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

GEORGE SAND

I7I

make the bounds of appreciation recede e This is why the figure
now shown us, blazed upon to the last intensity by the lamplight of investigation, and with the rank oil consumed in the
process fairly filling the air, declines to let us off from an hour
of that contemplation which yet involves discomfiture for us so
long as certain lucidities on our own part, certain serenities of
assurance, fail correspondingly to play up. We feel ourselves
so outfaced, as it were; we somehow want in any such case to
meet and match the assurances with which the subject himself
or herself immitigably bristles, and are nevertheless by no
means certain that our bringing up premature forces or trying
to reply with lights of our own may not check the current of
communication, practically without sense for us unless flowing
at its fullest. At our biographer's rate of progress we shall still
have much to wait for; but it can meanwhile not be said that
we have not plenty to go on with. To this may be added that
the stretch of " life," apart from the more concrete exhibition,
already accounted for by our three volumes (if one may discriminate between" production " and life to a degree that is in
this connection exceptionally questionable), represents to all
appearance the most violently and variously agitated face of the
career. The establishment of the Second Empire ushered in
for Madame Sand, we seem in course of preparation to make
out, the long period already more or less known to fame, that
is to criticism, as the period of her great placidity, her more
or less notorious appeasement; a string of afternoon hours as
hazily golden as so many reigns of Antonines, when her genius
had mastered the high art of acting without waste, when a
happy play of inspiration had all the air, so far as our spectatorship went, of filling her large capacity and her beautiful form
to the brim, and when the gathered fruit of what she had
dauntlessly done and been heaped itself upon her table as a
rich feast for memory and philosophy. So she came in for the
enjoyment of all the sagesse her contemporaries (with only such
exceptions as M. Paul de Musset and Madame Louise Colet
and the few discordant pleaders for poor Chopin) finally rejoiced on their side to acclaim; the sum of her aspects " com