the first thing i find to-day and on my very threshold[2] to say about gustave flaubert is that he has been reported on by m. émile faguet in the series of les grands écrivains fran?ais with such lucidity as may almost be taken to warn off a later critic. i desire to pay at the outset my tribute to m. faguet’s exhaustive study, which is really in its kind a model and a monument. never can a critic have got closer to a subject of this order; never can the results of the approach have been more copious or more interesting; never in short can the master of a complex art have been more mastered in his turn, nor his art more penetrated, by the application of an earnest curiosity. that remark i have it at heart to make, so pre-eminently has the little volume i refer to not left the subject where it found it. it abounds in contributive light, and yet, i feel on reflection that it scarce wholly dazzles another contributor away. one reason of this is that, though i enter into everything m. faguet has said, there are things—things perhaps especially of the province of the artist, the fellow-craftsman of flaubert—that i am conscious of his not having said; another is that inevitably there are particular possibilities of reaction in our english-speaking consciousness that hold up a light of their own. therefore i venture to follow even on a field so laboured, only paying this toll to the latest and best work because the author has made it impossible to do less.

flaubert’s life is so almost exclusively the story of his literary application that to speak of his five or six fictions is pretty well to account for it all. he died in 1880 after a career of fifty-nine years singularly little marked by changes of scene, of fortune, of attitude, of occupation, of character, and above all, as may be said, of mind. he would be interesting to the race of novelists if only because, quite apart from the value of his work, he so personally gives us the example and the image, so presents the intellectual case. he was born a novelist, grew up, lived, died a novelist, breathing, feeling, thinking, speaking, performing every operation of life, only as that votary; and this though his production was to be small in amount and though it constituted all his diligence. it was not indeed perhaps primarily so much that he was born and lived a novelist as that he was born and lived literary, and that to be literary represented for him an almost overwhelming situation. no life was long enough, no courage great enough, no fortune kind enough to support a man under the burden of this character when once such a doom had been laid on him. his case was a doom because he felt of his vocation almost nothing but the difficulty. he had many strange sides, but this was the strangest, that if we argued from his difficulty to his work, the difficulty being registered for us in his letters and elsewhere, we should expect from the result but the smallest things. we should be prepared to find in it well-nigh a complete absence of the signs of a gift. we should regret that the unhappy man had not addressed himself to something he might have found at least comparatively easy. we should singularly miss the consecration supposedly given to a work of art by its having been conceived in joy. that is flaubert’s remarkable, his so far as i know unmatched distinction, that he has left works of an extraordinary art even the conception of which failed to help him to think in serenity. the chapter of execution, from the moment execution gets really into the shafts, is of course always and everywhere a troubled one—about which moreover too much has of late been written; but we frequently find flaubert cursing his subjects themselves, wishing he had not chosen them, holding himself up to derision for having done so, and hating them in the very act of sitting down to them. he cared immensely for the medium, the task and the triumph involved, but was himself the last to be able to say why. he is sustained only by the rage and the habit of effort; the mere love of letters, let alone the love of life, appears at an early age to have deserted him. certain passages in his correspondence make us even wonder if it be not hate that sustains him most. so, successively, his several supremely finished and crowned compositions came into the world, and we may feel sure that none others of the kind, none that were to have an equal fortune, had sprung from such adversity.

i insist upon this because his at once excited and baffled passion gives the key of his life and determines its outline. i must speak of him at least as i feel him and as in his very latest years i had the fortune occasionally to see him. i said just now, practically, that he is for many of our tribe at large the novelist, intent and typical, and so, gathered together and foreshortened, simplified and fixed, the lapse of time seems to show him. it has made him in his prolonged posture extraordinarily objective, made him even resemble one of his own productions, constituted him as a subject, determined him as a figure; the limit of his range, and above all of his reach, is after this fashion, no doubt, sufficiently indicated, and yet perhaps in the event without injury to his name. if our consideration of him cultivates a certain tenderness on the double ground that he suffered supremely in the cause and that there is endlessly much to be learned from him, we remember at the same time that, indirectly, the world at large possesses him not less than the confrère. he has fed and fertilised, has filtered through others, and so arrived at contact with that public from whom it was his theory that he was separated by a deep and impassable trench, the labour of his own spade. he is none the less more interesting, i repeat, as a failure however qualified than as a success however explained, and it is as so viewed that the unity of his career attaches and admonishes. save in some degree by a condition of health (a liability to epileptic fits at times frequent, but never so frequent as to have been generally suspected,) he was not outwardly hampered as the tribe of men of letters goes—an anxious brotherhood at the best; yet the fewest possible things appear to have ever succeeded in happening to him. the only son of an eminent provincial physician, he inherited a modest ease and no other incumbrance than, as was the case for balzac, an over-attentive, an importunate mother; but freedom spoke to him from behind a veil, and when we have mentioned the few apparent facts of experience that make up his landmarks over and beyond his interspaced publications we shall have completed his biography. tall, strong, striking, he caused his friends to admire in him the elder, the florid norman type, and he seems himself, as a man of imagination, to have found some transmission of race in his stature and presence, his light-coloured salient eyes and long tawny moustache.

the central event of his life was his journey to the east in 1849 with m. maxime du camp, of which the latter has left in his “impressions littéraires” a singularly interesting and, as we may perhaps say, slightly treacherous report, and which prepared for flaubert a state of nostalgia that was not only never to leave him, but that was to work in him as a motive. he had during that year, and just in sufficient quantity, his revelation, the particular appropriate disclosure to which the gods at some moment treat the artist unless they happen too perversely to conspire against him: he tasted of the knowledge by which he was subsequently to measure everything, appeal from everything, find everything flat. never probably was an impression so assimilated, so positively transmuted to a function; he lived on it to the end and we may say that in “salammb?” and “la tentation de saint-antoine” he almost died of it. he made afterwards no other journey of the least importance save a disgusted excursion to the rigi-kaltbad shortly before his death. the franco-german war was of course to him for the time as the valley of the shadow itself; but this was an ordeal, unlike most of his other ordeals, shared after all with millions. he never married—he declared, toward the end, to the most comprehending of his confidants, that he had been from the first “afraid of life”; and the friendliest element of his later time was, we judge, that admirable comfortable commerce, in her fullest maturity, with madame george sand, the confidant i just referred to; which has been preserved for us in the published correspondence of each. he had in ivan turgenieff a friend almost as valued; he spent each year a few months in paris, where (to mention everything) he had his natural place, so far as he cared to take it, at the small literary court of the princess mathilde; and, lastly, he lost toward the close of his life, by no fault of his own, a considerable part of his modest fortune. it is, however, in the long security, the almost unbroken solitude of croisset, near rouen, that he mainly figures for us, gouging out his successive books in the wide old room, of many windows, that, with an intervening terrace, overlooked the broad seine and the passing boats. this was virtually a monastic cell, closed to echoes and accidents; with its stillness for long periods scarce broken save by the creak of the towing-chain of the tugs across the water. when i have added that his published letters offer a view, not very refreshing, of his youthful entanglement with madame louise colet—whom we name because, apparently not a shrinking person, she long ago practically named herself—i shall have catalogued his personal vicissitudes. and i may add further that the connection with madame colet, such as it was, rears its head for us in something like a desert of immunity from such complications.

his complications were of the spirit, of the literary vision, and though he was thoroughly profane he was yet essentially anchoretic. i perhaps miss a point, however, in not finally subjoining that he was liberally accessible to his friends during the months he regularly spent in paris. sensitive, passionate, perverse, not less than immediately sociable—for if he detested his collective contemporaries this dropped, thanks to his humanising shyness, before the individual encounter—he was in particular and superexcellently not banal, and he attached men perhaps more than women, inspiring a marked, a by no means colourless shade of respect; a respect not founded, as the air of it is apt to be, on the vague presumption, but addressed almost in especial to his disparities and oddities and thereby, no doubt, none too different from affection. his friends at all events were a rich and eager cénacle, among whom he was on occasion, by his picturesque personality, a natural and overtopping centre; partly perhaps because he was so much and so familiarly at home. he wore, up to any hour of the afternoon, that long, colloquial dressing-gown, with trousers to match, which one has always associated with literature in france—the uniform really of freedom of talk. freedom of talk abounded by his winter fire, for the cénacle was made up almost wholly of the more finely distinguished among his contemporaries; of philosophers, men of letters and men of affairs belonging to his own generation and the next. he had at the time i have in mind a small perch, far aloft, at the distant, the then almost suburban, end of the faubourg saint-honoré, where on sunday afternoons, at the very top of an endless flight of stairs, were to be encountered in a cloud of conversation and smoke most of the novelists of the general balzac tradition. others of a different birth and complexion were markedly not of the number, were not even conceivable as present; none of those, unless i misremember, whose fictions were at that time “serialised” in the revue des deux mondes. in spite of renan and taine and two or three more, the contributor to the revue would indeed at no time have found in the circle in question his foot on his native heath. one could recall if one would two or three vivid allusions to him, not of the most quotable, on the lips of the most famous of “naturalists”—allusions to him as represented for instance by m. victor cherbuliez and m. octave feuillet. the author of these pages recalls a concise qualification of this last of his fellows on the lips of émile zola, which that absorbed auditor had too directly, too rashly asked for; but which is alas not reproducible here. there was little else but the talk, which had extreme intensity and variety; almost nothing, as i remember, but a painted and gilded idol, of considerable size, a relic and a memento, on the chimney-piece. flaubert was huge and diffident, but florid too and resonant, and my main remembrance is of a conception of courtesy in him, an accessibility to the human relation, that only wanted to be sure of the way taken or to take. the uncertainties of the french for the determination of intercourse have often struck me as quite matching the sharpness of their certainties, as we for the most part feel these latter, which sometimes in fact throw the indeterminate into almost touching relief. i have thought of them at such times as the people in the world one may have to go more of the way to meet than to meet any other, and this, as it were, through their being seated and embedded, provided for at home, in a manner that is all their own and that has bred them to the positive preacceptance of interest on their behalf. we at least of the anglo-american race, more abroad in the world, perching everywhere, so far as grounds of intercourse are concerned, more vaguely and superficially, as well as less intelligently, are the more ready by that fact with inexpensive accommodations, rather conscious that these themselves forbear from the claim to fascinate, and advancing with the good nature that is the mantle of our obtuseness to any point whatever where entertainment may be offered us. my recollection is at any rate simplified by the fact of the presence almost always, in the little high room of the faubourg’s end, of other persons and other voices. flaubert’s own voice is clearest to me from the uneffaced sense of a winter week-day afternoon when i found him by exception alone and when something led to his reading me aloud, in support of some judgment he had thrown off, a poem of théophile gautier’s. he cited it as an example of verse intensely and distinctively french, and french in its melancholy, which neither goethe nor heine nor leopardi, neither pushkin nor tennyson nor, as he said, byron, could at all have matched in kind. he converted me at the moment to this perception, alike by the sense of the thing and by his large utterance of it; after which it is dreadful to have to confess not only that the poem was then new to me, but that, hunt as i will in every volume of its author, i am never able to recover it. this is perhaps after all happy, causing flaubert’s own full tone, which was the note of the occasion, to linger the more unquenched. but for the rhyme in fact i could have believed him to be spouting to me something strange and sonorous of his own. the thing really rare would have been to hear him do that—hear him gueuler, as he liked to call it. verse, i felt, we had always with us, and almost any idiot of goodwill could give it a value. the value of so many a passage of “salammb?” and of “l’éducation” was on the other hand exactly such as gained when he allowed himself, as had by the legend ever been frequent dans l’intimité, to “bellow” it to its fullest effect.

one of the things that make him most exhibitional and most describable, so that if we had invented him as an illustration or a character we would exactly so have arranged him, is that he was formed intellectually of two quite distinct compartments, a sense of the real and a sense of the romantic, and that his production, for our present cognisance, thus neatly and vividly divides itself. the divisions are as marked as the sections on the back of a scarab, though their distinctness is undoubtedly but the final expression of much inward strife. m. faguet indeed, who is admirable on this question of our author’s duality, gives an account of the romanticism that found its way for him into the real and of the reality that found its way into the romantic; but he none the less strikes us as a curious splendid insect sustained on wings of a different coloration, the right a vivid red, say, and the left as frank a yellow. this duality has in its sharp operation placed “madame bovary” and “l’éducation” on one side together and placed together on the other “salammb?” and “la tentation.” “bouvard et pécuchet” it can scarce be spoken of, i think, as having placed anywhere or anyhow. if it was flaubert’s way to find his subject impossible there was none he saw so much in that light as this last-named, but also none that he appears to have held so important for that very reason to pursue to the bitter end. posterity agrees with him about the impossibility, but rather takes upon itself to break with the rest of the logic. we may perhaps, however, for symmetry, let “bouvard et pécuchet” figure as the tail—if scarabs ever have tails—of our analogous insect. only in that case we should also append as the very tip the small volume of the “trois contes,” preponderantly of the deepest imaginative hue.

his imagination was great and splendid; in spite of which, strangely enough, his masterpiece is not his most imaginative work. “madame bovary,” beyond question, holds that first place, and “madame bovary” is concerned with the career of a country doctor’s wife in a petty norman town. the elements of the picture are of the fewest, the situation of the heroine almost of the meanest, the material for interest, considering the interest yielded, of the most unpromising; but these facts only throw into relief one of those incalculable incidents that attend the proceedings of genius. “madame bovary” was doomed by circumstances and causes—the freshness of comparative youth and good faith on the author’s part being perhaps the chief—definitely to take its position, even though its subject was fundamentally a negation of the remote, the splendid and the strange, the stuff of his fondest and most cultivated dreams. it would have seemed very nearly to exclude the free play of the imagination, and the way this faculty on the author’s part nevertheless presides is one of those accidents, man?uvres, inspirations, we hardly know what to call them, by which masterpieces grow. he of course knew more or less what he was doing for his book in making emma bovary a victim of the imaginative habit, but he must have been far from designing or measuring the total effect which renders the work so general, so complete an expression of himself. his separate idiosyncrasies, his irritated sensibility to the life about him, with the power to catch it in the fact and hold it hard, and his hunger for style and history and poetry, for the rich and the rare, great reverberations, great adumbrations, are here represented together as they are not in his later writings. there is nothing of the near, of the directly observed, though there may be much of the directly perceived and the minutely detailed, either in “salammb?” or in “saint-antoine,” and little enough of the extravagance of illusion in that indefinable last word of restrained evocation and cold execution “l’éducation sentimentale.” m. faguet has of course excellently noted this—that the fortune and felicity of the book were assured by the stroke that made the central figure an embodiment of helpless romanticism. flaubert himself but narrowly escaped being such an embodiment after all, and he is thus able to express the romantic mind with extraordinary truth. as to the rest of the matter he had the luck of having been in possession from the first, having begun so early to nurse and work up his plan that, familiarity and the native air, the native soil, aiding, he had finally made out to the last lurking shade the small sordid sunny dusty village picture, its emptiness constituted and peopled. it is in the background and the accessories that the real, the real of his theme, abides; and the romantic, the romantic of his theme, accordingly occupies the front. emma bovary’s poor adventures are a tragedy for the very reason that in a world unsuspecting, unassisting, unconsoling, she has herself to distil the rich and the rare. ignorant, unguided, undiverted, ridden by the very nature and mixture of her consciousness, she makes of the business an inordinate failure, a failure which in its turn makes for flaubert the most pointed, the most told of anecdotes.

there are many things to say about “madame bovary,” but an old admirer of the book would be but half-hearted—so far as they represent reserves or puzzlements—were he not to note first of all the circumstances by which it is most endeared to him. to remember it from far back is to have been present all along at a process of singular interest to a literary mind, a case indeed full of comfort and cheer. the finest of flaubert’s novels is to-day, on the french shelf of fiction, one of the first of the classics; it has attained that position, slowly but steadily, before our eyes; and we seem so to follow the evolution of the fate of a classic. we see how the thing takes place; which we rarely can, for we mostly miss either the beginning or the end, especially in the case of a consecration as complete as this. the consecrations of the past are too far behind and those of the future too far in front. that the production before us should have come in for the heavenly crown may be a fact to offer english and american readers a mystifying side; but it is exactly our ground and a part moreover of the total interest. the author of these remarks remembers, as with a sense of the way such things happen, that when a very young person in paris he took up from the parental table the latest number of the periodical in which flaubert’s then duly unrecognised masterpiece was in course of publication. the moment is not historic, but it was to become in the light of history, as may be said, so unforgettable that every small feature of it yet again lives for him: it rests there like the backward end of the span. the cover of the old revue de paris was yellow, if i mistake not, like that of the new, and “madame bovary: m?urs de province,” on the inside of it, was already, on the spot, as a title, mysteriously arresting, inscrutably charged. i was ignorant of what had preceded and was not to know till much later what followed; but present to me still is the act of standing there before the fire, my back against the low beplushed and begarnished french chimney-piece and taking in what i might of that instalment, taking it in with so surprised an interest, and perhaps as well such a stir of faint foreknowledge, that the sunny little salon, the autumn day, the window ajar and the cheerful outside clatter of the rue montaigne are all now for me more or less in the story and the story more or less in them. the story, however, was at that moment having a difficult life; its fortune was all to make; its merit was so far from suspected that, as maxime du camp—though verily with no excess of contrition—relates, its cloth of gold barely escaped the editorial shears. this, with much more, contributes for us to the course of things to come. the book, on its appearance as a volume, proved a shock to the high propriety of the guardians of public morals under the second empire, and flaubert was prosecuted as author of a work indecent to scandal. the prosecution in the event fell to the ground, but i should perhaps have mentioned this agitation as one of the very few, of any public order, in his short list. “le candidat” fell at the vaudeville theatre, several years later, with a violence indicated by its withdrawal after a performance of but two nights, the first of these marked by a deafening uproar; only if the comedy was not to recover from this accident the misprised lustre of the novel was entirely to reassert itself. it is strange enough at present—so far have we travelled since then—that “madame bovary” should in so comparatively recent a past have been to that extent a cause of reprobation; and suggestive above all, in such connections, as to the large unconsciousness of superior minds. the desire of the superior mind of the day—that is the governmental, official, legal—to distinguish a book with such a destiny before it is a case conceivable, but conception breaks down before its design of making the distinction purely invidious. we can imagine its knowing so little, however face to face with the object, what it had got hold of; but for it to have been so urged on by a blind inward spring to publish to posterity the extent of its ignorance, that would have been beyond imagination, beyond everything but pity.

and yet it is not after all that the place the book has taken is so overwhelmingly explained by its inherent dignity; for here comes in the curiosity of the matter. here comes in especially its fund of admonition for alien readers. the dignity of its substance is the dignity of madame bovary herself as a vessel of experience—a question as to which, unmistakably, i judge, we can only depart from the consensus of french critical opinion. m. faguet for example commends the character of the heroine as one of the most living and discriminated figures of women in all literature, praises it as a field for the display of the romantic spirit that leaves nothing to be desired. subject to an observation i shall presently make and that bears heavily in general, i think, on flaubert as a painter of life, subject to this restriction he is right; which is a proof that a work of art may be markedly open to objection and at the same time be rare in its kind, and that when it is perfect to this point nothing else particularly matters. “madame bovary” has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgment. for it deals not in the least, as to unapproachability, with things exalted or refined; it only confers on its sufficiently vulgar elements of exhibition a final unsurpassable form. the form is in itself as interesting, as active, as much of the essence of the subject as the idea, and yet so close is its fit and so inseparable its life that we catch it at no moment on any errand of its own. that verily is to be interesting—all round; that is to be genuine and whole. the work is a classic because the thing, such as it is, is ideally done, and because it shows that in such doing eternal beauty may dwell. a pretty young woman who lives, socially and morally speaking, in a hole, and who is ignorant, foolish, flimsy, unhappy, takes a pair of lovers by whom she is successively deserted; in the midst of the bewilderment of which, giving up her husband and her child, letting everything go, she sinks deeper into duplicity, debt, despair, and arrives on the spot, on the small scene itself of her poor depravities, at a pitiful tragic end. in especial she does these things while remaining absorbed in romantic intention and vision, and she remains absorbed in romantic intention and vision while fairly rolling in the dust. that is the triumph of the book as the triumph stands, that emma interests us by the nature of her consciousness and the play of her mind, thanks to the reality and beauty with which those sources are invested. it is not only that they represent her state; they are so true, so observed and felt, and especially so shown, that they represent the state, actual or potential, of all persons like her, persons romantically determined. then her setting, the medium in which she struggles, becomes in its way as important, becomes eminent with the eminence of art; the tiny world in which she revolves, the contracted cage in which she flutters, is hung out in space for her, and her companions in captivity there are as true as herself.

i have said enough to show what i mean by flaubert’s having in this picture expressed something of his intimate self, given his heroine something of his own imagination: a point precisely that brings me back to the restriction at which i just now hinted, in which m. faguet fails to indulge and yet which is immediate for the alien reader. our complaint is that emma bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her creator, is really too small an affair. this, critically speaking, is in view both of the value and the fortune of her history, a wonderful circumstance. she associates herself with frédéric moreau in “l’éducation” to suggest for us a question that can be answered, i hold, only to flaubert’s detriment. emma taken alone would possibly not so directly press it, but in her company the hero of our author’s second study of the “real” drives it home. why did flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and in the case of frédéric such abject human specimens? i insist only in respect to the latter, the perfection of madame bovary scarce leaving one much warrant for wishing anything other. even here, however, the general scale and size of emma, who is small even of her sort, should be a warning to hyperbole. if i say that in the matter of frédéric at all events the answer is inevitably detrimental i mean that it weighs heavily on our author’s general credit. he wished in each case to make a picture of experience—middling experience, it is true—and of the world close to him; but if he imagined nothing better for his purpose than such a heroine and such a hero, both such limited reflectors and registers, we are forced to believe it to have been by a defect of his mind. and that sign of weakness remains even if it be objected that the images in question were addressed to his purpose better than others would have been: the purpose itself then shows as inferior. “l’éducation sentimentale” is a strange, an indescribable work, about which there would be many more things to say than i have space for, and all of them of the deepest interest. it is moreover, to simplify my statement, very much less satisfying a thing, less pleasing whether in its unity or its variety, than its specific predecessor. but take it as we will, for a success or a failure—m. faguet indeed ranks it, by the measure of its quantity of intention, a failure, and i on the whole agree with him—the personage offered us as bearing the weight of the drama, and in whom we are invited to that extent to interest ourselves, leaves us mainly wondering what our entertainer could have been thinking of. he takes frédéric moreau on the threshold of life and conducts him to the extreme of maturity without apparently suspecting for a moment either our wonder or our protest—“why, why him?” frédéric is positively too poor for his part, too scant for his charge; and we feel with a kind of embarrassment, certainly with a kind of compassion, that it is somehow the business of a protagonist to prevent in his designer an excessive waste of faith. when i speak of the faith in emma bovary as proportionately wasted i reflect on m. faguet’s judgment that she is from the point of view of deep interest richly or at least roundedly representative. representative of what? he makes us ask even while granting all the grounds of misery and tragedy involved. the plea for her is the plea made for all the figures that live without evaporation under the painter’s hand—that they are not only particular persons but types of their kind, and as valid in one light as in the other. it is emma’s “kind” that i question for this responsibility, even if it be inquired of me why i then fail to question that of charles bovary, in its perfection, or that of the inimitable, the immortal homais. if we express emma’s deficiency as the poverty of her consciousness for the typical function, it is certainly not, one must admit, that she is surpassed in this respect either by her platitudinous husband or by his friend the pretentious apothecary. the difference is none the less somehow in the fact that they are respectively studies but of their character and office, which function in each expresses adequately all they are. it may be, i concede, because emma is the only woman in the book that she is taken by m. faguet as femininely typical, typical in the larger illustrative way, whereas the others pass with him for images specifically conditioned. emma is this same for myself, i plead; she is conditioned to such an excess of the specific, and the specific in her case leaves out so many even of the commoner elements of conceivable life in a woman when we are invited to see that life as pathetic, as dramatic agitation, that we challenge both the author’s and the critic’s scale of importances. the book is a picture of the middling as much as they like, but does emma attain even to that? hers is a narrow middling even for a little imaginative person whose “social” significance is small. it is greater on the whole than her capacity of consciousness, taking this all round; and so, in a word, we feel her less illustrational than she might have been not only if the world had offered her more points of contact, but if she had had more of these to give it.

we meet frédéric first, we remain with him long, as a moyen, a provincial bourgeois of the mid-century, educated and not without fortune, thereby with freedom, in whom the life of his day reflects itself. yet the life of his day, on flaubert’s showing, hangs together with the poverty of frédéric’s own inward or for that matter outward life; so that, the whole thing being, for scale, intention and extension, a sort of epic of the usual (with the revolution of 1848 introduced indeed as an episode,) it affects us as an epic without air, without wings to lift it; reminds us in fact more than anything else of a huge balloon, all of silk pieces strongly sewn together and patiently blown up, but that absolutely refuses to leave the ground. the discrimination i here make as against our author is, however, the only one inevitable in a series of remarks so brief. what it really represents—and nothing could be more curious—is that frédéric enjoys his position not only without the aid of a single “sympathetic” character of consequence, but even without the aid of one with whom we can directly communicate. can we communicate with the central personage? or would we really if we could? a hundred times no, and if he himself can communicate with the people shown us as surrounding him this only proves him of their kind. flaubert on his “real” side was in truth an ironic painter, and ironic to a tune that makes his final accepted state, his present literary dignity and “classic” peace, superficially anomalous. there is an explanation to which i shall immediately come; but i find myself feeling for a moment longer in presence of “l’éducation” how much more interesting a writer may be on occasion by the given failure than by the given success. successes pure and simple disconnect and dismiss him; failures—though i admit they must be a bit qualified—keep him in touch and in relation. thus it is that as the work of a “grand écrivain” “l’éducation,” large, laboured, immensely “written,” with beautiful passages and a general emptiness, with a kind of leak in its stored sadness, moreover, by which its moral dignity escapes—thus it is that flaubert’s ill-starred novel is a curiosity for a literary museum. thus it is also that it suggests a hundred reflections, and suggests perhaps most of them directly to the intending labourer in the same field. if in short, as i have said, flaubert is the novelist’s novelist, this performance does more than any other toward making him so.

i have to add in the same connection that i had not lost sight of madame arnoux, the main ornament of “l’éducation,” in pronouncing just above on its deficiency in the sympathetic. madame arnoux is exactly the author’s one marked attempt, here or elsewhere, to represent beauty otherwise than for the senses, beauty of character and life; and what becomes of the attempt is a matter highly significant. m. faguet praises with justice his conception of the figure and of the relation, the relation that never bears fruit, that keeps frédéric adoring her, through hindrance and change, from the beginning of life to the end; that keeps her, by the same constraint, forever immaculately “good,” from youth to age, though deeply moved and cruelly tempted and sorely tried. her contacts with her adorer are not even frequent, in proportion to the field of time; her conditions of fortune, of association and occupation are almost sordid, and we see them with the march of the drama, such as it is, become more and more so; besides which—i again remember that m. faguet excellently notes it—nothing in the nature of “parts” is attributed to her; not only is she not presented as clever, she is scarce invested with a character at all. almost nothing that she says is repeated, almost nothing that she does is shown. she is an image none the less beautiful and vague, an image of passion cherished and abjured, renouncing all sustenance and yet persisting in life. only she has for real distinction the extreme drawback that she is offered us quite preponderantly through frédéric’s vision of her, that we see her practically in no other light. now flaubert unfortunately has not been able not so to discredit frédéric’s vision in general, his vision of everyone and everything, and in particular of his own life, that it makes a medium good enough to convey adequately a noble impression. madame arnoux is of course ever so much the best thing in his life—which is saying little; but his life is made up of such queer material that we find ourselves displeased at her being “in” it on whatever terms; all the more that she seems scarcely to affect, improve or determine it. her creator in short never had a more awkward idea than this attempt to give us the benefit of such a conception in such a way; and even though i have still something else to say about that i may as well speak of it at once as a mistake that gravely counts against him. it is but one of three, no doubt, in all his work; but i shall not, i trust, pass for extravagant if i call it the most indicative. what makes it so is its being the least superficial; the two others are, so to speak, intellectual, while this is somehow moral. it was a mistake, as i have already hinted, to propose to register in so mean a consciousness as that of such a hero so large and so mixed a quantity of life as “l’éducation” clearly intends; and it was a mistake of the tragic sort that is a theme mainly for silence to have embarked on “bouvard et pécuchet” at all, not to have given it up sooner than be given up by it. but these were at the worst not wholly compromising blunders. what was compromising—and the great point is that it remained so, that nothing has an equal weight against it—is the unconsciousness of error in respect to the opportunity that would have counted as his finest. we feel not so much that flaubert misses it, for that we could bear; but that he doesn’t know he misses it is what stamps the blunder. we do not pretend to say how he might have shown us madame arnoux better—that was his own affair. what is ours is that he really thought he was showing her as well as he could, or as she might be shown; at which we veil our face. for once that he had a conception quite apart, apart i mean from the array of his other conceptions and more delicate than any, he “went,” as we say, and spoiled it. let me add in all tenderness, and to make up for possibly too much insistence, that it is the only stain on his shield; let me even confess that i should not wonder if, when all is said, it is a blemish no one has ever noticed.

perhaps no one has ever noticed either what was present to me just above as the partial makeweight there glanced at, the fact that in the midst of this general awkwardness, as i have called it, there is at the same time a danger so escaped as to entitle our author to full credit. i scarce know how to put it with little enough of the ungracious, but i think that even the true flaubertist finds himself wondering a little that some flaw of taste, some small but unfortunate lapse by the way, should as a matter of fact not somehow or somewhere have waited on the demonstration of the platonic purity prevailing between this heroine and her hero—so far as we do find that image projected. it is alike difficult to indicate without offence or to ignore without unkindness a fond reader’s apprehension here of a possibility of the wrong touch, the just perceptibly false note. i would not have staked my life on flaubert’s security of instinct in such a connection—as an absolutely fine and predetermined security; and yet in the event that felicity has settled, there is not so much as the lightest wrong breath (speaking of the matter in this light of tact and taste) or the shade of a crooked stroke. one exclaims at the end of the question “dear old flaubert after all—!” and perhaps so risks seeming to patronise for fear of not making a point. the point made for what it is worth, at any rate, i am the more free to recover the benefit of what i mean by critical “tenderness” in our general connection—expressing in it as i do our general respect, and my own particular, for our author’s method and process and history, and my sense of the luxury of such a sentiment at such a vulgar literary time. it is a respect positive and settled and the thing that has most to do with consecrating for us that loyalty to him as the novelist of the novelist—unlike as it is even the best feeling inspired by any other member of the craft. he may stand for our operative conscience or our vicarious sacrifice; animated by a sense of literary honour, attached to an ideal of perfection, incapable of lapsing in fine from a self-respect, that enable us to sit at ease, to surrender to the age, to indulge in whatever comparative meannesses (and no meanness in art is so mean as the sneaking economic,) we may find most comfortable or profitable. may it not in truth be said that we practise our industry, so many of us, at relatively little cost just because poor flaubert, producing the most expensive fictions ever written, so handsomely paid for it? it is as if this put it in our power to produce cheap and thereby sell dear; as if, so expressing it, literary honour being by his example effectively secure for the firm at large and the general concern, on its whole esthetic side, floated once for all, we find our individual attention free for literary and esthetic indifference. all the while we thus lavish our indifference the spirit of the author of “madame bovary,” in the cross-light of the old room above the seine, is trying to the last admiration for the thing itself. that production puts the matter into a nutshell: “madame bovary,” subject to whatever qualification, is absolutely the most literary of novels, so literary that it covers us with its mantle. it shows us once for all that there is no intrinsic call for a debasement of the type. the mantle i speak of is wrought with surpassing fineness, and we may always, under stress of whatever charge of illiteracy, frivolity, vulgarity, flaunt it as the flag of the guild. let us therefore frankly concede that to surround flaubert with our consideration is the least return we can make for such a privilege. the consideration moreover is idle unless it be real, unless it be intelligent enough to measure his effort and his success. of the effort as mere effort i have already spoken, of the desperate difficulty involved for him in making his form square with his conception; and i by no means attach general importance to these secrets of the workshop, which are but as the contortions of the fastidious muse who is the servant of the oracle. they are really rather secrets of the kitchen and contortions of the priestess of that tripod—they are not an upstairs matter. it is of their specially distinctive importance i am now speaking, of the light shed on them by the results before us.

they all represent the pursuit of a style, of the ideally right one for its relations, and would still be interesting if the style had not been achieved. “madame bovary,” “salammb?,” “saint-antoine,” “l’éducation” are so written and so composed (though the last-named in a minor degree) that the more we look at them the more we find in them, under this head, a beauty of intention and of effect; the more they figure in the too often dreary desert of fictional prose a class by themselves and a little living oasis. so far as that desert is of the complexion of our own english speech it supplies with remarkable rarity this particular source of refreshment. so strikingly is that the case, so scant for the most part any dream of a scheme of beauty in these connections, that a critic betrayed at artless moments into a plea for composition may find himself as blankly met as if his plea were for trigonometry. he makes inevitably his reflections, which are numerous enough; one of them being that if we turn our back so squarely, so universally to this order of considerations it is because the novel is so preponderantly cultivated among us by women, in other words by a sex ever gracefully, comfortably, enviably unconscious (it would be too much to call them even suspicious,) of the requirements of form. the case is at any rate sharply enough made for us, or against us, by the circumstance that women are held to have achieved on all our ground, in spite of this weakness and others, as great results as any. the judgment is undoubtedly founded: jane austen was instinctive and charming, and the other recognitions—even over the heads of the ladies, some of them, from fielding to pater—are obvious; without, however, in the least touching my contention. for signal examples of what composition, distribution, arrangement can do, of how they intensify the life of a work of art, we have to go elsewhere; and the value of flaubert for us is that he admirably points the moral. this is the explanation of the “classic” fortune of “madame bovary” in especial, though i may add that also of hérodias and saint-julien l’hospitalier in the “trois contes,” as well as an aspect of these works endlessly suggestive. i spoke just now of the small field of the picture in the longest of them, the small capacity, as i called it, of the vessel; yet the way the thing is done not only triumphs over the question of value but in respect to it fairly misleads and confounds us. where else shall we find in anything proportionately so small such an air of dignity of size? flaubert made things big—it was his way, his ambition and his necessity; and i say this while remembering that in “l’éducation” (in proportion i mean again,) the effect has not been produced. the subject of “l’éducation” is in spite of frédéric large, but an indefinable shrinkage has overtaken it in the execution. the exception so marked, however, is single; “salammb?” and “saint-antoine” are both at once very “heavy” conceptions and very consistently and splendidly high applications of a manner.

it is in this assured manner that the lesson sits aloft, that the spell for the critical reader resides; and if the conviction under which flaubert labours is more and more grossly discredited among us his compact mass is but the greater. he regarded the work of art as existing but by its expression, and defied us to name any other measure of its life that is not a stultification. he held style to be accordingly an indefeasible part of it, and found beauty, interest and distinction as dependent on it for emergence as a letter committed to the post-office is dependent on an addressed envelope. strange enough it may well appear to us to have to apologise for such notions as eccentric. there are persons who consider that style comes of itself—we see and hear at present, i think, enough of them; and to whom he would doubtless have remarked that it goes, of itself, still faster. the thing naturally differs in fact with the nature of the imagination; the question is one of proprieties and affinities, sympathy and proportion. the sympathy of the author of “salammb?” was all with the magnificent, his imagination for the phrase as variously noble or ignoble in itself, contribute or destructive, adapted and harmonious or casual and common. the worse among such possibilities have been multiplied by the infection of bad writing, and he denied that the better ever do anything so obliging as to come of themselves. they scarcely indeed for flaubert “came” at all; their arrival was determined only by fasting and prayer or by patience of pursuit, the arts of the chase, long waits and watches, figuratively speaking, among the peaks or by the waters. the production of a book was of course made inordinately slow by the fatigue of these measures; in illustration of which his letters often record that it has taken him three days[3] to arrive at one right sentence, tested by the pitch of his ideal of the right for the suggestion aimed at. his difficulties drew from the author, as i have mentioned, much resounding complaint; but those voices have ceased to trouble us and the final voice remains. no feature of the whole business is more edifying than the fact that he in the first place never misses style and in the second never appears to have beaten about for it. that betrayal is of course the worst betrayal of all, and i think the way he has escaped it the happiest form of the peace that has finally visited him. it was truly a wonderful success to be so the devotee of the phrase and yet never its victim. fine as he inveterately desired it should be he still never lost sight of the question fine for what? it is always so related and associated, so properly part of something else that is in turn part of something other, part of a reference, a tone, a passage, a page, that the simple may enjoy it for its least bearing and the initiated for its greatest. that surely is to be a writer of the first order, to resemble when in the hand and however closely viewed a shapely crystal box, and yet to be seen when placed on the table and opened to contain innumerable compartments, springs and tricks. one is ornamental either way, but one is in the second way precious too.

the crystal box then figures the style of “salammb?” and “saint-antoine” in a greater degree than that of “bovary,” because, as the two former express the writer’s romantic side, he had in them, while equally covering his tracks, still further to fare and still more to hunt. beyond this allusion to their completing his duality i shall not attempt closely to characterise them; though i admit that in not insisting on them i press most lightly on the scale into which he had in his own view cast his greatest pressure. he lamented the doom that drove him so oddly, so ruefully, to choose his subjects, but he lamented it least when these subjects were most pompous and most exotic, feeling as he did that they had then after all most affinity with his special eloquence. in dealing with the near, the directly perceived, he had to keep down his tone, to make the eloquence small; though with the consequence, as we have seen, that in spite of such precautions the whole thing mostly insists on being ample. the familiar, that is, under his touch, took on character, importance, extension, one scarce knows what to call it, in order to carry the style or perhaps rather, as we may say, sit with proper ease in the vehicle, and there was accordingly a limit to its smallness; whereas in the romantic books, the preferred world of flaubert’s imagination, there was practically no need of compromise. the compromise gave him throughout endless trouble, and nothing would be more to the point than to show, had i space, why in particular it distressed him. it was obviously his strange predicament that the only spectacle open to him by experience and direct knowledge was the bourgeois, which on that ground imposed on him successively his three so intensely bourgeois themes. he was obliged to treat these themes, which he hated, because his experience left him no alternative; his only alternative was given by history, geography, philosophy, fancy, the world of erudition and of imagination, the world especially of this last. in the bourgeois sphere his ideal of expression laboured under protest; in the other, the imagined, the projected, his need for facts, for matter, and his pursuit of them, sat no less heavily. but as his style all the while required a certain exercise of pride he was on the whole more at home in the exotic than in the familiar; he escaped above all in the former connection the associations, the disparities he detested. he could be frankly noble in “salammb?” and “saint-antoine,” whereas in “bovary” and “l’éducation” he could be but circuitously and insidiously so. he could in the one case cut his coat according to his cloth—if we mean by his cloth his predetermined tone, while in the other he had to take it already cut. singular enough in his life the situation so constituted: the comparatively meagre human consciousness—for we must come back to that in him—struggling with the absolutely large artistic; and the large artistic half wreaking itself on the meagre human and half seeking a refuge from it, as well as a revenge against it, in something quite different.

flaubert had in fact command of two refuges which he worked in turn. the first of these was the attitude of irony, so constant in him that “l’éducation” bristles and hardens with it and “bouvard et pécuchet”—strangest of “poetic” justices—is made as dry as sand and as heavy as lead; the second only was, by processes, by journeys the most expensive, to get away altogether. and we inevitably ask ourselves whether, eschewing the policy of flight, he might not after all have fought out his case a little more on the spot. might he not have addressed himself to the human still otherwise than in “l’éducation” and in “bouvard”? when one thinks of the view of the life of his country, of the vast french community and its constituent creatures, offered in these productions, one declines to believe it could make up the whole vision of a man of his quality. or when all was said and done was he absolutely and exclusively condemned to irony? the second refuge i speak of, the getting away from the human, the congruously and measurably human, altogether, perhaps becomes in the light of this possibility but an irony the more. carthage and the thebaid, salammb?, spendius, matho, hannon, saint anthony, hilarion, the paternians, the marcosians and the carpocratians, what are all these, inviting because queer, but a confession of supreme impatience with the actual and the near, often queer enough too, no doubt, but not consolingly, not transcendently? last remains the question whether, even if our author’s immediate as distinguished from his remote view had had more reach, the particular gift we claim for him, the perfection of arrangement and form, would have had in certain directions the acquired flexibility. states of mind, states of soul, of the simpler kind, the kinds supposable in the emma bovarys, the frédérics, the bouvards and the pécuchets, to say nothing of the carthaginians and the eremites—for flaubert’s eremites are eminently artless—these conditions represent, i think, his proved psychological range. and that throws us back remarkably, almost confoundingly, upon another face of the general anomaly. the “gift” was of the greatest, a force in itself, in virtue of which he is a consummate writer; and yet there are whole sides of life to which it was never addressed and which it apparently quite failed to suspect as a field of exercise. if he never approached the complicated character in man or woman—emma bovary is not the least little bit complicated—or the really furnished, the finely civilised, was this because, surprisingly, he could not? l’ame fran?aise at all events shows in him but ill.

this undoubtedly marks a limit, but limits are for the critic familiar country, and he may mostly well feel the prospect wide enough when he finds something positively well enough done. by disposition or by obligation flaubert selected, and though his selection was in some respects narrow he stops not too short to have left us three really “cast” works and a fourth of several perfect parts, to say nothing of the element of perfection, of the superlative for the size, in his three nouvelles. what he attempted he attempted in a spirit that gives an extension to the idea of the achievable and the achieved in a literary thing, and it is by this that we contentedly gauge the matter. as success goes in this world of the approximate it may pass for success of the greatest. if i am unable to pursue the proof of my remark in “salammb?” and “saint-antoine” it is because i have also had to select and have found the questions connected with their two companions more interesting. there are numerous judges, i hasten to mention, who, showing the opposite preference, lose themselves with rapture in the strange bristling arch?ological picture—yet all amazingly vivified and co-ordinated—of the carthaginian mercenaries in revolt and the sacred veil of the great goddess profaned and stolen; as well in the still more peopled panorama of the ancient sects, superstitions and mythologies that swim in the desert before the fevered eyes of the saint. one may be able, however, at once to breathe more freely in “bovary” than in “salammb?” and yet to hope that there is no intention of the latter that one has missed. the great intention certainly, and little as we may be sweetly beguiled, holds us fast; which is simply the author’s indomitable purpose of fully pervading his field. there are countries beyond the sea in which tracts are allowed to settlers on condition that they will really, not nominally, cultivate them. flaubert is on his romantic ground like one of these settlers; he makes good with all his might his title to his tract, and in a way that shows how it is not only for him a question of safety but a question of honour. honour demands that he shall set up his home and his faith there in such a way that every inch of the surface be planted or paved. he would have been ashamed merely to encamp and, after the fashion of most other adventurers, knock up a log hut among charred stumps. this was not what would have been for him taking artistic possession, it was not what would have been for him even personal honour, let alone literary; and yet the general lapse from integrity was a thing that, wherever he looked, he saw not only condoned but acclaimed and rewarded. he lived, as he felt, in an age of mean production and cheap criticism, the practical upshot of which took on for him a name that was often on his lips. he called it the hatred of literature, a hatred in the midst of which, the most literary of men, he found himself appointed to suffer. i may not, however, follow him in that direction—which would take us far; and the less that he was for himself after all, in spite of groans and imprecations, a man of resources and remedies, and that there was always his possibility of building himself in.

this he did equally in all his books—built himself into literature by means of a material put together with extraordinary art; but it leads me again to the question of what such a stiff ideal imposed on him for the element of exactitude. this element, in the romantic, was his merciless law; it was perhaps even in the romantic that—if there could indeed be degrees for him in such matters—he most despised the loose and the more-or-less. to be intensely definite and perfectly positive, to know so well what he meant that he could at every point strikingly and conclusively verify it, was the first of his needs; and if in addition to being thus synthetically final he could be strange and sad and terrible, and leave the cause of these effects inscrutable, success then had for him its highest savour. we feel the inscrutability in those memorable few words that put before us frédéric moreau’s start upon his vain course of travel, “il conn?t alors la mélancholie des paquebots;” an image to the last degree comprehensive and embracing, but which haunts us, in its droll pathos, without our quite knowing why. but he was really never so pleased as when he could be both rare and precise about the dreadful. his own sense of all this, as i have already indicated, was that beauty comes with expression, that expression is creation, that it makes the reality, and only in the degree in which it is, exquisitely, expression; and that we move in literature through a world of different values and relations, a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by it, and in which the image is thus always superior to the thing itself. this quest and multiplication of the image, the image tested and warranted and consecrated for the occasion, was accordingly his high elegance, to which he too much sacrificed and to which “salammb?” and partly “saint-antoine” are monstrous monuments. old cruelties and perversities, old wonders and errors and terrors, endlessly appealed to him; they constitute the unhuman side of his work, and if we have not the bribe of curiosity, of a lively interest in method, or rather in evocation just as evocation, we tread our way among them, especially in “salammb?,” with a reserve too dry for our pleasure. to my own view the curiosity and the literary interest are equal in dealing with the non-romantic books, and the world presented, the aspects and agents, are less deterrent and more amenable both to our own social and expressional terms. style itself moreover, with all respect to flaubert, never totally beguiles; since even when we are so queerly constituted as to be ninety-nine parts literary we are still a hundredth part something else. this hundredth part may, once we possess the book—or the book possesses us—make us imperfect as readers, and yet without it should we want or get the book at all? the curiosity at any rate, to repeat, is even greatest for me in “madame bovary,” say, for here i can measure, can more directly appreciate, the terms. the aspects and impressions being of an experience conceivable to me i am more touched by the beauty; my interest gets more of the benefit of the beauty even though this be not intrinsically greater. which brings back our appreciation inevitably at last to the question of our author’s lucidity.

i have sufficiently remarked that i speak from the point of view of his interest to a reader of his own craft, the point of view of his extraordinary technical wealth—though indeed when i think of the general power of “madame bovary” i find myself desiring not to narrow the ground of the lesson, not to connect the lesson, to its prejudice, with that idea of the “technical,” that question of the way a thing is done, so abhorrent, as a call upon attention, in whatever art, to the wondrous anglo-saxon mind. without proposing flaubert as the type of the newspaper novelist, or as an easy alternative to golf or the bicycle, we should do him less than justice in failing to insist that a masterpiece like “madame bovary” may benefit even with the simple-minded by the way it has been done. it derives from its firm roundness that sign of all rare works that there is something in it for every one. it may be read ever so attentively, ever so freely, without a suspicion of how it is written, to say nothing of put together; it may equally be read under the excitement of these perceptions alone, one of the greatest known to the reader who is fully open to them. both readers will have been transported, which is all any can ask. leaving the first of them, however that may be, to state the case for himself, i state it yet again for the second, if only on this final ground. the book and its companions represent for us a practical solution, flaubert’s own troubled but settled one, of the eternal dilemma of the painter of life. from the moment this rash adventurer deals with his mysterious matter at all directly his desire is not to deal with it stintedly. it at the same time remains true that from the moment he desires to produce forms in which it shall be preserved, he desires that these forms, things of his creation, shall not be, as testifying to his way with them, weak or ignoble. he must make them complete and beautiful, of satisfactory production, intrinsically interesting, under peril of disgrace with those who know. those who don’t know of course don’t count for him, and it neither helps nor hinders him to say that every one knows about life. every one does not—it is distinctly the case of the few; and if it were in fact the case of the many the knowledge still might exist, on the evidence around us, even in an age of unprecedented printing, without attesting itself by a multiplication of masterpieces. the question for the artist can only be of doing the artistic utmost, and thereby of seeing the general task. when it is seen with the intensity with which it presented itself to flaubert a lifetime is none too much for fairly tackling it. it must either be left alone or be dealt with, and to leave it alone is a comparatively simple matter.

to deal with it is on the other hand to produce a certain number of finished works; there being no other known method; and the quantity of life depicted will depend on this array. what will this array, however, depend on, and what will condition the number of pieces of which it is composed? the “finish,” evidently, that the formula so glibly postulates and for which the novelist is thus so handsomely responsible. he has on the one side to feel his subject and on the other side to render it, and there are undoubtedly two ways in which his situation may be expressed, especially perhaps by himself. the more he feels his subject the more he can render it—that is the first way. the more he renders it the more he can feel it—that is the second way. this second way was unmistakeably flaubert’s, and if the result of it for him was a bar to abundant production he could only accept such an incident as part of the game. he probably for that matter would have challenged any easy definition of “abundance,” contested the application of it to the repetition, however frequent, of the thing not “done.” what but the “doing” makes the thing, he would have asked, and how can a positive result from a mere iteration of negatives, or wealth proceed from the simple addition of so many instances of penury? we should here, in closer communion with him, have got into his highly characteristic and suggestive view of the fertilisation of subject by form, penetration of the sense, ever, by the expression—the latter reacting creatively on the former; a conviction in the light of which he appears to have wrought with real consistency and which borrows from him thus its high measure of credit. it would undoubtedly have suffered if his books had been things of a loose logic, whereas we refer to it not only without shame but with an encouraged confidence by their showing of a logic so close. let the phrase, the form that the whole is at the given moment staked on, be beautiful and related, and the rest will take care of itself—such is a rough indication of flaubert’s faith; which has the importance that it was a faith sincere, active and inspiring. i hasten to add indeed that we must most of all remember how in these matters everything hangs on definitions. the “beautiful,” with our author, covered for the phrase a great deal of ground, and when every sort of propriety had been gathered in under it and every relation, in a complexity of such, protected, the idea itself, the presiding thought, ended surely by being pretty well provided for.

these, however, are subordinate notes, and the plain question, in the connection i have touched upon, is of whether we would really wish him to have written more books, say either of the type of “bovary” or of the type of “salammb?,” and not have written them so well. when the production of a great artist who has lived a length of years has been small there is always the regret; but there is seldom, any more than here, the conceivable remedy. for the case is doubtless predetermined by the particular kind of great artist a writer happens to be, and this even if when we come to the conflict, to the historic case, deliberation and delay may not all have been imposed by temperament. the admirable george sand, flaubert’s beneficent friend and correspondent, is exactly the happiest example we could find of the genius constitutionally incapable of worry, the genius for whom style “came,” for whom the sought effect was ever quickly and easily struck off, the book freely and swiftly written, and who consequently is represented for us by upwards of ninety volumes. if the comparison were with this lady’s great contemporary the elder dumas the disparity would be quadrupled, but that ambiguous genius, somehow never really caught by us in the fact of composition, is out of our concern here: the issue is of those developments of expression which involve a style, and as dumas never so much as once grazed one in all his long career, there was not even enough of that grace in him for a fillip of the finger-nail. flaubert is at any rate represented by six books, so that he may on that estimate figure as poor, while madame sand, falling so little short of a hundred, figures as rich; and yet the fact remains that i can refer the congenial mind to him with confidence and can do nothing of the sort for it in respect to madame sand. she is loose and liquid and iridescent, as iridescent as we may undertake to find her; but i can imagine compositions quite without virtue—the virtue i mean, of sticking together—begotten by the impulse to emulate her. she had undoubtedly herself the benefit of her facility, but are we not left wondering to what extent we have it? there is too little in her, by the literary connection, for the critical mind, weary of much wandering, to rest upon. flaubert himself wandered, wandered far, went much roundabout and sometimes lost himself by the way, but how handsomely he provided for our present repose! he found the french language inconceivably difficult to write with elegance and was confronted with the equal truths that elegance is the last thing that languages, even as they most mature, seem to concern themselves with, and that at the same time taste, asserting rights, insists on it, to the effect of showing us in a boundless circumjacent waste of effort what the absence of it may mean. he saw the less of this desert of death come back to that—that everything at all saved from it for us since the beginning had been saved by a soul of elegance within, or in other words by the last refinement of selection, by the indifference on the part of the very idiom, huge quite other than “composing” agent, to the individual pretension. recognising thus that to carry through the individual pretension is at the best a battle, he adored a hard surface and detested a soft one—much more a muddled; regarded a style without rhythm and harmony as in a work of pretended beauty no style at all. he considered that the failure of complete expression so registered made of the work of pretended beauty a work of achieved barbarity. it would take us far to glance even at his fewest discriminations; but rhythm and harmony were for example most menaced in his scheme by repetition—when repetition had not a positive grace; and were above all most at the mercy of the bristling particles of which our modern tongues are mainly composed and which make of the desired surface a texture pricked through, from beneath, even to destruction, as by innumerable thorns.

on these lines production was of course slow work for him—especially as he met the difficulty, met it with an inveteracy which shows how it can be met; and full of interest for readers of english speech is the reflection he causes us to make as to the possibility of success at all comparable among ourselves. i have spoken of his groans and imprecations, his interminable waits and deep despairs; but what would these things have been, what would have become of him and what of his wrought residuum, had he been condemned to deal with a form of speech consisting, like ours, as to one part, of “that” and “which”; as to a second part, of the blest “it,” which an english sentence may repeat in three or four opposed references without in the least losing caste; as to a third face of all the “tos” of the infinitive and the preposition; as to a fourth of our precious auxiliaries “be” and “do”; and as to a fifth, of whatever survives in the language for the precious art of pleasing? whether or no the fact that the painter of “life” among us has to contend with a medium intrinsically indocile, on certain sides, like our own, whether this drawback accounts for his having failed, in our time, to treat us, arrested and charmed, to a single case of crowned classicism, there is at any rate no doubt that we in some degree owe flaubert’s counter-weight for that deficiency to his having, on his own ground, more happily triumphed. by which i do not mean that “madame bovary” is a classic because the “thats,” the “its” and the “tos” are made to march as orpheus and his lute made the beasts, but because the element of order and harmony works as a symbol of everything else that is preserved for us by the history of the book. the history of the book remains the lesson and the important, the delightful thing, remains above all the drama that moves slowly to its climax. it is what we come back to for the sake of what it shows us. we see—from the present to the past indeed, never alas from the present to the future—how a classic almost inveterately grows. unimportant, unnoticed, or, so far as noticed, contested, unrelated, alien, it has a cradle round which the fairies but scantly flock and is waited on in general by scarce a hint of significance. the significance comes by a process slow and small, the fact only that one perceptive private reader after another discovers at his convenience that the book is rare. the addition of the perceptive private readers is no quick affair, and would doubtless be a vain one did they not—while plenty of other much more remarkable books come and go—accumulate and count. they count by their quality and continuity of attention; so they have gathered for “madame bovary,” and so they are held. that is really once more the great circumstance. it is always in order for us to feel yet again what it is we are held by. such is my reason, definitely, for speaking of flaubert as the novelist’s novelist. are we not moreover—and let it pass this time as a happy hope!—pretty well all novelists now?