d,
and on the other with Edmond de Goncourt's foolish and bumptious boast
that Flaubert's epithets were not so "personal" as his own and his
brother's, would be for a different division of literary history. But
there is something--a very important, though not a very long
something--which must be said on the subject here. I have never found
myself in the very slightest degree _gene_--as the _abonne_ was by
Gautier's and as others are by the styles of Mr. George Meredith and Mr.
Henry James--by Flaubert's style. It has never put the very smallest
impediment, effected the most infinitesimal delay, in my comprehension
of his meaning, or my enjoyment of his art and of his story.[391] What
is more, though it has intensified that enjoyment, it has never--as may
perhaps have been the case with some other great "stylists"--_diverted_,
a little illegitimately, my attention and fruition from the story
itself. Style-craft and story-craft have married each other so perfectly
that they are one flesh for the lover of literature to rejoice in. And
if there be higher praise than this to be bestowed in the cases and
circumstances, I do not know what it is. It seems to belong in
perfection--I do not deny it to others in lesser degree--to three
writers only in this volume--Gautier, Merimee, and Flaubert--though if
any one pleads hard for the addition of Maupassant, it will be seen when
we come to him that I am not bound to a rigid _non possumus_; and though
there is still one living writer with whom, if he were not happily
disqualified by the fact of his living, I should not refuse to complete
the Pentad. But let this suffice for the mere point of style in its
purer and therefore more controversial aspect. There may be a little
more to say incidentally as we take the general survey under the old
heads of plot, etc. But before doing this we must--the books being so
few and so individually remarkable--say a little about each of them,
though only a very little about one.

[Sidenote: The books--_Madame Bovary_.]

Flaubert, after fairly early promise, the fulfilment of which was
postponed, began late, and was a man of eight and thirty when his first
complete book, _Madame Bovary_, appeared in 1859--a year, with its
predecessor 1858, among the great years of literature, as judged by the
books they produced. An absurd prosecution was got up against it by the
authorities of that most moral of _regimes_, the Second Empire, with the
even more absu