La Tentation de Saint Antoine is an attack on the idea of God! Of such a bêtise as this it is not easy to speak seriously; one can only fall back on the Dominie’s vocabulary, and exclaim, “Prodigious!”

Enough must have been said to bear out the contention I have already made that the importance of Flaubert is very much greater as a maker of literature than as a maker of novels, though I am far from inferring that in the latter capacity he must not be allowed very high rank. His observation of the types of human nature which he selects for study is astonishingly close and complete; his attention to unity of character never sleeps, and he has to a very remarkable degree the art of chaining the attention even when the subject is a distasteful one to the reader. He has been denied imagination, but I cannot suppose that the denial was the result of a full perusal of his work. The reader of Madame Bovary only might possibly be excused for making such a charge, the reader of L’Éducation Sentimentale only would be almost certain to make it. But Salammbô supplies an almost sufficient answer to it, and La Tentation de Saint Antoine, together with the Trois Contes, an answer very much more than sufficient. His imagination, however, is poetic rather than fictitious; it does not supply him with a rush of lively creations like the imaginations of the Scotts and the Sands, but with fantastic and monstrous figures, which his admirable writing power enables his readers to perceive likewise, and that not dimly, nor through a misty and hazy atmosphere. There are few things more curious than the combination of such an imagination with the photographic clearness of observation and reproduction which his less imaginative work displays.

His unpopularity as a novelist, such as it is, arises, I must repeat, in reality principally from the fact that he is a writer who not only deserves but demands to be read twice and thrice before he can be fully enjoyed. I have mentioned my own impression in first reading Salammbô—how I wondered at the lack of interest (as it then seemed to me) which distinguished it, although at the same time I found it impossible to drop or skip it, and how years afterwards I read it again, and then it no longer seemed to me to lack interest, and I was no longer in doubt as to what had made me read it through at first almost against my will. Much the same thing occurs, I think, with all Flaubert’s books. One is struck at first by what can only be called the unpleasantness of the subject, and this colours the judgment. At the second reading the subject has ceased to engage the attention mainly, and the wonderful excellences of the treatment become visible, and at every subsequent reading this excellence becomes more and more apparent.

How great it is has rarely been denied by competent persons. Even M. Scherer, whose antipathy to certain subjects and certain styles not unfrequently weakened his critical faculty, had to confess how unmistakable was Flaubert’s position, comme écrivain. Hazlitt says somewhere about Shakespeare that he is not for or against his characters. The same thing is eminently true of Flaubert. He is in his own person a sufficient and victorious refutation of the theory which will have it that the artist’s choice of subjects must express his personal tastes. Flaubert is altogether an outsider to his subjects; as Falstaff would say, they have lain in his way and he has found them. These subjects are in a manner revealed to him, and the details hold therefore much the same place as the exact and careful enumeration of the armies of doubters and bloodmen in Bunyan’s Holy War. The extraordinary pains which he takes to secure accuracy in matters of reference are sufficiently shown in the controversy which he carried on respecting Salammbô with an antiquarian critic, and his accuracy in describing his own impressions and imaginations may be assumed to be equally minute. We cannot imagine Flaubert suppressing an idea because it was troublesome to express or unpleasant to handle, or in any other way intractable. He is altogether of the opinion of Gautier in his contempt for the writer whose thoughts find him unequal to the task of giving them expression, and he may be assumed to be of Gautier’s opinion also respecting the excellence of dictionaries as reading, for his vocabulary is simply unlimited.

Now all these characteristics are distinctly those of the abstract littérateur rather than those of the novelist. There is probably no other literary form in which they could have been so well displayed as in the novel, certainly there is none in which they would have been so satisfactorily enjoyed. One takes up Flaubert and reads a chapter, or two or three, with hardly any reference to the already familiar story. His separate tableaux are, as I have said, admirably and irreproachably combined. But their individual merit is so great that they possess interest independently of the combination. He is a writer upon whom one can try experiments with one’s different moods, very much as one can try experiments with different lights