GEORGES SAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 1813, 20 August 1886, Page 35

GEORGES SAND.

There are two Georges Sands, each differing in almost every respect from the other. There is the Georges Sand whose fame has become legendary, as the French would say. This was she who quarrelled wifcli her husband, and went for a part of each year to live the gay life of bachelorhood in Paris ; who donned the dress of the man, and smoked the cigar ef Bohemianism; who joined readily in the mad pranks of the hirsute generation, the race ckeveluo (as M. Zola calls them) in 1830 ; who betook herself to Venice with Alfred de Musset — for " secretary," as M. de Beaufort tells us, and a very queer secretary he must have been — and who then accompanied Chopin to Majorca. It was she too who, while indulging in these and other kindred freaks, and setting conventions and even morals at open defiance, wrote persistently against such institutions as marriage and properLy, and generally allied herself with St. Simonians, Fourierists, Socialists of every type, revolutionists, anti-clericals, and all the quacks, who had each,his nostrnm for the regeneration of man in the days when Louis Phillipe was king. A strange and not altogether edifying Georges Sand this : and it can be small matter of surprise that she loomed in the imagination of her contemporaries as a very dreadful character. But there is another Georges Sand, an altotogether different person. This Georges Sand had many of the sweetest, noblest, attributes of womanhood. She was tenderly attached to her two children, watching over them with all motherly solicitude. She possessed a keen love for the joys and pleasures of her country home. Her heart was large, and

ever ready to sympathise with those in sorrow or suffering. Her purse was always opened freely for the relief of the needy. " I have earned about a million francs with my pen," she says in 1860, "and out of this I have not put by a single sou. I have given all away except some 20,000 francs, which I invested two years ago, so that, in case of illness, I might not be a burden to my children ; and yet lam not sure that I shall be able to keep even that little capital. I may meet with those who want it more than I, and if I be well j enough to earn a little more, I shall have to part with my savings. Keep this a secret, so that I may be able to retain them as long as possible." Nor was she generous with her money alone. She was prodigal of her time. She would bestow it upon the peasantry among whom she lived, upon aspirants for literary fame, upon all who rightly or wrongly thought they had a claim upon her attention. And this was the more creditable, inasmuch as the time given away — and some j would have thought squandered — was not the time of an indolent person glad of an excuse for idleness. It was the time of an indefatigable worker, working habitually, as she tells us in one place, seven hours a day, and sometimes thirteen, and always executing her task with the conscientiousness of a true artist. And her courage equalled her industry and kindliness. As she had marched with her .friends to their shortlived triumph in 1848, so she stood by them in the hour of defeat, and pleaded for them in 1852, with Napoleon 111. It was courage too, of a high and feminine type ; good not only in special moments of conflict or adversity, but forming part of the tissue of her life, and enabling her to face the slow attacks of age with unbated cheerfulness, and to look death in the face untroubled and undaunted. " You admire my serenity," she writes to Flaubert in 1875, the year preceeding her end. "It does not come of myself, but of the necessity I experience of thinking of others I am still, if not essential, at least extremely useful to my dear ones ; and so long as my life is left to me I will continue to think, speak, and work for them. . . . Duty is the master of masters, the real Zeus of modern times ; the son of Time, he has become Time's master. . . . I have no longer any leisure | for thinking about myself, dreaming of disheartening things, despairing of mankind, I brooding over past joys and sorrows, and calling upon death. Certainly if we were selfish we should welcome death. It mast be sweet, indeed, to sleep in oblivion, or wake to a better life; for such are the two hypotheses, or rather antitheses, that death offers us. But he who has still his task to perform must not invoke death before the wearing out of the body fits him to cross the threshold of the true abode of freedom Do not give way to weakness. We ought to set an example to our friends, our relations, our fellow-citizens." \And again, on May 28, 18-76, just twelve days before her death she writes to her medical man : — "I wonder whither I am faring, and whether I must not be prepared to go off suddenly some fine morning. I should prefer to know it now, rather than to be surprised. lam not one of those who are afraid at the prospect of submitting to a great and general law, and rebel against the conclusion of universal life. But I will, in order to get better, do anything I am ordered Ito do • ■ . so that you may help me to add to the length of my task; for I feel I am still useful to my family." ' It is this second Georges Sand — good, ' kindly, unselfish, brave, devoted to duty, and, for all her genius, unaffectedly modest — it is this Georges Sand that we can best sfoidy in her correspondence. — Frank T. Marizals, in the Academy.