that Flaubert despises his, and the American author does not. To the student of Mr. Lewis's indirect analytical method, I commend his remorseless twenty-fourth chapter, beginning with the "thesis": "All that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott"; likewise his subtle record of Carol's reaction to Breshnahan in relation to her husband. So much for the parallelism between the French master and the American disciple.
As for the divergence, it is not all to the advantage of Flaubert. Mr. Lewis saw more types of people, more kinds of activity, more meshes of the social network in Gopher Prairie than Flaubert saw in Rouen. Without destroying their artistic subordination, he made more of his secondary personages. He increased greatly the significance and the tension of his novel by choosing, as the principal representatives of middle-class revolt and middle-class stability, characters with a far higher degree of general and professional intelligence than is possessed by the French protagonists. He faithfully presents the specific erotic passion as only occasionally or seasonally perturbing the average American temperament—not obsessing it, not hounding it. Flaubert sees this passion as the centre of his theme. Mr. Lewis does not. If our novelists generally were not dissuaded by the terrors of our censorship, if they dared to tell the truth, would they, like many of their European colleagues and like one or two of their American confrères, would they represent the average middle-class American as living feverishly
