Sand, GEORGE, the nom de guerre of Armandine (or Amantine) Lucile Aurore Dupin, 'Baronne' Dudevant, was born in Paris on the 5th July 1804, and died at Nohant in Berri on the 7th June 1876. Her father Maurice Dupin was the son of M. Dupin de Francueil (well known in the writings of Rousseau and his circle) by a natural daughter of the Marshal de Saxe and of Mdlle. Verriere, also well known in the 18th century. Aurore's own mother was a Parisian milliner. Her father died when she was very young, and she was the subject of continual disputes between her mother and her grandmother, Madame Dupin (by her first marriage Comtesse de Horn). Aurore lived with both in turn, but principally at Nohant with her grandmother, on whose death the property descended to her. She was educated partly at home, partly at the English convent in Paris, and represents herself in her voluminous Histoire de ma Vie (which contains little fact and much fancy) as a child full of reverie of all kinds. An heiress as has been said, though in no great way, and with no near relations except her mother, she was married at the age of eighteen to a certain M. Dudevant, the natural son of a colonel and baron of the empire, who also had some small fortune. The marriage was quite of the ordinary French kind, with no love, but also no particular dislike, between the parties. Two children were born of it—a boy, Maurice (1825-89), who afterwards took his mother's assumed surname and became a man of letters of some little accomplishment, and a girl, Solange, who married the sculptor Clésinger. Very little is known of M. Dudevant, who seems, however, to have been by no means especially tyrannical or offensive, but merely an ordinary squireen, devoted to sport, not actively sympathising with, but also not violently opposing his wife's bookish tastes, and probably, as her letters show, a good deal tried by the increasing number of her doubtless Platonic friendships. After nine years of married life, towards the end of which the situation became very much strained, she 'threw her cap over the mills,' and at first resigning her property to her husband as the price of an amicable separation, went to Paris to make her living by literature, to associate (often in men's clothes) with the Bohemian society of the time (1831), and in short to 'see life' generally in a very full sense. Nevertheless after some years the local tribunals found sufficient cause in her husband's behaviour to turn the amicable into a legal separation, and to give her the complete enjoyment of her own property. For the best part of twenty years her life (apart from its literary features, to which we shall come presently) was spent in the company and partly under the influence of divers more or less distinguished men, with some of whom she certainly, and with others probably, was on the terms which might be expected in such circumstances. Bnt George Sand's was a very peculiar temperament, and it is not safe to take too much for granted in respect to her. During the first few years her interests were chiefly directed towards poets and artists, the most famous being Alfred de Musset and Chopin, with the former of whom she took a journey to Italy notable in the lives of both; while the second was more or less her companion for several years, including a dismal winter which they spent together at Majorca, and which she has recorded in a noteworthy book. In the second decade her attention shifted to the wilder sort of philosophers and politicians, such as Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, and Michel (de Bourges). But the advance of years and the revolution of 1848 with its consequences put an unexpected end to her rather protracted Sturm-und-Drang period. By a revolution not by any means universal among men and almost unexampled among women, she settled down as the quiet 'châtelaine of Nohant,' and spent her life for more than a quarter of a century thus, occupying it with wonderful literary activity, varied only by foreign travel now and then, and by occasional visits to Paris. She was exceedingly hospitable: almost all French and many foreign men of letters of eminence visited at Nohant, which was an unostentatious but pleasant Liberty Hall, the especial diversion being a marionette theatre. No private event of any importance disturbed this long and quiet period, which only closed by her death with the words 'Laissez la verdure' on or almost on her lips.
We must now pass from this curious existence—a youth of dream, a womanhood of racket and license, an old age of laborious calm—to her work. In this some have marked three, others four periods, the last two of which do not seem to be separated by any very real gap. The threefold division corresponds almost exactly to her life experiences as above sketched. When she first went to Paris, and with her companion Jules Sandeau, from the first half of whose name her pseudonym was taken, settled, partly under the guidance of Henri de Latouche, to novel-writing, her books partook of the Romantic extravaganza of the time, specially informed and directed by a polemic against marriage and by the invention and glorification of the femme incomprise. Indiana, Valentine, Lélia (the most remarkable of all), and Jacques are the chief works of this period. In the next her philosophical, political, and (if they can be so called) religious teachers got the upper hand, and in a fashion fathered the rhapsodies of Spiridon, Consuelo (one of her best books, however), and the Comtesse de Rudolstadt. Between the two groups should be placed in time the fine novel of Mauprat. Towards the middle of the century appeared the extraordinary study called Lucrezia Floriani, the chief characters of which are undoubtedly in part drawn from herself and Chopin; while she also now began to turn towards the studies of rustic life, of which La Petite Fadette, François le Champi, and La Mare au Diable are the chief, and which some of her admirers regard as her greatest works. Some critics (the chief of whom is M. Caro) would make these rustic novels a third division by themselves, and construct a fourth for the miscellaneous and less spontaneous works of the last twenty years of her life. Some of those last, such as Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois Doré, Le Marquis de Villenec, Mlle. la Quintinie (a duel with Feuillet), and others, are of high merit. Not a tithe of her enormous list of novels can be mentioned here, while there has to be added to it a considerable Théâtre, the bulky Histoire de ma Vie already referred to, some nondescript work, such as the Hiver à Majorque referred to above, and Elle et Lui (a sort of vindication of her relations with Mnsset (q.v.), written after his death), and a delightful and extensive collection of letters published posthumously. One division of this last—those to Flaubert—is of the very first literary and personal interest, and the whole exhibits the personal and literary character of the writer in such a light as to have conciliated to her the affection of some who had previously been rather recalcitrant.
The popularity of George Sand, like that of most very voluminous authors, has sunk considerably since her death. Nor have critical estimates invariably agreed about her. The one thing which both friends and foes accord her is the possession of a most remarkable style, somewhat too fluent and facile, but never slipshod or commonplace, if never exquisite or distinguished. To this gift may be added the still more important one of a faculty of imagination which always idealised the subject and treatment to the point necessary to fix the work as literature. A third, though a more disputable gift, was a singular faculty of receptivity which enabled her to catch and render not merely the aspects of scenery and the outline of personages, but the fleeting ideas of the day on all manner of subjects. She had no great or deep originality; despite her fertility, she scarcely ever (the sole great exception is the wonderful study of insatiable jealousy and ontweared love in Lucrezia Floriani) achieved the analysis which results in synthesis and fixes a character for ever. She wrote with something like the business-like regularity of Mr Anthony Trollope in England; and her work cost her so little that in a very few years she as regularly forgot all about it, and read her own novels as if they were those of others. It is scarcely paradoxical to doubt whether—though her books are unceasingly occupied with love, and a good portion of her life was at least not closed to it—she ever felt in her own person a passionate affection. In conversation, it is said, she was awkward and dull, and there is hardly any wit or humour even in her books. They are also notoriously destitute of plot or composition. It seems to have been her portion to produce or reproduce with a certain passivity, but in never-failing yield, novels as the earth produces crops. All this sounds like unfavourable criticism, and so to a certain extent it is and must be. It is a commonplace of criticism on her to say that George Sand's novels are seldom read a second time. Story they have as a rule not much to tell, and their characters, though never exactly unreal, are too slightly provided with life to exercise an absorbing fascination. Yet after all exceptions are made, and after allowing the utmost that criticism can demand, it is difficult to speak with anything but admiration of this enormous work, the very bulk of which perhaps does it harm, because the same defects recurring almost throughout become more obvious than they would be in a smaller total. The charm—not strange or deep, but constant—of the style, the vast variety and volume of the creations, the constant faithfulness to the one law of art, 'idealise, always idealise,' stand in lieu of many ornaments which are not there. If George Sand had written nothing but Lucrezia Floriani and the Letters to Flaubert men would have gone about saying what a marvellous novelist, what an acute critic of life and letters had given but glimpses of herself. As it is we have a whole Sandian panorama, and we find fault with it.
The Œuvres Complètes of George Sand, which amount to about a hundred and twenty volumes in their compact form, were and are all published by Messrs Lévy of Paris. Critical and biographical writings on her (these latter rather meagre, but supplemented by the
Letters) are numerous. The best is the volume in the Grands Écrivains series (Paris, Hachette), by the late M. Caro, which, under a style at first appearing rather desultory and affected, will be found to contain excellent criticism, and has been translated by M. Masson. But the subject is so huge that no book in a small compass can be really complete. There is an English monograph by Miss Bertha Thomas in the series of 'Eminent Women.'