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

GEORGE SAND

i87

of " Isidora,"' in which fiction we are shown the parody perpetrated. If women rend each other on occasion with sharper
talons than seem to belong on the whole to the male hand,
however intendingly applied, we find ourselves reflect parenthetically that the loss of this advantage may well be a matter
for them to consider when the new approximation is the issue.
The great sign of the Nohant circle on all this showing, at
any rate, is the intense personalism, as we may call it, reigning
there, or in other words the vivacity, the acuity and irritability
of the personal relations-which flourished so largely, we at
the same time feel, by reason of the general gift for expression,
that gift to which we owe the general superiority of every letter,
from it scarce matters whom, laid under contribution by our
author. How could people not feel with acuity when they could,
when they had to, write with such point and such specific intelligence.-just indeed as one asks how letters could fail to remain
at such a level among them when they incessantly generated
choice matter for expression. Madame Sand herself is of
course on this ground easily the most admirable, as we have
seen; but every one " knows how " to write, and does it well
in proportion as the matter in hand most demands and most
rewards proper saying. Much of all this stuff of history seems
indeed to have been susceptible of any amount of force of statement; yet we note all the while how in the case of the great
mistress of the pen at least some shade of intrinsic beauty
attends even the presentation of quite abominable facts. We
can only see it as abominable, at least, so long as we have
Madame Sand's words-which are somehow a different thing
from her word-for it, that Chopin had from the first " sided "
with the atrocious Solange in that play of her genius which is
characterised by our chronicler as wickedness for the sake of
wickedness, as art for the sake of art, without other logic or
other cause. " Once married," says Madame Karenine, " she
made a double use of this wickedness. She had always hated
Augustine; she wished, one doesn't know why, to break off
her marriage, and by calumnies and insinuations she succeeded.