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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

cake and had it, been equally initiated in directions the most
opposed. Of how much cake she partook the letters to Musset
and Sainte-Beuve well show us, and yet they fall in at the same
time, on other sides, with all that was noble in her mind, all
that is beautiful in the books just mentioned and in the six
volumes of the general " Correspondance: i8i2-i876," out
of which Madame Sand comes so immensely to her advantage.
She had, as liberty, all the adventures of which the dots are so
put on the i's by the documents lately published, and then she
had, as law, as honour and serenity, all her fine reflections on
them and all her splendid busy literary use of them. Nothing
perhaps gives more relief to her masculine stamp than the rare
art and success with which she cultivated an equilibrium. She
made from beginning to end a masterly study of composure,
absolutely refusing to be upset, closing her door at last against
the very approach of irritation and surprise. She had arrived
at her quiet elastic synthesis-a good-humour, an indulgence
that were an armour of proof. The great felicity of all this was
that it was neither indifference nor renunciation, but on the
contrary an intense partaking; imagination, affection, sympathy and life, the way she had found for herself of living most
and living longest. However well it all agreed with her happiness and her manners, it agrees still better with her style, as
to which we come back with her to the sense that this was really
her point d'appui or sustaining force. Most people have to say,
especially about themselves, only what they can; but she said
-and we nowhere see it better than in the letters to Musseteverything in life that she wanted. We can well imagine the
effect of that consciousness on the nerves of this particular
correspondent, his own poor gift of occasional song (to be so
early spent) reduced to nothing by so unequalled a command
of the last word. We feel it, I hasten to add, this last word, in
all her letters: the occasion, no matter which, gathers it from
her as the breeze gathers the scent from the garden. It is
always the last word of sympathy and sense, and we meet it
on every page of the voluminous " Correspondance." These
pages are not so " clever " as those, in the same order, of some