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

60,

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

little enough of the extravagance of illusion in that indefinable
last word of restrained evocation and cold execution " L'Sducation 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