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Updated: May 25, 2025
In the setting of realistic historical novels, like George Eliot's "Romola" and Flaubert's "Salammbô," what the authors have mainly striven for has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historical novels, like those of Scott and Dumas père, the authors have sought rather for imaginative fitness of setting.
As he played without looking at her, he felt that her eyes were fixed on him, that she was standing tensely behind him. Her hand touched his shoulder. He stopped playing. "Oh, I am dreadfully sorry," she said. "Nothing. I am finished." "You were playing something of your own?" "Have you ever read La Tentation de Saint Antoine?" he asked in a low voice. "Flaubert's?" "Yes."
And so we have the early episodes of Charles's youth and his first marriage, all his history up to the time when he falls in Emma's way; and Flaubert's questionable manner of working round to his subject is explained.
A border-lander, as is Maurice Maeterlinck, Munch has a more precise vision; in a word he is a mystic, and a true mystic always sees dreams as sharp realities. It was Mr. Saintsbury who first called attention to the clear flame of Flaubert's visions as exemplified by his Temptation of St. Anthony.
Now, then, I do my duty as best I can; I am forsaken.... No one pities my misfortunes; those of others occupy their attention! I give to humanity what it gives to me indifference!" Is not the link between Flaubert's "indifference" and his conception of art evident here? But Flaubert said besides: "Living does not concern me! It is only necessary to shun suffering."
The Russian indeed never quite understood Flaubert's "rage for the word." Yet the deep inner concord of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence. It was the supreme friendship of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet was the friendship of his earlier years.
She would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the stiff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-Dieu." This is the language in which his religious sentiment is expressed. And yet we have understood from the Government Attorney that scepticism reigned in M. Flaubert's book from one end to the other.
That is all the story, given as an "argument," and so summarized it tells us nothing of Flaubert's subject. There might be many subjects in such an anecdote, many different points of view from which the commonplace facts might make a book.
And that purpose and meaning are not a whit less personal to Flaubert than the purpose and meaning of Indiana, let us say, are personal to George Sand. The "meaning" of Madame Bovary and Salammbo is, broadly speaking, Flaubert's sense of the significance or, rather, of the insignificance of human life; and the "purpose" of the books is to express it.
He found Maupassant "deficient in the moral sense"; yet he was interested and followed the progress of Flaubert's pupil. When Une Vie appeared, the Russian novelist pronounced it incomparably the best work of its author perhaps the best French novel since Hugo's Les Misérables. He wrote this in an article entitled Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction.
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