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At first you are tempted to believe that Flaubert's work is diverse, though inconsiderable in volume; and, primarily do not see clearly the threads which unite the Education Sentimentale with the Tentation de Saint Antoine or Salammbô with Madame Bovary.
But of course it is not so; one glance at our remembrance of the book is enough to show it. Emma's world could not be other than it is, she could not be shifted into richer and larger conditions, without destroying the whole point and purpose of Flaubert's novel. She by herself is not the subject of his book.
George Sand's fluent improvisations ordinarily originated, as we have noted, in an impulse of her lyrical idealism; she began with an aspiration of her heart, to execute which she invented characters and plot so that she is always on the inside of her story. According to Flaubert's theory, the novel should originate in a desire to present a certain segment of observed life.
The most noticeable thing in M. Flaubert's book is what some accounts have called a fidelity wholly Daguerreian in the reproduction of the type of things, and in the intimate nature of the thought of the human heart; and this reproduction becomes more powerful still by the magic of his style.
If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed how tardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading his confession may think that his almost endless hesitation had much to do with diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will be the product of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's.
The rest of the task is to arrange and set forth these facts so that they shall tell the truth about life impressively, in scene and dramatic spectacle, the meaning of which shall be implicit in the plot and shall reach the reader's consciousness through his senses. Critics have spent much time in discussing the conflict of "romantic" and "realistic" tendencies in Flaubert's works.
You find Madame Bovary lascivious in Flaubert's description, but there is not a man, and I will not except you, who, having taken part in a ball like that and seen that sort of waltz, has not had in mind the wish that his wife or his daughter refrain from this pleasure which has in it so much of the untamed.
The morbid and mathematical Pascal claimed to be an authority in morals. The Crystal had superseded Life. So it came about that Logic was introduced as the guide of morals; Logic, which the Greeks regarded as an exercise for schoolboys; Logic, which in Flaubert's Tentation is the leader of the chorus of the Seven Deadly Sins!
These ponderous forms, these sudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts, bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged bulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage, with its pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis. Bloch's themes oftentimes have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line of the synagogic chants.
We may go still farther than that towards wiping out the distinction between Flaubert's "romantic" and his "realistic" works; and by the same stroke what is illusory in the pretensions of the realists, namely, their aspiration to an "impersonal art."
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