[393] For in novels, to a greater degree than in poems, greatness does depend on the subject.
[394] Somebody has, I believe, suggested that if Emma had married Homais, all would have been well. If this means that he would have promptly and comfortably poisoned her, for which he had professional facilities, there might be something in it. Otherwise, hardly.
[395] His forte is in single utterances, such as the unmatched "J'ai un amant!" to which Emma gives vent after her first lapse (and which "speaks" her and her fate, and the book in ten letters, two spaces, and an apostrophe), or as the "par ce qu'elle avait touché au manteau de Tanit" of Salammbô; and the "Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main" of the unfinished summary of Bouvard et Pécuchet.
[396] It is known that Flaubert, perhaps out of rather boyish pique (there was much boyishness in him), had originally made its offence ranker still. One of the most curious literary absurdities I have ever seen—the absurd almost drowning the disgusting in it—was an American attempt in verse to fill up Flaubert's lacuna and "go one better."
[397] The old foreign comparison with London was merely rhetorical; but there really would seem to have been some resemblance between Carthage and modern Berlin, even in those very points which Flaubert (taking advice) left out.
[398] There is a recent and exceptionally good translation of the book.
[399] The Letters are almost, if not quite, of first-rate quality. The play, Le Candidat, is of no merit.
[400] Vol. I. p. 4.
[401] All these will be found Englished in the Essay referred to.
[402] Too much must not be read into the word "failure": indeed the next sentence should guard against this. I know excellent critics who, declining altogether to consider the book as a novel, regard it as a sort of satire and satura, Aristophanic, Jonsonian or other, in gist and form, and by no means a failure as such. But as such it would have no, or very small, place here. I think myself that it is, from that point of view, nearer to Burton than to any one else: and I think further that it might have been made into a success of this kind or even of the novel sort itself. But as it stands with the sketch of a completion, I do not think that Flaubert's alchemy had yet achieved or approached projection.