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Updated: May 25, 2025
She seemed to see two marionettes battling in the desert. And yet and yet! She remembered a saying of Flaubert's, that man is like a nomad journeying on a camel through the desert; and he is the nomad, and the camel and the desert. How true that was, for even now, as she felt herself to be nothing, she felt herself to be tremendous.
He recalls to me the Frederic Moreau of Flaubert's "L'Education Sentimentale." There is an atrophy of the will, for Chopin can neither propose nor fly from Warsaw. He writes letters that are full of self-reproaches, letters that must have both bored and irritated his friends.
Even in him it was probably quite unconscious, well as he was aware of most of the refinements of his craft; and perhaps it is only a sleight of hand that might come naturally to any good story-teller. But it is interesting to follow Flaubert's method to the very end, for it holds out so consummately; and I think it is possible to define it here.
Jules de Gaultier seeks to apply to human life a principle of Bovarism by which we always naturally seek to appear other than we are, as Madame Bovary sought, as sought all Flaubert's personages, and indeed, less consciously on their creator's part, Gaultier claims, the great figures in all fiction. But sometimes I ask myself whether there is not in Nature herself a touch of Madame Bovary.
Lea's History of Sacerdotal Celibacy gives the classical and authoritative account of the moral consequences of the practice of celibacy. For a vivid picture of the psychology of the ascetic, see Flaubert's great romance, St. Antony. Cited by Lecky, ii. p. 131. Dean Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, ii. pp. 81-2. Lecky, ii. pp. 134-5. Hereditary Genius, 1869, p. 357. Lea, p. 109. Lea, p. 332.
The events, therefore, Emma's excursions to Rouen, her forest-rides, her one or two memorable adventures in the world, all these are only Flaubert's way of telling his subject, of making it count to the eye. They are not in themselves what he has to say, they simply illustrate it.
We may take account at the same time of the nature of his pessimism. For there are many ways of being a pessimist, and Flaubert's was not at all like that of Schopenhauer or Leopardi.
His rhythmic sense is akin to Flaubert's, of whom Arthur Symons wrote: "He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with every mood, or for the convenience of every fact; ... he has no fixed prose tune." Nor, by the same token, has Conrad. He seldom indulges, as does Théophile Gautier, in the static paragraph. He is ever in modulation. There is ebb and flow in his sentences.
The effects which it produces are not of the kind that overwhelm and astonish, but of the more subtle sort that creep into the mind by means of a thousand details, an infinitude of elaborated fibres, and which, once there, are there for ever. The solidity of Flaubert's work, however, was not unaccompanied with drawbacks.
It is being discovered that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little anæmic. Bouvard et Pécuchet was the crowning proof that Flaubert had lost sight of the humanness of the world, and suffered from the delusion that he had been born on the wrong planet. The glitter of his technique is dulled now, and fools even count it against him.
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