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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

Then angry with her mother she avenged herself on her as
well by further calumnies. Thereupon took place at Nohant
such events that "-that in fine we stop before them with this
preliminary shudder. The cross-currents of violence among
them would take more keeping apart than we have time for,
the more that everything comes back, for interest, to the intrinsic
weight of the tone of the principal sufferer from them-as we
see her, as we wouldn't for the world not see her, in spite of the
fact that Chopin was to succumb scarce more than a year later
to multiplied lacerations, and that she was to override and reproduce and pre-appointedly flourish for long years after. If
it is interesting, as I have pronounced it, that Chopin, again,
should have consented to be of the opinion of Solange that the
relations between her brother Maurice and the hapless Augustine were of the last impropriety, I fear I can account no better
for this than by our sense that the more the genius loci has to
feed her full tone the more our faith in it, as such a fine thing
in itself, is justified. Almost immediately after the precipitated
marriage of the daughter of the house has taken place, the
Clesinger couple, avid and insolent, of a breadth of old time
impudence in fact of which our paler day has lost the pattern,
are back on the mother's hands, to the effect of a vividest
picture of Maurice well-nigh in a death-grapple with his apparently quite monstrous " bounder " of a brother-in-law, a
picture that further gives us Madame Sand herself smiting
Clesinger in the face and receiving from him a blow in the
breast, while Solange " coldly," with an iciness indeed peculiarly her own, fans the rage and approves her husband's assault,
and while the divine composer, though for that moment much
in the background, approves the wondrous approval. He still
approves, to all appearance, the daughter's interpretation of
the mother's wish to " get rid " of him as the result of an
amorous design on the latter's part in respect of a young man
lately introduced to the circle as Maurice's friend and for the
intimate relation with whom it is thus desirable that the coast
shall be made clear. How else than through no fewer consistencies of the unedifying on the part of these provokers of