pass.

There is one slight danger in the estimate of Flaubert to which, though
I actually pointed it out, I think I may have succumbed a little when I
first wrote about him. He is so great a master of literature that one
may be led to concentrate attention on this; and if not to neglect, to
regard somewhat inadequately, his greatness as a novelist. Here at any
rate such failure would be petty, if not even high, treason.

[Sidenote: General considerations.]

One may look at his performance in the novel from two points of
view--that of "judging by the result" simply and in the fashion
of a summing-up; and that of bringing him under certain
ticket-qualifications, and enquiring whether they are justly applicable
to him or not. I need hardly tell any one who has done me the honour to
read either this or any other critical work of mine, which of these two
I think the more excellent way; but the less excellent in this
particular instance, may demand a little following.

Was Flaubert a Romantic? Was he a Realist? Was he a Naturalist? This is
how the enquiries come in chronological order. But for convenience of
discussion the first should be postponed to the others.

"Realist," like a good many other tickets, is printed on both sides, and
the answer to our question will be by no means the same whichever side
be looked at. That Flaubert was a Realist "in the best sense of the
term" has been again and again affirmed in the brief reviews of his
novels given above. He cannot be unreal--the "convincingness" of his
most sordid as of his most splendid passages; of his most fantastic
_diableries_ as of his most everyday studies of society; is unsurpassed.
It is, in fact, his chief characteristic. But this very fact that it
_pervades_--that it is as conspicuous in the _Tentation_ and in _Saint
Julien l'Hospitalier_ as in _Madame Bovary_ and the _Education_--at once
throws up a formidable, I think an impregnable, line of defence against
those who would claim him for "Realism" of the other kind--the cult of
the ugly, because, being ugly, it is more real than the beautiful. He
has no fear of ugliness, but he cultivates the ugly because it is the
real, not the real because it is the ugly. Being to a great extent a
satirist and (despite his personal boyishness) saturnine rather than
jovial in temperament, there is a good deal in him that is _not_
beautiful. But he can escape into beauty whenever he chooses, and in
these escapes he is al