PIERRE LEROUX--SOCIALISTIC NOVELS
Hitherto we have seen George Sand put into her work her sufferings, her protests as a woman, and her dreams as an artist. But the nineteenth-century writer did not confine his ambitions to this modest task. He belonged to a corporation which counted among its members Voltaire and Rousseau. The eighteenth-century philosophers had changed the object of literature. Instead of an instrument of analysis, they had made of it a weapon for combat, an incomparable weapon for attacking institutions and for overthrowing governments.
The fact is, that from the time of the Restoration we shall scarcely meet with a single writer, from the philosopher to the vaudevillist, and from the professor to the song-maker, who did not wish to act as a torch on the path of humanity. Poets make revolutions, and show Plato how wrong he was in driving them away from his Republic.
Sophocles was appointed a general at Athens for having written a good tragedy, and so novelists, dramatists, critics and makers of puns devoted themselves to making laws. George Sand was too much a woman of her times to keep aloof from such a movement.
We shall now have to study her in her socialistic _role_.
We can easily imagine on what side her sympathies were. She had always been battling with institutions, and it seemed to her that institutions were undoubtedly in the wrong. She had proved that there was a great deal of suffering in the world, and as human nature is good at bottom, she decided that society was all wrong.
She was a novelist, and she therefore considered that the most satisfactory solutions are those in which imagination and feeling play a great part. She also considered that the best politics are those which are the most like a novel. We must now follow her, step by step, along the various roads leading to Utopia.
The truth is, that in that great manufactory of systems and that storehouse of panaceas which the France of Louis-Philippe had become, the only difficulty was to choose between them all.
The first, in date, of the new gospels was that of the Saint-Simonians.
When George Sand arrived in Paris, Saint-Simonism was one of the curiosities offered to astonished provincials. It was a parody of religion, but it was organized in a church with a Father in two persons, Bazard and Enfantin. The service took place in a _bouis-bouis_. The costume worn consisted of white trousers, a red waistcoat and a blue tunic. On the days when the Father came down from the heights of Menilmontant with his children, there was great diversion for the people in the street. An important thing was lacking in the organization of the Saint-Simonians. In order to complete the "sacerdotal couple," a woman was needed to take her place next the Father. A Mother was asked for over and over again.
It was said that she would soon appear, but she was never forthcoming.
Saint-Simon had tried to tempt Madame de Stael.
"I am an extraordinary man," he said to her, "and you are just as extraordinary as a woman. You and I together would have a still more extraordinary child." Madame de Stael evidently did not care to take part in the manufacture of this prodigy. When George Sand's first novels appeared, the Saint-Simonians were full of hope.
This was the woman they had been waiting for, the free woman, who having meditated on the lot of her sisters would formulate the Declaration of the rights and duties of woman. Adolphe Gueroult was sent to her. He was the editor of the _Opinion nationale_.
George Sand had a great fund of common sense, though, and once more the little society awaited the Mother in vain. It was finally decided that she should be sought for in the East. A mission was organized, and messengers were arrayed in white, as a sign of the vow of chastity, with a pilgrim's staff in their hand. They begged as they went along, and slept sometimes outdoors, but more often at the police-station.
George Sand was not tempted by this kind of maternity, but she kept in touch with the Saint-Simonians. She was present at one of their meetings at Menilmontant. Her published _Corrspondance_ contains a letter addressed by her to the Saint-Simonian family in Paris.
As a matter of fact, she had received from it, on the 1st of January, 1836, a large collection of presents. There were in all no less than fifty-nine articles, among which were the following: a dress-box, a pair of boots, a thermometer, a carbine-carrier, a pair of trousers and a corset.
Saint-Simonism was universally jeered at, but it is quite a mistake to think that ridicule is detrimental in France. On the contrary, it is an excellent means of getting anything known and of spreading the knowledge of it abroad; it is in reality a force.
Saint-Simonism is at the root of many of the humanitarian doctrines which were to spring up from its ashes. One of its essential doctrines was the diffusion of the soul throughout all humanity, and another that of being born anew. Enfantin said: "I can feel St. Paul within me. He lives within me." Still another of its doctrines was that of the rehabilitation of the flesh.
Saint-Simonism proclaimed the equality of man and woman, that of industry and art and science, and the necessity of a fresh repartition of wealth and of a modification of the laws concerning property.
It also advocated increasing the attributions of the State considerably.
It was, in fact, the first of the doctrines offering to the lower classes, by way of helping them to bear their wretched misery, the ideal of happiness here below, lending a false semblance of religion to the desire for material well-being. George Sand had one vulnerable point, and that was her generosity. By making her believe that she was working for the outcasts of humanity, she could be led anywhere, and this was what happened.
