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

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

73

faster. The thing naturally differs in fact with the nature of
the imagination; the question is one of proprieties and affinities, sympathy and proportion. The sympathy of the author
of " Salammb6 " was all with the magnificent, his imagination
for the phrase as variously noble or ignoble in itself, contributive or destructive, adapted and harmonious or casual and
common. The worse among such possibilities have been multiplied by the infection of bad writing, and he denied that the
better ever do anything so obliging as to come of themselves.
They scarcely indeed for Flaubert "came " at all; their arrival
was determined only by fasting and prayer or by patience of
pursuit, the arts of the chase, long waits and watches, figuratively speaking, among the peaks or by the waters. The production of a book was of course made inordinately slow by
the fatigue of these measures; in illustration of which his
letters often record that it has taken him three days to arrive
at one right sentence, tested by the pitch of his ideal of the
right for the suggestion aimed at. His difficulties drew from
the author, as I have mentioned, much resounding complaint;
but those voices have ceased to trouble us and the final voice
remains. No feature of the whole business is more edifying
than the fact that he in the first place never misses style and
in the second never appears to have beaten about for it. That
betrayal is of course the worst betrayal of all, and I think the
way he has escaped it the happiest form of the peace that has
finally visited him. It was truly a wonderful success to be so
the devotee of the phrase and yet never its victim. Fine as he
inveterately desired it should be he still never lost sight of the
question Fine for what f It is always so related and associated,
so properly part of something else that is in turn part of some1 It was true, delightfully true, that, extravagance in this province of his life,
though apparently in no other, being Flaubert's necessity and law, he deliberated
and hung fire, wrestled, retreated and returned, indulged generally in a tragicomedy of waste; which I recall a charming expression of on the lips of Edmond
de Goncourt, who quite recognised the heroic legend, but prettily qualified it:
4 II faut vous dire qu'il y avait la-dedans beaucoup de coucheries et d'ecole
buissoniere." And he related how on the occasion of a stay with his friend
under the roof of the Princess Mathilde, the friend, missed during the middle
hours of a fine afternoon, was found to have undressed himself and gone to bed
to think!
F