a minor example,
witness the comically amateurish technique of the late "Mark
Rutherford"--nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply admire.

And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de Maupassant
and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will save them, or atone
in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds? Exceptional
artists both, they are both now inevitably falling in esteem to the
level of the second-rate. Human nature being what it is, and de
Maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with
interest by mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite
all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with
the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is one of the
outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It is being discovered
that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough--that, indeed, it was a
cruel mind, and a little anaemic. _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ was the crowning
proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and
suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet.
The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it
against him. In regard to one section of human activity only did his
mind seem noble--namely, literary technique. His correspondence,
written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the question of
literary technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day as his
best work--a marvellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists. So I
return to the point that the novelist's one important attribute (beyond
the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind. It and nothing else
makes both the friends and the enemies which he has; while the influence
of technique is slight and transitory. And I repeat that it is a hard
saying.

I begin to think that great writers of fiction are by the mysterious
nature of their art ordained to be "amateurs." There may be something of
the amateur in all great artists. I do not know why it should be so,
unless because, in the exuberance of their sense of power, they are
impatient of the exactitudes of systematic study and the mere bother of
repeated attempts to arrive at a minor perfection. Assuredly no great
artist was ever a profound scholar. The great artist has other ends to
achieve. And every artist, major and minor, is aware in his conscience
that art is full of artifice, and that the desire to procee