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

GEORGE SAND

x63

as I have noted, into those of the nobler form. It is prolonged
till the following February, we make out, at furthest, and only
after having been more than once in the interval threatened
with violent extinction. It bequeaths us thus in a handful of
dates a picture than which probably none other in the annals
of 4" passion " was ever more suggestive. The passion is of the
kind that is called " immortal "-and so called, wonderful to
say, with infinite reason and justice. The poems, the letters,
the diaries, the novels, the unextinguished accents and lingering echoes that commemorate it are among the treasures of the
human imagination. The literature of the world is appreciably
the richer for it. The noblest forms, in a word, on both sides,
marked it for their own; it was born, according to the adage,
with a silver spoon in its mouth. It was an affection in short
transcendent and sublime, and yet the critic sees it come and
go before he can positively turn round. The brief period of
some seventeen or eighteen months not only affords it all its
opportunity, but places comfortably in its lap a relation founded
on the same elements and yet wholly distinct from it. Musset
occupied in fact but two-thirds of his mistress's time. Pagello
overlapped him because Pagello also appealed to the heart; but
Pagello's appeal to the heart was disposed of as expeditiously.
Musset, in the same way, succeeded Pagello at the voice of a
similar appeal, and this claim, in its turn, was polished off in
yet livelier fashion.
Liveliness is of course the tune of the " gay " career; it has
always been supposed to relegate to comedy the things to which
it puts its mark-so that as a series of sequences amenable
mainly to satire the approximations I have made would fall
neatly into place. The anomaly here, as on other occasions of
the same sort depicted in Madame Karenine's volumes, is that
the facts, as we are brought near to them, strike us as so out
of relation to the beautiful tone. The effect and the achieved
dignity are those of tragedy - tragedy rearranging, begetting
afresh, in its own interest, all the elements of ecstasy and despair.
How can it not be tragedy when this interest is just the interest,