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

64

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

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 Frederic Moreau in " L'Sducation " 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 Frederic such abject
human specimens e 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 Frederic 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'ducation 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