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

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

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,howeverface to facewith 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