DOI Artikel:
James, Henry: She and He: recent documents
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.25498#0036
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She and He : recent Documents
commemorated as stages in the unfolding of the great statesman
and the great poet. It is very much the same large list, the same
story of free appropriation and consumption. She appeared in
short to have lived through a succession of such ties exactly in the
manner of a Goethe, a Byron or a Napoleon ; and if millions of
women, of course, of every condition, had had more lovers, it was
probable that no woman, independently so occupied and so
diligent, had ever had, as might be said, more unions. Her
fashion was quite her own of extracting from this sort of experi-
ence all that it had to give her, and being withal only the more
just and bright and true, the more sane and superior, improved
and improving. She strikes us, in the benignity of such an
intercourse, as even more than maternal : not so much the mere
fond mother as the supersensuous grandmother of the wonderful
affair. Is not that practically the character in which Therese
Jacques studies to present herself to Laurent de Fauvel ? the light
in which Lucrezia Floriani (a memento of a friendship for
Chopin, for Liszt) shows the heroine as affected toward Prince
Karol and his friend ? George Sand is too inveterately moral, too
preoccupied with that need to do good which is often, in art, the
enemy of doing well ; but in all her work the story-part, as
children call it, has the freshness and good faith of a monastic
legend. It is just possible indeed that the moral idea was the real
mainspring of her course—I mean a sense of the duty of avenging
on the unscrupulous race of men their immemorial selfish success
with the plastic race of women. Did she wish above all to turn
the tables—to show how the sex that had always ground the other
in the intellectual mill was on occasion capable of being ground ?
However this may be, nothing is more striking than the im-
punity with which she gave herself to conditions that are usually
held to denote or to involve a state of demoralisation. This
impunity
She and He : recent Documents
commemorated as stages in the unfolding of the great statesman
and the great poet. It is very much the same large list, the same
story of free appropriation and consumption. She appeared in
short to have lived through a succession of such ties exactly in the
manner of a Goethe, a Byron or a Napoleon ; and if millions of
women, of course, of every condition, had had more lovers, it was
probable that no woman, independently so occupied and so
diligent, had ever had, as might be said, more unions. Her
fashion was quite her own of extracting from this sort of experi-
ence all that it had to give her, and being withal only the more
just and bright and true, the more sane and superior, improved
and improving. She strikes us, in the benignity of such an
intercourse, as even more than maternal : not so much the mere
fond mother as the supersensuous grandmother of the wonderful
affair. Is not that practically the character in which Therese
Jacques studies to present herself to Laurent de Fauvel ? the light
in which Lucrezia Floriani (a memento of a friendship for
Chopin, for Liszt) shows the heroine as affected toward Prince
Karol and his friend ? George Sand is too inveterately moral, too
preoccupied with that need to do good which is often, in art, the
enemy of doing well ; but in all her work the story-part, as
children call it, has the freshness and good faith of a monastic
legend. It is just possible indeed that the moral idea was the real
mainspring of her course—I mean a sense of the duty of avenging
on the unscrupulous race of men their immemorial selfish success
with the plastic race of women. Did she wish above all to turn
the tables—to show how the sex that had always ground the other
in the intellectual mill was on occasion capable of being ground ?
However this may be, nothing is more striking than the im-
punity with which she gave herself to conditions that are usually
held to denote or to involve a state of demoralisation. This
impunity