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Updated: May 25, 2025
And if, in such later works as Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet and the Latter-Day Pamphlets of Carlyle, only the difference between the two minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in temperament. It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.
Of Flaubert's harmonious and imaginatively coloured manner, Maupassant shows no trace in his six novels and his two hundred and odd tales. Maupassant was not altogether faithful to Flaubert's injunctions regarding the publication of his early attempts. He made many secret flights under different pen-names, though Boule de Suif was the first prose signed by him.
Whether Smollett, in Flaubert's deliberate way, purposely abstained from moralising on the many scenes of physical distress which he painted; or whether he merely regarded them without emotion, has been debated. It seems more probable that he thought they carried their own moral.
Let us follow, now, the consequences of this principle in Flaubert's work, and see successively all that his work means, and the dogma of art which proceeds from it.
Let Emma and her plight, therefore, appear as a picture; let her be shown in the act of living her life, entangled as it is with her past and her present; that is how the final fact at the heart of Flaubert's subject will be best displayed. Here is the clue, it seems, to his treatment of the theme. It is pictorial, and its object is to make Emma's existence as intelligible and visible as may be.
The city of Rouen reared a monument to Flaubert's memory, but on the spot where he breathed his last are reared the chimneys and the buildings of a factory, a tribute possibly unconscious to reality in life.
But a peculiarity of Flaubert's, and one more personal, which even most of the naturalists have not shared with him, neither the Dutch in their paintings, nor the English in the history of romance (the author of Tom Jones or of Clarissa Harlowe), nor the Russians, Tolstoi or Dostoiefski, is to despise the rôle of irony in art. "My personages are profoundly repugnant to me," he wrote,
I shall love it always, shall not you? and you must come back in other years and study its buildings and its history, Paul with your new, fine eyes." "We shall come together, my darling," he answered. "I should never want anything alone." "Sweetheart!" she cooed again in his ears; and then presently, "Paul," she said, "some day you must read 'Salammbo, that masterpiece of Flaubert's.
The famous "impersonality" of Flaubert and his kind lies only in the greater tact with which they express their feelings dramatizing them, embodying them in living form, instead of stating them directly. It is not to this matter, Flaubert's opinion of Emma Bovary and her history which indeed is unmistakable that I refer in speaking of our relation to the writer of the book.
And what an eclectic principle this really is! employing for its one sole purpose that absolute accordance of expression to idea all other literary beauties and excellences whatever: how many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same time safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evocation of "the phrase," are equally good art.
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