“An actor,” he says, “must know all the passions, so that he may express them as he should.  I study them in myself.”  And then he adds:  “That is what you call, orderly!  And what is to become of genius while I am being orderly?”

All this is absurd.  The artist is not the man who has felt the most, but the man best gifted for imagining the various states of mind and feeling and for expressing them.  We know, too, that an irregular life is neither the origin nor the stamp of extraordinary intellectual worth.  All the cripples of Bohemian life prove to us that genius is not the outcome of that kind of life, but that, on the contrary, such life is apt to paralyze talent.  It is very convenient, though, for the artist and for every other variety of “superior beings” to make themselves believe that ordinary morals are not for them.  The best argument we can have against this theory is the case of George Sand.  The artist, in her case, was eminently a very regular and hard-working bourgeois woman.

The art in which George Sand gave evidence of the surest taste was music.  That is worthy of notice.  In one of her Lettres d’un voyageur, she celebrates Liszt attacking the Dies irae on the Fribourg organ.  She devotes another letter to the praise of Meyer-beer.  She has analyzed the different forms of musical emotion in several of her books.  One of the ideas dear to romanticism was that of the union and fusion of all the arts.  The writer can, and in a certain way he ought, to produce with words the same effects that the painter does with colours and the sculptor with lines.  We all know how much literature romantic painters and sculptors have put into their art.  The romantic writers were less inclined to accord the same welcome to music as to the plastic arts.  Theophile Gautier is said to have exclaimed that music was “the most disagreeable and the dearest of all the arts.”  Neither Lamartine, Hugo, nor any other of the great writers of that period was influenced by music.  Musset was the first one to be impassioned by it, and this may have been as much through his dandyism as from conviction.

Fille de la douleur, Harmonie, Harmonie, Langue que fiour l’amour invents le ginie, Qui nous viens d’Italie, et qui lui vins des cieux, Douce langue du coeur, la seule ou la pensee, Cette vierge craintive et d’une ombre ofensie, Passe en gardant son voile et sans craindre les eux, Qui sait ce qu’un enfant peut entendre et peut dire Dans tes soupirs divins nes de l’air qu’il respire, Tristes comme son coeur et doux comme sa voix?

George Sand, who agreed with Musset, claimed for “the most beautiful of all the arts,” the honour of being able to paint “all the shades of sentiment and all the phases of passion.”  “Music,” she says, “can express everything.  For describing scenes of nature it has ideal colours and lines, neither exact nor yet too minute, but which are all the more vaguely and delightfully poetical."(31)