I name “Jean Christophe” as a sort of archetype in this connection, because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds, that comes to us now via Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from France.  The great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book of Flaubert, “Bouvard et Pecuchet.”  Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction—­Turgenev was not more austere and restrained—­broke out at last into this gay, sad miracle of intellectual abundance.  It is not extensively read in this country; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there it is—­and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secret of a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading.  But if Flaubert is really the Continental emancipator of the novel from the restrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion, we of the discursive school, must for ever recur is he, whom I will maintain against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest artist—­I lay stress upon that word artist—­that Great Britain has ever produced in all that is essentially the novel, Laurence Sterne....

The confusion between the standards of a short story and the standards of the novel which leads at last to these—­what shall I call them?—­Westminster Gazettisms?—­about the correct length to which the novelist should aspire, leads also to all kinds of absurd condemnations and exactions upon matters of method and style.  The underlying fallacy is always this:  the assumption that the novel, like the story, aims at a single, concentrated impression.  From that comes a fertile growth of error.  Constantly one finds in the reviews of works of fiction the complaint that this, that or the other thing in a novel is irrelevant.  Now it is the easiest thing, and most fatal thing, to become irrelevant in a short story.  A short story should go to its point as a man flies from a pursuing tiger:  he pauses not for the daisies in his path, or to note the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety.  But the novel by comparison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning; nothing is irrelevant if the waiter’s mood is happy, and the tapping of the thrush upon the garden path, or the petal of apple-blossom that floats down into my coffee, is as relevant as the egg I open or the bread and butter I bite.  And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story—­the introduction, for example, of the author’s personality—­any comment that seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing’s are not necessarily wrong in the novel.  Of course,