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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

everything at the end was to indicate that she was not to have
been defeated. Others might well have been, and the banks of
the stream of her career are marked, not invisibly, with mouldering traces of the less lucky or the less buoyant; but her attitude as life went on was more and more that of showing how
she profited of all things for wisdom and sympathy, for a general
expertness and nobleness. These forces, all clarified to an admirable judgment, kept her to the last day serene and superior,
and they are one of the reasons why the monument before us is
felt not to be misplaced. There should always be a monument
to those who have achieved a prodigy. What greater prodigy
than to have bequeathed in such mixed elements, to have principally made up of them, the affirmation of an unprecedented
intensity of life ~ For though this intensity was one that broke
down in each proposed exhibition the general example remains,
incongruously, almost the best we can cite. And all we can say
is that this brings us back once more to the large manner, the
exceptional energy and well-nigh monstrous vitality, of the individual concerned. Nothing is so absurd as a half-disguise, and
Madame Sand's abiding value will probably be in her having
given her sex, for its new evolution and transformation, the real
standard and measure of change. This evolution and this transformation are all round us unmistakable; the change is in the
air; women are turned more and more to looking at life as men
look at it and to getting from it what men get. In this direction
their aim has been as yet comparatively modest and their emulation low; the challenge they have hitherto picked up is but
the challenge of the " average " male. The approximation of
the extraordinary woman has been practically, in other words,
to the ordinary man. George Sand's service is that she planted
the flag much higher-her own approximation at least was to
the extraordinary. She reached him, she surpassed him, and she
showed how, with native dispositions, the thing could be done.
So far as we have come these new records will live as the precious
text-book of the business.