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

GEORGE SAND

I59

meant the consequent, life. She had reached toward such a life
obviously in quitting the conjugal roof in i831-had attacked
the experiment clumsily, but according to her light, by throwing herself on such material support as faculties yet untested
might furnish, and on such moral as several months of the
intimite of Jules Sandeau and a briefer taste of that of Prosper
Merimee might further contribute. She had done, in other
words, what she could; subsequent lights show it as not her
fault that she had not done better. With Musset her future
took a long stride; emotionally speaking it "looked up."
Nothing was wanting in this case - independently of what
might then have appeared her friend's equal genius - quite
ideally to qualify it. He was several years her junior, and as
she had her husband and her children, he had, in the high
degree of most young Frenchmen of sensibility, his mother. It
is recorded that with this lady on the eve of the celebrated step
she quite had the situation, as the phrase is, out; which is a
note the more in the general, the intellectual lucidity. The
only other note in fact to be added is that of the absence of
funds for the undertaking. Neither partner had a penny to
spare; the plan was wholly to " make money," on a scale, as
they went. A great deal was in the event, exactly speaking, to
be made-but the event was at the time far from clear to them.
The enterprise was in consequence purely and simply, with a
rounded perfection that gives it its value for the critic, an affair
of the heart. That the heart, taking it as a fully representative
organ, should fail of no good occasion completely and consistently to engage itself was the definite and, as appeared, the
promising assumption on which everything rested. The heart
was real life, frank, fearless, intelligent and even, so far as might
be, intelligible life; everything else was stupid as well as poor,
muddle as well as misery. The heart of course might be misery,
for nothing was more possible than that life predominantly was;
but it was at all events the misery that is least ignoble.
This was the basis of Madame Sand's personal evolution, of
her immense moral energy, for many a year; it was a practical