Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes

I am afraid the interest of the world of native letters is not at this moment so great as to make us despise mere translation as an aid to curiosity. There is indeed no reason w...

“The Whirlpool,” I crudely confess, was in a manner a grief to me, but the book has much substance, and there is no light privilege in an emotion so sustained. This emotion perh...

How do journalists fetch up their drivel? . . . It has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked prowess, I am proud of the exploit! . . . A respect...

Flaubert’s life is so almost exclusively the story of his literary application that to speak of his five or six fictions is pretty well to account for it all. He died in 1880 af...

But how in the world indeed was the point so indicated _not_ to be the particular cross-road at which the critic should lie in wait for a poor child of the age whom preceding ag...

I must not, I know, make too much of “Il Piacere”—one of those works of promising youth with which criticism is always easy—and I should indeed say nothing of it if it were also...

The incident bears a family resemblance to another which our biographer finds in her path in the year 1837. Having to chronicle the close of the relation with Michel de Bourges,...

This is Balzac caught in the very fact of his monstrous duality, caught in his most complete self-expression. He is clearly quite unwitting that in handing over his _data_ to hi...

There can scarcely be a better illustration of differences of national habit and attitude than the fact that while among his own people this is the character, as an operative fo...

The main thing doubtless to agree with M. Faguet about, however, is the wonder of the rate at which this genius for an infatuated grasp of the environment could multiply the cre...

Many of us will doubtless not have forgotten how we were witnesses a certain number of years since to a season and a society that had found themselves of a sudden roused, as fro...

The various situations determined for the more eminent of George Sand’s intimate associates would always be independently interesting, thanks to the intrinsic appeal of these ch...

And yet it is not after all that the place the book has taken is so overwhelmingly explained by its inherent dignity; for here comes in the curiosity of the matter. Here comes i...

I may add in this connection moreover that refinement of intention did on occasion and after a fashion of its own unmistakably preside at these experiments; making the remark in...

So with the other finest passages of the story, notably the summer day spent by the lovers in a long dusty dreadful pilgrimage to a famous local miracle-working shrine, where th...

What is equally apt for poetic or for the other, indeed, is the thing for which we feel “The Ring and the Book” preponderantly done—it is at least what comes out clearest, comes...

Robert Louis Stevenson 1 Émile Zola 26 Gustave Flaubert 65 Honoré de Balzac, 1902 109 Honoré de Balzac, 1913 143 George Sand, 1897 160 George Sand, 1899 187 George Sand, 1914 21...

Autobiographic in form, “L’Innocente” sticks closely to its theme, and though the form is on the whole a disadvantage to it the texture is admirably close. The question is of no...

If on such an occasion as this—even with our natural impulse to shake ourselves free of reserves—some sharp choice between the dozen different aspects of one of the most copious...

I must be pardoned for coming back to it, for seeming unable to leave it; it enshrouds so interesting a mystery. How was so solidly systematic a literary attack on life to be co...

These, however, are subordinate notes, and the plain question, in the connection I have touched upon, is of whether we would really wish him to have written more books, say eith...

These reservations may, however, all be sufficiently just without affecting our author’s peculiar air of having eaten her cake and had it, been equally initiated in directions t...

This dismal _parti pris_ indeed will inevitably, it is to be feared, when all the emancipations shall have said their last word, be that of the ladies. Yet perhaps too, whatever...

It is at any rate keeping within bounds to say that the novel will surely not become less free in proportion as the condition of women becomes more easy. It is more or less in d...

The effort is admirably honest, the tug at his subject splendidly strong; but the consequences remain of the strangest, and we get the impression that—as representing discrimina...

It is a pleasure to meet M. Émile Faguet[5] on the same ground of mastered critical method and in the same air of cool deliberation and conclusion that so favoured his excellent...

This bewilderment might be our last word if it were not for the occasional occurrence of accidents especially appointed to straighten out a little our tangle. We are reminded th...

Mr. Conrad’s first care on the other hand is expressly to posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular, possessed of infinite sources of r...

That he _is_ a discoverer is of the essence of his interest, a successful and resourceful young discoverer, even as the poor ballet-girl in “Carnival” is a tragically baffled an...

It was not in the tower of art that George Sand ever shut herself up; but I come back to a point already made in saying that it is in the citadel of style that, notwithstanding...

It is in this assured manner that the lesson sits aloft, that the spell for the critical reader resides; and if the conviction under which Flaubert labours is more and more gros...

What remains with us all this time, none the less, is the effect of magnification, the exposure of each of these figures, in its degree, to that iridescent wash of personality,...

We have already noted that “Round the Corner,” Mr. Gilbert Cannan’s liveliest appeal to our attention, belongs to the order of _constatations_ pure and simple; to the degree tha...

The answer of her life to the question of what an effective annexation of the male identity may amount to, amount to in favouring conditions certainly, but in conditions suscept...

Because such questions did come, we must at once declare, and we are still in presence of them, for all the world as if that case of the perfect harmony, the harmony between sub...

The explanation of her extraordinary fecundity was a rare original equipment, an imperturbability of courage, health and brain, to which was added the fortune or the merit of he...