discover how method tends to be laid upon method, so
that we get, as it were, layers and stratifications in the treatment
of a story. Some of these I shall try to distinguish, and the search
is useful, I think, for an understanding of the novelist himself. For
though it is true that a man's method depends upon the particular
story he is engaged in telling, yet the story that occurs to him, the
subject he happens upon, will be that which asks for the kind of
treatment congenial to his hand; and so his method will be a part of
himself, and will tell us about the quality of his imagination. But
this by the way--my concern is only with the manner in which the thing
is done; and having glanced at some of the features of that manner in
Flaubert's Bovary, I may now seek the reason of them in a more
attentive handling of the book.

VI

If Flaubert allows himself the liberty of telling his story in various
ways--with a method, that is to say, which is often modified as he
proceeds--it is likely that he has good cause to do so. Weighing every
word and calculating every effect so patiently, he could not have been
casual and careless over his method; he would not take one way rather
than another because it saved him trouble, or because he failed to
notice that there were other ways, or because they all seemed to him
much the same. And yet at first sight it does seem that his manner of
arriving at his subject--if his subject is Emma Bovary--is
considerably casual. He begins with Charles, of all people--Charles,
her husband, the stupid soul who falls heavily in love with her
prettiness and never has the glimmer of an understanding of what she
is; and he begins with the early history of Charles, and his
upbringing, and the irrelevant first marriage that his mother forces
upon him, and his widowhood; and then it happens that Charles has a
professional visit to pay to a certain farm, the farmer's daughter
happens to be Emma, and so we finally stumble upon the subject of the
book. Is that the neatest possible mode of striking it? But Flaubert
seems to be very sure of himself, and it is not uninteresting to ask
exactly what he means.

As for his subject, it is of course Emma Bovary in the first place;
the book is the portrait of a foolish woman, romantically inclined, in
small and prosaic conditions. She is in the centre of it all,
certainly; there is no doubt of her position in the book. But _why_ is
she there? The true subj