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

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

83

iridescent as we may undertake to find her; but I can imagine
compositions quite without virtue - the virtue I mean, of
sticking together-begotten by the impulse to emulate her.
She had undoubtedly herself the benefit of her facility, but
are we not left wondering to what extent we have it<' There
is too little in her, by the literary connection, for the critical
mind, weary of much wandering, to rest upon. Flaubert himself wandered, wandered far, went much roundabout and sometimes lost himself by the way, but how handsomely he provided
for our present repose! He found the French language inconceivably difficult to write with elegance and was confronted
with the equal truths that elegance is the last thing that languages, even as they most mature, seem to concern themselves
with, and that at the same time taste, asserting rights, insists
on it, to the effect of showing us in a boundless circumjacent
waste of effort what the absence of it may mean. He saw the
lesson of this desert of death come back to that-that everything at all saved from it for us since the beginning had been
saved by a soul of elegance within, or in other words by the
last refinement of selection, by the indifference on the part
of the very idiom, huge quite other than " composing " agent,
to the individual pretension. Recognising thus that to carry
through the individual pretension is at the best a battle, he
adored a hard surface and detested a soft one-much more a
muddled; regarded a style without rhythm and harmony as
in a work of pretended beauty no style at all. He considered
that the failure of complete expression so registered made of
the work of pretended beauty a work of achieved barbarity. It
would take us far to glance even at his fewest discriminations;
but rhythm and harmony were for example most menaced in
his scheme by repetition-when repetition had not a positive
grace; and were above all most at the mercy of the bristling
particles of which our modern tongues are mainly composed
and which make of the desired surface a texture pricked through,
from beneath, even to destruction, as by innumerable thorns.
On these lines production was of course slow work for him