Page:Points of view (Repplier).djvu/123

Rh amid their unpromising and unsavory materials. So it was that Mr. Howells startled a great many respectable people by the assurance that "Madame Bovary" was "one impassioned cry of the austerest morality," when they had innocently supposed it to be something vastly different. Even respectable critics, unemancipated English critics in particular, seem to have been somewhat taken back by the breadth of this definition. Perhaps they recalled Epictetus,—"Austerity should be both cleanly and pleasing,"—and considered that "Madame Bovary" was neither. Perhaps they thought, and with some reason, that never, since Swift's angry eyes were closed in death, has any writer expressed more harsh and cruel scorn for his fellow-men than Gustave Flaubert, and that concentrated contempt is seldom the most effective weapon for an apostle. Perhaps they were merely conventional enough to fancy that a novel, against which even wicked Paris protested, was hardly decorous enough for sober London. At all events, it would appear as though a goodly number of stragglers along the path of virtue felt themselves insufficiently advanced