One may take Bouvard et Pécuchet as the beginning of a new form in literature; neither Gargantua nor Don Quixote furnish a real precedent. Rabelais did fairly well succeed in rebutting the imbecilities of his era, Cervantes attacked only one form of hyperbole. Since Flaubert no one save James Joyce has had the energy, courage, patience to take up the task. Bouvard is unfinished, Ulysses is gigantically complete, and the latter parts of Ulysses, notably Bloom's conversational outburst, give one excellent ground for comparison. He has emitted what appear to be all the clichés of the English language in a single volcanic eruption. He, Bloom, exists in a more contagious milieu than that inhabited by Flaubert's retired copyists, and, as I wrote in my last letter, he is a much more rapid means of summarizing the normal stupidity of the age. It is only by a comparison of the two books that one can get any clear and accurate idea of where we have "in a manner of speakin' got to" in the art of the novel. From this spring-board the next great prose writer must presumably "take off"—I mean he has here a better chance than if he occupies himself solely with applying known and familiar processes in depicting the affairs of some new locality. Kipling, in applying a cheaper form of Maupassant to British India, made no contribution to the art of the short story. Flaubert's art was the art of "generalization," that is he presumably sought conditions, facts, relations which would be unaltered by milieu; I take it that Mr Eliot has this in mind in the current issue of the Tyro when he complains that no American has yet done for America what James Joyce has done for Ireland; that is, he, Eliot, must mean that no American author has yet so written of things in America that they would be equally profound and equally true for the rest of the Caucasian world.
He cannot mean that there has been no American contribution to international letters, for there remain Poe, Whitman, and may we say Hawthorne. And Henry James was translated into French in "the Eighties," in an edition which I have seen on book stalls in the French provinces; Mr Eliot must mean that these authors have treated their characters as if some fortuitous extra interest attached to them on account of their nationality, and that the interest is attached by such frail bonds that it would get unstuck if exposed to sea-breezes. Stephen Crane has been mislaid, and everyone seems to have forgotten a bad writer named Graham Phillips who must
