is then universal; it belongs to the spirit of youth and lasts for ever. With all this I think it begins to be clear why the broad lines of Tolstoy's book have always seemed uncertain and confused. Neither his subject nor his method were fixed for him as he wrote; he ranged around his mountain of material, attacking it now here and now there, never deciding in his mind to what end he had amassed it. None of his various schemes is thus completed, none of them gets the full advantage of the profusion of life which he commands. At any moment great masses of that life are being wasted, turned to no account; and the result is not merely negative, for at any moment the wasted life, the stuff that is not being used, is dividing and weakening the effect of the picture created out of the rest. That so much remains, in spite of everything, gives the measure of Tolstoy's genius; _that_ becomes the more extraordinary as the chaotic plan of his book is explored. 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. Whatever this book may be or may not be, after much re-reading, it remains perpetually the novel of all novels which the criticism of fiction cannot overlook; as soon as ever we speak of the principles of the art, we must be prepared to engage with Flaubert.