Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

GEORGE SAND

I4I

this on the day she published " Elle et Lui t; she forgot it
again more gravely when she bequeathed to the great snickering public these present shreds and relics of unutterably
personal things. The aberration refers itself to the strange
lapses of still other occasions-notably to the extraordinary
absence of scruples with which she in the delightful " Histoire
de ma Vie " gives away, as we say, the character of her remarkable mother. The picture is admirable for vividness, for
breadth of touch; it would be perfect from any hand not a
daughter's, and we ask ourselves wonderingly how through all
the years, to make her capable of it, a long perversion must
have worked and the filial fibre-or rather the general flower
of sensibility-have been battered. Not this particular anomaly,
however, but many another, yields to the reflection that as just
after her death a very perceptive person who had known her
well put it to the author of these remarks, she was a woman
quite by accident. Her immense plausibility was almost the
only sign of her sex. She needed always to prove that she had
been in the right; as how indeed could a person fail to who,
thanks to the special equipment I have named, might prove it
so brilliantly e It is not too much to say of her gift of expression-and I have already in effect said so-that from beginning
to end it floated her over the real as a high tide floats a ship
over the bar. She was never left awkwardly straddling on the
sandbank of fact.
For the rest, in any case, with her free experience and her
free use of it, her literary style, her love of ideas and questions,
of science and philosophy, her comradeship, her boundless
tolerance, her intellectual patience, her personal good-humour
and perpetual tobacco (she smoked long before women at large
felt the cruel obligation), with all these things and many I don't
mention she had more of the inward and outward of the other
sex than of her own. She had above all the mark that, to speak
at this time of day with a freedom for which her action in the
matter of publicity gives us warrant, the history of her personal
passions reads singularly like a chronicle of the ravages of some