It is true that along with mercy, patience, and the recognition of one’s obligations there was also an extraordinary pride in this scrutiny and in protest, but this pride was precious because it stemmed from that higher truth without which humanity could never maintain its high moral ideals.
This pride is not a feeling of hostility quand même, based on the fact that I am supposedly better than you and you are worse than I; it is only a sense of the most chaste impossibility of compromise with falsity and vice, although, I repeat, this feeling excludes neither universal forgiveness nor mercy. Moreover, along with the pride came an enormous responsibility, voluntarily assumed.
These heroines of hers sought to make sacrifices and do noble deeds. Several of the girls in her early works particularly appealed to me; these were the ones depicted, for example, in what were called at the time her Venetian tales (including L’Uscoque and Aldini). These were of the type that culminated in her novel Jeanne, a brilliant work which presents a serene and, perhaps, a final solution to the historical question of Joan of Arc.
In a contemporary peasant girl she suddenly resurrects before us the image of the historical Joan of Arc and graphically makes a case for the actual possibility of this majestic and marvellous historical phenomenon, a task quite characteristic of George Sand, for no one but she among contemporary poets, perhaps, bore within her soul such a pure ideal of an innocent girl, an ideal that derives its power from its innocence.
In several works in succession we find all these girl characters engaged in the same task and exemplifying the same theme (however, not only girls: this same theme is repeated later in her magnificent novel La Marquise, also one of her early works). We see depicted the upright, honest, but inexperienced character of a young female having that proud chastity, a girl who is unafraid and who cannot be stained by contact with vice, even if she were suddenly to find herself in some den of iniquity.
The need for some magnanimous sacrifice (which supposedly she alone must make) strikes the heart of the young girl, and, without pausing to think or to spare herself, she selflessly, self-sacrificingly, and fearlessly takes a most perilous and fateful step. The things she sees and encounters subsequently do not trouble or frighten her in the least; to the contrary, courage at once rises up in her young heart, which only now becomes fully aware of its power – the power of innocence, honesty, purity. Courage doubles her energy and shows new paths and new horizons to a mind that had not fully known itself but was vigorous and fresh and not yet stained by life’s compromises. In addition to this, there was the irreproachable and charming form of her poem-novels.
At that time George Sand was particularly fond of ending her poems happily, with the triumph of innocence, sincerity, and young, fearless simplicity. Are these images that could trouble society and arouse doubts and fears?
To the contrary, the strictest fathers and mothers began permitting their families to read George Sand and could only wonder, ‘Why is everyone saying these things about her?’ But then voices of warning began to be heard: ‘In this very pride of a woman’s quest, in this irreconcilability of chastity with vice, in this refusal to make any concessions to vice, in this fearlessness with which innocence rises up to struggle and to look straight into the eyes of the offender – in all this there is a poison, the future poison of women’s protest, of women’s emancipation.’
And what of it? Perhaps they were right about the poison; a poison really was being brewed, but what it sought to destroy, what had to perish from that poison and what was to be saved – these were the questions, and they were not answered for a long time.
Now these questions have long been resolved (or so it seems). It should be noted, by the way, that by the middle of the forties the fame of George Sand and the faith in the force of her genius stood so high that we, her contemporaries, all expected something incomparably greater from her in the future, some unprecedented new word, even something final and decisive. These hopes were not realized: it turned out that at that same time, that is, by the end of the forties, she had already said everything that she was destined to say, and now the final word about her can be said over her fresh grave.
George Sand was not a thinker, but she had the gift of most clearly intuiting (if I may be permitted such a fancy word) a happier future awaiting humanity. All her life she believed strongly and magnanimously in the realization of those ideals precisely because she had the capacity to raise up the ideal in her own soul. The preservation of this faith to the end is usually the lot of all elevated souls, all true lovers of humanity.
George Sand died a déiste, firmly believing in God and her own immortal life, but it is not enough to say only that of her: beyond that she was, perhaps, the most Christian of all her contemporaries, the French writers, although she did not formally (as a Catholic) confess Christ.
Of course, as a French-woman George Sand, like her compatriots, was unable to confess consciously the idea that ‘in all Creation there is no name other than His by which one may be saved’ – the principal idea of Orthodoxy. Still, despite this apparent and formal contradiction, George Sand was, I repeat, perhaps one of the most thoroughgoing confessors of Christ even while unaware of being so.
She based her socialism, her convictions, her hopes, and her ideals on the human moral sense, on humanity’s spiritual thirst, on its striving toward perfection and purity, and not on the ‘necessity’ of the ant heap. She believed unconditionally in the human personality (even to the point of its immortality), and she elevated and expanded the conception of it throughout her life, in each of her works.
Thus her thoughts and feelings coincided with one of the most basic ideas of Christianity, that is, the acknowledgment of the human personality and its freedom (and accordingly, its responsibility). From here arise her acknowledgment of duty and rigorous moral scrutiny to that end, along with a complete awareness of human responsibility.
And there was not a thinker or writer in the France of her time, perhaps, who understood so clearly that ‘man does not live by bread alone.’ As far as the pride in her scrutiny and her protest are concerned, I repeat that this pride never excluded mercy, the forgiveness of an offence and even limitless patience based on compassion toward the one who gave offence.
On the contrary, in her works George Sand was often attracted by the beauty of these truths and often created incarnations of the most sincere forgiveness and love. They write that she died as an admirable mother who worked to the end of her life, a friend to the local peasants, deeply beloved by her friends. It seems she was somewhat inclined to set great store by her aristocratic origins (she was descended on her mother’s side from the royal house of Saxony), but, of course, one can state firmly that if she saw aristocracy as something to be valued in people, it was an aristocracy based only on the level of perfection of the human soul: she could not help but love the great, she could not reconcile herself with the base and compromise her ideas; and here, perhaps, she may have shown an excess of pride.
It is true that she also did not like to portray humble people in her novels, to depict the just but pliant, the eccentric and the downtrodden, such as we meet in almost every novel of the great Christian Dickens. On the contrary, she proudly elevated her heroines and placed them as high as queens. This she loved to do, and this trait we should note; it is rather characteristic.
(June 1876)
The End
