upon a picture. The immense labour which he has evidently spent upon his work has resulted in equally immense excellence. His cabinets have secret drawers in them which are only discoverable after long familiarity. It has been justly said of him that he can do with a couple of epithets what Balzac takes a page of laborious analysis to do less perfectly. All this is so rarely characteristic of a novelist, that it has, perhaps, seemed to some people incompatible with the novelist’s qualities—a paralogism excusable enough in the mere subscriber to the circulating library, but certainly not excusable in the critic. Flaubert was a novelist, and a great one. As a dramatist or a poet he might, had his genius so inclined him, have been greater still in the general estimation; but he could hardly have been greater in the estimation of those who are content to welcome greatness in the form in which it chooses to present itself, instead of suggesting that it should suit its costume to their preconceived ideas.

Since Flaubert’s death in 1881 a very unusual amount, not of new matter whereon to found criticism, but of documents important for correcting and checking criticism already made, has been published respecting him. In the first place there appeared the posthumous work (on which a few remarks have been inserted above), Bouvard et Pécuchet. This is Flaubert’s only failure. In design it is something like a particularisation with immense developments of the plan of Gulliver’s Travels: indeed, Flaubert might be accused of having, in it, justified to some extent M. Taillandier’s preposterous criticism given above. Two Parisian employees who possess between them a moderate fortune, go into the country to enjoy themselves for the remainder of their days, and are most dismally disappointed. They try history only to find it all apples of Sodom, literature only to be bored and disenchanted, science only to potter and fail, benevolence only for their protégés to turn out worthless, even vice to a certain extent only to find that it is very bitter in the belly and not very sweet in the mouth. In the scenario of the unfinished part it is written, “Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main.” Now this, though a very ambitious, is not an impossible scheme. The preacher did it and more than it in a dozen pages long aog: Mr. Thackeray has done not much less in a dozen volumes. Whether in the hey-day of his strength Flaubert could have done it, is a might-have-been argument of no great importance. As a fact he did not.

Meanwhile general interest (which at the date of the bulk of this essay was not strong) in Flaubert had been growing, and his younger friends the Naturalists had been distorting his method, or something as near it as they could reach, in a very surprising manner. Even earlier gossip had talked of a certain club of four—Flaubert, M. Zola, M. Daudet, and the Russian novelist Tourguéneff—who met and talked enormities from time to time. Not very long after Flaubert’s death appeared the reminiscences of his much earlier friend, M. Maxime du Camp, which contained a good deal about the author of Madame Bovary, and developed a complete theory about his peculiarities, to the effect that a serious illness which he had had in early manhood had in some curious fashion arrested his creative power—all his ideas having been formed previously—but had left him the merely literary faculty in full strength. This excited no little wrath among Flaubert’s later friends, and besides indulging in various polemical writings, they began a series of publications of his letters (and of a few unimportant early works) which has lasted to the present time. By these letters (the earliest instalment of which was an especially interesting correspondence with George Sand) and by other documents, two facts of great interest and importance were made clear. The first was that Flaubert’s admirable style (which had struck all fit, however, few, readers before) was the result of a perfectly Herculean study of the mot propre; the second, which had been also anticipated by critics, that Flaubert occupied a very singular middle position between Romanticism and Naturalism, between the theory of literary art which places the idealising of merely observed facts first of all, and is sometimes not too careful about the observation, and the theory which places the observation first if not also last, and is sometimes ostentatiously careless of any idealising whatsoever. The publication of these personal details excited, as is the way of the world, a much wider though perhaps not a more intelligent interest in Flaubert than had previously existed, and discussions on him in current literature have been proportionately more active. But I do not know that there is much to add to the criticism given above. In style of the less spontaneous and more studied kind Flaubert has few if any superiors; in satirical contemplation of what is not the joy of living he has even fewer, perhaps none; in maintaining, in spite of his own realist rummaging of the “document,” the absolute prerogative, and what is more, the absolute duty of art to idealise and transcend, he stands alone among writers of recent days. With a happier temperament and milieu he might (it is not certain that he would) have done things even better; with