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

8o

NOTES ON NOVELISTS

upon attention, in whatever art, to the wondrous Anglo-Saxon
mind. Without proposing Flaubert as the type of the newspaper novelist, or as an easy alternative to golf or the bicycle,
we should do him less than justice in failing to insist that a
masterpiece like " Madame Bovary" may benefit even with
the simple-minded by the way it has been done. It derives
from its firm roundness that sign of all rare works that there is
something in it for every one. It may be read ever so attentively,
ever so freely, without a suspicion of how it is written, to say
nothing of put together; it may equally be read under the
excitement of these perceptions alone, one of the greatest known
to the reader who is fully open to them. Both readers will have
been transported, which is all any can ask. Leaving the first
of them, however that may be, to state the case for himself, I
state it yet again for the second, if only on this final ground.
The book and its companions represent for us a practical
solution, Flaubert's own troubled but settled one, of the eternal
dilemma of the painter of life. From the moment this rash
adventurer deals with his mysterious matter at all directly his
desire is not to deal with it stintedly. It at the same time remains
true that from the moment he desires to produce forms in
which it shall be preserved, he desires that these forms, things
of his creation, shall not be, as testifying to his way with them,
weak or ignoble. He must make them complete and beautiful,
of satisfactory production, intrinsically interesting, under peril
of disgrace with those who know. Those who don't know of
course don't count for him, and it neither helps nor hinders
him to say that every one knows about life. Every one does not
-it is distinctly the case of the few; and if it were in fact the
case of the many the knowledge still might exist, on the evidence
around us, even in an age of unprecedented printing, without
attesting itself by a multiplication of masterpieces. The question
for the artist can only be of doing the artistic utmost, and thereby of seeing the general task. When it is seen with the intensity
with which it presented itself to Flaubert a lifetime is none too
much for fairly tackling it. It must either be left alone or be
dealt with, and to leave it alone is a comparatively simple matter.