He
could work with such lordly neglect of his subject and yet he could
produce such a book--it is surely as much as to say that Tolstoy's is
the supreme genius among novelists.
V
And next of the different methods by which the form of a novel is
created--these must be watched in a very different kind of book from
Tolstoy's. For a sight of the large and general masses in which a
novel takes shape, War and Peace seemed to promise more than another;
but something a great deal more finely controlled is to be looked for,
when it is a question of following the novelist's hand while it is
actually at work. Not indeed that anybody's hand is more delicate than
Tolstoy's at certain moments and for certain effects, and a critic is
bound to come back to him again in connection with these. But we have
seen how, in dealing with his book, one is continually distracted by
the question of its subject; the uncertainty of Tolstoy's intention is
always getting between the reader and the detail of his method. What I
now want, therefore, will be a book in which the subject is absolutely
fixed and determined, so that it may be possible to consider the
manner of its treatment with undivided attention. It is not so easy to
find as might be supposed; or rather it might be difficult to find,
but for the fact that immediately in a critic's path, always ready to
hand and unavoidable, there lies one book of exactly the sort I seek,
Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
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