Vidal Gore — Eighteen Seventy [860]

Yet when one reads his own easy lady-flattering fictions, one wonders if for all his intelligence he can ever cease to be the opposite of what he affects to admire. I have several times mentioned Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale as a novel that perfectly shows human life as it is—the undifferentiated drift down the years which most lives are—and yet the author is able to make every eddy in that slow progress glitter with some truthful light, so unlike the foolish jokes of a Mark Twain or the melodramatic romances of Hawthorne. — Vidal Gore, Eighteen Seventy, 860

Note

The passage presents a sophisticated critique of literary figures through a thoughtful and complex exploration of realism versus romanticism. The contrast between Flaubert’s work and Hawthorne’s closing suggestion of the ‘natural being bent, banished, killed’ indicates an astute awareness of thematic depth and parallels the text’s broader narrative.