Literary Criticism by James Henry

Author:James, Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: (Privatkopie)
Published: 2010-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

III

The great difficulty was that, though they were sublime, the couple were really not serious. But on the other hand if on a lady's part in such a relation the want of sincerity or of constancy is a grave reproach the matter is a good deal modified when the lady, as I have mentioned, happens to be – I may not go so far as to say a gentleman. That George Sand just fell short of this character was the greatest difficulty of all; because if a woman, in a love affair, may be – for all she is to gain or to lose – what she likes, there is only one thing that, to carry it off with any degree of credit, a man may be. Mme Sand forgot this on the day she published Elle et Lui; she forgot it again more gravely when she bequeathed to the great snickering public these present shreds and relics of unutterably personal things. The aberration refers itself to the strange lapses of still other occasions – notably to the extraordinary absence of scruples with which she in the delightful Histoire de ma Vie gives away, as we say, the character other remarkable mother. The picture is admirable for vividness, for breadth of touch; it would be perfect from any hand not a daughter's, and we ask ourselves wonderingly how through all the years, to make her capable of it, a long perversion must have worked and the filial fibre – or rather the general flower of sensibility – have been battered. Not this particular anomaly, however, but many another, yields to the reflection that as just after her death a very perceptive person who had known her well put it to the author of these remarks, she was a woman quite by accident. Her immense plausibility was almost the only sign of her sex. She needed, always to prove that she had been in the right; as how indeed could a person fail to who, thanks to the special equipment I have named, might prove it so brilliantly? It is not too much to say of her gift of expression – and I have already in effect said so – that from beginning to end it floated her over the real as a high tide floats a ship over the bar. She was never left awkwardly straddling on the sandbank of fact.

For the rest, in any case, with her free experience and her free use of it, her literary style, her love of ideas and questions of science and philosophy, her comradeship, her boundless tolerance, her intellectual patience, her personal good humour and perpetual tobacco (she smoked long before women at large felt the cruel obligation), with all these things and many I don't mention she had more of the inward and outward of the other sex than of her own. She had above all the mark that, to speak at this time of day with a freedom for which her

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