me and vitality
are what matters most. Scott's imagination was at once prodigious and
profound. He seems to me to have said to his creations, 'Let the young
men now arise and play before us.' But I don't think his art was the
better for his carelessness. Great and noble as the result was, I think
it would have been greater if he had taken more pains. Of course
one regards men of genius like Scott and Shakespeare with a kind of
terror--one can forgive them anything; but it is because they do by a
sort of prodigal instinct what most people have to do by painful
effort. If one's imagination has the poignant rightness of Scott's or
Shakespeare's, one's hurried work is better than most people's finished
work. But people of lesser force and power, if they get their stitches
wrong, have to unpick them and do it all over again. Sometimes I have
an uneasy sense, when I am writing, that my characters are feeling as if
their clothes do not fit. Then they have to be undressed, so to speak,
that one may see where the garments gall them. Now, take a book like
Madame Bovary, painfully and laboriously constructed--it seems obvious
enough, yet the more one reads it the more one becomes aware how every
stroke and detail tell. What almost appals me about that book is the way
in which the end is foreseen in the beginning, the way in which Flaubert
seems to have carried the whole thing in his head all the time, to have
known exactly where he was going and how fast he was going."

"That is perfectly true," I said. "But take an instance of another of
Flaubert's books, Bouvard et Pecuchet, where the same method is pursued
with what I can only call deplorable results. Every detail is perfect of
its kind. The two grotesque creatures take up one pursuit after another,
agriculture, education, antiquities, horticulture, distilling perfumes,
making jam. In each they make exactly the absurd mistakes that such
people would have made; but one loses all sense of reality, because one
feels that they would not have taken up so many things; it is only a
collection of typical absurdities. Given the men and the particular
pursuit, it is all natural enough, but one wearies of the same process
being applied an impossible number of times, just as Flaubert was often
so intolerable in real life, because he ran a joke to death, and never
knew when to put it down. The result in Bouvard et Pecuchet is a lack of
proportion and subordination. It is like one of the earl