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

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

7I

tion; and I by no means attach general importance to these
secrets of the workshop, which are but as the contortions of
the fastidious muse who is the servant of the oracle. They
are really rather secrets of the kitchen and contortions of the
priestess of that tripod-they are not an upstairs matter. It is
of their specially distinctive importance I am now speaking,
of the light shed on them by the results before us.
They all'represent the pursuit of a style, of the ideally right
one for its relations, and would still be interesting if the style
had not been achieved. " Madame Bovary," " Salammbo,"
" Saint-Antoine," " L'Iducation " are so written and so composed (though the last-named in a minor degree) that the more
we look at them the more we find in them, under this head,
a beauty of intention and of effect; the more they figure in the
too often dreary desert of fictional prose a class by themselves
and a little living oasis. So far as that desert is of the complexion of our own English speech it supplies with remarkable
rarity this particular source of refreshment. So strikingly is
that the case, so scant for the most part any dream of a scheme
of beauty in these connections, that a critic betrayed at artless
moments into a plea for composition may find himself as
blankly met as if his plea were for trigonometry. He makes
inevitably his reflections, which are numerous enough; one of
them being that if we turn our back so squarely, so universally
to this order of considerations it is because the novel is so
preponderantly cultivated among us by women, in other words
by a sex ever gracefully, comfortably, enviably unconscious (it
would be too much to call them even suspicious,) of the requirements of form. The case is at any rate sharply enough made for
us, or against us, by the circumstance that women are held to
have achieved on all our ground, in spite of this weakness and
others, as great results as any. The judgment is undoubtedly
founded: Jane Austen was instinctive and charming, and the
other recognitions-even over the heads of the ladies, some of
them, from Fielding to Pater-are obvious; without, however,
in the least touching my contention. For signal examples of