Madame KarÉnine’s third volume is copiously devoted to the period of her heroine’s intimacy with Chopin and to the events surrounding this agitated friendship, which largely fill the ten years precedent to ’48. Our author is on all this ground overwhelmingly documented, and enlisted though she is in the service of the more successful party to the association—in the sense of Madame Sand’s having heartily outlived and survived, not to say professionally and brilliantly “used,” it—the great composer’s side of the story receives her conscientious attention. Curious and interesting in many ways, these reflections of George Sand’s middle life afford above all the most pointed illustration of the turn of her personal genius, her aptitude for dealing with men, in the intimate relation, exactly after the fashion in which numberless celebrated men have contributed to their reputation, not to say crowned their claim to superiority, by dealing with women. This being above all the note of her career, with its vivid show of what such dealing could mean for play of mind, for quickening of gift, for general experience and, as we say, intellectual development, for determination of philosophic bent and education of character and fertilisation of fancy, we seem to catch the whole process in the fact, under the light here supplied us, as we catch it nowhere else. It gives us in this application endlessly much to consider—it is in itself so replete and rounded a show; we at once recognise moreover how comparatively little it matters that such works as “Lucrezia Floriani” and “Un Hiver À Majorque” should have proceeded from it, cast into the shade as these are, on our biographer’s evidence, by a picture of concomitant energies still more attaching. It is not here by the force of her gift for rich improvisation, beautiful as this was, that the extraordinary woman holds us, but by the force of her ability to act herself out, given the astounding quantities concerned in this self. That energy too, we feel, was in a manner an improvisation—so closely allied somehow are both the currents, the flow of literary composition admirably instinctive and free, and the handling power, as we are constantly moved to call it, the flow of a splendid intelligence all the while at its fullest expressional ease, for the actual situations created by her, for whatever it might be that vitally confronted her. Of how to bring about, or at the least find one’s self “in for,” an inordinate number of situations, most of them of the last difficulty, and then deal with them on the spot, in the narrowest quarters as it were, with an eloquence and a plausibility that does them and one’s own nature at once a sort of ideal justice, the demonstration here is the fullest—as of what it was further to have her unfailing verbal as well as her unfailing moral inspiration. What predicament could have been more of an hourly strain for instance, as we cannot but suppose, than her finding herself inevitably accompanied by her two children during the stay at Majorca made by Chopin in ’38 under her protection? The victory of assurance and of the handling power strikes us as none the less never an instant in doubt, that being essentially but over the general kind of inconvenience or embarrassment involved for a mother and a friend in any real consistency of attempt to carry things off male fashion. We do not, it is true, see a man as a mother, any more than we easily see a woman as a gentleman—and least of all perhaps in either case as an awkwardly placed one; but we see Madame Sand as a sufficiently bustling, though rather a rough and ready, father, a father accepting his charge and doing the best possible under the circumstances; the truth being of course that the circumstances never can be, even at the worst, or still at the best, the best for parental fondness, so awkward for him as for a mother.

What call, again, upon every sort of presence of mind could have been livelier than the one made by the conditions attending and following the marriage of young Solange Dudevant to the sculptor ClÉsinger in 1846, when our heroine, summoned by the stress of events both to take responsible action and to rise to synthetic expression, in a situation, that is in presence of a series of demonstrations on her daughter’s part, that we seem to find imaginable for a perfect dramatic adequacy only in that particular home circle, fairly surpassed herself by her capacity to “meet” everything, meet it much incommoded, yet undismayed, unabashed and unconfuted, and have on it all, to her great advantage, the always prodigious last word? The elements of this especial crisis claim the more attention through its having been, as a test of her powers, decidedly the most acute that she was in her whole course of life to have traversed, more acute even, because more complicated, than the great occasion of her rupture with Alfred de Musset, at Venice in ’35, on which such a wealth of contemplation and of ink has been expended. Dramatic enough in their relation to each other certainly those immortal circumstances, immortal so far as immortalised on either side by genius and passion: Musset’s return, ravaged and alone, to Paris; his companion’s transfer of her favour to Pietro Pagello, whom she had called in to attend her friend medically in illness and whose intervention, so far from simplifying the juncture, complicated it in a fashion probably scarce paralleled in the history of the erotic relation; her retention of Pagello under her protection for the rest of her period in Venice; her marvellously domesticated state, in view of the literary baggage, the collection of social standards, even taking these but at what they were, and the general amplitude of personality, that she brought into residence with her; the conveyance of Pagello to Paris, on her own return, and the apparent signification to him at the very gate that her countenance was then and there withdrawn. This was a brilliant case for her—of coming off with flying colours; but it strikes us as a mere preliminary flourish of the bow or rough practice of scales compared to the high virtuosity which Madame KarÉnine’s new material in respect to the latter imbroglio now enables us ever so gratefully to estimate. The protagonist’s young children were in the Venetian crisis quite off the scene, and on occasions subsequent to the one we now glance at were old enough and, as we seem free to call it, initiated enough not to solicit our particular concern for them; whereas at the climax of the connection with Chopin they were of the perfect age (which was the fresh marriageable in the case of Solange) to engage our best anxiety, let alone their being of a salience of sensibility and temper to leave no one of their aspects negligible. That their parent should not have found herself conclusively “upset,” sickened beyond repair, or otherwise morally bankrupt, on her having to recognise in her daughter’s hideous perversity and depravity, as we learn these things to have been, certain inevitabilities of consequence from the social air of the maternal circle, is really a monumental fact in respect to our great woman’s elasticity, her instinct for never abdicating by mere discouragement. Here in especial we get the broad male note—it being so exactly the manly part, and so very questionably the womanly, not to have to draw from such imputations of responsibility too crushing a self-consciousness. Of the extent and variety of danger to which the enjoyment of a moral tone could be exposed and yet superbly survive Madame KarÉnine’s pages give us the measure; they offer us in action the very ideal of an exemplary triumph of character and mind over one of the very highest tides of private embarrassment that it is well possible to conceive. And it is no case of that passive acceptance of deplorable matters which has abounded in the history of women, even distinguished ones, whether to the pathetic or to the merely scandalous effect; the acceptance is active, constructive, almost exhilarated by the resources of affirmation and argument that it has at its command. The whole instance is sublime in its sort, thanks to the acuteness of all its illustrative sides, the intense interest of which loses nothing in the hands of our chronicler; who perhaps, however, reaches off into the vast vague of Chopin’s native affiliations and references with an energy with which we find it a little difficult to keep step.

In speaking as we have done of George Sand’s “use” of each twist of her road as it came—a use which we now recognise as the very thriftiest—we touch on that principle of vital health in her which made nothing that might by the common measure have been called one of the graver dilemmas, that is one of the checks to the continuity of life, really matter. What this felicity most comes to in fact is that doing at any cost the work that lies to one’s hand shines out again and yet again as the saving secret of the soul. She affirmed her freedom right and left, but her most characteristic assertion of it throughout was just in the luxury of labour. The exhaustive account we at any rate now enjoy of the family life surrounding her during the years here treated of and as she had constituted it, the picture of all the queer conflicting sensibilities engaged, and of the endless ramifications and reflections provided for these, leaves us nothing to learn on that congested air, that obstructive medium for the range of the higher tone, which the lady of Nohant was so at her “objective” happiest, even if at her superficially, that is her nervously, most flurried and depressed, in bravely breasting. It is as if the conditions there and in Paris during these several years had been consistently appointed by fate to throw into relief the applications of a huge facility, a sort of universal readiness, with a rare intelligence to back it. Absolutely nothing was absent, or with all the data could have been, that might have bewildered a weaker genius into some lapse of eloquence or of industry; everything that might have overwhelmed, or at least have disconcerted, the worker who could throw off the splendid “Lucrezia Floriani” in the thick of battle came upon her at once, inspiring her to show that on her system of health and cheer, of experiential economy, as we may call it, to be disconcerted was to be lost. To be lacerated and calumniated was in comparison a trifle; with a certain sanity of reaction these things became as naught, for the sanity of reaction was but the line of consistency, the theory and attitude of sincerity kept at the highest point. The artist in general, we need scarcely remind ourselves, is in a high degree liable to arrive at the sense of what he may have seen or felt, or said or suffered, by working it out as a subject, casting it into some form prescribed by his art; but even here he in general knows limits—unless perchance he be loose as Byron was loose, or possess such a power of disconnection, such a clear stand-off of the intelligence, as accompanied the experiments of Goethe. Our own experiments, we commonly feel, are comparatively timid, just as we can scarce be said, in the homely phrase, to serve our esthetic results of them hot and hot; we are too conscious of a restrictive instinct about the conditions we may, in like familiar language let ourselves in for, there being always the question of what we should be able “intellectually” to show for them. The life of the author of “Lucrezia Floriani” at its most active may fairly be described as an immunity from restrictive instincts more ably cultivated than any we know. Again and yet again we note the positive premium so put upon the surrender to sensibility, and how, since the latter was certain to spread to its maximum and to be admired in proportion to its spread, some surrender was always to have been worth while. “Lucrezia Floriani” ought to have been rather measurably bad—lucidity, harmony, maturity, definiteness of sense, being so likely to fail it in the troubled air in which it was born. Yet how can we do less than applaud a composition throwing off as it goes such a passage as the splendid group of pages cited by Madame KarÉnine from the incident of the heroine’s causing herself to be rowed over to the island in her Italian lake on that summer afternoon when the sense of her situation had become sharp for her to anguish, in order to take stock of the same without interruption and see, as we should say to-day, where she is? The whole thing has the grand manner and the noblest eloquence, reaching out as it does on the spot to the lesson and the moral of the convulsions that have been prepared in the first instance with such complacency, and illustrating in perfection the author’s faculty for the clear re-emergence and the prompt or, as we may call it, the paying reaction. The case is put for her here as into its final nutshell: you may “live” exactly as you like, that is live in perfect security and fertility, when such breadth of rendering awaits your simply sitting down to it. Is it not true, we say, that without her breadth our wonderful woman would have been “nowhere”?—whereas with it she is effectively and indestructibly at any point of her field where she may care to pretend to stand.

This biographer, I must of course note, discriminates with delicacy among her heroine’s felicities and mistakes, recognising that some of the former, as a latent awkwardness in them developed, inevitably parted with the signs that distinguished them from the latter; but I think we feel, as the instances multiply, that no regret could have equalled for us that of our not having the display vivid and complete. Once all the elements of the scarce in advance imaginable were there it would have been a pity that they should not offer us the show of their full fruition. What more striking show, for example, than that, as recorded by Madame KarÉnine in a footnote, the afflicted parent of Solange should have lived to reproduce, or rather, as she would herself have said, to “arrange” the girlish character and conduct of that young person, so humiliating at the time to any near relation, let alone a mother, in the novel of “Mademoiselle Merquem,” where the truth to the original facts and the emulation of the graceless prime “effects” are such as our author can vouch for? The fiction we name followed indeed after long years, but during the lifetime of the displeasing daughter and with an ease of reference to the past that may fairly strike us as the last word of superiority to blighting association. It is quite as if the close and amused matching of the character and its play in the novel with the wretched old realities, those that had broken in their day upon the scared maternal vision, had been a work of ingenuity attended with no pang. The example is interesting as a measure of the possible victory of time in a case where we might have supposed the one escape to have been by forgetting. Madame Sand remembers to the point of gratefully—gratefully as an artist—reconstituting; we in fact feel her, as the irrepressible, the “healthy” artist, positively to enjoy so doing. Thus it clearly defined itself for her in the fulness of time that, humiliating, to use our expression, as the dreadful Solange might have been and have incessantly remained, she herself had never in the least consented to the stupidity or sterility of humiliation. So it could be that the free mind and the free hand were ever at her service. A beautiful indifferent agility, a power to cast out that was at least proportioned to the power to take in, hangs about all this and meets us in twenty connections. Who of her readers has forgotten the harmonious dedication—her inveterate dedications have always, like her clear light prefaces, the last grace—of “Jeanne,” so anciently, so romantically readable, to her faithful Berrichon servant who sits spinning by the fire? “Vous ne savez pas lire, ma paisible amie,” but that was not to prevent the association of her name with the book, since both her own daughter and the author’s are in happy possession of the art and will be able to pass the entertainment on to her. This in itself is no more than a sign of the writer’s fine democratic ease, which she carried at all times to all lengths, and of her charming habit of speech; but it somehow becomes further illustrational, testifying for the manner in which genius, if it be but great enough, lives its life at small cost, when we learn that after all, by a turn of the hand, the “paisible amie” was, under provocation, bundled out of the house as if the beautiful relation had not meant half of what appeared. FranÇoise and her presence were dispensed with, but the exquisite lines remain, which we would not be without for the world.