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

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

69

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