I name "Jean Christophe" as a sort of archetype in this connection,
because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the
admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater
predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single
mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds,
that comes to us now _via_ Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from France. The
great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book of
Flaubert, "Bouvard et Pecuchet." Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was
spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction--Turgenev was not
more austere and restrained--broke out at last into this gay, sad
miracle of intellectual abundance. It is not extensively read in this
country; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there it
is--and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secret
of a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading. But if
Flaubert is really the Continental emancipator of the novel from the
restrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion,
we of the discursive school, must for ever recur is he, whom I will
maintain against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest _artist_--I
lay stress upon that word artist--that Great Britain has ever produced
in all that is essentially the novel, Laurence Sterne.
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