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

GEORGE SAND

I6I

it; but the too numerous weaknesses, vulgarities and penalties
of adventure and surrender she had only in sufficient degree to
complete the experience before they shaped themselves into the
eloquence into which she could always reascend. Her eloquence
-it is the simplest way to explain her-fairly made her success;
and eloquence is superlatively rare. When passion can always
depend upon it to vibrate passion becomes to that extent action,
and success is nothing but action repeated and confirmed. In
Madame Sand's particular case the constant recurrence of the
malady of passion promoted in the most extraordinary way the
superior appearance, the general expression, of health. It is of
course not to be denied that there are in her work infirmities
and disfigurements, odd smutches even, or unwitting drolleries,
which show a sense on some sides enfeebled. The sense of her
characters themselves for instance is constantly a confused one;
they are too often at sea as to what is possible and what impossible for what we roughly call decent people. Her own categories, loose and liberal, are yet ever positive enough; when
they err it is by excess of indulgence and by absence of the
humorous vision, a nose for the ridiculous-the fatal want,
this last almost always, we are reminded, the heel of Achilles,
in the sentimental, the romantic estimate. The general validity
of her novels, at any rate, I leave impugned, and the feature I
have just noted in them is but one of the points at which they
fail of reality. I stick to the history of her personal experiment,
as the now so numerous documents show it; for it is here, and
here only, that her felicity is amusing and confounding; amusing by the quaintness of some of the facts exposed, and yet
confounding by reason of the beauty mixed with them.
The " affair " with Musset for example has come to figure,
thanks to the talent of both parties, as one of the great affairs
in the history of letters; and yet on the near view of it now
enjoyed we learn that it dragged out scarce more than a year.
Even this measure indeed is excessive, so far as any measure
serves amid so much that is incoherent. It supposed itself to
have dropped for upwards of six months, during which another