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

I74

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

stretch forth her hand and take. There it is that her precedent
t stands out-apparently to a blind generation; so that some little
li insistence on theJethQd.f hex.appropriations woiseem to
k be peculiarly in place. It was a method that 'iay be summed up
indeed in a fairly simple, if comprehensive, statement: it consisted in her dealing with life exactly as if she had been a mani 1jexactly not being too much to say. Nature certainly had co6ntriutea onhetbhaitvhs'mcdess; it had given her a constitution and a temperament, the kind of health, the kind of
mind, the kind of courage, that might most directly help-so
that she had but to convert these strong matters into the kind
of experience. The writer of these lines remembers how a
distinguished and intimate friend of her later years, who was a
very great admirer, said of her to him just after her death that
her not having been born a man seemed, when one knew her,
t but an awkward accident: she had been to all intents and purposes so fine and frank a specimen of the sex. This anomalous
native turn, it may be urged, can have no general applicationwomen cannot be men by the mere trying or by calling themselves " as good "; they must have been provided with what
we have just noted as the outfit. The force of George Sand's
exhibition consorts, we contend, none the less perfectly with! the logic of the consummation awaiting us, if a multitude of
signs are to be trusted, in a more or less near future: that
effective repudiation of the distinctive, as to function and
opportunity, as to working and playing activity, for which the
definite removal of immemorial disabilities is but another name.
We are in presence already of a practical shrinkage of the distinctive, at the rapidest rate, and that it must shrink till nothing of it worth mentioning be left, what is this but a war-cry
(presenting itself also indeed as a plea for peace) with which
four ears are familiar e' Unless the suppression of the distinctive,
(however, is to work to the prejudice, as we may fairly call it,, ) of men, drawing them over to the feminine type rather than
/ drawing women over to theirs-which is not what seems most
/ probable-the course of the business will be a virtual._.rl.
taking on the part of the half of humanity acting ostensibly for