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

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

59

Pecuchet " 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,
manceuvres, 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