a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal--Dostoievsky--what a hasty,
amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable _Brothers
Karamazov_! Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction
by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy and
careless. What would have been Flaubert's detailed criticism of that
book? And what would it matter? And, to take 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 anæmic. _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ 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