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

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

and process and history, and my sense of the luxury of such a
sentiment at such a vulgar literary time. It is a respect positive
and settled and the thing that has most to do with consecrating
for us that loyalty to him as the novelist of the novelist-unlike
as it is even the best feeling inspired by any other member of
the craft. He may stand for our operative conscience or our
vicarious sacrifice; animated by a sense of literary honour,
attached to an ideal of perfection, incapable of lapsing in fine
from a self-respect, that enable us to sit at ease, to surrender
to the age, to indulge in whatever comparative meannesses (and
no meanness in art is so mean as the sneaking economic,) we
may find most comfortable or profitable. May it not in truth
be said that we practise our industry, so many of us, at relatively little cost just because poor Flaubert, producing the most
expensive fictions ever written, so handsomely paid for its' It
is as if this put it in our power to produce cheap and thereby
sell dear; as if, so expressing it, literary honour being by his
example effectively secure for the firm at large and the general
concern, on its whole esthetic side, floated once for all, we find
our individual attention free for literary and esthetic indifference. All the while we thus lavish our indifference the spirit of
the author of " Madame Bovary," in the cross-light of the old
room above the Seine, is trying to the last admiration for the
thing itself. That production puts the matter into a nutshell:
" Madame Bovary," subject to whatever qualification, is
absolutely the most literary of novels, so literary that it covers
us with its mantle. It shows us once for all that there is no
intrinsic call for a debasement of the type. The mantle I speak
of is wrought with surpassing fineness, and we may always,
under stress of whatever charge of illiteracy, frivolity, vulgarity, flaunt it as the flag of the guild. Let us therefore frankly
concede that to surround Flaubert with our consideration is
the least return we can make for such a privilege. The consideration moreover is idle unless it be real, unless it be intelligent enough to measure his effort and his success. Of the effort
as mere effort I have already spoken, of the desperate difficulty
involved for him in making his form square with his concep

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