society's denunciation were to be swept into the wallet wherein Time, according to Shakespeare, carries scraps for oblivion, George Sand would still remain where she now is,—at the head of the French fiction of her day. It is true, as Goethe says, that "miracle-working pictures are rarely works of art." The books which make the hair of the respectable public stand on end are not often the works by which the fame of the author is preserved for posterity. ”

“ Not to speak of such accomplished artists in impurity as the lady who calls herself Ouida, and one or two others of the same school, we have young women, only just promoted from pantalettes, who can throw you off such glowing chapters of passion and young desire as would make the rhapsodies of "Indiana" seem very feeble milk-and-water brewage by comparison. ”

“ I hold that the most ardent advocates of the irrevocable endurance of the marriage bond are bound, by their very principles, to admit that, in protesting against the so-called marriage system of France, George Sand stood on the side of purity and right. ”

“ But I am not aware that she ever taught any lesson save the lesson that men and women must endeavor to be heroes and heroines for themselves, heroes and heroines though all the world else were craven, and weak, and selfish, and unprincipled. ”

“ I think George Sand paints men as they are, and also not merely as they ought to be, but as they can be. The sum of the lesson taught by her books is one of confidence in man's possibilities, and hope in his steady progress. At the same time she is entirely practical in her faith and her aspirations. She never expects that the trees are to grow up into the heavens, that men and women are to be other than men and women. ”

“ Many worthy people can listen with comparative fortitude when sacred and eternal truths are assailed, who are stricken with horror when the ark of propriety is never so lightly touched. George Sand's pantaloons were, therefore, regarded as the most appalling illustration of George Sand's wickedness. ”

“ I fancy a good deal of this sentiment was due to the fearful reports wafted across the seas, that this terrible woman had not merely repudiated the marriage bond, but had actually put off the garments sacred to womanhood. That George Sand appeared in men's clothes was an outrage upon consecrated proprieties far more astonishing than any theoretical onslaught upon old opinions could be. Reformers, indeed, should always, if they are wise in their generation, have a care of the proprieties. ”

“ George Sand constrains us to look at the realities through the medium of her fiction. Thirdly, she insists that man can and shall make his own career; not whine to the stars, and rail out against the powers above, when he has weakly or wantonly marred his own destiny. Fourthly,—and this ought not to be considered her least service to the literature of her country,—she has tried to teach [Pg 23] people to look at Nature with their own eyes, and to invite the true love of her to flow into their hearts. ”