ma. Flaubert
might work on the book from that point of view and throw the emphasis
on the issue. The middle of his subject would then be found in the
struggle between Emma and all that constitutes her life, between her
romantic dreams and her besetting facts. The question is what will
happen.

But then again--that is not exactly the question in this book.
Obviously the emphasis is not upon the commonplace little events of
Emma's career. They might, no doubt, be the steps in a dramatic tale,
but they are nothing of the kind as Flaubert handles them. He makes it
perfectly clear that his view is not centred upon the actual outcome
of Emma's predicament, whether it will issue this way or that; _what_
she does or fails to do is of very small moment. Her passages with
Rodolphe and with Leon are pictures that pass; they solve nothing,
they lead to no climax. Rodolphe's final rejection of her, for
example, is no scene of drama, deciding a question that has been held
in suspense; it is one of Emma's various mischances, with its own
marked effect upon _her_, but it does not stand out in the book as a
turning-point in the action. She goes her way and acts out her
history; but of whatever suspense, whatever dramatic value, there
might be in it Flaubert makes nothing, he evidently considers it of no
account. Who, in recalling the book, thinks of the chain of incident
that runs through it, compared with the long and living impression of
a few of the people in it and of the place in which they are set? None
of the events really matter for their own sake; they might have
happened differently, not one of them is indispensable as it is. Emma
must certainly have made what she could of her opportunities of
romance, but they need not necessarily have appeared in the shape of
Leon or Rodolphe; she would have found others if these had not been at
hand. 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.

What it comes to, I take it, is that though Madame Bovary, the novel,
is a kind of drama--since there is the interaction of this woman
confronted by these facts--it is a drama chosen for the sake of the
picture in it, for the impression it gives of the manner in which
certain lives are lived. It might have anoth