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

GEORGE SAND

175

the first time in freedom to annex the male identity, that of the
other half, so far as may be7F aftcontrivab1e, to its own cluster
of elents. Individuals are in great world and race movements negligible, and if that undertaking must inevitably
appeal to different recruits with a differing cogency, its really
enlisting its army or becoming reflected, to a perfectly conceivable vividness, in the mass, is all our demonstration requires. At that point begins the revolution, the shift of the
emphasis from the idea of woman's weakness to the idea of her
strength-which is where the emphasis has lain, from far back,
by his every tradition, on behalf of man; and George Sand's
great value, as we say, is that she gives us the vision, gives us
the particular case, of the shift achieved, displayed with every
assurance and working with every success.
The answer of her life to the ugstion of what an effective
annexation of tealeidentr man amount to amount to in
favouring conditions certainly, but in conditions susceptible to
the highest degree of encouragement and cultivation, leaves
nothing to be desired for completeness. This is the moral of
her tale, the beauty of what she does for us-that at no points
whatever of her history or her character do their power thus
to give satisfaction break down; sothat w hIS.f=a t
whQe.he ki Ls,
fe na butthe richness that she adds to t asculin. It is not simply tat she could don a disguise that gaped
at the seams, that she could figure as a man of the mere carnival
or pantomime variety, but that she made so virile, so efficient
and homogeneous a one. Admirable child of the old order as
we find her, she was far from our late-coming theories and
fevers-by the reason simply of her not being reduced to them;
as to which nothing about her is more eloquent than her living
at such ease with a conception of the main relevance of women
that is viewed among ourselves as antiquated to " quaintness."
She could afford the traditional and sentimental, the old,
romantic and historic theory of the function most natural to
them, since she entertained it exactly as a man would. It is