SD1829. Journal Entry of Elizabeth Clementine Kinney
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 21, 376–377 (in part).
[Florence]
Thursday June 7th [1855]
Last evening Mr & Mrs Browning, Miss Blagden, & the Count & Countess C[ottrell]. took tea with us. A beautiful summer evening so that we sat out on the terrace till 9 o’clock. The conversation turned on the notorious French authoress Madame Dudevant, or “George Sand,” whom Mr Browning said he had the pleasure of seeing recently when she passed thro’ Florence en route for Venice. “And I kissed her beautiful hand,” added he, with the satisfaction of one who deemed himself thereby honored! “Pray who is her lover now?” enquired I. “I can’t say—he replied—since she has a new one every day. “What!” I exclaimed, “is she so bad as that? I supposed she had never loved but one—certainly but one at a time.” “One, good heavens! ‘their name is legion.’ Put three ciphers to your one—that will not include the sum total of her lovers.” “And you kiss the hand of such a woman—Robert Browning does this?” “Yes, & Elizabeth Barrett Browning does the same, in respect to one of the greatest geniuses God ever made!” This he said with an air of surprise that I could question the act. “Well, well,” I rejoined, “the greater the genius, the greater the shame of yielding that body which should be sacred as a temple for the consecrated mind, ‘to the least of the flesh’: to me George Sand is the worst of women.” “Don’t say that!” exclaimed Mrs Browning, as if my lips had spoken blasphemy, “She is not a bad woman, but, on the contrary, a good & charitable one.” “Then what your husband has just told me of her is not true,” I said. “If it be true,” she answered, “it is only because she has fallen under the dominion of a sensual appetite which she cannot control; but it is no worse than gluttony or intemperance: I pity her, more than I blame her for it: Her mind is none the less godlike.” A sigh was all that could for the moment escape me, so swollen was my heart with indignation, that Mrs Browning—the truest & purest of women—could so speak!
When I recovered myself I said freely that I could make no such abstraction of mind, as to separate it from the morale of the individual possessing it, at least in this case where the whole heart & mind must be alike depraved & polluted with the body: that a licentious appetite was not to be compared with other sensual appetites, affecting merely the taste; that no one could be in acts lascivious without having also a lascivious mind. This led to a long & warm discussion. I insisted that if George Sand had been led astray by misplaced affection, having had, as it is said, a husband uncongenial, love even tho’ unlawful, would have somewhat excused, if it did not sanctify, an unhallowed intercourse. “Love!” they both exclaimed at once, “she never loved anyone but herself.” “Horrible!” was my reply, to which I added that had she pursued this vile course for bread, again there might have been some palliation of her crimes; or even were the appetite which caused them love of gain, it were less bestial. “No! no!” rejoined Mrs B. “There’s Rachele, the tragedienne, I would not visit her; for she leads a dissolute life (Jewess indeed) for money alone.” I persisted that the other was the most debasing lust, & that had George Sand the genius of the Archangel, to me she was but more the monster! The result was, that our discussion left each party fully persuaded in its own mind; but, as for me, I could not sleep on retiring for the night. So dreadful does it seem for one, to whom God has given power to be superhuman, to become brutal, thro’ the most polluting of sensual passions: & that this should be a woman too, seemed to me a shame to her whole sex. When men are licentious, we are disgusted; if they have genius, we add sorrow to disgust: a licentious woman shocks us. And this woman paints models of virtue with her pen!
This woman too is author of a book so obscene that it was suppressed by the Government of licentious France. “Out of the same fountain cometh sweet water & bitter?”
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Columbia University.
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