cited in the last sentence and
earlier have. This aureole may be larger or smaller, brighter or less
bright--a full circlet of unbroken or hardly broken splendour, or a sort
of will-o'-the-wisp cluster of gleam and darkness. But wherever it is
found there is, in differing degrees, _literature_ of the highest class;
of the major prose _gentes_; literature that can show itself with
poetry, under its own conditions and with its own possibilities, and
fear no disqualification. Of this I am bound to say I do not find very
much in this second division of our volume, and I find none in Dumas
_fils_. But I find a great deal more than in any one else in Gustave
Flaubert.

[Sidenote: Some former dealings with him.]

As I have said this, the reader may expect, magisterially, dreadingly,
or perhaps in some very "gentle" cases hopefully, a full chapter on
Flaubert. He shall have it. But the same cause, or group of causes,
which has been at work before prevents this from being a very long one,
and from containing very full accounts of his novels. One of the longest
and most careful of those detailed surveys of forty years ago, to which
I have perhaps too often referred, was devoted to Flaubert, and was
slightly supplemented after his death. The earlier form had, though I
did not know it for a considerable time, not displeased himself--a
fortunate result not too common between author and critic[389]--and
there are, consequently, special reasons for leaving it unaltered and
unrehashed. I shall, therefore, as with Balzac and Dumas, attempt a
shorter but more general judgment, which--his work being so much less
voluminous than theirs--may be perhaps even less extensive than in the
other cases,[390] but which should leave no doubt as to the writer's
opinion of his "place in the story."

[Sidenote: His style.]

No small part of that high claim to purely literary rank which has been
made for him rests, of course, upon his mere style--that famous and much
debated "chase of the single word" which, especially since Mr. Pater
took up the discussion of it, has been a "topic" of the most usitate in
England as well as in France. When I left my chair and my library at
Edinburgh I burnt more lecture-notes on the subject than would have
furnished material for an entire chapter here, and I have no intention
of raking my memory for their ashes. The battle on the one side with the
anti-Unitarians who regard "monology" as a fond thing vainly invente