or have failed to understand it.  What an error to suppose that the finest foreign novels show a better sense of form than the finest English novels!  Balzac was a prodigious blunderer.  He could not even manage a sentence, not to speak of the general form of a book.  And as for a greater than Balzac—­Stendhal—­his scorn of technique was notorious.  Stendhal was capable of writing, in a masterpiece:  “By the way I ought to have told you earlier that the Duchess—!” And as for a greater than either Balzac or Stendhal—­Dostoievsky—­what a hasty, amorphous lump of gold is the sublime, the unapproachable Brothers Karamazov!  Any tutor in a college for teaching the whole art of fiction by post in twelve lessons could show where Dostoievsky was clumsy and careless.  What would have been Flaubert’s detailed criticism of that book?  And what would it matter?  And, to take a minor example, witness the comically amateurish technique of the late “Mark Rutherford”—­nevertheless a novelist whom one can deeply admire.

And when we come to consider the great technicians, Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert, can we say that their technique will save them, or atone in the slightest degree for the defects of their minds?  Exceptional artists both, they are both now inevitably falling in esteem to the level of the second-rate.  Human nature being what it is, and de Maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with interest by mankind; but he is already classed.  Nobody, now, despite all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with the first magnitudes.  And the declension of Flaubert is one of the outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism.  It is being discovered that Flaubert’s mind was not quite noble enough—­that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little anaemic. Bouvard et Pecuchet was the crowning proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet.  The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it against him.  In regard to one section of human activity only did his mind seem noble—­namely, literary technique.  His correspondence, written, of course, currently, was largely occupied with the question of literary technique, and his correspondence stands forth to-day as his best work—­a marvellous fount of inspiration to his fellow artists.  So I return to the point that the novelist’s one important attribute (beyond the two postulated) is fundamental quality of mind.  It and nothing else makes both the friends and the enemies which he has; while the influence of technique is slight and transitory.  And I repeat that it is a hard saying.