ways at his best.

This fact, while leaving him a Realist of the nobler type, at once shuts
him off from community with his friends Zola and the Goncourts, and
saves him from any stain of the "sable streams." But besides this--or
rather looking at the same thing from a slightly different point of
view--there is something which not only permits but demands the most
emphatic of "Noes!" to the question, "Was Flaubert a Naturalist?"

This something is itself the equally emphatic "Yes!" which must be
returned to the third and postponed question, "Was he a Romantic?" There
are many strange things in the History of Literature: its strangeness,
as in other cases, is one of its greatest charms. But there have been
few stranger than the obstinacy and almost passion with which the
Romanticism of Heine, of Thackeray, and of Flaubert has been denied.
Again and again it has been pointed out that "to laugh at what you love"
is not only permissible, but a sign of the love itself. Moreover,
Flaubert does not even laugh as the great Jew and the great Englishman
did. He only represents the failures and the disappointments and the
false dawns of Love itself, while in other respects he is _romantique a
tous crins_. Compare _Le Reve_ with _La Tentation_ or _Saint-Julien
l'Hospitalier_; compare _Madame Bovary_ with _Germinie Lacerteux_; even
compare _L'Education Sentimentale_, that voyage to the Cythera of
Romance which never reaches its goal, with _Sapho_ and _L'Evangeliste_,
and you will see the difference. It is of course to a certain extent "Le
Coucher du Soleil Romantique" which lights up Flaubert's work, but the
_crapauds imprevus_ and the _froids limacons_ of Baudelaire's epitaph
have not yet appeared, and the hues of the sunset itself are still
gorgeous in parts of the sky.

Of Flaubert's famous doctrine of "the single word" perhaps a little more
should, after all, be said. The results are so good, and the processes
by which they are attained get in the way of the reader so little, that
it is difficult to quarrel with the doctrine itself. But it was perhaps,
after all, something of a superstition, and the almost "fabulous
torments" which it occasioned to its upholder and practitioner seem to
have been somewhat Fakirish. We need not grudge the five years spent
over _Salammbo_; the seven over _L'Education_; the earlier and, I think,
less definitely known gestation of _Madame Bovary_; and that portion of
the twenty which, producing the