he men she desires.
What were her neighbours to her? They existed in her consciousness
only as tiresome interruptions and drawbacks, except now and then when
she had occasion to make use of them. But to us, to the onlooker, they
belong to her portrait, they represent the dead weight of provincial
life which is the outstanding fact in her case. Emma's rudimentary
idea of them is entirely inadequate; she has not a vestige of the
humour and irony that is needed to give them shape. Moreover they
affect her far more forcibly and more variously than she could even
suspect; a sharper wit than hers must evidently intervene, helping out
the primitive workings of her mind. Her pair of eyes is not enough;
the picture beheld through them is a poor thing in itself, for she can
see no more than her mind can grasp; and it does her no justice
either, since she herself is so largely the creation of her
surroundings.

It is a dilemma that appears in any story, wherever the matter to be
represented is the experience of a simple soul or a dull intelligence.
If it is the experience and the actual taste of it that is to be
imparted, the story must be viewed as the poor creature saw it; and
yet the poor creature cannot tell the story in full. A shift of the
vision is necessary. And in Madame Bovary, it is to be noted, there is
no one else within the book who is in a position to take up the tale
when Emma fails. There is no other personage upon the scene who sees
and understands any more than she; perception and discrimination are
not to be found in Yonville at all--it is an essential point. The
author's wit, therefore, and none other, must supply what is wanting.
This necessity, to a writer of Flaubert's acute sense of effect, is
one that demands a good deal of caution. The transition must be made
without awkwardness, without calling attention to it. Flaubert is not
the kind of story-teller who will leave it undisguised; he will not
begin by "going behind" Emma, giving her view, and then openly,
confessedly, revert to his own character and use his own standards.
There is nothing more disconcerting in a novel than to _see_ the
writer changing his part in this way--throwing off the character into
which he has been projecting himself and taking a new stand outside
and away from the story.

Perhaps it is only Thackeray, among the great, who seems to find a
positively wilful pleasure in damaging his own story by open
maltreatment of this kind;