ngly developed. She was masculine only
in the deliberate libertinism of certain episodes in her own life. This
was a characteristic--one on no account to be overlooked or denied or
disguised, but it was not her character. The character was womanly,
tender, exquisitely patient and good-natured. She would take cross
humanity in her arms, and carry it out into the sunshine of the fields;
she would show it flowers and birds, sing songs to it, tell it stories,
recall its original beauty. Even in her moods of depression and revolt,
one recognises the fatigue of the strong. It is never for a moment the
lassitude of the feeble, the weary spite of a sick and ill-used soul. As
she was free from personal vanity, she was also free from hysteria. On
marriage--the one subject which drove her to a certain though always
disciplined violence--she clearly felt more for others than they
felt for themselves; and in observing certain households and life
partnerships, she may have been afflicted with a dismay which the
unreflecting sufferers did not share. No writer who was carried away
by egoistic anger or disappointment could have told these stories of
unhappiness, infidelity, and luckless love with such dispassionate
lucidity.

With the artist's dislike of all that is positive and arbitrary, she
was, nevertheless, subject rather to her intellect than her emotions.
An insult to her intelligence was the one thing she found it hard
to pardon, and she allowed no external interference to disturb her
relations with her own reasoning faculty. She followed caprices, no
doubt, but she was never under any apprehension with regard to their
true nature, displaying in this respect a detachment which is usually
considered exclusively virile. _Elle et Lui_, which, perhaps because
it is short and associated with actual facts, is the most frequently
discussed in general conversation on her work, remains probably the
sanest account of a sentimental experiment which was ever written. How
far it may have seemed accurate to De Musset is not to the point.
Her version of her grievance is at least convincing. Without fear and
without hope, she makes her statement, and it stands, therefore, unique
of its kind among indictments. It has been said that her fault was an
excess of emotionalism; that is to say, she attached too much importance
to mere feeling and described it, in French of marvellous ease and
beauty, with a good deal of something else which one can alm