Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/404

336 have tried this sort of thing. He was shot by a maniac before arriving at any recognizable sort of technique. The universal must exist somewhere under the American crust? Or not?

We have, perhaps, the handicap of sprouting in an atmosphere where one believes that everything would be all right if we could only get to Chicago, or to New York, or to Paris; or at any rate that everything will be all right in a few years or in a century or so? Whereas the Frenchman knows that if he can't settle the matter on French soil it will never be settled at all. Some clever fellow said similarly about Russia: they'll never be civilized because the country is so big they can always move to somewhere else if they don't like it where they are.

Joyce, growing steadily out of Flaubert, parallels the Trois Contes, and l'Education without passing his predecessor; in Ulysses he has gone further. The American writer, if he be serious, must recognize that our indigenous product has only got as far as Maupassant in the short story, and as far as H. James in the novel. It remains to be seen whether any one will undertake to catch up with the gigantic sottisier; whether the national folly will stand still long enough to be registered; this registration does not mean a simple filming of imbeciles and imbecilities as they pass, it means a vast co-ordination and synthesis, without the Kate Douglas Wig- gin touch, without the soft tender hand.

Eliot asks for someone to sort out the universal and provincial elements in Dickens. Surely the division line is the Christmas spirit. In Flaubert things are inevitable. In Dickens a simple touch of goodwill on the part of the villain would usually put everything right. (I exaggerate, perhaps, but so general a statement must permit of exceptions.) In other provincial writers the tragedy would often disappear by a mere application of some bit or mass of "culture," i. e., of knowledge more or less commonly circulated somewhere else.

I mean that with Dickens, with any provincial writer there is an "answer," which the author and reader know; a touch of kindness, the payment of the instalment due on the mortgage, et cetera; but with Flaubert, with the writer of first magnitude there is no answer,