[470] That Flaubert escaped their error only so far as by fire has been allowed. One might indeed say so by death. For Bouvard et Pécuchet as it stands, and as outlined further, is very near Naturalism. Earlier he had carried the principle far in Salammbô, and would have carried it farther if he had not listened to good advice for once. But he had fire enough in his interior to burn the rubbish and smelt the ore in his better books, and skill enough to run off the metal from the dross, into proper shape. The others had not.
[471] I learn from the lucubrations of some Americans—who, having been, rather late and with some difficulty, induced to perceive that Edgar Poe was their chief literary glory, have taken vehemently to his favourite kind, and written voluminously in and on it—that it ought to be called a "brief-narrative," the hyphen being apparently essential. This is very interesting: and throws much light on the subject. However, having read a great deal on it, I do not find myself much advanced beyond a position which I think I occupied some fifty years ago—to wit, that a short story is not merely a long one cut down, nor a long story a short one spun out.
[472] Barbey d'Aurevilly's (v. sup.) attack on the book is one of the most remarkable instances of the irresponsibility of his criticism.
[473] V. sup. p. 258.
[474] One ought perhaps to verify; but that would be hard lines to have to read Nana twice!
[475] That of the Union Générale.
[476] Vérité, though a remarkable "human document" itself, and an indispensable historical document for any student of the particular popular madness with which it deals, need surely be inflicted a second time on no mortal. It is a transposition into the regions of the unmentionable, of the Dreyfus case itself. But nobody save a failure of something like a novelist of genius, with this failure pushed near the confines of madness, could have written it.
[477] "M. Zola [is] apparently persuaded that, if you can only kill God, the Devil will die—an idea which seems to leave out of consideration the idiosyncrasy of a third personage, Man" (The Later Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh and London, 1907, pp. 93, 94).
[478] Only it would have to be real Blake, not imitation, which latter is one of the furthest examples of dreary futility known to the present writer.
[479] The horticulture of L'Abbé Mouret is nearest to an exception; but even that is overdone.